Life After Brecht

G.D. Brown | PopMatters | 20th January 2022

On the "lowbrow dialectics" visible in the films of director Wes Anderson, especially his latest offering, The French Dispatch. The "distinct unreality" of its world recalls Bertolt Brecht's theatre work, with its awareness of its own artificiality and the spectacle being created. In Anderson's visual world, "high art grows forth from the bourgeois malaise of the neoliberal era" (1,442 words)

Folders Versus Tags

Eleanor Konik | 24th September 2021

Personal knowledge management enthusiast's magnum opus on the fraught subject of hierarchical organisation. The overwhelming trend in digital products, from Gmail down to the most niche notetaking app, is to apply tag to files rather than sort them away into folders. But, as is argued here, keeping all of your information in one bucket with no compartments has its downsides (4,238 words)

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Five Books: The best books on Science Fiction and Philosophy. Serious philosophy need not take the form of a journal article or monograph, argues the philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel, as he selects five science fiction books that succeed both as novels and provocative thought experiments that push us to consider deep philosophical questions from every angle.

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Martian Minutes

Matt Webb | Interconnected | 18th January 2022

A day on Mars is 39.5 minutes longer than a day on Earth. So when humans get to Mars and need to co-ordinate with humans on Earth, how will they agree on the time? Nasa has been experimenting with wristwatches set to lose 39.5 minutes each 24-hour day. A more metaphysical option: Let all Martian clocks stop at 00:00 each midnight and restart 39.5 Earth-minutes later at 00:01. (1,115 words)

The Year Of Duke Ellington

Harmony Holiday | Black Music And Black Muses | 18th January 2022

We all need more Duke Ellington in our lives — for his musical genius, of course, but also for his qualities as a role-model. Ellington's was "a lucky spirit, a winner’s spirit which made battle appear and sound effortless but never cowered in the face of it". He "maintained the exacting chivalry of a leader effective enough to remind us how to love and console one another even amidst uproar" (1,650 words)  

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Ecléctico Music Selection: "Nin Hun", by Maryam Mursal – a singer and composer from Mogadishu, Mursal's music is a hybrid of African and Arabic influences unique to Somalia.

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Show Some Emotion

Meghan Racklin | Baffler | 18th January 2022

Survey of several projects exploring how to create a taxonomy of emotions. They have esoteric, quasi-dystopian names: the Museum of Contemporary Emotions, the Bureau of Linguistical Reality, the Emotions Lab. Their efforts are doomed to fail. "Emotions are a particularly amorphous element of this divine scheme, so our attempts to catalogue them are doomed to be provisional at best" (2,169 words)

What Does A Vow Of Poverty Mean?

Vivian Warren | Bruderhof | 5th January 2022

Relatively new member of the Bruderhof, an evangelical Protestant movement founded in Germany in 1920, contemplates the vow of poverty she has taken. "The poverty I should be concerned about is not expressed through the lack of physical things. Those are relatively easy to do without. The poverty that is the hardest for me is that of giving up my own plans, ideas, opinions, and dreams" (1,014 words)

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You use social media but you hate it. You've heard about those studies saying it's bad for you, but what else is new? So is junk food and cigarettes. Why is this any different? Because on social media, you're addicting your friends too.

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Five Books: The Best Manga for Children and Teens. Long associated with Japanese popular culture, manga are now found in translation across the world. In North America, this dynamic form of visual narration is overtaking comics and graphic novels in popularity. Oscar, age 13, recommends his favourite manga for children and teenagers.

