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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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

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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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