An Experiment In Following A Worm

William Davis | The Collation | 5th August 2021

Archive photographer explains how tracking the path of a worm through a 17C letter helped to reveal the folding habits of 17C writers. This missive was sent to the Laird of Craighall, Scotland, in 1647 when it was customary to fold up letters into small packages to keep "grime and gossips" away from the words. Software was used to avoid handling the letter during the investigation (1,991 words)

What Driveling Times Are These!

Penelope J. Corfield | Lapham's Quarterly | 8th February 2022

The Georgians loved to give names to the period of time through which they were living. These terms invented to characterise this 18C period were mostly pessimistic. A selection: the Age of Lead, a Cheating Age, the Age of Mad-Folks, a Depraved Age, Driveling Times, this Irreligious Age and the present Age of Vice. There was even a newspaper called the Spirit of the Age (1,984 words)

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Browser Readings: The Embarrassing Episode of Little Miss Muffet, by Guy Wetmore Carryl

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She Used To Sing Opera

Imogen Crimp | Granta | 3rd February 2022

On the complicated welter of emotions evoked by a failed attempt at becoming an opera singer. The training is hellish and the prize upon graduation loses its sheen. "I’m a soubrette, the lightest type of soprano voice. My main bread-and-butter is sluts and children – Emmie, Zerlina, Despina... These would be my roles, I realise. Sluts and children. This would be my entire career" (4,669 words)

What Was The TED Talk?​

Oscar Schwartz | The Drift | 31st January 2022 | BMP 3/m

Astute assessment of the impact that the TED Talk had on the cultural role of the public intellectual. No punches are pulled. At the height of its popularity, the "inspiresting" style of these speakers was reaching tens of millions. This mode is "earnest and contrived. It is smart but not quite intellectual, personal but not sincere, jokey but not funny. It is an aesthetic of populist elitism" (4,757 words)

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Podcast: The Science Of Dreams | Knowable. Dreams are subjective, hard to share, and difficult to analyse — a terrible subject for scientific inquiry. This history of attempts to understand dreams since Freud is illuminating (31m 27s)

Video: Kinda Magic Socks | YouTube | Wool And The Gang. Cheerful timelapse of a knitter making one patterned sock from a single ball of wool. As in all the best stop motion animation, the final product seems to appear by magic (1m 29s)

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Why Mathematics Is Different

Jay Daigle | Jay's Blog | 2nd February 2022

Why doesn't mathematics have a "replication crisis"? Mainly because maths papers are being "replicated" all the time, whenever another mathematician reads the paper and understands the math (or not). Maths papers are full of mistakes, but rarely mistakes that invalidate the conclusions. "We can be right for the wrong reasons — we mostly only try to prove things that are basically true" (4,060 words)

James Joyce's Ulysses Reviewed

Sisley Huddleston | Observer | 5th March 1922

The publication of Ulysses 100 years ago signalled the birth of modernism in literature. Here is how it was received at the time: "Blasphemy and beauty, poetry and piggishness jostle each other. But one becomes tired of beastliness always breaking in. There is one chapter devoted to the reverie of a woman, and her monologue intérieur is, I imagine, the vilest in all literature" (1,540 words)

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Five Books: Notable Nonfiction Of Early 2022. Five Books editor Sophie Roell surveys some of the best new books from the early days of this year, covering everything from Neolithic archaeology to the latest insights of neuroscience to where we work, what we feel, and how we die.

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How We Broke the Supply Chain

David Dayen & Rakeen Mabud | American Prospect | 31st January 2022

One day you can’t find bicycle parts; the next it’s luxury watches or cream cheese. You might walk into a Burger King and see a sign that says “No potatoes”, or the fries are soggy because there’s not enough cooking oil. Today's shortages are the blowback from decades of Wall Street pressure on big companies to cut inventory and workers, outsource everything and crush competitors (2,700 words)

A Mathematician’s Guide to Wordle

Ali Lloyd | Aperiodical | 1st February 2022

How Wordle compares to Mastermind; and how to win Wordle more easily but not too easily. "The target word list is a set of less than 2500 words. This complicates strategy in two ways: it involves consideration of whether a word has been deemed common enough; and it opens up the possibility of guessing a word which will not be correct, but will rule out enough to make it worthwhile" (2,300 words)

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Browser Bets: Tom Chivers, science editor at Unherd.com and author of How To Read Numbers, places the odds that Boris Johnson survives as Prime Minister until June 1 and that artificial intelligence wipes out humanity (55m 07s)

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Should I Ask Over Zoom?

