High angle close-up view of a senior Caucasian woman's hands drawing Alzheimer's disease cognitive functions clock test with positive results suggesting illness

Half Past Dementia

Drawing a clock has become a standard test of cognitive impairment, but there’s no consensus on who should do it or how.
Charles Nelson of Hoxton in East London has been working as a 'knocker-up' for 25 years. He wakes up early morning workers such as doctors, market traders and drivers.

Who and What Was a Knocker-Upper?

Pour one out for the people paid to rouse the workers of industrial Britain.
Analog time clock isolated on white. Time set to 9 AM.

Working Against the Clock: Time Colonialism and Lakota Resistance

Resisting Western conceptualizations of time and productivity, the Lakota peoples have maintained a task-oriented economy based on kinship and relationships.
Japanese double folio clock (Wadokei)

A Tale of Two Times: Edo Japan Encounters the European Clock

In country that followed a time-keeping system with variable hours, the fixed-hour clock of the Europeans had only symbolic value.
Chinese incense clock that measures time by burning powdered incense along a pre-measured path, with each stencil representing a different amount of time.

Keeping Time with Incense Clocks

As chronicled by Chinese poet Yu Jianwu, the use of fire and smoke for time measurement dates back to at least the sixth century CE.
An illustration of a mechanical watch mechanism

Chronemics and the Nonverbal Language of Time

Through the lens of chronemics, we can examine why time appears to have a different essence at, well, different times.
Some of the chief defendants listening to the court summary at the Nuremberg War Trials. In the front row (from left to right) are Goering, Hess, von Ribbentrop, Keitel, Kaltenbrunner and Rosenberg. In the back row are Doenitz, Raeder, von Schirach and Sauckel.

In History, The Past is the Present is the Future

If the past is so all terribly bad, then aren’t we lucky in the present?
Boy and girl standing in front of camera with car.

Fun with Naming Decades in History

Whether the 2020s will roar remains to be seen, but people have been coming up with nicknames for decades since the Elegant (18)80s.
Francesca Vidotto

Francesca Vidotto: The Quantum Properties of Space-Time

Theoretical physicist Francesca Vidotto on feminist epistemology, white holes, string theory, and her book (with Carlo Rovelli) on loop quantum gravity.
Gif og a woman alseep on a white sheet with clocks blinking in and out of sight

What Is Chronobiology?

Does it explain why we’re having so much trouble sleeping?