In Search Of Troy

Joshua Hammer | Smithsonian | 22nd February 2022

Update on the archaeological excavations at the site of the ancient city of Troy, on the Aegean coast of modern Turkey, celebrated in Homer's Iliad. The site was first identified and excavated — some would say looted — by the 19C adventurer Heinrich Schliemann. But recent exploration reveals a city much bigger than previously thought, and perhaps among the oldest on Earth (5,200 words)

I Feel Lucky

Adam Williams | Real Life | 22nd February 2022

What's with that button below Google's search box that says “I’m Feeling Lucky”? Practically nobody uses it; but if you do, you will find that it takes you directly to the top result for a given search term. It's a relic of the days when Google was quirky and search was fun. "The feature persists as a puzzling characteristic that gives an otherwise familiar sight a minor, unassimilable mystique" (1,300 words)

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Mr Bennett And Mrs Brown

Virginia Woolf | Berfrois | 22nd February 2022

Woolf's rebuttal to fellow novelist Arnold Bennett, who had published a review of Jacob's Room under the title "Is the Novel Decaying" and suggested that her characters did not "vitally survive in the mind". Her essay has since been read as a mission statement for modernism, in particular her injunction that readers should "tolerate the spasmodic, the obscure, the fragmentary, the failure" (7,838 words)

Where Ideas Go To Die

Matthew Guay | Reproof | 15th February 2022

Taking notes should be about forgetting, not remembering. Whether it is in notebooks or via a constellation of apps, we hoard information that we aren't ready to let go of yet. But recording things should, in fact, be about being free of them. "We’ve stalked the prey, secured it for later nourishment. We can safely forget. We’ve insured against faulty memories. Now on to the next quest" (1,404 words)

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Afterthought:
"You cannot fight against the future. Time is on our side"
— William Ewart Gladstone

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The Curse Of Sliced Bread

Mary Harrington | Unherd | 18th February 2022

Musings on productivity, explained as a failed baking experiment. The writer's bread collapsed because she tried to eliminate its fifth ingredient: after flour, water, salt and yeast, it needs time to prove. Removing time from the baking process requires over a dozen potentially unhealthy additives. The same could be said of a relentlessly "life hacking" approach to modern existence (1,405 words)

Bird Brother

Rodney Stotts | Washingtonian | 9th February 2022

Excerpt from a falconer's memoir. Rodney Stotts was making his way as a "midlevel" drug dealer in southeast Washington DC, but needed a job with payslips in order to rent a flat. He took a gig with an environmental charity at random, only to fall in love with "learning the mysterious language of birds". After many years of work, in 2021 he finally attained the elite level of master falconer (2,820 words)

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Browser Readings: The Lady Of Shalott, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

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The Masses, Not The Classes

Bob Stanley | 21st February 2022

Vignette about Irving Berlin's breakthrough 1912 song "Alexander's Ragtime Band" from an upcoming history of popular music. Why was it such a hit? It wasn't actually ragtime, but it was about that musical form, and Berlin also disrupted songwriting convention to make it catchy. It emphasises the chorus, has no second verse, and unusually these two parts are in different keys (706 words)

Déneigement Montreal

Hillary Predko | The Prepared | 17th February 2022

Montreal has mastered the art of snow management. The city receives an average of 82 inches every winter yet, thanks to a well choreographed maintenance programme, remains a highly accessible place for cyclists and pedestrians. The secret? Actually removing the snow, rather than just ploughing or gritting. Trucks transport around 300,000 loads to dumping sites every cold season (1,608 words)

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Do you or someone you know suffer from bureaucratic psychosis? Experimental History has the cure.

