Who’s The Smartest Corvid?

Louis Lefebvre | Tyee | 5th June 2026

An American crow once disappeared into the near-vertical shaft of a decommissioned mine for over nine minutes and emerged with a bat. Another crow made a pointed tool out of a wooden splinter and used it as a probe to retrieve a spider in a hole. An Indian crow was observed killing a rat by drowning it, periodically pulling it out to see if it was dead and plunging it back in if not (2,200 words)

Puzzle: Play Nomido, the Browser’s daily word game.

The Long Illness Persists

Systems Thinking Collection | 7th June 2026

The scientific community remains baffled by Long Covid. Understanding it requires a systemic approach, which modern medicine has largely rejected in favour of specialisation. The human body is like an intricate mechanical watch and the pathogen is a grain of sand. “The disease is the whole entity — the watch steadily grinding its own gears down in an inflammatory attempt to chew through the sand” (4,700 words)

The Body In The Wheelchair

Andrew Kersley | Londoner | 30th May 2026

Investigation into a tragedy in the East End of London, which culminated in a 77-year-old woman wheeling her long-deceased daughter's corpse through the streets on a November morning in 2023. Dealing with disability, poverty and grief, the pair had evaded contact with the authorities for decades, leaving almost no paper trail of their existence. A story of difficult lives and institutional failure (5,500 words)

Not featured here: The World Cup, Edvard Munch vs Lars von Trier, Angela Merkel, calls from the Iranian city of Shiraz, and the last film of Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable.

Pickiness Tastes Like Trauma

Amy Brown | Oakland Review Of Books | 11th May 2026

Parental food anxiety is widespread and hard to fix. "My kids have only known a world where mommy can press a button on her phone and a guy shows up at our house with Cholita Linda, a world where there are seventy-five types of cereal and every movie ever made is available to watch immediately on Netflix... How could you not become picky under these circumstances? Even the family dog is picky" (2,300 words)

Podcast: The World’s Biggest Problem | Endgame. The abilities of AI models are outrunning the appetite to develop ways to control them. Should we be worried? Probably, these experts conclude (35m 55s)

Video: The Portraits That Shape Us | YouTube | National Portrait Gallery | 4m 19s

Stephen Fry talks about Oscar Wilde.

Looted Lauterbach

Fernanda Eberstadt | European Review Of Books | 8th May 2026

A Stradivarius violin, made in 1719 and missing since 1944, has resurfaced. Its last legal owner was a German amateur musician with strong Polish allegiance who died in 1939. He donated his possessions to the Museum of Warsaw, from where it was stolen by a German soldier during WW2. Efforts to trace it and restore it to its rightful owners reveal much about the continued ripple effects of Nazi looting (1,500 words)

Welwyn Garden City

Sam Farley | Far Out | 2nd June 2026

This planned city just to the north of London was conceived in the late 19C as a response to the squalor of Victorian London. Its architect, Ebenezer Howard, wanted the countryside to co-exist with the town. The model was influential, but there were few precise replicas of this utopian vision. George Orwell mocked the movement for appealing to the “fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac” (700 words)

Puzzle: Play Nomido, the Browser’s daily word game.

I Fed The People Building The Metaverse

Titty Boobowitz | 29th May 2026

Former pastry chef at a Meta data centre recalls her time making baked goods for the people trying to build Mark Zuckerberg's "digital universe". The campus was "obnoxiously sterile" and everything — hundreds of breakfast pastries, two daily lunchtime desserts, warm cookies to restock all the jars, twice-weekly bread — had to be made from scratch. It was a bad, offensively ordinary workplace (2,200 words)

Puzzle: Play Nomido, the Browser’s daily word game.

