The Global Rise Of Listening Bars

Melanie Mcfarland | Salon | 24th October 2026

Spaces dedicated to the express purpose of listening to a music album in its entirety are growing everywhere, a symptom of vinyl’s resurgence and a fatigue with digital streaming. “The first thing you feel is not volume; it’s presence. The room seems to steady itself around a note. The air thickens. You sit differently. Your breath slows without negotiation. The room listens back” (1,400 words)

The Tragedy Of Johannes Kepler

Amod Lele | Love Of All Wisdom | 25th October 2026

Kepler believed that the world was the orderly creation of a benevolent God. All too aware of the chaos that reigned on Earth, he turned to the skies for comfort. He believed that the celestial bodies’ orbital speeds corresponded to music and was appalled by the idea of an infinite universe, the horror that Lovecraft used in his stories, “where the knowledge of the universe’s true nature drives people mad” (800 words)

Two Million Hornets

Tom Smith | Dark Mountain | 23rd October 2026

"I fish out the dead queens with a fork, counting them one by one. Easier said than done. What follows is a string of corpses, each entangled with the one beside it, creating a sticky, decomposing mess. In the last eight weeks, I have counted 361 queens... A mature hornet nest can have 6,000 individuals, so potentially over two million fewer hornets will be patrolling our local landscape come autumn" (2,000 words)

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The Sixth-Worst McDonald’s In America

Sylvie McNamara | Washingtonian | 19th October 2026

The reviews for this establishment in the exurbs of Stafford County, Virginia, are universally "atrocious", speaking of teenage staff who hide from customers rather than dishing out the fries. When the reporter visits, though, she finds a clean, well-run location and gets her still-hot food in a timely fashion. Let young people be young, she concludes: "Haven’t you ever goofed off at a job while making minimum wage?" (1,900 words)

Podcast: Return Of The Bookseller Diarist | Book Club. Interview with a bookseller about the changing world of bookselling and the characters who frequent second-hand bookshops (31m 15s)

Video: The Art Of Entering The Sea | Vimeo | Marko Roth | 2m 11s

Clips of people about to immerse themselves in water, stitched together to create a tense, maritime-themed collage.

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

The Real Kevin Bacon

Owen Lacey | Pudding | 21st October 2026

Data-driven investigation of the game "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon", in which players name actors to form a chain of casting connections between films. Its name stems from "the conventional wisdom is that Kevin Bacon is the all-encompassing centre of Hollywood". In fact, that position belongs to Samuel L. Jackson: every actor is, on average, just 2.09 degrees of separation from him (5,000 words)

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Making Memories My Husband Might Lose

Josepha Natzke | Electric Lit | 22nd October 2026

Subtitled "Aphantasia: A Floor Plan", this short story (or personal essay, the veracity doesn't signify) uses a house renovation to explore a marriage where one person has little capacity for memory. "Your mind, I know, is racing along other tracks in a different city, so consumed with whatever is right in front of it that it cannot think back to what and who it has left. At least, I have to believe this to be true" (5,100 words)

Deported To Liberia, Again

Natalia Cintra & Tosin Durodola | Africa Is A Country | 21st October 2026

Liberia has agreed to take in over a thousand US deportees, many of whom are not Liberian and have legal protection from removal to their home countries. History is repeating itself: the state of Liberia began in the 19C as a project of the American Colonization Society, founded 1816, under which freed and free-born black people were deported from the US or illegal slave ships against their will (1,500 words)

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

The Most Successful Political Party

Paul Mason | LitHub | 21st October 2026

Truly "communist" or not, the Communist Party of China has one hundred million members and the aim of "running the strongest state on earth by 2049". If it succeeds, the Party will write the history of the times we are currently living through. This is just one of many reasons "we should stop treating the history of communism as a finished episode, without relevance to the choices facing us today" (1,300 words)

