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Self-Integrity And The Drowning Child

Eliezer Yudkowsky | LessWrong | 24th October 2021

Peter Singer asked whether we are bound to save a child drowning in shallow water close by. For 50 years, everybody confronted with that question replied: "Yes". The argument here is not quite for "No", but it leads to a slippery slope — "Let me think about that". If you, the observer, are wearing costly new clothes, can you take 15 seconds to strip them off before jumping in? A minute? (1,400 words)

The Autograph Collector

Ulli Lust | Popula | 17th February 2019

I don't think we have recommended a comic strip on The Browser before, but more out of habit than principle. This one held and rewarded my attention just as much as an equivalent short story might have done, so I thought, why not? See what you think. The story tells of an autograph-hunter who may or may not be a scammer. Set in Germany, and translated from a German original (70 frames)

Whither The Plain Female Protagonist?

Lucinda Rosenfeld | LitHub | 1st November 2021

The leading ladies of literature are almost universally attractive; one must look long and hard to find a plain woman in a starring role. Balzac's 1846 novel Cousin Bette might be the only 19C novel about an ugly woman. Beauty is, as Toni Morrison put it, one of the "most destructive ideas in the history of human thought", yet even present day fiction so rarely interrogates it (1,828 words)

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Want to teach your child to love reading as much as you do? Raising Readers is a fun, scripted guide for you to teach your child to read in just 20 minutes a day—with love, care, and joy only a parent and child can share. The best part? It’s free to download until Nov 20.

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From A Guy From The Himalayas
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Did you know that the NIH awards 7 times more funding to scientists >65, than to those 35 and younger? New Science is a 501c3 nonprofit building new, well-functioning institutions of basic science. Learn more about our plans, positions & the 2022 fellowship for young scientists.

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Podcast: I Can’t Believe It’s Pink Margarine | 99% Invisible. Margarine is yellow now, like butter; but in some parts of the US and Canada it had to be dyed white or pink well into the 20th century, owing to lawsuits and lobbying by a dairy industry determined to spoil margarine's appeal as a cheap butter substitute (26m 32s)

Video: Eye Of The Tiger | YouTube | Harvard Thud. An undergraduate society dedicated to percussion plays the classic Survivor number on tuned lengths of hollow plastic tubing (2m 06s)

Afterthought:
"To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it"
— G. K. Chesterton

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Simón Bolívar: Theorist of Empire?

Peter Morgan | JHI Blog | 20th October 2021

At the same time that Bolívar was leading a campaign to expel the Spanish from his homeland, he was imagining how the British Empire might assist in the creation of an independent South America. As such, he counterintuitively "belongs with Thomas Hakluyt, Edmund Burke, and James Mill as a British imperial thinker". He was not against empire itself, merely "despotism" (1,684 words)

The Uselessness Of Useful Knowledge

Robbert Dijkgraaf | Quanta | 20th October 2021

Artificial intelligence is a development in the history of science comparable to alchemy, and that's not a bad thing. The latest self-learning algorithms are created with "the same wishful thinking and misunderstanding that the ancient alchemists had when mixing their magic potions". But this is a "necessary adolescent phase" of overconfidence that the past suggests will bear fruit in time (1,208 words)

Tongue Stuck

Irina Dumitrescu | Rumpus | 12th October 2021

On the sensation of linguistic impediment. "When I try to write in Romanian, my tongue does not feel injured. No. It feels as though my tongue were cleaving to the roof of my mouth, as if I had unthinkingly eaten two large spoonfuls of peanut butter and lost both the power to speak and the air from my lungs." The author wrote this piece in Romanian first and then translated it (2,685 words)

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Browser Interview: Byrne Hobart On Finance. Interesting throughout. For high earners, the opportunity cost of reading newsletters is higher than the financial cost of a subscription; this puts a premium on novelty, decision-relevance and concision. "Moby-Dick has a scene where Ishmael is negotiating his equity comp package (he gets 33 bps)." Meme stocks represent both earnestness and nihilism about efforts to get rich (3,960 words)

Podcast: Episode 1 | Blind Landing. Investigative series about one of the biggest controversies to date in women's gymnastics: how the vault at the 2000 Olympic Games came to be set two inches too low (25m 00s)

Video: The Drunken Boat | Shihan Ma. Contemplative short documentary about a man who sits on the South Bank in London as a "poet for hire". He types out an original poem for passersby while they wait (16m 46s)

