Raghuveer Parthasarathy | The Eighteenth Elephant | 29th November 2021
Building upon the astronomical work of early 20C French mathematician Émile Borel, this piece explores the idea that the answer to the question "Does X affect Y?" is always yes, and is thus useless. Better questions for scientists to be asking include "how much?" and "do I care about the magnitude of the effect?". Borel is verbose and vague, but this writer is neither (2,321 words)
Edmond Smith | Lapham's Quarterly | 29th November 2021
Communication failure could spell disaster for the merchant adventurer in the 16C, wiping out an entire voyage's profit. Linguistic skill was highly prized, as was knowledge of local customs and etiquette. Handwriting mattered too: in 1636, a factor omitted the "r" from the phrase "2 or 3 apes", meaning that over 200 primates were shipped to London instead of the desired two or three (1,971 words)
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Caroline Crampton, Editor-In-Chief; Robert Cottrell, Founding Editor; Jodi Ettenberg, Associate Editor; Raymond Douglas, Associate Editor; Uri Bram, CEO & Publisher; Al Breach, Founding Director
Interview with a hotel housekeeper who estimates that she has cleaned over 60,000 rooms. She is on her feet for eight hours a day and the goal is to be indispensable but invisible. The anonymity of the job appeals to her; she loves a perfectly arranged room. She aims to leave rooms "as untouched as when she last cleaned them, as if she had never even been there at all" (2,556 words)
Uri Bram and Applied Divinity | The Browser | 1st December 2021
A professor of philosophy and and a professor of economics discuss their new podcast, and the lessons it holds for communication and expertise. "It is actually pretty amazing that we can communicate at all. We are hardly ever clear, so our listeners have to work to figure out what we could be saying. Spending half our time checking if we understand each other isn’t at all implausible" (5,296 words)
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André van Loon | Spectator | 27th November 2021 | MP
Brief but information-packed review of Skin,an essay on psoriasis bySergio del Molino, who suffers from the condition, as, apparently, did Josef Stalin, John Updike, Pablo Escobar and Vladimir Nabokov. Del Molino "slowly guides us into his world of intense physical discomfort; most treatments of psoriasis only deal with its symptoms, rather than healing its immunological causes" (670 words)
via The Viewer | Carter Dishman | YouTube | 23rd November 2021
A story that would make a great movie: Wearing hand-me-down male uniforms, an all-female squad of Soviet soldiers flew plywood planes ("certified death traps") into Germany, without instruments to guide them through the darkness. "The sound of the wind on their canvas wings supposedly sounded like a broomstick flying through the air"—hence the moniker, the Night Witches (8m 18s)
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On Sundays, Browser subscribers receive a special edition filled with quizzes, images, archive picks and other excellent goodies. A taste of yesterday's supplement is included below; if you'd like to receive the full supplement every Sunday, please do Join The Browser.
Prize Quiz Of The Week
If you have a five-goal handicap in polo, are you a good player or a bad player?
What happened at the Estadio Azteca in Mexico City on 22nd June 1986?
What is Deobandism?
In 1920 the Czechoslovak writer Karel Čapek coined a word which has since passed into many languages to describe a field of technology and its products. What is the word?
Where might you encounter a nekomata, a bakeneko, a kasha and a maneki?
Answers at the foot of the page
From The Browser Four Years Ago
Raising A Teenage Daughter Elizabeth Weil & Hannah Duane | California Sunday | 30th November 2017 | U A mother writes about her teenage daughter; the daughter annotates the article. The effect is one of eavesdropping on a conversation between the inner voices of mother and daughter. Both have precision, plausibility, and charm. Hard to say which is more compelling — the honesty of the dialogue, or the love so clearly present. Would an angry dialogue make such good reading? (1,600 words)
From The Browser Six Years Ago
Observations On Donald Trump Ward Baker | NRSC | 22nd September 2015 | PDF Prescient advice from a Republican strategist on the implications for GOP Senators were Donald Trump to win the party's 2016 presidential nomination. "Trump is a Misguided Missile. Let’s face facts. Trump says what’s on his mind and that’s a problem. Our candidates will have to spend full time defending or condemning him if that continues. And, that’s a place we never, ever want to be" (1,750 words)
Sam & Dave perform Soul Man in 1967 for the German television show Beat-Club. Sam Moore (born 1935) is the tenor; Dave Prater (1937–1988) was the baritone. They performed together from 1961 until 1981.
