The New New — Issue Fifteen
In which bionic reading speeds us up, rocket launches slow us down, and we see where food goes next.
Image of bees dressed as fish swimming around an iridescent wine bottle was custom created for Brent Turner by DALLE-2’s AI image engine.
This irregular—and often irreverent—roundup of emerging experiences, culture-driven experiments, and scoops of perception is back—a bit faster than usual.
Sometimes the good stuff piles up quickly. This is one of those times.
All Good
Bionic Reading, playing with Fixation, Saccade, and Opacity to make reading faster, better, and more focused
Electric Fabric, stretchable and waterproof ‘fabric’ converts body energy to electricity
Voice Privacy, protecting our voice data during the rise of the Big Voice industry
Twitter Data Dash, turning privacy policies into video games
Gentle Gaming, shifting a toxic culture with ‘low-sodium’ communities
Not Good
Rocket Launches, may be delaying your next airline flight home
Tire Shedding, EV tires cause air pollution that is 1,850 times worse than ICE tailpipe emissions
Graffiti’s Return, back on NYC trains (and seemingly every other major city I’ve visited recently)
Looks Good
Pawpaw, reviving a forgotten American fruit
Cheese Fraud Fighters, true Parmigiano Reggiano will be high-tech Parmigiano Reggiano
Underwater Wineries, said to taste better and age up to 8x faster than their land-aged counterparts
Air Vodka, made from greenhouse gas emissions
It Depends
The Fate of Food, a “food futurologist” view on what dinner will look like over the next 100 years
Velveeta Scented Nail Polish, up-levels nail art for the cheese’s fans
Bees = Fish, at least in California
Robots with Living Human Skin, will make it easier for us to communicate with them (so they say)
Look Again
Really Unreal. The image above was generated by DALL‑E 2’s new text-to-image AI.
I was recently granted access to try their new tool. Based on the stories in this issue, I asked DALL‑E to create an image of “bees dressed as fish swimming around an iridescent wine bottle.” It generated multiple options, zoom into my favorite on OpenAI’s site.
This is sci-fi game-changing technology made real—and it’s incredible.
The New New will be back again.
Until then, let’s go back to a little over a year ago, where Issue Eight, where we were hanging with rhinos, fairies, goblins, and astronauts while picking up objects with acoustic tweezers and predicting the future.
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