Afterthought:
"The true secret of happiness lies in taking a genuine interest in all details of daily life"
— William Morris

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I Collect Cashflows

Josh Brown | Reformed Broker | 5th October 2021

A way to explain the stock market to crypto and meme investors. "I collect shares of businesses. I use a certain type of non-fungible token called a stock certificate for this. It’s in digital form, living somewhere in the multiverse. People say: You’re crazy, why would you want to buy a fraction of a company you will never touch and hold in your hands? And I’m like: You just don’t understand” (1,050 words)

A Very Big Little Country

Katherine LaGrave | Afar | 13th October 2021

The micronation of Westarctica has an aristocracy, a currency (ice marks) and 2,300 citizens, none of whom are based in western Antarctica. Its ruler, His Royal Highness Travis I, Grand Duke, has worked as both a US Navy antiterrorism intelligence specialist and a recruiter for psychics. In 2015, he pivoted Westarctica from a wacky internet joke into a serious climate change non-profit (3,827 words)

Futurists Have Their Heads In The Clouds

Erik Hoel | Substack | 25th August 2021

Futurists "trend toward being sci-fi writers without the plot" and as a result tend to make bad predictions, this writer argues. "If you want to predict the future accurately, you should be an incrementalist and accept that human nature doesn’t change along most axes. Meaning that the future will look a lot like the past." There will, however, be a Martian colony by 2050, he says (4,238 words)

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An entertaining new podcast for critical conversations about comedy: But Is It Funny?. Featuring Guardian critic Brian Logan, Suchandrika Chakrabarti, Jamal Khadar. Plus special guest comedians, academics and more.

The essence of the web, every morning in your inbox. Thousands of busy people start their day with their personalized digest by Refind. Tell us what you're interested in, and we'll start delivering tomorrow.

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Podcast: Get Some Houseplants | Just One Thing. Efficient overview of the research on whether being surrounded by indoor foliage can have health benefits, especially in relation to air quality (13m 58s)

Browser Interview: A Literal Banana on the problems with social science. Even beyond fraud and the replication crisis, the problem in social science is "using abstractions poorly." Neither surveys nor "reductive laboratory protocols" are actually capable of meaningfully measuring abstractions like trust or happiness. Study results are often seen as high status, when in fact "stories from yourself and trusted people are almost the only kind of evidence that’s real" (2,218 words)

Video: A Crewneck For Pete | Brad Howe | Vimeo | 9m 15s

So meta that it almost disappears up its own Bruce Hornsby. But if you love L.L. Bean, plaid shirts, James Taylor, New England, and men named Dad ... proceed.

Afterthought:
"Believe nothing until it has been officially denied"
— Claud Cockburn

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Castaway Cuisine

Christine Baumgarthuber | Austerity Kitchen | 3rd October 2021

Remembering Alain Bombard, a French doctor who believed that shipwrecked sailors could survive by drinking seawater so long as they did so in moderation. He tested his thesis in 1952 by sailing from Monaco to Barbados living mostly on fish, plankton and seawater. "He calculated that fish juice alone carried him through 43 days of his voyage; seawater alone through fourteen" (1,550 words)

Yesterday’s Mythologies

Ryan Ruby | New Left Review | 5th October 2021

Jonathan Franzen, hailed as the Great American Novelist, has become "the inescapable literary figure of the world’s inescapable nation". Guilty of regularly producing "prose of a very deep shade of purple", his work cannot now be separated from the publicity machine that promotes it. His latest novel is not one that America needs, but it is "exactly the one it deserves" (2,895 words)

Primate Memory

Tetsuro Matsuzawa | Inference Review | 11th October 2021

Primatologist reflects on a long career. The 1.2% DNA difference between humans and chimpanzees is most evident in our diverging capacities for memory and communication. Chimpanzees have extraordinary recall and can quickly absorb all details of a new situation, whereas humans rather evolved the ability to focus on one aspect, give it a label and share that information with a group (4,329 words)

Podcast: Corpse, Corps, Horse And Worse | 99% Invisible. Arika Okrent explains why English spelling and pronunciation lurches from the inconsistent to the incomprehensible. (30m 29s)

Video: Libertarian James Bond | Reason | YouTube | 5m 23s

"Bond is back in an explosive new film filled with action, intrigue, and a lengthy discussion of Federal Reserve monetary policy"

