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The full Browser recommends five articles, a video and a podcast. Today, enjoy our audio and video picks.
Podcast: Whispering Pines | Charlie's Place. Beginning of a five-part series about Charlie Fitzgerald, a Black businessman who operated a popular integrated nightclub in the Jim Crow South during the 1940s (32m 43s)
Rehearsal footage and reflections from prima ballerina Gillian Murphy as she prepares for her retirement performance in Swan Lake after a career spanning 29 years.
Not-at-all boring essay about the nature and utility of boredom, which is "the substrate without which peace is impossible". Eliminate it at your peril. "We think we’re escaping boredom by filling every silence, every pause, every flicker of inconvenience. But it’s the other way around. What we’re escaping is everything else — depth, clarity, attention, the work of tolerating discomfort" (8,500 words)
Lengthy and heavily footnoted review of the evidence for the miraculous life and career of Joan of Arc. She was an "artillerist, fraudbuster, confirmed saint, and Extremely Documented Person". There is no other saint with such a paper trail. This makes Joan fascinating: even this agnostic writer has to admit that "she’s such unusually good evidence for miracles". Could we see her like again? (24,000 words)
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Thoughts arising from a visit to the Totteridge Yew, London's oldest tree. It can be found in a churchyard in Barnet, at the northern end of the Northern Line. It is somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 years old. "It is a ridiculous sort of tree, its character faintly lunatic, all those branches pointing out in different directions under a shaggy coat, a kind of manginess to its self-presentation" (2,600 words)
Talia Lavin | The Sword And The Sandwich | 1st August 2025
Post-burglary debrief. During a break-in that did not disturb any of the four people or the dog asleep in the writer's apartment, the malefactor unmounted and made off with ten huge swords that had been fixed to the wall. None were especially valuable and much pricier electronics were left undisturbed. The police "manfully refrained from laughing" because "I am the victim of an extremely silly crime" (1,800 words)
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Musings on laughter, oft-equated with happiness when it should be seen as a form of release found in any visceral experience — sex, grief, horror. The Auschwitz prisoners who found humour there proved that it can be found in any place. When her hair was shaved, one prisoner laughed and explained that it was her first time getting a free hairdo. To laugh amidst suffering is a great spiritual accomplishment (1,800 words)
Adam Ozimek | Economic Innovation Group | 1st August 2025
The protectionist case for the US auto industry to be insulated from foreign competition rests on a few myths, debunked here. The auto industry has not been decimated by globalisation, it is alive and well. 10.3 million vehicles are made annually, with the value of cars at all-time highs. Detroit’s decline was caused not by trade but by local unions’ militancy and factories moving to other parts of the US (6,600 words)
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Despite its apparent strangeness to speakers of Indo-European languages, there are many similar words in Finnish. Hamppu, haukka, kakku, leipä and valas resemble hemp, hawk, cake, loaf and whale respectively. The English same and the Finnish sama are essentially the same. That most Finnish of words, sauna, may have derived from a Proto-Germanic word that has given English stack (2,200 words)
It has been 100 years since the Paris Expo which gave Art Deco its name. The French, keen to reassert their role as arbiters of taste, wanted to disallow Le Corbusier’s pavilion for being too “austere” and “stark”. Le Corbusier, for his part, was dismissive of Art Deco: “decorative art is the final twitch of the old manual mode. Our pavilion will contain only standard things created by industry and mass-produced” (1,400 words)
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Five Books features in-depth author interviews recommending five books on a theme. You can read more interviews on the site, or sign up for the newsletter.