M. Mahdi Roghanizad and Vanessa K. Bohns | Social Psychological and Personality Science | 27th December 2021 | PDF

Paper detailing a study into whether asking for help via different forms of communication — face to face conversation, video call, audio call, email — can affect whether the desired support is offered. The results are intriguing: in person requests are by far the most effective, but few of the helpseekers who took part in the experiments seemed to be aware of this. Email is the worst (5,094 words)

The Swedish Witch Trials

Jennie Tiderman-Österberg | Folklife | 25th October 2021

The height of the witch trials in Sweden, between 1668 and 1676, is known as det stora oväsendet or "The Great Noise". About 300 people, mostly women, were executed — three times as many as in the past century. Folk traditions were at odds with the new state Lutheran religion. The climate was cooling, milk yields were down, plague and poverty were rife. A scapegoat was found (3,280 words)

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Podcast: Pages 1 - 28 | Friends of Shakespeare And Company Read Ulysses. Will Self begins this reading project celebrating a century since James Joyce's Ulysses was first published in its entirety (56m 38s)

Video: Pass The Ball | Vimeo | Nathan Boey | 2m 38s. Animation project in which many artists from different countries made a three-second video about a small red ball. The resulting video stitches all of the work together in a rapid burst of styles and colours.

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On Cat Pictures

Teow Lim Goh | Los Angeles Review Of Books | 31st January 2022

There are more pet dogs than pet cats in the US, yet it is feline portraiture that dominates the American internet. Why? The answer lies in the fundamental tension of cat-keeping. "Cats are still-wild animals that depend on us for food and shelter... The best cat pictures and jokes negotiate this tension between the wild and the domesticated." Cat pictures are a "social currency" (2,589 words)

Disturbing Heritage

Birgit Meyer | Allegra | 31st January 2022

Debate rages over what to do with previously cherished objects belonging to ideas that have now declined in popularity. The impulse to conserve everything is untenable. "In many ways, heritage has run out of control – politically, but also epistemologically." Unwanted Christian artefacts form the case study here; they retain a "sacred residue" that makes repurposing them difficult (2,321 words)

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Browser Readings: She Walks In Beauty, by Lord Byron

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A View From Across The River

Samprati Pani | Chiragh Dilli | 29th January 2022

On the process of "homing" and of becoming at home in the Delhi neighbourhood of Patparganj. Situated on the eastern side of the Yamuna river, until transport infrastructure expanded rickshaw drivers would regularly refuse to go there. Although home to many middle class apartment dwellers, the street life in between these buildings has thrived rather than being suppressed (3,791 words)

Luxury For All

Gideon Fink Shapiro | Places | 19th January 2022

Commentary on "Rêverie à Paris", an 1867 essay by the novelist George Sand on contemporary urban design and garden art. It amounts to "a love letter to public space and a defence of decorative landscape". She wanted everyone to have access to inspiring open spaces, but — unusually — also made the subversive argument that the common man needed free time to spend dawdling in them (8,999 words)

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Podcast: The Grace Of André Leon Talley | GABA. Immersive soundscape providing what the creator calls "a Wagnerian meditation" on the work of the recently deceased fashion editor (11m 00s)

Video: The Wisdom of Lou Reed | YouTube | Marshare. Reed talks to the camera in his role as "Man With Strange Glasses" from Wayne Wang and Paul Auster's 1995 ad lib comedy film Blue In the Face (5m 01s)

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Life Stories From Death Row

Amanda Abrams | Plough | 27th January 2022

Gripping review of Right Here, Right Now, an anthology of life-stories written by American prisoners awaiting execution. They tell of childhoods filled with violence, addiction, and abuse. Many claim to have found "peace and brotherhood" only in prison. True, the writers "scarcely mention the crimes that landed them on death row". Even so: "In all their horror, they deserve our consideration" (1,390 words)

🦒 Interview: Eat Your Catfish With Noah Arjomand

Noah Arjomand's raw and uncompromising documentary, Eat Your Catfish, documents Noah's mother's struggle with the degenerative motor-neuron disease ALS. According to Variety, Eat Your Catfish is making "an outsize impact in the documentary circuit". Noah talks to The Browser's Baiqu Gonkar about the making of the film and the obligations of familial love. (27m 28s)

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Five Books: The Best Books On The Harlem Renaissance. William J. Maxwell, Professor of English and African American Studies, recommends the best reads on this golden age for American culture, a flourishing of Black literature and music that exploded in the 1910s and lasted through to the Great Depression.