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The Attack Of Zombie Science

Natalia Pasternak, Carlos Orsi, Aaron F. Mertz and Stuart Firestein | Nautilus | 12th January 2022

The past two years has seen a sharp increase in the amount of "zombie science" extant in the academic ecosystem, these researchers argue. This is "mindless" work that "goes through the motions of scientific research without a real research question to answer, it follows all the correct methodology, but it doesn’t aspire to contribute to advance knowledge in the field". It must be destroyed (1,963 words)

Podcast: Two Old Ghosts | Edith!. Courtly satire centred on Edith Wilson, who covertly performed some of her husband Woodrow Wilson's presidential duties to conceal the extent of his illness from the American people (32m 35s)

Five Books: The best books on Future Cities. Understanding the way we interact with our built environment is becoming an increasingly data-driven enterprise. Davina Jackson shares the five books that best explain the technology behind the urban planning of the future.

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Browser Readings: During Wind And Rain, by Thomas Hardy.

Not only five excellent article recommendations, but also a brilliant podcast and a delightful video, and a thought-provoking quote to boot? It can only be The Browser:

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What Is Great Taste?

Max Fletcher | Vittles | 17th January 2022

Is it ever possible to say definitively if one food tastes better than another? Judges for the Great Taste Awards, the UK's most prestigious food prize, follow an esoteric procedure as part of an attempt to do so. Each judge eats a blind and random assortment of the 14,000 entries so that no one palette can dominate. As a result, "you might taste a collagen powder right after some haslet" (2,693 words)

You Don’t Think In Any Language

David J. Lobina | 3 Quarks Daily | 17th January 2022

Natural languages, like English or Spanish, may be used for an interior monologue. Beneath that thoughts have a different, and perhaps more universal, mode of expression. "The language of thought is the common code in which concepts are couched... We all think in roughly the same mental language, a system composed of concepts that allows us to represent and make sense of the world" (2,114 words)

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Five Books: The Best Nonfiction Books Of 2021. Five Books editor Sophie Roell shares some of her favourite nonfiction books of the year, from history to economics, lessons on how to write like Chekhov to the part each of us can play in reducing political polarization.

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Vintage Prada And Snow

Olivia Giovetti | VAN | 13th January 2022

A music critic recommends recent classical recordings accessible and absorbing enough to banish, however briefly, your Weltschmerz. They are the "miniature idylls" of Grieg’s song cycle, Haugtussa; Beethoven's three violin sonatas, over which the composer's style evolves from late Classical to early Romantic; and Liszt’s Harmonies poétiques et religieuses, a "musical koan" (1,000 words)

🦒: Browser Bets: Helen Toner

The aim of Browser Bets is to go beyond talking about the future and to start putting some numbers on what will happen and when. This week The Browser's James Dillard goes Bayesian with Helen Toner, Director of Strategy at Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technologies, and board member at OpenAI. Topics include China, security theatre, AI-powered fast-food ordering, and quantum supremacy. Read or watch.

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Five Books: The Best Historical Fiction Set In The Ancient World. The ancient world offers an excellent canvas for historical fiction but too many books fall victim to anachronistic thinking, says Oxford ancient historian Harry Sidebottom; here he recommends some of his own favourites, all written during the golden age of classical historical fiction half a century ago.

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Buy Things, Not Experiences

Harold Lee | 9th January 2022

Current wisdom advises spending disposable income on "experiences, not things”. But this would be perverse behaviour. Material goods are cheaper than ever. Why shun their probably temporary abundance in favour of buying services, from exotic vacations to designer haircuts, which, thanks to Baumol’s cost disease, are "just as hard to produce as ever", and historically relatively expensive? (785 words)

You, Yourself, And Your Brand Name

Nancy Friedman | Medium | 12th January 2022

"Implicit egotism" is the new nominal determinism. If you choose a name for your company or your product, chances are you will factor in your own name to some degree, perhaps without even noticing. Is it mere coincidence that Amazon was founded by Jeff Bezos, Instagram by Kevin Systrom, Zoom by Yuan Zheng? Well, perhaps yes. More data is needed. But still, an interesting conjecture (800 words)

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Browser Reading: The Lesson of the Moth, by Don Marquis (1m 59s)

