Danchi, Wikipedia & Mary Ellen Pleasant

Japanese mass housing from the 1960s is a fascinating cross-cultural experiment that merged Western and Soviet modernist typologies with traditional Japanese elements.
Once a symbol of a new “modernized” way of life, it has since become a burden for Japanese society.
Current living conditions in these housing estates are unsuitable for elderly residents and have given rise to the phenomena of kodokushi—lonely, unnoticed deaths inside of the apartments.

People used to think the crowdsourced encyclopedia represented all that was wrong with the web. Now it’s a beacon of so much that’s right.
Wikipedia is the eighth-most-visited site in the world. The English-language version recently surpassed 6 million articles and 3.5 billion words; edits materialize at a rate of 1.8 per second.
Wikipedia has become a community, a library, a constitution, an experiment, a political manifesto—the closest thing there is to an online public square.

Mary Ellen Pleasant may not be a household name, but her story rivals that of any great American entrepreneur.
“I often wonder what I would have been with an education,” Pleasant said in an autobiography published in 1902. “I have let books alone and studied men and women a good deal.”
Pleasant used her proximity and anonymity to pick up countless valuable investing tips by listening in on her employers’ conversations.
“It’s quite possible that the jobs she had as a domestic were a cover that she was using because she clearly made her money from investments,.”

Here is a map of mathematics as it stands today, mathematics as it is practiced by mathematicians.
From simple starting points — Numbers, Shapes, Change — the map branches out into interwoven tendrils of thought.