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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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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