Issue #4 — Claw Magazine
One billion people voluntarily reset their relationship with consumption every year. The cognitive science behind what happens to your brain when you fast is more interesting than anyone admits.
READ MORE →Every year, 1.8 billion Muslims observe Ramadan — a month of dawn-to-sunset fasting that restructures sleep, eating, social rhythms, and relationship to impulse. From the outside, it looks like deprivation. From the inside, longtime observers describe something that sounds a lot like a cognitive upgrade.
The neuroscience is catching up. Intermittent fasting increases BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor), which promotes neural growth and has been linked to improved focus and reduced anxiety. Ketosis — the metabolic state fasting induces — appears to provide more stable cognitive energy than glucose. And the social dimension of Ramadan, the shared breaking of fast, the heightened communal awareness, activates social-bonding neurotransmitters that modern isolated life chronically underfeeds.
"Ramadan isn't really about food. It's about practicing the skill of not being controlled by your immediate impulses — and discovering what that feels like."
There's something quietly radical about voluntarily refusing, for a defined period, to consume on demand. In an economy built on frictionless consumption, fasting — of food, of content, of stimulation — is a form of cognitive resistance.
You don't have to be Muslim to learn from this. The question Ramadan asks is universal: what would you notice about yourself if you stopped immediately satisfying every appetite? The answer, for most people, is more interesting than they expect. 🌙
For three years, AI was a chatbot. Then it learned to use a browser, write code, and hire itself. The agentic era isn't coming — it arrived last Tuesday.
READ MORE →The shift happened quietly, between product updates. ChatGPT got a browsing tool. Claude got computer use. Gemini got Google Workspace integration. And then — almost without anyone noticing — AI stopped being something you talked to and started being something that did things.
Agentic AI doesn't wait for your prompt. It receives a goal, breaks it into tasks, executes them using real tools — web browsers, code environments, email clients, databases — and reports back with results. The user experience shifts from "assistant" to "employee."
"The question stopped being 'can AI do this?' It became 'should I be the one doing this?' Those are very different questions."
The jobs most immediately affected aren't the ones requiring least skill. They're the ones requiring most routine cognitive work — research synthesis, first-draft writing, data formatting, scheduling, email triage, basic analysis.
The people winning in this transition aren't the ones fighting it. They're the ones who've learned to direct agents — to think clearly about goals, break them into executable steps, and evaluate outputs critically. The meta-skill of the agentic era is knowing what to ask for. 🤖
Before we sent humans to space, we sent everything else. The history of space medicine reads like a cabinet of curiosities — and the cat experiments are the least weird part.
READ MORE →In 1963, France launched Félicette — a stray Parisian cat — into space aboard a Véronique rocket. She survived, was recovered, and became the only cat to have travelled to space. Her contribution to science: confirming that cats' nervous systems function under microgravity conditions roughly as they do on Earth. What we do with that information is left as an exercise for the reader.
The early history of space medicine is a catalogue of desperate improvisation. We needed to understand what happened to living bodies in space before we sent living humans there. So we sent everything else first.
"The fruit flies launched on the first American V-2 in 1947 were the first animals in space. They survived. The scientists who launched them were apparently surprised."
Enormous amounts of actual knowledge. The rotating chair experiments that mapped space sickness. The isolation studies that founded modern understanding of psychological effects of confinement. The bone density research from early long-duration missions that now informs osteoporosis treatment on Earth.
The history of science is substantially a history of doing strange things to see what happens. Sometimes the strangest experiments produce the most useful results. Félicette would probably agree, if cats cared about such things. 🐱🚀