Ruby-Maude Rioux

Fake is our leading candidate for word of the century. It captures almost everything relevant now in a single syllable.

It is a comforting thought that the burning of a puppet could do away with any one person’s problems, to say nothing of an entire city’s — or country’s. Anxiety has a strong anticipatory element: It is predicated on what might happen, what could go wrong. Once a specific future snaps into place, it survives only by attaching to a new object of rumi... See more

The media ecosystem is in crisis because social media has a mental illness and traditional media has a physical illness. Today’s dominant social media platforms might make us angry and dumb, but they have functioning business models and, with the exception of X, financial stability. Today’s largest traditional media companies have the opposite prob... See more

Women also have on average a 41% lower grip strength than men, and this is not a sex difference that changes with age: the typical seventy-year-old man has a stronger handgrip than the average twenty-five-year-old woman. It’s also not a sex difference that can be significantly trained away: a study which compared ‘highly trained female athletes’ to... See more

In anthropology, when there’s no empirical connection between acts and their desired outcomes, “We call this stuff ‘magic,’”

“In the past, jobs were about muscles. Now they’re about brains, but in the future, they’ll be about the heart.”