Interview: Chris Williamson Talks To Baiqu Gonkar

Baiqu sits down with Chris Williamson to discuss finding meaning in life, figuring out masculinity for a working-class northern man, having an existential crisis on Love Island, and cooling mattress pads. (33m16s, or read the transcript here)

Afterthought:
"In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you"
— Leo Tolstoy

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The Advantage Of Permission

Ian Welsh | 28th September 2021

Simplified yet interestingly provocative look at the rise of corporate oligarchies, which surely cannot last forever. "Oligarchy is always stupid and unproductive. The great oligarchs are made out to be heroes, but almost all of them exist by making more activities impossible than they make possible: they do their best to allow nothing to succeed unless they will profit from it" (1,709 words)

The Artist Paints Herself

Jennifer Higgie | Lapham's Quarterly | 5th October 2021

On the self-portraiture of three artists — Elisabetta Sirani, Sofonisba Anguissola, and Rosalba Carriera — who were successful in their own times but are less well known now. Sirani inserted her own features into her classical paintings too; pleasingly, she gave her own face to Timoclea at the moment that sturdy matron tipped a "Captain of Alexander the Great" head first into a well (2,178 words)

Hello (Bonjour) From Your Friendly TV Translator

David Buchanan | Zocalo | 29th September 2021

Audiovisual translator lifts the curtain on this invisible craft. Ego must be put aside. A translation is always a compromise, but when writing subtitles or a script for dubbing, the aim is to replicate the feeling of watching the film or episode in its original language. Emotions, body language and lip syncing all play a part. "If you don’t notice my work, it means I’m doing my job properly" (1,540 words)

Podcast: Cars, Gadgets, Costume | No Time To Die. Behind-the-scenes podcast from the producers of the James Bond films. Here, the special effects and camera tricks that make the spy's gadgets seem to work on screen are explained (39m 53s)

Video: Everything You Need to Know About American Fashion | Vogue | YouTube | 8m 50s.

Illustrated digest of the major developments in American fashion after the US entered WW2 and European couture ceased to be the point of inspiration.

Interview: Uri Bram Talks To Baiqu Gonkar | 19m 04s

Uri Bram is the publisher of The Browser, and author of Thinking Statistically and The Business of Big Data. This week Uri tells Baiqu about massage school, importing Rwandan chilli oil, and the benefits of philosophy coaching (19m 04s, or read the transcript here)

Afterthought:
"One forges one's style on the terrible anvil of daily deadlines"
— Émile Zola

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Lone Star Mower Racing Association

Dina Gachman | Texas Monthly | 22nd September 2021

Lawn mower racing is an eccentric offshoot of Texas's popular motor racing scene, but those who "full-throttle it to 35 or 40 miles per hour around dirt tracks" on their souped up garden maintenance vehicles take it extremely seriously. Many of the racers get into it initially because unlike at other motoring competitions, "no one picks fights at lawn mower events" (1,875 words)

The Cactus That Came Back From The Dead

Amir Aziz | Walrus | 27th September 2021

In the wild, many cacti are highly endangered. But it's difficult to talk of extinction when the same plants can be found in garden centres and on office window ledges around the world. Is the genome's survival enough, or should the hyperlocal conditions that originally fostered it also be preserved? "A cactus in a pot could be considered as 'alive' as a butterfly pinned inside a glass case" (1,760 words)

Confessions Of A Michelin Inspector

Anonymous | Luxeat | 28th February 2021

Insider's account of the process for awarding restaurants the coveted Michelin stars. To train as inspector, one must pass an oral and written exam plus interviews with the guide's editors. Most of the restaurants inspectors eat at are "pretty mediocre" and they must eat ten meals for review a week. The pay is low but the expense account is large. Keeping weight off is a challenge (2,851 words)

Podcast: A Taxonomy Of Emotion | Why Do I Feel?. Introduction to a series about feelings that surveys current thinking about what an emotion is. A philosopher and a neuroscientist give different but overlapping views (20m 09s)

Video: Pentatonic Scale | World Science Festival | YouTube | 3m 03s.

Singer Bobby McFerrin uses physical movement to demonstrate how easily a crowd of amateurs can grasp a simple pentatonic melody.

