Planning For Desert Storm

William Sayers | Mystics & Statistics | 6th April 2022

Retired Pentagon analyst recounts how much work went into war-gaming and computer-modelling the US invasion of Iraq in 1991, and how little weight those exercises carried in the heat of battle. "Lord knows we threw enough time and money at the problem, but in the end, Schwarzkopf just had to pray that we had enough combat power when our troops rolled across the line" (1,100 words)

Daddy Of Them All

Richard Roud | Guardian | 6th April 1972

The Guardian bravely republishes its review of The Godfather from 1972, a time when critics saw all Hollywood films as commodities, and failed to recognise The Godfather as a turning-point: "It’s your big commercial film which, without advancing the art of the cinema a millimetre, without a real directorial presence behind it, is nonetheless an extremely satisfying three hours" (1,045 words)

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Forgiving Someone Who Isn’t Sorry

Rachel Wilkerson Miller | Vox | 25th March 2022

Advice from experts in reconciliation on how to move past a conflict when the other party isn't willing or able to apologise. Redefining forgiveness as a moral virtue can help; being "good to the one who was not good to you" can take the sting out of fruitless resentment. The act of forgiving can be a justifiably selfish one. Being free of anger towards others is a worthy goal in and of itself (2,245 words)

Tripping The Late Capitalist Sublime

Ed Simon | Millions | 28th January 2022

The boundary between literature and advertising copy is porous: we judge fictional characters by their consumerist choices, and some of the 20C's greatest authors — F. Scott Fitzgerald, Salman Rushdie, Don DeLillo — worked as copy writers. Even when actively trying to break away from the cycle of consumption, we define ourselves through the products we select or don't select (4,982 words)

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Thucydides Was A Realist

Patrick Porter | Engelsberg Ideas | 1st April 2022

Modern scholarship has "nuanced" the work of Athenian historian Thucydides to death. Attention to detail has obscured the bigger picture, which is that "he was one of the founders of a pessimistic intellectual tradition that believes the world, like the one he endured, is inherently a cold, harsh, dangerous place in which power and its acquisition is paramount" (2,725 words)

Cell Death And Vomiting

Lorenzo Seneci, Timothy Patrick Jenkins, Shirin Ahmadi & Christoffer V. Sørensen | Science Nordic | 31st March 2022

What happens to the body during mushroom poisoning. One major group of toxins, the amanitins, prevent protein synthesis — killing cells one by one in a domino effect that takes down major organs. Muscarine toxins, meanwhile, attack neurons and slow down involuntary muscle contractions, including those in the heart. The conclusion? Be very, very sure of the mushrooms you eat (1,545 words)

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The West Will Decide On Putin's Bankruptcy

Peter Littger | Der Spiegel | 31st March 2022

Interview with ex-Goldman Sachs economist Jim O'Neill, who coined the acronym BRICs to designate Brazil, Russia, India and China as an emergent economic elite. So why did Russia go sideways? "It’s the corruption and the terrible demographics – in particular, the low life expectancy among men. Productivity is a huge issue. Profound reforms and reliable institutions are necessary" (2,200 words)  

The Lives Of Houses

Hermione Lee | Princeton University Press | 31st March 2022

Notes on the part played by houses and homes (the distinction is important) in the lives and works of writers including Virginia Woolf and Henry James. "How a house is lived in can tell you everything you need to know about people, whether it’s the choice of wallpaper, the mess in the kitchen, the silence or shouting over meals, doors left open or closed, a fire burning in the hearth" (1,200 words)

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Conspiracy-Proof Archaeology

Telescopic Turnip | Malmesbury | 28th February 2022

Historiography is an arms race between ways to establish facts and ways to falsify them. Popular memory has never been reliable. Photographs and videos seemed trustworthy until ways were found to fake them. Carbon dating works, but samples can be salted. Genetics and paleogenetics are currently the best tools for some types of historical investigation, but even genes can be forged (1,850 words)

Wang Huning And Chinese Culture

Kerry Brown | US-China Perception Monitor | 28th March 2022

Western awareness of Chinese leaders follows a power law. Everyone knows of Xi Jinping. Some know of Li Keqiang. Almost nobody knows of Wang Huning. But Wang may yet prove the most consequential figure of his political generation. He is portrayed here as the deep thinker behind Xi's shift away from market liberalism and back towards "traditional" Communist and Confucian values (2,070 words)

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The Brink Of Erasure

Narayani Basu | Contingent | 10th July 2021

Access to material that documents the past is the right of every citizen in a democracy. Yet at the National Archives of India, a scholar is lucky if five out of ten requests are fulfilled. Bureaucratic obstacles and government interference keep inconvenient truths hidden. This is why, despite the elapsed decades, "the study of post-independence India is still a nascent field" (2,604 words)