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Walking America: Washington, DC

Chris Arnade | Intellectual Int-ing | 25th January 2022

Chris Arnade seems to be reinventing the long walk as a literary genre, combining a lively record of the passing scene in words and pictures with reflections on what these glimpses of local life can tell us about the condition of American society as a whole. Described here: a 12-mile walk through Anacostia and on to the White House; a 13-mile walk from Alexandria through northern Virginia (2,540 words)

Becoming A Centaur

Janet Jones | Aeon | 14th January 2022

The average horse weighs half a tonne, makes instantaneous movements, and "can become hysterical in a heartbeat".  In evolutionary terms, humans are predators and horses are prey. So how do riders ever control their mounts? It helps that horses are sensitive to touch, so physical signals travel easily from rider to horse. But mainly, rider and horse must somehow understand one another (3,000 words)

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Ecélctico Music Pick: "Ami" by Bebe Manga, hit song in the makossa style with its funky Cameroonian rhythms. Click and scroll down for links to every music platform.

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Six Architects On Their Dream Desks

Drawing Matter | 17th December 2019

Architects are, unsurprisingly, very specific about their workspaces. To wit: "My ideal desk is something large, antique and heavy but not too heavy, an antique timber desk with side drawers, not as heavy as Victorian, but nicely Georgian/Biedermeier. Biedermeier preferably. Elegant and classical but with some gravitas. Something in green leather on top and cherry wood" (1,528 words)

The Insanity Of Being A Scrabble Enthusiast

Oliver Roeder | LitHub | 25th January 2022

Recovering Scrabble addict's account of his years in love with the game. Most people don't realise that there's a deep strategy to it because they learn as children. "There is something magical about realising how to play Scrabble even one step above beginner: using the bonus spaces, creating overlapping words, hitting your first bingo. You also learn how to play defence" (1,807 words)

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Five Books: The Best Books On Islam And The State. Political Science Professor Ahmet T. Kuru recommends books that help trace the historical relationship between Islam and the state—and points to strands of secularism that may hold the key to a happier relationship between Islam and liberal democracy.

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On Writing: An Abecedarian

Priscilla Long | Hudson Review | 24th January 2022

Alphabetically arranged essay on the history of writing. At "Y" for "Yesternight" comes this musing on why some words survive while others are forgotten or relegated as archaic. "Language is always in flux, always changing, morphing, moving. Words are added; words drop away. Words shift in meaning to mirror the world: digitise used to mean to manipulate with the fingers" (4,423 words)

On The Trail Of Colombia’s Sloth Cartel

Natasha Daly | National Geographic | 11th January 2022

Investigation into Latin America's illegal trade in sloths. Like other illicit markets, this one also has its cartels, its kingpins and its conflicts. While on the trail of the region's most notorious trader, the writer ends up in some strange situations. One source was busy poaching other species when she caught up with him, so "he stashed the owl somewhere before sitting down to talk" (4,480 words)

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Browser Readings: Generations, by Amy Lowell

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Caroline Crampton, Editor-In-Chief; Robert Cottrell, Founding Editor; Jodi Ettenberg, Associate Editor; Uri Bram, CEO & Publisher; Al Breach, Founding Director

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My Uncle The Witch Hunter

Rosemary Counter | Walrus | 10th January 2022

Profile of a shadowy figure from "one of Canada’s greatest ghost stories". In 1829 the McDonalds of Baldoon, Ontario, were being tormented by their haunted farmhouse. A multitalented healer — the writer's distant uncle — stopped the curse with a silver bullet but barely features in the folklore. Born in 1753, he abandoned the Amish lifestyle to practice folk magic on the shores of Lake Erie (1,948 words)

🦒: Tomiwa Owolade On Social And Moral Movements

Uri Bram | The Browser | 22nd January 2022

The Browser's Uri Bram talks to writer and critic Tomiwa Owolade about social and moral movements.

By doing justice, then, I mean squeezing, as much as I can, the full complexity of  a given topic like a lemon to season a dry meal. This won’t change society, and it may not even change the mind of the individual reading my work, but I hope it will at least provoke them to think more rigorously.

Read more.

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Video: Miniature Calendar | Youtube| Tatsuya Tanaka. Fast paced introduction to the work of an artist who combines foodstuffs and intricate models to create beautiful dioramas. The iceberg lettuce mountain is especially good (2m 08s)

Afterthought:
"To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often"
— John Henry Newman

Not only does The Browser recommend outstanding articles, we also select great podcasts and videos and quotes to ponder too. Get it all with a full Browser membership:

Caroline Crampton, Editor-In-Chief; Robert Cottrell, Founding Editor; Jodi Ettenberg, Associate Editor; Uri Bram, CEO & Publisher; Al Breach, Founding Director

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