Golden Giraffe For Best Writing

Golden Giraffe Award For Article Of The Month

Each day The Browser recommends outstanding writing of lasting value. Each month we celebrate the best of the best, the pieces that delight the mind and dazzle the senses ...

Winner of the Golden Giraffe for August 2019:

Understory

Robert Macfarlane | Emergence | 25th August 2019

Set aside half an hour to lose yourself in this gorgeous adventure among the roots and fungi of the forest floor, to whose very existence you might never have given a thought, but which, refracted through the eyes and imagination of Robert Macfarlane and his forest guide, Merlin Sheldrake, offer intellectual, emotional, and spiritual riches equal to anything in our animal universe. With digressions touching on, inter alia, the shaving of bees, the urine of monkeys, and apples from Newton’s tree (9,100 words)

also brilliant:

Baseball’s Secret Sauce

Emma Baccellieri | Sports Illustrated | 7th August 2019

The biggest spectator sport in the world relies on buckets of mud from a man in New Jersey. The sport is Major League Baseball; the man is Jim Bintliff, who sells the mud needed to rub new balls so that pitchers can grip them securely. The MLB rule-book says that only Bintliff’s mud can be used; only Bintliff knows exactly where the mud can be found. “It’s mud, but it’s an essential piece of a multibillion-dollar business, a feature without which an official baseball game cannot be played” (2,400 words)

also brilliant:

If Sapiens Were A Blog Post

Neil Kakkar | 29th June 2019

Yuval Noah Harari’s epic history of human evolution is condensed here into a 30-minute summary — and superbly well. The writing starts off a little scrappily, but soon beds down. Much is gained in the abridgement: The main points of Sapiens are more readily accessible, the arguments appear in sharper relief, the reader saves nine hours to do other things. But how to resolve the free-rider problem, that the long book must first be written in order to make the summary possible and preferable? (6,500 words)

Congratulations to Robert, Emma and Neil! We hope you’ll enjoy their writing as much as we did.

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