Paper, Cut

Caroline Jones And Staff | Washington City Paper | 5th May 2022

Memories of a newspaper now closing its print operation. It aided in launching the careers of, among others, David Carr, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Kara Swisher. The tales here recall a rollicking journalistic culture that now feels remote. As one former staffer puts it: "The people that you wrote about would, in the worst-case scenario, punch you in the face, but you knew that it had an effect"

The Senior Song Book

Marvin Weisbord | The Smart Set | 5th May 2022

Touching account of the unlikely musical collaboration between two "best old friends" who met by chance in a retirement community. A lesson in being proactive about happiness and hobbies. "It’s easy to talk about 'ageing gracefully'. It takes real work to do it." They wrote about the everyday lives of old people, setting their words to the half-remembered tunes of their youth (3,442 words)

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Hume’s Real Riches

Charles Goldhaber | PhilArchive | 4th May 2022 | PDF

On David Hume's cheerfulness. His autobiography reveals that he was proud of his "natural temper" and ability to overcome disappointment rapidly. Cheerfulness was both a fairly common sociable playfulness and a rarer virtue that provides "fortification against unhappy accidents". Stoicism and scepticism together give a way in which "philosophy can be practical, and help us live well" (5,244 words)

The White House’s Weirdly Hip Record Collection

Rob Brunner | Washingtonian | 3rd May 2022 | U

Jimmy Carter's grandson investigates the presidential record library. Acquired during the Carter administration, the collection was partly curated by Johnny Mercer of "Moon River" fame, but holds more than just easy listening. "Funkadelic’s Hardcore Jollies made the cut, as did Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols and Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica" (2,230 words)

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When Animals Shed Their Wings

Richard Dawkins | Quillette | 5th May 2022

Who would not want wings? Who would not want to fly? And yet there must be a downside to wings, since some animals genetically equipped to grow them, such as worker ants, do not do so. Only the queen ant grows wings; and, having mated, she rips them off. The explanation may be that flying consumes lots of energy — energy which a body can use instead to grow bigger and stronger (1,600 words)

Mechanical Watch

Bartosz Ciechanowski | 4th May 2022

I cannot believe that this blog is new to me. Each essay is a marvellously clear and  informative account of how a particular gadget or technology works, with animations to explain the various moving parts. This latest post is an anatomy of the mechanical watch, proceeding from springs and gears via escapements and balance wheels to clicks, crowns, minute wheels and date correctors (8,000 words)

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On Sundays, Browser readers receive a special edition with puzzles, poems, books, charts, music and more – here's a little taste of this week's edition.

Poem Of The Week: Casual Chandeliers

Susan Finlay | Poetry Foundation | March 2022

so understated he could be
swedish or so sehr praktisch
even deutsch with his grey haus­-
schuhe in the door of a space
safe with church tax rent control
an automatic heating plan
and cheap light softened by
synthetic glass refracting
the abyss of memory
foam and cut-price bedding

continue reading at Poetry Foundation

Book Of The Week: A Life Of Picasso: The Minotaur Years 1933–1943
John Richardson | PenguinRandomHouse | 2021

Recommended by Stephen Smith in the Financial Times:
"Richardson's biography of Picasso has been described as the best ever written about an artist. There’s a gamy, taurine flavour to volume IV. Picasso’s long-suffering muses were his inspiration, and thanks to them it was a rare day that he wasn’t making art. Richardson finally takes his leave of the artist in 1943. It’s hard to imagine that he could be bettered as our guide in the labyrinth of the minotaur."

The Browser Sunday edition is a smorgasbord of delights. If you enjoyed this taster, subscribe for puzzles, crosswords, art, charts, articles and more each Sunday - plus five articles daily, in your inbox:

Thomas Jefferson On Newspapers

Michael Zuo | M.Y.Z. | 3rd May 2020

From Jefferson's letter to a newspaper editor, John Norvell, in 1807: “To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted so as to be most useful ... An editor might begin a reformation in some such way as this: Divide his paper into 4 chapters, heading the 1st Truths, 2d Probabilities, 3d Possibilities, 4th Lies. The 1st chapter would be very short" (704 words)

The Map

Venkatesh Rao | Ribbonfarm | 5th May 2022

Hard to say whether this should be classified as science fiction, allegory, satire, or prophecy. But if you can imagine some combination of Jorge-Luis Borges, William Gibson, Ted Chiang, Italo Calvino and GPT-3, you have a sense of the company in which this fable belongs. It tells of the creation of the virtual world, and of how the virtual world comes to overlay and then absorb the physical world (2,050 words)

To Jefferson's favoured division
I'd offer one minor revision.
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That will blow you away,
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New Light On Nato Enlargement

Klaus Wiegrefe | Spiegel | 3rd May 2022

Declassified German papers clarify who said what about Nato when the Soviet Union was collapsing in 1991. Chancellor Kohl not only opposed any future Nato enlargement, but also wanted a new union between Russia and Ukraine, and a ten-year moratorium on independence for the Baltic States. But when Germany pressed for an official declaration on Nato's limits, America refused (2,600 words)

What We Can Deduce From A Leaked PDF

Matthew Butterick | 5th May 2022

A typographer looks for clues to the leaker of the draft Supreme Court judgement on abortion rights, and concludes that the leaked version, a photocopy of a PDF print-out, was made on a home scanner/printer. "I’d suppose it’s a friend, spouse, or family member of a Supreme Court justice who has opposed Roe v. Wade, acting with some­thing between autonomy and plau­sible deni­a­bility" (1,900 words)

