Author: Errica Jensen

72,000 pamphlets were distributed to homes, community centers, and organizations throughout Bristol in July 2025. They were advertising the Adult Learning courses, which include painting, design, and creative workshops. These are the kinds of classes that encourage people to continue creating things with their hands. A figure with four fingers and seven toes was depicted on the front cover in a yellow color that someone on Reddit correctly likened to a frame from The Simpsons. The city that had spent decades developing one of the most unique creative cultures in Britain was not overly happy to learn that Bristol City…

The most fascinating discussions are rarely taking place in a classroom when you stroll through the Harvard Graduate School of Design on any given afternoon. They take place in the spacious hallway that runs alongside the Gund Hall trays, where students studying architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning end up at the same coffee station and start fighting over a topic that none of them were given to consider that day. John Andrews designed the structure, which was finished in 1972 and has been causing those collisions for more than 50 years. As it happens, that was never an accident.…

In June 2025, a researcher named Cydni Meredith Robertson stood in front of five tiny dresses made of silk, cotton, taffeta, organza, and silk velvet that Ruth E. Carter had created for the movie Selma to symbolize the four girls who perished in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church and the lone survivor. The dresses are ideal for Sundays. They are devastating. A young girl passed by, pointed, and remarked, “Ooh, pretty dresses.” Robertson almost started crying as she stood there taking in the significance of what she was observing. That moment, captured in her reflection for the…

T. Alexander Puutio, a professor of economics at Harvard, observed an odd phenomenon with his students’ essays in the fall of 2022. Suddenly, writers he knew to be strong B+ students were turning in work that was polished in ways that didn’t resemble anything they had previously produced, and it was strewn with Oxford commas and em dashes. The writing was skillful. The voice had vanished. He quickly identified it as the specific blankness of text that has been processed rather than written, which has since been dubbed “AI slop” with a high degree of accuracy. Puutio took a different…

People tend to stay in the studio at Swansea College of Art, UWTSD. Students spread fabric samples and pattern drafts across all available surfaces at long worktables and Apple Mac suites in this open-plan, well-lit space. It’s the type of area that conveys institutional intent; it’s not just a place where work is done, but a space that conveys the importance of the work being done. Many of the students who are now enrolled in Surface Pattern and Textiles were not enrolled when they first entered the studio. It was as rivals. Students, trainees, and apprentices have the opportunity to…

For the first time in years, a student stopped in front of a tree on the Montclair State University campus in New Jersey and looked at it for several minutes. She observed the bark’s ridges, the way each leaf maintained its shape, and the snow-like pattern of seeds floating from branches. She then wrote about it. Not for a science project. Not for a class on art. For a course called Creative Thinking, which was taught concurrently by a professor of classics, a mathematician, a physicist, and a philosopher, none of whom completely agreed on what creativity was but all…

In practically every American city, you can find laminated safety procedures, periodic tables, and labeled diagrams all over the walls of a high school biology class. The walls appear completely different when you enter the art room down the hall. There are student paintings, partially completed ceramics, and pinned-up sketches that are in different stages of development. Typically, the distance between the two rooms is around thirty feet. They might as well be located in separate structures. The physical division between the arts wing and the science corridor is intentional. It reveals a deeper aspect of the way American schools…

A researcher presents a picture of a newborn to an algorithm inside a children’s hospital in Washington, D.C., which is close to the U.S. Capitol. In a matter of seconds, the software measured the infant’s eye angle, nose bridge width, and the distance between specific facial landmarks. It also identified a potential chromosomal abnormality that no one in the room had yet to name out loud. The infant is two days old. The program, known as mGene, was created at Children’s National by Marius George Linguraru and his colleagues. As of right now, it has accuracy rates well over 90%…

A seven-year-old types four words into a screen and sees a fully rendered dragon appear in front of her somewhere in an elementary school classroom, the kind with construction paper tacked to the walls and a jar of dried-out markers on the windowsill. The picture is vivid, intricate, and truly amazing. It wasn’t drawn by her. She didn’t start with a rough sketch. She got the scales wrong three times before getting them right, but she didn’t smear paint on her hands. She punched. She got it. She went on. A growing number of child development researchers are spending a…

Shrewsbury is not the type of town that frequently makes headlines across the country. With its cobblestone streets, timber-framed buildings that lean slightly into one another, and the River Severn curving around the entire area as if it had nowhere better to be, it is medieval in the best sense of the word. You could be forgiven for believing that not much has changed in three centuries if you stroll through the alleyways and shuts off the high street on a Tuesday morning. Because of this, it’s simple to pass number 5 Belmont and overlook what’s going on inside. Located…