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Podcast: Existentialism Today | Microphilosophy. Wideranging roundtable discussion about the state of this school of thought, with plenty of reference to the work of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre (52m 04s)

Video: The Giant Chainmail Box | Tom Scott. The Hill House, in Helensburgh, Scotland, was created in the early 1900s by Charles Rennie Mackintosh. This tour around the unorthodox ongoing restoration project is fascinating (3m 38s)

Afterthought:
“The days that make us happy make us wise”
— John Masefield

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The Trip To Rose Cottage

Cal Flyn | Granta | 17th February 2022

Letter from Swona, a small island off the northern tip of of Scotland which has been uninhabited for almost 50 years, and for the preceding 50 years was home to a single family, the Rosies, whose house survives just as it was when the last Rosie left in 1974. The kitchen table is "sitting ready for a meal, with a jar of marmalade, tinned milk powder and a box of biscuits at its centre" (2,300 words)

Fight To The Death With A Leopard

B.P. | Stuff Nobody Cares About | 12th February 2022

From the memoirs of the explorer and taxidermist Carl Akeley, published in 1923, comes this gripping account of a hand-to-hand fight with a leopard: "I fell to the ground, the leopard underneath me, my right hand in her mouth, my left hand clutching her throat, my knees on her lungs, my elbows in her armpits. Her body was twisted in an effort to get hold of the ground to turn herself" (2,040 words)

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Five Books: The Best Books On Ukraine And Russia. Serhii Plokhy, Professor of Ukrainian History at Harvard University, recommends books to better understand the conflict, from an introductory work by an eminent historian to the latest work of some of Ukraine's leading novelists.

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Designing Olympic Sports For Spectators

Brad Templeton | Brad Ideas | 11th February 2022

The 100m sprint is the ideal spectator sport. "You can watch it, and understand it, and see who is winning and who won, just with your eyes". Time-trials and judged events are much less satisfying to watch. Could they be tightened up? "One could imagine a discipline of skate jumping where figure skaters just show off harder and harder jumps and tricks until only the best is left skating" (1,500 words)

How To Commit Murder Inside A Locked Room

Ted Gioia | Honest Broker | 12th February 2022

In praise of of locked-room mysteries, and their master, John Dickson Carr. "It’s as if H.P. Lovecraft and Agatha Christie had a precocious love child who combined both their temperaments in a single vocation. That mixture of the ratiocinative and the eldritch makes Carr’s books irresistible — they are like spiderwebs both in their intricacy and the overtones of dark dangers dimly perceived" (2,400 words)

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Ecléctico Music Selection: Dennis Gonzalez New Dallas Quartet. "Any one musician would have changed the whole sound of the band," says trumpet player and composer Gonzalez. And he's right.

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A Paper Archaeology

Susan Stewart | Public Domain Review | 9th February 2022

Piranesi, the 18C engraver-architect, was outraged and saddened by the cavalier attitude to Roman ruins he observed in his travels around Italy. He thus "determined to preserve them forever by means of engraving", combining the precision of a draughtsman with the fantasies of an artist to produce works that imagine what "the reality of the past" might have looked like (2,659 words)

Red Poets Society

Philip Oltermann | Irish Times | 8th February 2022

Introduction to the “Working Circle of Writing Chekists”. This weekly gathering of East German poetry enthusiasts was an attempt by the Stasi in the 1980s "to professionalise their lyrical praxis" and "weaponise verse for a Cold War culture war". But instead of making them better at tracking down dissident poets, the exercise made the writers question the fundamental tenets of the GDR (996 words)

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Five Books: The Best Philip Roth Books. He wrote about what he saw when he looked in the mirror, even when he didn't like it; Roth's literary biographer talks us through this most uncomfortable of novelists.

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The Big Here Quiz

Kevin Kelly | Technium | 15th February 2022

List of 34 universal question intended to make you more conscious of your place in the larger system of your environment. It invites consideration of issues that are often deliberately avoided, such as "where does your garbage go?" and "where does the pollution in your air come from?" as well as data points like tides and moon phases. Best of all is the first on the list: "Point north" (713 words)

The Omnipotence Of Dream Memes

ML Kejera | New Inquiry | 10th February 2022

Connecting a niche community on Reddit with the early 20C surrealist movement. Members of the r/thomastheplankengine forum document the extent to which the visual language of the internet has entered their subconscious by creating and sharing the memes they see in their dreams, which they call "planks". This mirrors the "psychic automatism" proposed by André Breton (2,007 words)

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Podcast: Voice Lessons | The Harper’s Podcast. Erudite conversation about inner voices, with a focus on research about the ways that athletes can internalise the vocalisations of their coaches (42m 19s)