From the death of Stalin and the career of Putin's chef to shaministic rituals on the Indonesian island of Siberut, Five Books editor Sophie Roell gives an overview of some of the excellent new nonfiction books that have appeared since April. Read more
If you have recently discovered the work of Kristin Hannah following her recent hit The Women, a story of female fighters in the Vietnam War, then you may be excited to learn that she has an extensive back-catalogue of more than twenty books to catch up on. Here they are, in order. Read more
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The Appalachian Trail runs 2,000 miles from Georgia to Maine. Hiking the length of it — a five or six month adventure — changes the mind and the body. Not always for the better. “Naturally, most hiking injuries center around the feet. Blisters bubble up. Toenails blacken and fall off. Joints swell. During the course of my hike, my feet grew a half shoe size. The easiest way to spot a thru-hiker is to catch them barefoot. Without boots, the super-hiker is reduced to a limping old crone” (3,040 words)
A conversation with Osama bin Laden’s mother, Alia Ghanem, who lives in Jeddah with her second husband and two sons; they remain one of Saudi Arabia’s richest families thanks to Saudi Binladin, their “dynastic construction empire”. Ghanem says Osama was “brainwashed” at university by radicals who wanted his money, and that at least some of his wives and children have been allowed back from Abbottabad: “I speak to his harem most weeks. They live nearby” (3,300 words)
Question Of The Week
August rolls around, and it's time to round up our reading for the July edition of the Browser Book Club. What did you read last month, and what did you make of it?
We shared Jack Maden’s Should Parenting Require a License?, in which he considers philosopher Hugh LaFollette’s idea that we should introduce a license for raising (not creating) children, “to screen out people who’d make very bad, abusive parents”. Were Browser readers persuaded?
(i) Yes, I would support some form of parental licensing 53% (ii) No, I object to any form of parental licensing 47 %
For a while it seemed we might be reporting the first draw in QOTW history, but the ayes just about won out with the final votes. The nays, however, are more numerous in the mailbag — and they are fervent nays. A rich crop of arguments this week, considering prejudicial enforcement, failures of existing licenses, failures of existing care systems — and the possible need to license philosophers, too.
Astonishing vocal acrobatics. Watch in awe. Intimately shot, too; there’s a lot to be enjoyed in the performers’ delight, and the twitches of Bartoli’s hand as she guides herself through the treacherous passages.
“The Great Betrayal: The Struggle for Freedom and Democracy in the Middle East is by Fawaz Gerges, a professor at LSE, and represents more than a decade of work “trying to answer a recurring question posed by my students: Why has the Middle East reached this seeming low point after a century of state- and nation-building?” The book covers the region from the end of the Ottoman Empire to the Arab Spring and highlights the interaction of foreign intervention and domestic authoritarianism as the root cause of the problems.”
Wonderfully vivid sculpture in bronze. The sitter was Russian dancer and pianist Countess Thamara Swirskaya. Troubetzkoy, born in Italy with an American mother and a Russian prince for his father, was internationally renowned: he also created the St Petersburg Equestrian Statue of Tsar Alexander III, and the monument to General Harrison Grey Otis in MacArthur Park, Los Angeles.
These statements pertain to one major geographical landmark: the first letters of the missing words spell out its name. Can you piece together the name and fill in the blanks?
(i) It begins in the ______ (ii) The largest city alongside it is ______ (iii) It ends where it meets the ______ (iv) It is spanned by ______ bridges (v) Its name is popularly attributed to the female resistance encountered by the expedition of Francisco de ______ (vi) It crosses ______ countries
Another debut cryptic this week! Setter Danish Abdi is a freelance game designer and musician in Bangalore, India, filling up what's left of his time with poetry, triathlons, open water swimming, rock climbing, and calisthenics –Dan Feyer
Quiz Answers
The landmark is the River Amazon
(i) It begins in the ANDES (ii) The largest city alongside it is MANAUS (iii) It ends where it meets the ATLANTIC (iv) It is spanned by ZERO bridges (v) Its name is popularly attributed to the female resistance encountered by the expedition of Francisco de ORELLANA* (vi) It crosses NINE countries
*This idea has been present since 1609 but is by no means firmly established. An alternative theory comes from the native term 'amassona', or 'boat destroyer'. An interesting etymological detour.
