The Wild Heart Of David Lynch

Matt Feeney | UnHerd | 20th January 2025

“In every Lynch film there are shots and scenes that make you want to throw your head back and laugh at their sheer audacious beauty. His whimsical sayings — some hybrid of a seven-year-old boy and ninety-year-old man — travelled with the internet’s most wholesome memes. And his art sat at the heart of contemporary culture as its most searching examinations of human fallenness and depravity” (2,600 words)

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Do We Need A Second New Deal?

Nathan J. Robinson | Current Affairs | 20th January 2025

On how FDR got public and legislative support for sweeping changes. “Any president or party who wants to be successful should take that lesson from Roosevelt: give people things they can see and feel, and tell them you’ve given it to them. He made them feel that with him in the White House they shared the presidency. The New Deal did not just give monetary handouts. It fostered culture and belonging” (3,900 words)

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Loskop To Swakop

Stan Engelbrecht | Radavist | 15th January 2025 | U

Travel diary covering a cycling trip across Namibia, one of the most sparsely populated places in the world. There are practical challenges and travelling with a support vehicle seems wise, but the wonders of the place make up for it. The so-called "Moon Landscape" is breathtaking and the occasional subterranean boom from the mining industry only adds to the eerieness (2,300 words)

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A Shoddy Work Of History

Stefan Gužvica | Jacobin | 7th January 2025 | U

The Black Book of Communism is a 1997 essay collection by a group of European academics. It was intended to be "a massive compendium of crimes and deaths committed in the name of communism" but is riddled with incorrect data, including the disputed "one hundred million deaths" figure. Yet the book's popularity endures, influencing people who have never heard of it (2,700 words)

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Podcast: Can Beef Be Done Better? | Small Things Big Climate. It can, with difficulty. One useful rule: "We should all be eating half as much beef and paying twice as much for it" (34m 14s)

Video: A Five Year Old Prodigy | YouTube | British Pathé | 1m 25s

Performance from 1930 by five-year-old Ruth Slenczynski, who turned 100 years old in January 2025. A virtuoso pianist, she is the last surviving pupil of Sergei Rachmaninov.

The Honourable Parts

Spencer Wright | Scope Of Work | 6th January 2025

On industrial photographer Christopher Payne’s odes to modern manufacturing. “His subjects are often highly engineered (Boeing’s 787 assembly line), but just as often they’re highly soulful (Steinway pianos). There are also moments when Payne zooms out, and the reader sees an entire industrial symphony. Here, the subject of Payne’s photography seems to be modern industrial complexity itself” (5,100 words)

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The Story Of Russian Roulette

Beat Kuhn | Swiss National Museum | 14th January 2025

Perhaps invented by the Russians, but made famous by Swiss author Georges Surdez with his 1937 story by the same name. Its protagonist, Sergeant Burkowski, is a gambler who survives many rounds of Russian Roulette before deliberately shooting himself. In the story, he claims the game was invented in 1917 by Russian soldiers in Romania. Was it just a “clever fictional contrivance”? We don’t know (1,200 words)

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The Cargo Cult Metaphor

Ken Shirriff | 12th January 2025

Discursive history of the “cargo cult” metaphor, popularised by Feynman in a famous speech to describe people who “follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but are missing something essential”. He derived the term from Pacific Islanders who saw wartime airplanes bring supplies, and later built fire-lit runways and bamboo radio towers, waiting in vain for planes to land (10,100 words)

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Knowing Things Is Hard

Sean Manning | Book And Sword | 11th January 2025

This ongoing lexicon catalogues all the reasons why. Examples — “Harmonisation of sources: erasing the parts of sources which disagree with each other. Friedman’s Law of Anecdotes: distrust any historical anecdote good enough to have survived on its literary merit. Telescoping the Past: people naturally blend all times before the memories of the oldest person they listen to as “old times”” (5,200 words)

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A Storm Trapped A Luxury Passenger Train