Image Of The Week
Traffic Management In Amsterdam
The Damrak main street in Amsterdam, before and after the city government gave pedestrians, cyclists and public transport priority over motor-cars. source:The One-Handed Economist
Quiz Answers
If you have a five-goal handicap in polo, are you a good player or a bad player? A very good player. Probably a professional. The polo handicapping scale runs from -2 (for a novice) to +10. Two-thirds of all handicapped players are rated at +2 goals or less; fewer than two dozen living players are handicapped at +10. The handicap describes "the player's worth to his or her team". It is an overall rating of a player's horsemanship, team play, knowledge of the game, strategy, and horses.
What happened at the Estadio Azteca in Mexico City on 22nd June 1986? Diego Maradona scored two of the most-discussed goals in football history, ensuring a 2-1 victory for Argentina over England in a quarter-final of the soccer World Cup. While scoring his first goal Maradona touched the ball with his hand but the referee lacked a clear line of sight and the foul went unpenalised. Maradona said later that the goal was scored "a little with his head, and a little with the hand of God". Maradona then managed a 60-yard dash, bamboozling four English outfielders and a goalkeeper, to score a second goal, often cited as "the goal of the century" and perhaps the greatest individual goal of all time.
Who are the Deobandis? Deobandis are a sect of Sunni Muslims concentrated in South Asia. After the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, the spiritual home of the Deobandi movement remained in India but its political centre moved to Pakistan. The Taliban in Afghanistan identify as Deobandis, although not all Deobandis welcome them as such.
In 1920 the Czechoslovak writer Karel Čapek coined a word which has since passed into many languages to describe a field of technology and its products. What is the word? The word is "robot". It first appears in Čapek's stage-play R.U.R, depicting a company called Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti which manufactures artificial people called roboti. Initially happy to work as servants and slaves, the robots eventually revolt and exterminate humanity. Roboti echoes the Czech word robota, meaning forced labour, which derives from rab, meaning "slave".
Where might you encounter a "nekomata", a "bakeneko", a "kasha" or a "maneki neko"? In Japan; or, at least, in Japanese folkore. These are types of cats that possess magical powers or are themselves possessed by demons. The nekomata is a "massive, man-eating, two-tailed cat" believed to stalk the woods of Nara prefecture. The bakeneko is a shape-shifting cat liable to kill and replace its owner.The kasha, having once smelt a corpse, turns into a demon from hell. The maneki neko, by happy contrast, is the “Lucky Cat” whose smiling image — typically sitting up and extending its front paws — brings happiness and prosperity.
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Caroline Crampton, Editor-In-Chief; Robert Cottrell, Founding Editor; Jodi Ettenberg, Associate Editor; Raymond Douglas, Associate Editor; Uri Bram, CEO & Publisher; Al Breach, Founding Director
Cecily Giraffe is fond of cats, especially the mystical ones. She is fonder still of Browser subscribers. (Or equally fond, both are magical in their own special ways).
Many animals have magical attributes in Japanese folklore, but cats are "somewhat unique in the myriad powers they can manifest". In the Edo period, old cats were thought liable to become bakeneko — shapeshifters that killed their owners and took their place. A scarcely lesser fate awaited unwary owners of a kasha, a cat which, having once smelled a corpse, became a "demon from hell" (2,300 words)
"Fat Leonard" made billions as a contractor for the US Navy. "He was paying for prostitutes and orgies for navy officers, all the way up to admirals." Though "gifts for their wives, Chanel handbags, Cohiba Cigars, $30,000 dinners," he secured inflated contracts and the redirection of US ships to ports under his control. Now Leonard awaits trial, but senior admirals remain uncharged (3,862 words)
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The Library of Alexandria contained 40,000 scrolls; The Browser newsletter contains just five excellent recommendations every day. 40,000 is too many scrolls; subscribe to The Browser.
