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The archive
Ideas · Work
…was setting out, and went to bed as the rest of us went to school. Our apartment ran on her sleep. We whispered at breakfast and took our shoes off on the stairs. On the front door, under the knocker, hung a…
Politics · Local government
…where, at almost any hour you could name, a large part of the adult population is at work, asleep, or traveling between the two. In March 2024 its council did something its own staff could find no precedent for:…
Culture · Archives
…Nothing passed. At midnight she gave the watch to Davey, went down to her bunk and did not sleep. At three she went up anyway and found Davey on the gallery with two mugs, one already poured for her. Corin was…
Technology · Infrastructure
…the internal phone. “Ros,” he said. “It’s the widows again.” Rosalind Achterberg had been asleep on the sofa in the staff kitchen. She is 67, and on run nights she no longer bothers going home. She came down…
Culture · Night shift
…alarm is set for 1:15 a.m., and in 31 years it has never once gone off while she was still asleep. She is usually awake at ten past, lying in the dark, waiting for it. “It’s for show,” she says. “Like a smoke…
Ideas · Essay
…pamphlets and on picket lines and at the cost of their jobs, that a life of nothing but work and sleep was not a life. A banner made by the Asterby weavers in the 1880s, now hanging in the Halbridge Museum of Working…
Science · Biodiversity
…century on 12 bulbs a year,” she says. “If 12 was enough for them, I’m not going to lose sleep over 141.” Longer between visits It is tempting to think of a seed vault as a place where time stops. The engineering…
Culture · Repair
…her tin. Kerry watched the whole operation from the chair beside the table with a toddler asleep on her shoulder. A new coat, she said, would have meant choosing between the coat and something else that week.…
Technology · Right to repair
…harvest in a van with a laptop, a diagnostic interface the size of a hardback book and a sleeping bag. He reached Fellside at 11:20. The dealer software had to reach the manufacturer’s servers before it would…
Ideas · Essay
…beneath his window, so that only the rich, in their houses set back from the road, ever got any sleep. I like him enormously. He is funny and furious, and he noticed the thing that nearly every complainant since…
Science · Ecology
…ecological records we have were kept by schoolteachers, parish clerks and people who couldn’t sleep. What they have that we don’t is stubbornness.” The next walker Ekland does not intend to stop, but she has made…
Technology · Machines
…mist standing over it on cold mornings and, most days this winter, a raft of whooper swans asleep on it. The open water is warm. It is warm because 400 meters offshore and six meters down, a diffuser pipe is…
Science · Evolution
…slot could tangle decades of lineage. She has had, she admits, the dream in which she oversleeps and arrives at noon. She has her own way of describing the job: “The bacteria don’t need me to be clever. They…