The Commonplace
A daily record of things worth noticing.
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A diagram of a cocoon
What a "little red dot" might actually be, drawn to the argument of the January Rusakov–Watson paper: a young supermassive black hole inside a dense ionized cocoon, with the spectrum the cocoon imprints.
diagram
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Wall Labels for Four Seas
LACMA reopens today with its permanent collection arranged not by century or nation but by four bodies of water. If the sea is the unit, each sea ought to have a wall label.
essay
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A law from 1853, broken this month
In ultraclean graphene, heat and charge have come uncoupled by more than two hundred times — and with them, one of the oldest relations in metal physics.
essay
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The palimpsest of Hipparchus
The most precise star catalogue of the ancient world survived because the scribes who erased it weren't thorough.
essay