An introduction to "self-working" card tricks — tricks which exploit mathematical logic without any need for sleight of hand. The basic trick described here is the "magic separation", a simple but pleasingly counterintuitive way of shuffling and sorting 20 cards. You need a bit of maths to see how it works, but just knowing that it works seems like a skill exploitable for fun and profit (2,300 words)
From the tablets in the Royal Library of Ashurbanipal in the 7th century BCE to the digital deluge of today. Warnings for the present abound, not least in the disappearance of the great Library of Alexandria, which was not a tale of "barbaric ignorance triumphing over civilised truth" but rather "a cautionary tale of the danger of creeping decline through underfunding, low prioritisation and general disregard" (238 pages)
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Insider's account of working the night shift at an Amazon delivery station. Full of intriguing detail. Every evening when the author arrived for work, he strapped on the robotic tools that would supervise his every move. "We’d log into our device, and from that moment on no longer be in control of our actions." Gradually he realises that even managers are just there in service of the machines (3,962 words)
Coprolalia doesn't "magically make you say the F-word specifically," but rather "whatever I’m thinking right now in the least charitable and most offensive way" – which can be worse. "Bad experiences (forcible exorcism, being detained by police)" are a peril, "but they’ve been thankfully rare." The cons outweigh the pros, but "an incredibly brazen but disarming personality" has its benefits (4,270 words)
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Caroline Crampton, Editor-In-Chief; Robert Cottrell, Founding Editor; Jodi Ettenberg, Associate Editor; Raymond Douglas, Associate Editor; Uri Bram, CEO & Publisher; Al Breach, Founding Director
Francis Yeats-Brown, a British officer in India who loved yoga, wrote one of the most popular books of the 1930s. Bengal Lancer became a film starting Gary Cooper and made its author a literary star. But he was a complicated character: his idea of a good time was walking the streets of London with Gandhi at dawn but in the 1940s he was ostracised for his support of Italian fascism (2,223 words)
China will land a live human on Mars by 2035 says Maggie Lieu, in conversation with Browser Bets about the future of space, robotics, and the universe (6,125 words)
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Tove Jansson and Tuulikki Pieitilä | Granta | 4th October 2021 | U
Extract from a book by the Moomins creator and her partner about a stay in their cabin on an outcrop of rock in the Gulf of Finland. In this passage, they are waiting for the ice that surrounds them on all sides to crack up. "Unbelievable tabernacles floated by, driven by a mild south-west breeze, statuesque, glittering, as big as trolleys, cathedrals, primeval caverns, everything imaginable!" (854 words)
Highly personal account by a professor of political theory of growing up in Albania, the last Stalinist redoubt in Europe, and her mixed feelings as it turned to liberal democracy. “Now, with free and fair elections, everything was different. Nobody would care if we voted or not. Everyone lingered in bed, as if they were still deciding whether it was worth disrupting one’s sleep to go to the polls” (336 pages)
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The Browser delights in bringing you writing about topics you'd never imagined reading about; today we share a surprisingly lovely piece in praise of slime. Become a subscriber to keep feeding your curiosity every day.
In praise of slime, an "aqueous and viscously fluid hydrogel", which, like a cat, can behave as a solid under certain conditions. Without the "long reign" of primeval slime there would be no life now. "We are all creatures of slime, but some of us are more creative than others. Microbes were the only form of life for billions of years, with slime, as the éminence gluante, propping up their power" (2,500 words)
The Browser's Sylvia Bishop talks to Andrew Hunter Murray about his book The Last Day, a dystopian world in which the earth’s orbit had been disrupted and the planet moves in lock-step with the sun. "Really it’s a story about human nature in a world which is starting to change dramatically, and where nations have retreated to look after only their own citizens rather than looking outwards" (1,866 words)
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Richard Hughes Gibson | Hedgehog Review | 15th November 2021
Communicating effectively with part of the face obscured by a mask is a more physical undertaking. The best speakers throw "their hands up to signify exaltation and despair; they thrust their hands forward in supplication; they threw their hands down at their sides in grief and resignation; they cut their hands across the air in defiance." It's time to return to the ancient art of "chirology" (1,733 words)
Podcast: Dakou | Radiolab: Mixtape. Beginning of a series about the cultural history of the cassette. This episode looks at how discarded tapes helped to bring western music to communist China (51m 05s)
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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You can get a free lifetime subscription to The Browser by getting a tattoo of our giraffe mascot, Cecily; honestly a better idea is to become a subscriber for less than $1 a week.
Series of short interviews with people about why they got their tattoos. What emerges is a litany of trauma marked upon the body, as each subject describes the emotional turmoil that led to the ink on their skin. Common themes emerge — bereavement, abuse, estrangement — but the images chosen to represent those feelings are utterly individual. Surprisingly moving (3,257 words)
Caroline O'Donoghue | Irish Examiner | 24th October 2021
Silly and delightful. The writer imagines the performance review that she and her partner would give their terrier, who they adopted in the hope that she would take care of their rodent problem. She did not. "I’m sorry to say you are now officially on employee probation. Your work will be under strict review, and if you fail again — well. Nothing will happen. You will continue living a wonderful life" (930 words)
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