Samurai City

Samuel Hughes | Works In Progress | 2nd June 2026

How did Japan avoid civil war between 1600 and 1868, the years of the Shogunate? Instead, almost three centuries of peace and social stability prevailed. In part, the ruling Tokugawa family achieved this by keeping most of their possible rivals, members of the elite class, stuck in the same city for most of the year. Edo, now Tokyo, was simultaneously the apex of the social world, and a prison (2,500 words)

Visualising The Past

Nathan Goldwag | Goldwag’s Journal On Civilisation | 2nd June 2026

On intriguing maps. In 1881, Francis Galton created the first isochrone map, an attempt to depict time by classifying all of Earth by the time it would take to travel there from London. He used ocean liner timetables, Post Office estimates of mail transit time, journey records, and information from friends — a snapshot of a moment when steamships and railways had “shrunk the world” (2,700 words)

The full copy of this Browser edition also featured: Stephen Wolfram, the Beach Boys, Esperanto, John Williams and Oscar Wilde. Wish you were there?

The Dirt That Refused To Die

Siddhant Pusdekar | Quanta | 1st June 2026

Scientists have been trying to kill dirt — in vain — for 15 years. Dirt sterilised by gamma radiation continues to consume oxygen and emit carbon dioxide. This suggests that metabolic processes previously thought to occur only in living cells may not be exclusive to them. It lends weight to an origin-of-life theory that metals may have catalysed biochemical reactions long before life emerged (2,000 words)

You Must Remember This

Jonathan Weiner | American Scholar | 1st June 2026

On autobiographical memory and its two basic types. “In the first type, episodic memory, you remember a scene from your past with a sensation called ‘mental time travel’. In the second type, semantic memory, there is zero time travel. A classic example is the colour of milk. There are vast numbers of facts and concepts that you’ve filed away in your memory as things you just know” (6,700 words)

Inside The Roman Apartment Building

Stefan Al | Common Edge | 28th May 2026

Notes on real estate in ancient Rome. To make room for the high demand, Rome pioneered a form of high-density, vertical living called insulae, apartments that may have been up to eight stories high. Communal staircases, vaulted arcades, balconies, and spaces combining residential, commercial and religious uses were some of its innovations. Insulae were lucrative for real estate moguls (2,000 words)

Melanie Klein Among The U-Boats

Ben Parker | Granta | 29th May 2026

Revisiting a 1961 psychoanalytic text: Narrative of a Child Analysis by Melanie Klein. The book tells the story of her treatment of a ten-year-old evacuee, ‘Richard’, in the Scottish Highlands in 1941. The child was, understandably, fixated on the war and killing Hitler. Over 93 sessions, she observed in him an "outlandish schema of early sexuality". Tracked down decades later, the patient was oblivious to the book (3,000 words)

Puzzle: Play Nomido, the Browser’s daily word game.

The False Prophet Of Los Angeles

Abe Asher | Jacobin | 28th May 2026

Reality television villain Spencer Pratt is best known for his antics on the 2000s-era MTV show The Hills and his subsequent pursuit of notoriety. His latest venture is politics, and his run for the mayoralty of Los Angeles is proving shockingly successful. Endorsed by Trump and opposing a vastly unpopular incumbent, he has become a "a quintessential LA character" who is venting his rage on a real city (2,000 words)

Podcast: The Thing | Expert Witness. First episode in a new series that tracks the growing — and questionable — role of AI technology in criminal investigations (36m 8s)

Video: Chasing Pari | YouTube | Alina Naza | 13m 5s

Narrator travels to Tajikistan to better understand her grandmother. Features breathtaking visuals of the country

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'Seriously The Best Boss Ever'

Sophie Elmhirst | Guardian | 28th May 2026

Lesley Groff was Jeffrey Epstein's assistant for 18 years, from 2001 until his arrest in July 2019. Her name appears in the Epstein files over 160,000 times. No charges have ever been brought against her. She was good at her job, dealing with everything from her boss's health concerns to the lost property of the girls who came to see him. Yet she maintains she knew nothing of his crimes. Is that possible? (6,800 words)

Josh At Christmas

Geoffrey Mak | 28th May 2026

Reflective memoir about the first time the writer and his brother introduced their boyfriends to each other. The action of the piece is gently comic — a proposed visit to Disneyland, an afternoon shopping at a snooty New York boutique, a night of karaoke — with additional context subtly layered in. Fear of judgment from their family of conservative Chinese Christians hangs over the narrative like a cloud (5,200 words)