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Beastly Clues

Roddy Howland Jackson | Public Domain Review | 12th January 2022

T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land was once derided by a critic as a “pompous cross-word puzzle” but the connection between modernist poetry and the cryptic crossword — both of which flowered in the 1920s — was far stronger than a cheap jibe. Both could be said to provide "a uniquely vital opportunity for defamiliarising language" in order to reveal "portals into surprising realities" (3,630 words)

On Not Hating The Body

Martha C. Nussbaum | Liberties | 9th January 2022

Philosopher's take on the "disgust with the body, this anti-corporeal campaign" that is so deeply embedded in our culture and collective psyche. Although she ranges widely across the literary canon, it is Leopold Bloom from Joyce's Ulysses that offers a three-part alternative to this instinctive hatred of the flesh. Rather, approach the body with kindly empathy and, crucially, humour (6,143 words)

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Five Books: Notable Novels Of 2022, recommended by Cal Flyn. Including new and upcoming work by Hanya Yanagihara and Sheila Heti.

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The End Of The Empress

Alizeh Kohari | Guernica | 11th January 2022

Empress Market in Karachi was built in the 1880s and over the following century a vibrant informal settlement grew around its Indo-Gothic walls. Until the bulldozers came in 2018, that is, to demolish this "encroachment" as part of a wider effort to "spruce up the city". In a single morning, at least 1,700 shops were reduced to rubble and an estimated 200,000 people lost their jobs (4,413 words)

🦒: The Two Best Ways To Win At Wordle

Nate Cardin and Uri Bram | Slate | 11th January 2022

The Browser's Nate Cardin, a professional crossword setter, discusses the optimal strategies for Wordle. If your main concern is not to lose, you should "maximize the information you acquire" by "making your first few guesses span as many common letters as possible." If you'd rather try to win in as few turns as possible, "focus your mental energy on the first and last letters of the word" (1,203 words)

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Podcast: Zzzzzzzzzzzrr | Twenty Thousand Hertz. An entirely serious look at "one of the most primordial parts of the viral internet as we know it". Some truly special personalities are encountered during this investigation (44m 38s)

Five Books: The Best Books On Scottish Nationalism, recommended by Murray Leith. The Break Up Of Britain, The Scottish Question and more.

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Plastic Liberated And Entombed Us

Jeannette Cooperman | Common Reader | 29th December 2021

Considering the cultural trail that plastic, "the quintessential American material", blazed through the last century. "Plastic can be textured — by us. It has no texture of its own. No shape, either. No colour, no density. It is protean, ready to mould to our wishes." Amid today's environmental concerns, it is useful to be reminded just how cool plastic was, and how deeply this influenced society (5,741 words)

‘Hunky Dory’ Turns 50

Rick Quinn | PopMatters | 10th January 2022

Fifty years after its release, David Bowie's glam masterpiece "remains a spectacle of sound and vision". The album can be read as a response to the decade just concluded: the 1960s, with its insistence that all one needed was "three chords and the truth". Glam rock revels in inauthenticity. This piece is, for no clear reason, displayed over two pages, so be sure to click through to part two (3,675 words)

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How to Begin: Start Something That Matters is the tool to make 2022 better. Oliver Burkeman calls it “an intensely practical manual to figure out what to do with your ridiculously finite time on the planet.” Austin Kleon says it’s “a friendly voice and a guiding hand”

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Video: The Bialetti Moka Express | YouTube | James Hoffmann. Exploration of the iconic Italian espresso maker, from its inception to the best way to use it. When Renato Bialetti died, his ashes were interred in a giant coffee pot (12m 39s)

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Quiz Of The Week

1. Apple introduced the LaserWriter printer in March 1985. Guess how much it cost then, and how much it weighed.
2. He served as a British colonial civil servant in what is now Sri Lanka, before returning to London and marrying a woman whose fame would far eclipse his own, though he outlived her by 28 years, dying in 1969. Who was he?
3. President Trump had a small red button installed on his desk in the Oval Office. President Biden had the button removed. What did the button do?
4. What was the Vegetable Lamb Of Tartary?