Robert Klara | Smithsonian | 9th January 2025

In January 1952, snowdrifts stalled and buried a train in the Sierra Nevadas. The streamliner service from Chicago to San Francisco usually took 40 hours and 15 minutes. After 24 hours of being stuck, the lights went out. Then carbon monoxide began to leak from the portable heaters and food had to rationed. Wealthy passengers were losing it by the time help arrived three days later (1,800 words)

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The Rise And Fall Of "Fact-Checking"

Nate Silver | Silver Bulletin | 8th January 2025

Reducing content moderation by fact-checkers on Facebook is likely "the right move for the wrong reasons", Silver argues. The checkers had minimal power — they could not remove material, merely "demote" it — and the volume of false claims was always too great to address. Fact checking should be an intrinsic part of journalism before publication, not a separate enterprise later on (1,900 words)

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Podcast: Frostbite | Tiny Matters. On the origins of frostbite treatment, following the fortunes of a French soldier during Napoleon's ill-fated march on Moscow (27m 26s)


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Video: Neanderthal Bone Flute Music | YouTube | Primoz Jakopin | 8m 37s

Musician Ljuben Dimkaroski plays a replica of the Neanderthal flute of Divje babe, which was excavated in Slovenia in 1995. Includes melodies by Albinioni, Beethoven and Ravel.

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The Life Of Herod The Great

Zora Neale Hurston | LitHub | 7th January 2025

Extract from Hurston's historical novel about the villain of the nativity story. “But how did the admirable Herod appear? Accused of murder, he stood before us clothed in purple, with his hair finely trimmed, and adorned with the most costly ornaments. His armed men were about him. Neither the president of this body, nor yet Hyrcanus our high priest, dared open the trial for terror” (1,100 words)

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The Dictionary Of PC

Adrian Daub | Slate | 5th January 2025

Panic about "political correctness" was a major American export in the 1980s and 1990s: many other countries, including the UK, France, Germany and Russian, seized upon the idea and created new variants. The strangest consequence is the appearance of "dictionaries of political correctness" in many languages, which tend to rehash culture war grievances in an alphabetical format (2,800 words)

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Hedgehog Highways

Stephanie Castellano | Reasons To Be Cheerful | 7th January 2025

England has lost a third of its hedgehogs since 2000, largely to habitat loss and roadkill. In response, homeowners are connecting their urban gardens with “hedgehog highways”, by cutting tiny holes in garden fences for the animals to squeeze through. Getting people on board is easy — hedgehogs are irresistibly cute. “You mention hedgehog to most people, and they go, ‘Aww, Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle’” (1,600 words)

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Shoot, Ask…And Run!

Chris Stowers | China Underground | 7th January 2025

Interview with photojournalist on conflict zones. “I discovered that people in war zones soon accept the presence of photographers. We are welcomed as a sign that their plight hasn’t been forgotten. I’ve found that countries run by dictators have been some of the safest to travel. But it is fascinating to see how short people’s memories can be. The fondness for the hardships of a mythologised youth is strong” (5,200 words)

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Against Optimisation

Brian Klaas | Garden Of Forking Paths | 6th January 2025

“The new god is called Optimisation — and the disciples are legion. The problem is that there’s a trade-off being ignored. Rather than a demon to be slayed by a McKinsey exorcism, slack is required for robustness. From modern systems to our individual lives, we are over-optimised, courting disaster because we are deliberately slicing away the sinews that make ourselves and our world sturdier” (4,000 words)

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The Values Gap

Scrupulous Pessimism | 5th January 2025

Any talk of “shared values” between the US and other Western nations is cliché, not truth. In many ways, the US is an outlier: Americans are exceptionally desensitised to violent crime. Much of the developed West has a “safety-first mentality”; Americans are social Darwinists. On religion, they are more likely to identify with Erdogan’s Turkey than the “desert of godlessness that is modern Europe” (2,800 words)

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