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Counting The Dead In Ukraine

Sanjana Varghese | New Lines | 4th May 2022

There are three methodologies for monitoring civilian casualties during a conflict. The first is based on available institutional documentation, the second uses surveys and interviews to create a kind of census, and the third relies on modelling from larger trends. None of these systems are working well in Ukraine at the moment; it will be a long time before the true death toll is known (1,787 words)

Resurrecting A Coral Reef

Benji Jones | Recode | 22nd April 2022

Coral is "an ecosystem under siege", but there is now a way to reverse the damage. An accident in a lab revealed that pieces of broken coral grow much faster than the original entity, meaning that new specimens can now be produced at a rapid rate. Spawning tanks, which use LEDs to mimic the moonlight the corals need to breed, move the process on further. Gradually, entire reefs are regrown (3,523 words)

Did you know that this piece of the Browser can grow too? LED lights not required. We'd love to send you five article recommendations, a podcast and a video tonight:

From Ancient Oaks To Walking Yews

Tony Hall | Guardian | 30th April 2022

Survey of Britain's rarest trees, written by someone rejoicing in the esoteric title of "head of temperate arboretum collections at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew". Knowing how to read the trees unlocks past landscapes. Oaks were used in times past to mark boundaries; thus an isolated yet ancient specimen on a suburban street can signal the extent of a vanished royal hunting forest (1,942 words)

A Cosmos Indoors

Andrew O’Hagan | London Review Of Books | 21st April 2022

On obsolete objects. Contains many excellent turns of phrase. "I yearn every other day for Mint Cracknel, a chocolate bar from the 1970s that was criminally discontinued. I miss Player’s Number 6. I mourn flappy airline tickets with your name printed in purple ink. I miss memos... and I wish I had a serving hatch in my sitting room because then I’d feel properly middle class" (2,086 words)

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The Legend Of The Music Tree

Ellen Ruppel Shell | Smithsonian | 1st April 2022

Luthiers have long been obsessed with the wood of a single mahogany tree, felled in a remote rainforest in Belize, left to lie for 18 years, and eventually exported for sale. It has a rare "quilted grain" pattern, likely as a result of environmental stress. Although studies have failed to find anything objectively different about the sound of instruments created from its wood, its myth remains strong (5,221 words)

The Future Will Have To Wait

Michael Chabon | Details | 22nd January 2006

Novelist considers plans for a "Clock of the Long Now", a mechanical clock that keeps time for 10,000 years. Of late, people have forgotten to dream of the future, he says. "It’s as if we lost our ability, or our will, to envision anything beyond the next hundred years or so, as if we lacked the fundamental faith that there will in fact be any future at all beyond that not-too-distant date" (2,019 words)

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Bizarre Talmudic Scenarios

Jeremy Brown | Talmudology | 29th April 2022

On the value of hypothetical and highly improbable cases for clarifying Talmudic (and American) law. A cart may not be pulled by an ox and a donkey — but may it be pulled by a goat and a fish? If a bird lays eggs in a person's hair, must the bird be driven away before the eggs are collected? If a randomly thrown knife cuts an animal's throat, can the slaughtered animal be considered kosher? (2,030 words)

How To Be A First Sentence

Paul Vacca | Berfrois | 26th April 2022

Some great first sentences acquire lives of their own over time, revealing their star qualities and outshining the books from which they are drawn. But a first sentence should appear modest when met on the page. Its job there is to welcome the reader and then get out of the way. "The first sentence does not live for itself, it does not claim any self-sufficiency. It never seeks to shine for its own sake" (1,700 words)  

How to be a last sentence. The last sentence never seeks to shine for its own sake. It only seeks to remind you that, with a full subscription to The Browser, you could be receiving five article recommendations, a podcast and a video daily.

Barneys Fantasia

Adrienne Raphel | Paris Review | 27th April 2022

Anatomy of a departed department store. Barneys was a Manhattan institution that endured for almost a century before its demise in 2019. The company tried to expand to other locations; none thrived as the New York stores did. Barneys was a class marker: "It symbolised what it meant to be a member of the elite". Also, it was the best place to go to the bathroom in the city (4,418 words)

Insomniac Technologies

Sierra Komar | Real Life | 21st April 2022

Sleep aids of the past century — eyeshades, softer pillows, bigger beds — assumed that obstacles to perfect sleep lay outside the body. New "wearable" sleep aids assume them to lie inside the body. We must train ourselves to sleep better by learning more about how we sleep now. Sleep becomes a form of exercise, a form of discipline. By sleeping better, we can sleep less, and work more (2,380 words)

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Defending History

Maurice Earls | Dublin Review Of Books | 20th April 2022

It is worth studying the cultural and political landscape of Ireland post 19C famine precisely because it is now part of the forgotten past. Today's social liberalism inherited from this period of darkness "both the conditions which encouraged a culture of instruction, conformity and obedience and also those widespread feelings of dissatisfaction which bubbled beneath the surface" (1,843 words)

In Defence Of Friction

Gabriel Kahane | Substack | 26th April 2022

Case for ridding oneself of the smartphone, explained via the music of Brian Wilson. Without a phone, one is "ecstatically untethered", forced to appreciate fully the ever-present human labour that makes life possible. Being exposed to the true friction of existence makes us resourceful and curious — and wise to the "myth" that technology is indispensable for comfort and happiness (2,403 words)

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