From The Browser Five Years Ago

How The World’s Heaviest Man Lost It All
Justin Heckert | GQ | 7th March 2017
From the grotesque to the terribly sad. An ordinary young Brit called Paul Mason eats carelessly, then obsessively, until finally he weighs half a ton. He is the fattest man in the world. “I had a waistline of eight feet”. Bedridden for years, he opts for bariatric surgery. He loses 700 pounds. A new life awaits! But, oh dear, it is the life of a middle-aged man with poor health and almost no money (5,750 words)

From The Browser Seven Years Ago

Words That Seem Related But Aren’t
Arika Okrent | The Week | 10th March 2015
Memorise this and you will have talking points for the rest of your life. The origins of male and female are quite distinct, and the overlap of pronunciation is accidental. The step in stepmother is not signalling the more distant relationship; it comes from Old English steop, "bereavement". Outrage is not about rage. Shamefaced isn't about your face; it's a corruption of shamefast (695 words)

Two words that seem highly related: "you" and "Browsersubscriber":

The Last Classical Music Store

Brian Reinhart | Texas Monthly | 25th February 2022

Bittersweet account of a visit to one of the last known music shops to specialise entirely in classical music on CD. Many regular customers are older and don't like streaming. The vastness of the classical catalogue makes it difficult to diversify into selling CDs online — without the expert in the shop to help, how can someone know which recording of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony they want? (1,195 words)

Does Britain Exist?

Tim Watkins | Consciousness Of Sheep | 24th February 2022

Provocative musings on the shifting geopolitics of the British Isles. The era of imperial Britain and even the United Kingdom is over, it is argued here. These entities are merely "a brief interruption of simpler and far more localised political entities such as the Norman duchies and earldoms or Anglo-Saxon and Celtic kingdoms". Chances, are a new Wessex will emerge in the south (1,913 words)

Video: Arooj Aftab: Tiny Desk | NPR Music. Sultry set from the Pakistani singer and an accomplished ensemble of instrumentalists, performed live in a deserted convent in Brooklyn, New York (22m 13s)

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Afterthought:
"Fashions come and go; bad taste is timeless"
— Beau Brummell

Serhii Plokhy On Ukraine and Russia

Sophie Roell | Five Books | 24th February

Discussion of the Russia-Ukraine conflict and its historical roots. "What we see is the process of disintegration of one of the last world empires ... The Bolsheviks held [the Russian Empire] together, but it still fell apart in 1991, almost overnight. Everyone was surprised. It was a miracle that there was no major war or bloodshed. Now we realize that the war was just postponed" (3,500 words)

Why Girardians Exist

Joshua Landy | Republics Of Letters | 24th February 2012

Amusing and well-footnoted attack on the theories of René Girard, which Landy places more or less on a level with Scientology. Even if, as Girard claims, we mimic the desires of others, we would still have an near-infinity of desires from which to choose. As for Girard's theory that early humans resolved conflicts by sacrificing scapegoats, it is as "fanciful" as Freud's Oedipus Complex (14,000 words)

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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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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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