Video: Mitarashi Dango From Demon Slayer | Youtube | Alvin Zhou. Nicely filmed tutorial on how to make a glazed rice dumplings snack. Includes an unsuccessful experiment with indoor charcoal grilling (7m 30s)

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Picasso’s Secret Lover

Jeffrey Meyers | London Magazine | 4th February 2022

Geneviève Laporte is the "most shadowy and elusive lover" in Picasso's long list of conquests. She met him at 18, a month after the Liberation of Paris in 1944, when she interviewed him for her student newspaper. Their intense two-year affair began six years later. Torn between wanting her own artistic life and to assist the great artist, Laporte "escaped with only minor wounds" (2,322 words)

The Trials Of Ernest Shackleton

Ranulph Fiennes | Literary Hub | 31st January 2022

Extract from a biography of the 20C Antarctic explorer, authored by a modern day adventurer. Confined conditions are compared; Fiennes benefitted greatly from the fact that his wife Ginny took part in his expeditions. "I would vent my spleen in my diary. It is quite funny now, looking back, as some of my gripes were so inconsequential, but at the time they felt like major disagreements" (2,531 words)

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Browser Readings: High Flight, by John Gillespie Magee.

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How Einstein Conceived General Relativity

Michael Dine | Literary Hub | 10th February

Accessible explainer of how Einstein arrived at a new understanding of gravity, the basis of his theory of general relativity. His conceptual breakthrough came in 1907 with a thought-experiment borrowed from everyday life: He imagined an elevator-car in free fall, its cables cut, and deduced that observers inside the car would feel weightless. He called this "the happiest thought of my life" (2,900 words)

Lavender In A Drawer

Peter Hitchens | The Lamp | 11th February 2022

Proust was right about memory-pumps. Tastes and smells beat sights and sounds. "Music can evoke recollections, but only in a bludgeoning, sentimental way. Smell and taste go straight past years of forgetting to awake unwanted, unexpected things — lavender in a drawer, the thrilling scent of burning coal on chilly afternoons, wet raincoats, the slimy odor of the seashore at low tide" (1,300 words)

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Five Books: The Best Books For Learning French. There's no easy way to learn a language, but here are five books that will truly help with the long path to fluency.

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The Logical Mystic

Peter Salmon | New Humanist | 7th February 2022  

Notes on the centenary of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, drafted on the battlefields of World War One and completed in a prison camp where Wittgenstein acquired a faith in God. Bertrand Russell said of him: “He has penetrated deep into mystical ways of thought and feeling, but I think (though he wouldn’t agree) that what he likes best in mysticism is its power to make him stop thinking” (2,600 words)

The Roaring Game

Laurie Winkless | North & South | 1st September 2021

A New Zealand physicist investigates the finer points of curling. How does the curler set the trajectory of the stone across the ice? What's with all those brooms? The interaction of stone and ice is still a matter of scientific disagreement. Some argue for a “pivot-slide model” in which the texture of the stone dominates; others for “scratch-guiding”, in which the texture of the ice is crucial (3,900 words)

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Ecléctico Music Selection: The Black Square Quartet, a contemporary classical ensemble from Brisbane, Australia, performing composer Thomas Green's Five Quick-Tempered Dances.

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The Waddling Wood Pigeon

Derek Niemann | Guardian | 9th February 2022

Stellar instalment of the daily Country Diary, a column debuted in 1906. In a few hundred words, the writer sketches a complete and vivid scene. A deceptively slow-seeming pigeon is mounting a raid on some ivy berries. The fruit matures at different paces; no other birds have tried it yet. The plump bird "combines a gymnast’s grace with a bouncer’s weight" as it makes the grab (362 words)

Losing Discoveries

Carmen Faye Mathes | Public Books | 2nd February 2022

Commentary on Samuel Johnson's Dictionary from a scholar who helped to digitise it. She learned and then forgot hundreds of marvellous new words and their meanings, and came closer to the great man as a result. "I have come to relate to Johnson as more of a long-distance runner: an athlete whose particular facility lies in the way he marathons forth even as it pains him" (1,841 words)

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Five Books: The Best New Celebrity Memoirs. With dozens of celebrity memoirs published every year, these are the ones that do more than just spin out platitudes on how to succeed or get through adversity.

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