Manhattan’s Gilded Age Interiors

Jane Coombs | Engelsberg Ideas | 20th October 2026

Appreciation of James Wall Finn, the “unknown” artist behind Manhattan’s most beautiful interiors. His talents were discreet and versatile, augmenting architectural features. For the Morgan Library, Finn decorated a “16C Florentine coffered ceiling with aged-looking coats of arms sourced from a book of Renaissance breastplates. It was done with such accuracy that it has ‘fooled at least one historian’” (1,500 words)

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Disagreeability As A Superpower

Conor Fitzgerald | The Fitzstack | 20th October 2026

Under the intense social scrutiny of the internet, the willingness to be disagreeable is power. Trump, Nick Fuentes and Michael Tracey are examples of this phenomenon. People who don’t care about being accused of bad things “become important because they’re the only ones who can function under a system that weaponises social opprobrium on an industrial scale, facilitated by technology” (3,200 words)

My Neighbour, Me, And A Grand Principle

Ann Finkbeiner | Last Word On Nothing | 19th October 2026

Exuberant anecdote-turned-explainer of homochirality, the work that won this year’s Chemistry Nobel. “Pretty word, ancient Greek, means ‘hand’, I sort of knew what chirality meant: the way the molecule twists itself, spirals toward the left or right, I pictured a snail shell, a DNA molecule, a helix. Turns out every amino acid in every protein in every cell twists toward the left, they are all left-handed” (1,100 words)

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The Boiling Pot Of Tourist Towns

Luke Allen | In The Teeth Of All Hope | 16th July 2026

Small tourist towns are at a point of over-saturation. If you must visit them, this is how not to be a bad tourist. Leave the Bluetooth speakers at home. Don’t use rental apps that are pricing people out of their homes. If you find an unspoiled place, don’t post about it. In essence, “treat the area you are vacationing in as an actual community, rather than a playground that exists solely for your recreation” (2,300 words)

The Fatal Flaw Of 911

Christie Thompson | Marshall Project | 16th October 2026

Interview with the author of a history of America's emergency telephone number. Interesting throughout. The biggest public misconception is that when you call, the dispatcher can see where you are. The system was designed for landline phones, which now make up less than 10 per cent of calls. Sending police by default, as is common, results in more fatal confrontations than is necessary (2,100 words)

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

On Kylie Jenner's New Vlogs

Brendon Holder | Loosey | 11th October 2026

Close reading of Jenner's banal video diaries. One does not become a billionaire without drive or ambition, but this is nowhere on screen. "What we are witnessing isn’t labour; it’s luxury. It stands in opposition to the dominant cultural force that says to be valuable, you have to be productive, be a boss, create empires, turn yourself into a personal brand. Here is a person who is doing the exact opposite" (1,800 words)

Podcast: An American Journalist Imprisoned As A Spy In Russia | New Yorker Radio Hour. Interview with Evan Gershkovich about what it's like to spend over 500 days in a Russian prison and then reacclimatise to life in the US (21m 48s)

Video: Prussian Sonata No. 5 In C Major | YouTube | Voices of Music | 4m 06s

C.P.E. Bach piece performed on a beautiful replica of the kind of double manual harpsichord used at the time of composition.

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

Do You Actually Have To Finish That Novel?

Michel Chaouli | Yale Review | 16th March 2026

The guilt at not being able to finish a book — especially if that's a regular occurrence — is acute. Unfinished tomes pile up, taunting the reader. "Sometimes I am so intoxicated by the beauty and the intelligence of a novel that I must set it aside. The charge it delivers is so inordinate that I need to measure out the doses I permit myself." To reckon with the end of a good book is to grasp our own mortality (2,500 words)

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One Balaclava After Another

Piers Gelly | Articles Of Interest | 15th October 2026

Thoughts on the balaclava, "a singularly scary article of clothing". "It has a special monstrousness. The head is flattened to a silhouette, practically a living shadow; the mouth, when there’s a mouth, becomes a ragged, roaring O." In life, it's a practical cold weather face covering. In art, it takes on a rich political life, as artists like Pussy Riot, Odd Future, Kneecap and others have demonstrated (2,900 words)

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