Interview: Pamela Hobart Talkes To Baiqu Gonkar

Pamela Hobart is a philosopher turned philosophical life coach and mother of three. This week she discusses how to deal with an existential sandwich, why small innovations are valuable, and the deathbed fallacy. (30m 23s, or read the transcript here)

Afterthought:
"Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive"
— Josephine Hart

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The War For Gaul

James O'Donnell | Princeton University Press | 13th September 2021

The translator of a new edition of Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars shares his impressions of the book and its author. "The book is magnificent: amoral, certainly, but clear, vivid, and dramatic, a thing to be remembered and read for the ages ... At the same time, there should be no denying that it is a bad man’s book about his own bad deeds. It is the best bad man’s book ever written" (950 words)

The Digital Death Of The Collector

Kyle Chayka | Substack | 18th September 2021

Every time a platform like Spotify rearranges its software, our physical memory of digital cultural artefacts is eroded. "It’s as if the bookshelves have started changing shape on their own in real time, shuffling some material to the front and downplaying the rest like a sleight-of-hand magician trying to make you pick a specific card — even as they let you believe it’s your own choice" (2,854 words)

The Truth

Stanisław Lem | MIT Press Reader | 20th September 2021

Science fiction short story that the Polish writer published in 1964, now appearing in English for the first time in a translation by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. Best known for his much-adapted novel Solaris, Lem's protagonist for this tale is a physicist now held in an asylum because of his belief in the consciousness of stars. Branded a "pyroparanoiac", he contends that the Sun is a living being (9,525 words)

Video: Japanese Curry Udon Noodles | Peaceful Cuisine. Instructional video showing how to make this popular dish from scratch. There is no voiceover, only onscreen annotations, encouraging the viewer to watch carefully (14m 09s)

Podcast: Afrikka Didn't Need To Die | Algorithm. Beginning of a compelling series about how a reporter built an algorithm that searched FBI data for serial killings in order to catch a murderer (37m 17s)

Interview: Ada Palmer Talks To Baiqu Gonkar. Ada Palmer is a cultural historian and the author of science fiction novels, including the award-winning Terra Ignota series. This week, she talks to Baiqu about big tech’s censorship problem, the false narrative of the singular hero in history, and Machiavelli's laundry (42m 19s, or read the transcript here)

Afterthought:
"Nothing is illegal if one hundred well-placed business men decide to do it"
— Andrew Young

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The Messy Truth About Carbon Footprints

Sami Grover | Undark | 9th September 2021

The idea of the personal carbon footprint has fallen out of favour of late. Critics argue that once fossil fuel interests co-opted the technique as a form of greenwashing, scrutinising one person's impact on the environment became meaningless. But self examination is never a bad thing, and having a way of knowing what lifestyle changes make a difference does matter (1,054 words)

Italy’s Book Doctor

Luisa Grosso | Craftsmanship Quarterly | 9th July 2021

Conservator Pietro Livi is in high demand with flooded archives and museums. He studied book restoration with Benedictine friars and over his decades of work has put together "a kind of Renaissance workshop" of different artisans who can, between them, save a priceless manuscript. They have been working non stop since the Venetian flood of 2019, which damaged 25,000 texts and scores (899 words)

Help! I Keep Writing Fake Agony Aunt Letters

Bennett Madison | Gawker | 13th September 2021

Writer confesses to submitting dozens of fictional letters to an advice column. They were regularly published and nobody seemed to realise or care that they were invented. "I learned that a good letter is defined by two opposing values: it must be plausible, but it must also be ridiculous." He targeted just one column — Dear Prudence at Slate — and considered the columnist his nemesis (1,953 words)

Video: Eight Levels Of Bach | Shutian Cheng. An aspiring concert pianist plays eight extracts from different works by Bach, each more difficult than the last. Onscreen annotations explain the techniques demanded by each piece (6m 39s)

Podcast: The Missing Ships, 1944-45 | The Kraken Busters. The US Navy has a surprising history of conflicts with supposedly mythical creatures. This episode tells the story of how one such incident went down during WW2 (23m 33s)

Interview: Steve Randy Waldman writes about finance, economics, and politics at interfluidity.com. He talks to Baiqu Gonkar about wading in the river of intellectual life, the dynamics of capitalism, and the evolution of the blogosphere
(24m 15s, or read the transcript here)

Afterthought:
"Of all the qualities that enable Kant to achieve so much, one is inconsistency"
— Derek Parfit