Haunted By Venus

Choi Suk-mun | Alpinist | 24th March 2022

Account of a climbing trip in South Korea. Part way up, the climber is aghast to find that bolts have been embedded to make the ascent less challenging. A debate ensues over whether to remove them. With the addition of these aids, something is lost: "A sense of beauty, wildness, imagination and curiosity, a longing that had drawn us all into the mountains since our childhood years" (6,926 words)

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The View From Warsaw

Joy Neumeyer | Baffler | 21st March 2022

Over two million Ukrainians have entered Poland, where lawmakers voted to grant them free travel on public transport, access to health care, and the possibility of three years of residency without a visa. Relations between the two countries have been fractious in centuries past, but the overwhelming support for the refugees is perhaps "a form of apology by a former ruler and fellow sufferer" (2,207 words)

Inventing The Sovereign State

Ali S. Harfouch | Genealogies Of Modernity | 29th March 2022

Discourse on the origin of sovereignty. The continuity between theology and political theory is instructive. "Modernity did not do away with transcendence but rather it transposed it onto the world," the writer argues. The invention of sovereignty reflects "a need for a symbolic order that mirrors what it deems to be permanent". Secular power owes much to religious tradition (1,666 words)

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Balance Of Terrors

Zachary Loeb | Real Life | 21st March 2022

Revisiting a 1957 essay by an "Atomphilosoph", or "nuclear philosopher", in light of events in Russia and Ukraine. In "Commandments in the Atomic Age", Günther Anders argued that the world doesn't spend enough time being afraid of its end. "Don’t be a coward. Have the courage to be afraid," he said. We should know that a catastrophe may come and not be crushed by the possibility (2,725 words)

How To Choose Your Perfume

Jude Stewart | Paris Review | 23rd March 2022

Transcript of a conversation about scents. Full of arresting details, such as: only twenty per cent of fragrances are luxury perfumes — the rest are created as "functional perfumes" for laundry detergent and cleaning products. To smell can be to travel in time; the cologne Napoleon wore is still on sale. Perfume can provide an invisible armour and a shortcut to a particular emotion (2,855 words)

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Americans Must Vote

E.J. Dionne Jr. & Miles Rapoport | Literary Hub | 24th March 2022

The case for making voting compulsory in America, as it is in Australia: Voting is a "public responsibility of all citizens, no less important than jury duty". Compulsory voting improves the quality of democracy by making election outcomes more representative. It protects voting rights from erosion. "To say that everyone should vote is the surest guarantee that everyone will be enabled to vote" (1,440 words)

You Should Not Open A Door ...

Adam Mastroianni | Experimental History | 9th March 2022

I truncated the headline because, well, let's just say that the door is a loo door, and so carelessly designed that the person inside (or, indeed, outside) cannot be sure if the door is locked or not. One theory of why the most commonly-used objects, like doors and loos, tend to display the biggest defects in usability: "By the time the doors are installed, the door designers are off designing other doors" (1,700 words)

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Morumbi And Paraisopolis

Feng Xinqi | Allegra Laboratory | 22nd March 2022

The first time, I think, that we have recommended a play on The Browser, and a good reason for setting the precedent. This short drama takes place in a city which seems to be a composite of Mumbai and Sao Paulo. The theme is the gulf between rich and poor. The wider the gap, the harder it is for either side to understand the other, and the easier it is for the rich to view the poor as a threat (2,000 words)

Deciding When A Pandemic Is Over

Tanya Lewis | Scientific American | 14th March 2022

A pandemic is over "when people stop paying attention to it". Sociology trumps epidemiology. The "Spanish flu" pandemic went through four waves betweeen 1918 and 1920. The fourth wave of 1920 was more lethal than the second wave of 1918, but by 1920 virtually no American cities were imposing further restrictions. People were just fed up. Perhaps we have reached that point with Covid-19 (1,200 words)

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Consumed In The Culture

Emma Quackenbush | Van | 16th March 2022

Orchestras are in need of human resources departments. As described here, these artistic institutions sound uniquely designed as dysfunctional workplaces, with musicians expected to offer up their most vulnerable facets to make good music while navigating a rigid contractual environment. Steeped in tradition, orchestras are slow to change and toxicity, once introduced, keeps building (2,376 words)

Personal Growth

Marina Benjamin | Granta | 11th March 2022

Essay about childhood memory — in this case, as a child who didn't grow and hated food — and the unreliability of memoir. "What concerns me is the rather too neat idea that memory is something that floats up intact from the murky past, like some archaeological find you’ve unearthed and off which you merely have to brush the dirt... All this organic indeterminacy makes memory troubling" (5,615 words)

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