Archive Pick: Thank You For Finding My Son

Michael McWatters | Medium | 10th January 2018

Open letter from the father of an autistic boy to an Ikea staffer who saw the boy run off into the store and sensed a need to assist. “You did a remarkable thing. You saw a kid running away from his dad and understood there was something more at play. Most people wouldn’t have given the situation a second thought, but you did. You spared us both from excruciating anxiety — or worse” (940 words)

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🦒 Browser Interview: Phares Kariuki

Uri Bram talks about trust, justice, and human nature with The Browser's favourite philosopher of technology, Phares Kariuki, CEO of Pure Infrastructure Limited and host of the Pure Infrastructure Podcast.

Phares:  

The secret to the human race isn't so much our intelligence, rather it's our cooperation. The best hunters cooperate; persistence hunting is how human beings evolved in the savannah. Killer whales and African wild dogs also persistence hunt and this leads to some of the highest kill rates of any predators

Read more....

Yes you're just scrolling down to find the answers to the quiz, but wouldn't you love a quiz like this every single week? Join us:

Quiz Answers

1. Apple introduced the LaserWriter printer in March 1985. Guess how much it cost then, and how much it weighed.
   The first LaserWriter printer cost US$6,995 (equivalent to $16,832 in 2020) and weighed 77 lbs (35 kg). It was the first printer to ship with Adobe's PostScript page description language, sparking the desktop publishing revolution of the mid-1980s. In 1988 Apple launched a more "affordable" printer, the LaserWriter II, with a list price of $4,599 and a weight of 45 lbs.
2. He served as a British colonial civil servant in what is now Sri Lanka, before returning to London and marrying a woman whose fame would far eclipse his own, though he outlived her by 28 years, dying in 1969. Who was he?
   He was Leonard Woolf, a prolific writer in his own right, mostly of political tracts, but best remembered as the husband of novelist and critic Virginia Woolf, who committed suicide in 1941. Together they founded the Hogarth Press in 1917, which published, inter alia, the first edition of T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland.
3. President Trump had a small red button installed on his desk in the Oval Office. President Biden had the button removed. What did the button do?
   The button signalled a White House aide to bring the President a Diet Coke on a silver platter.
4. What was the Vegetable Lamb Of Tartary?
   The Vegetable Lamb Of Tartary was a mythical fruit (or animal) believed to grow on trees across the Russian steppe from the Caspian to the Pacific. According to some commentators, the fruit "perfectly resembled a lamb, with legs, hooves, ears and head". Others claimed that the Lamb was an actual animal, or perhaps a hybrid of animal and plant, which nonetheless grew on trees. Belief in the Tartary Lamb remains strong among Western scholars in the 16th and early 17th centuries, but crumbled in the late 17th century as travellers began crossing Siberia and failing to find it.

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Ideas Want To Be Shared

Kevin Kelly | Technium | 5th January 2022

Copyrights and patents reward their owners excessively at society's expense. Most inventions have multiple inventors. Most "new" things are old things combined or refactored. Most "breakthrough" ideas are incremental additions to existing ideas. Twenty years is plenty for any copyright. "Public domain and fair use should be the default, and an IP monopoly should be the exception"  (1,700 words)

Against Shock

Sam Kahn | 3AM Magazine | 5th January 2022

There was a time when art took upon itself the duty of shocking its public, and when some of its great works were very shocking indeed. But that time was the late 19th century. For the past century or so, "shocking" artworks have grown ever cruder in form and ever more trivial in their effects. It is time for a return to art which is enduring, wise and resonant. Life can supply the shocks (2,860 words)

Audi0: The Original Bambi | Ideas Podcasts | 38m 50s. Discursive conversation with folklore and fairytale scholar Jack Zipes about the origins of Bambi, which began as a "philosophical" essay by the Austrian-Jewish writer Felix Salten in 1921. Salten extended Bambi into a novel which was published in 1923, translated into English — by Whittaker Chambers — in 1928, and filmed by Disney in 1942.

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