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A Loveable Anarchist

Isabelle Aron | Vice | 1st September 2021

Oral history of a bizarre yet beloved British cultural property: the seven-foot tall pink and yellow spotted shape that is Mr Blobby. Originally introduced as a minor character for a prank segment on a 1990s gameshow, he soon had a life of his own and the country was swamped with Mr Blobby merchandise. Best of all: for 20 years the man in the suit was a serious Shakespearean actor (2,649 words)

Wingwalker To The Rescue

F. Gerald Phillips | Air & Space | 16th July 2021

Thrilling tale of an aeroplane mishap in 1926. A pilot took off on a photographic mission before a mechanic had finished securing one of the wheels. To avoid a crash landing, another plane with a stuntman flew alongside to do a mid-air repair. "At 1,500 feet and 70 mph, Al made an extremely difficult job look easy," but he still had to hold the wheel on with his foot as they came into land (1,525 words)

What The Romans Found Funny

Orlando Gibbs | Antigone | 28th August 2021

With its stock characters, punch-lines, reversals and running gags, ancient humour worked in much the same way as its modern counterpart. "The structure of the jokes bears a striking resemblance to modern joke-telling. A set-up introduces some incongruity or tension. The punchline defuses, clarifies, or blasts through that tension with a secondary proposition or idea" (2,540 words)

Video: Inside A New York City Micro Apartment | Erik Conover. Tour of three progressively smaller apartments for rent in NYC, with discussion of the trade offs and practicalities of each (14m 10s)

Podcast: The Unsilencing | Radiolab. Autoimmune disorders disproportionately affect women, but tend to disappear during pregnancy. The reasons for this can be traced back to the evolution of the placenta (28m 56s)

Interview: Browser Publisher Uri Bram talks to three Stanford professors –  philosopher Rob Reich, political scientist Jeremy Weinstein and computer scientist Mehran Sahami – about their brand new book System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot, discussing sensible regulation, democratic values and the future of technology in under ten words each (video: 26m 39s, podcast: 26m 34s, transcript: 4,136 words)

Afterthought:
"There's no such thing as talent. What they call talent is nothing but the capacity for doing continuous hard work in the right way"
— Winslow Homer

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The World's Longest Shrubbery  

Kamala Thiagarajan | BBC Future | 25th August 2021

It seems hard now to believe, and not a trace of it remains, but when the British ruled India in the mid-19th century they partitioned the country with a fortified hedge 2,300 miles long — an "impenetrable thicket of thorny native shrubs" — to frustrate smugglers. "By 1869, the great hedge stretched from the foothills of the Himalayas to Odisha, and then inched towards the Bay of Bengal" (2,200 words)

Tetlock And The Taliban

Richard Hanania | Substack | 25th August 2021

Thoughts provoked by America's failure to stabilise Afghanistan, despite spending billions of dollars and deploying thousands of specialists in warfare and nation-building. What colossal failure of expertise allowed pundits and policymakers to spend 20 years "making a living off the idea that the US was doing something reasonable in Afghanistan"? And what else are they getting wrong? (5,300 words)

Culture As Counterculture

Adam Kirsch | New Criterion | 18th August 2021

On taste, snobbishness and the rejection of cultural hierarchies. In the last two centuries, everything has been reversed. "Preferring things that are old, distant, and difficult to those that are immediate and ubiquitous means alienating oneself from one’s community, in some cases from one’s own family. It is at best an inexplicable quirk, at worst a form of antisocial arrogance" (3,952 words)

Video: Harp Distortion | Emily Hopkins. A harpist demonstrates the effect of a heavy distortion pedal on two different harps. She utterly transforms the instrument's sound into something from a metal band (3m 52s)

Podcast: A Tale Of Edible Intrigue | Subtitle. Who writes the fortunes in fortune cookies, and how did this practice begin? A blend of language analysis and history here explains — it's not a Chinese tradition (27m 38s)

Interview: Baiqu sits down with Sylvia Bishop, who is a children's book writer with nine titles translated into 16 languages, part of the musical improv duo Peablossom Cabaret, and (not least) Assistant Publisher of The Browser (17m 03s, podcast or transcript here)

Afterthought:
"We enormously exaggerate the part that law plays in the universe. It is by means of regularities that we understand what little we do understand of the world"
— C.S. Peirce

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