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Caroline Crampton, Editor-In-Chief; Robert Cottrell, Founding Editor; Jodi Ettenberg, Editor-At-Large; Dan Feyer, Crossword Editor; Uri Bram, CEO & Publisher; Sylvia Bishop, Assistant Publisher; Al Breach, Founding Director
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Erik Hoel | Intrinsic Perspective | 31st July 2025
Children can start learning to read at an early age, between two and four. There is plenty of historical evidence from the 18C that this was common, since specific reading primers were published for this age group. Yet it is increasingly the norm in the US that reading isn't taught until kids are seven or eight, because of 60-year-old "neuromyths" about what early reading does to the brain (3,500 words)
Before they founded Studio Ghibli in the 1980s, the animator-director partnership of Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata were working continual overtime making films and TV series as employees of other companies. Hits included Heidi, Girl of the Alps and Anne of Green Gables, both from the mid-1970s. This retrospective is illustrated with plenty of wonderful sketches and frame outlines (2,900 words)
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Henry Farrell | Programmable Mutter | 27th July 2025 | U
Social scientists are trained to assume that markets and governments are distinct, and that individual whims get smoothed out in the collective. This may not fit the world today. The growing isolation of the billionaire class from mortal concerns recalls sci-fi writer William Gibson‘s words — “she knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human” (1,700 words)
So-called "armchair physicists" are using large language models to develop what they think are new advances in the field. Not only is this "completely delusional", it is a dangerous example of how well-meaning, smart people can be taken in by "the phenomenon of unfettered AI slop". General use LLMs are designed to conceal their limitations and struggle to derive universal laws from patchy data (3,200 words)
Erik Hoel | Intrinsic Perspective | 31st July 2025 | U
Children can start learning to read at an early age, between two and four. There is plenty of historical evidence from the 18C that this was common, since specific reading primers were published for this age group. Yet it is increasingly the norm in the US that reading isn't taught until kids are seven or eight, because of 60-year-old "neuromyths" about what early reading does to the brain (3,500 words)
Whether mocking the rehabilitation of known Nazis or lamenting World War III, Tom Lehrer’s political songs — all of which he placed in the public domain — were “laced with countercultural venom”. Despite his songs’ popularity, Lehrer had no interest in fame. “He could never get comfortable with the self-consciously politically engaged comedy which eventually took over big parts of American culture” (2,100 words)
CEO of Medium explains how he made the company profitable. Told with a refreshing lack of ego. It helped that he was a former top poster on Medium. There are technicalities that business-minded readers will enjoy, but it boiled down to ceasing to operate like a tech startup. He cut costs, got rid of the fancy office, and stopped paying "writers with suss motivations" to write poor quality posts (4,600 words)
High resolution, uninterrupted footage of birdsong, recorded in New York state.
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Caroline Crampton, Editor-In-Chief; Robert Cottrell, Founding Editor; Kaamya Sharma, Editor; Jodi Ettenberg, Editor-At-Large; Dan Feyer, Crossword Editor; Uri Bram, CEO & Publisher; Sylvia Bishop, Assistant Publisher; Al Breach, Founding Director
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So-called "armchair physicists" are using large language models to develop what they think are new advances in the field. Not only is this "completely delusional", it is a dangerous example of how well-meaning, smart people can be taken in by "the phenomenon of unfettered AI slop". General use LLMs are designed to conceal their limitations and struggle to derive universal laws from patchy data (3,200 words)
The global demand for marble from Italy's Apuan Alps is accelerating at an astonishing rate: more stone has been quarried from the region in the past 30 years than in the previous 2,000. Michelangelo used this stone for the David and the Pietà because of its density, strength and uniform colour. The quarries could be empty in 50 years. Meanwhile, the marble barons and the environmentalists feud (3,500 words)
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CEO of Medium explains how he made the company profitable. Told with a refreshing lack of ego. It helped that he was a former top poster on Medium. There are technicalities that business-minded readers will enjoy, but it boiled down to ceasing to operate like a tech startup. He cut costs, got rid of the fancy office, and stopped paying "writers with suss motivations" to write poor quality posts (4,600 words)
The International Bartenders Association maintains a list of 102 official cocktails. Trying them all "turned out to be unexpectedly tricky" and took several years of effort. Some are drinks that any bartender can whip up. The more esoteric inclusions required ordering off-menu and finding staff willing to go the extra mile. The "final boss", the IBA Tiki, required sanctioned Cuban rum and some DIY mixology (4,200 words)
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