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The Case For Better Watch Typography

Liz Stinson | Hodinkee | 18th March 2021

Watch makers spend too little time thinking about fonts. Instead of designing bespoke numerals for this small space, most just modify or squeeze in a typeface that can be found in Microsoft Word. One historic Swiss brand has even "replaced the custom lettering on its watches with a stretched version of Times Roman". When creating a luxury timepiece, it’s a bizarre corner to cut (1,271 words)

Why I Planted The Brighton Bomb

Patrick Magee | Jacobin | 21st March 2021

Moving extract from a new memoir by the IRA member who planted the bomb at the Grand Hotel, Brighton, in 1984. Decades later, after his release under the Good Friday Agreement, the bomber met with the daughter of a Tory MP who died in the blast. "I told her that I was sorry that I killed her father; that 'I want to help in any way I can.' Then Joanna — Jo — said: 'I’m glad it was you'" (4,123 words)

Bad Birds In Quarantine

Kimon de Greef | Guernica | 10th March 2021

Tour of the finch smuggling trade. Captured in Guyana and imported to the US, these birds compete in "bloodless cockfighting" that revolves around their song. "Customs agents at New York airports have come across finches drugged with rum and tucked inside hair curlers; sometimes the tiny birds wake in transit and begin singing. One man was caught with finches in his pants" (3,421 words)

Audio of the Week: Nice Tipple

Episode: "Decanter Or Not?" | Podcast: A Good Drop | 26m54s

Alcohol podcast hosted by two genial Australians. Subject matter and format varies widely on this feed. Sometimes they devote an entire episode to one bottle of wine, while at other points they zoom out to look at the varied uses of a single cocktail ingredient or the history of a movement like prohibition. This one is about the virtues of decanting wine before drinking it. In addition to some scientific background, they conduct an on air taste test to determine if decantation really improves the flavour of a drink (26m54s)

Book Of The Week: The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia | Courtesy of Five Books

The entire history of humanity from the point of view of the oceans. Migrants and traders are the key historical figures; even the maps look different. The Lapita (not a name they used themselves) emerge as early heroes, island-hopping across thousands of miles in the prehistoric Pacific. “The Polynesian navigators proved that one can solve some challenging problems without any technology at all, just the super-computer of the human brain” (908 pages)

Editor's note: An exceptional Browser Zoom Conversation awaits us this coming Sunday, 28th March, when Lord Martin Rees, cosmologist and scholar of existential risk, will be talking to Anatole Kaletsky, co-founder of GaveKal economic advisors, about the future of humanity, the nature of the Universe, and the limits of science. The conversation begins at 6pm London time, which is 1pm in New York and 10am in San Francisco. It will last for 50 minutes, and it is free to all. Please register to attend at https://thebrowser.com/conversations — Robert

Afterthought:
"A compromise is an agreement between two men to do what both agree is wrong"
— Lord Edward Cecil

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Deep History Of Work

James Suzman | Next Big Idea | 5th March 2021

Why do we work so much? Blame farming. Our hunter-gatherer forebears toiled little and lived well for 300,000 years until agriculture was invented, and with it the coercions and complications of a capitalist economy — labour, wages, profits, debts. The work-ethic of capitalism seems to have captured our souls, though it is scarcely needed in our current era of "unprecedented abundance" (1,100 words)

The Electrician Who Sabotaged The Nazis

Tereixa Constenla | El País | 1st March 2021

Comprehensive account of an extraordinary life. Born on the island of Corisco, then part of the Spanish colony of Guinea, José Epita Mbomo became an aircraft mechanic and electrician who cut quite a dash through the society of 1930s Spain. A committed Communist, while living in exile with his wife in France during WW2 he helped to sabotage Nazi vehicles and electrical infrastructure (3,482 words)

A Midwest Salt Monopoly

Matt Stoller | Big | 15th March 2021

On consolidation in the American salt market as a case study for the country's shifting political stance on monopolies. A ready supply of salt prevents car accidents in bad weather and keeps vital freight moving. It's an immobile product, making the market peculiarly regional. Now, with a private equity firm "overseeing a roll-up of roll-ups", there will be more shortages and higher prices (1,719 words)

Audio Of The Week: Among Us

Episode: "Urban Rodentology (Sewer Rats) With Bobby Corrigan" | Podcast: Ologies with Alie Ward | 78m30s

Interviews with experts about their "ology". This one is not for the faint of heart: the subject is rats, and particularly the ecosystem that they create around human habitation in big cities. The guest here is so incredibly upbeat and positive about the wonders of these creatures, though, that any rodent-based squeamishness is quickly overcome by their enthusiasm. These creatures have "food dialects", impressive memories and are so resourceful that we should be working with them, not against them, apparently (78m30s)

Book Of The Week: The Monkey King, Or Journey To The West

by Wu Cheng’en, translated by Julia Lovell | Courtesy of Five Books

Much-needed new, abridged translation of one of the classics of Chinese literature, the tale of the ludicrous Monkey as he accompanies a timorous monk on a dangerous journey to India to get scriptures from the Buddha, accompanied by a cast of characters including demons, dragons, Laozi (the founder of Daoism), the Tang emperor, and various heavenly bureaucrats including the General of Curtain-Drawing (339 pages)

For this week's Browser Conversation, we welcome Agnes Callard, professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago and the Browser's most-recommended writer of 2020. Please join us on Sunday 21st March at 6pm GMT (please note: due to daylight savings in the US this is 11am PT / 2pm ET, an hour later than usual). Reserve your place at https://thebrowser.com/conversations/, and feel free to invite friends

Afterthought:
"To be or not to be. That's not really a question"
— Jean-Luc Godard

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Feeling Sheepish

Sally Coulthard | Lapham's Quarterly | 3rd March 2021

Why "black sheep" are proverbially unwelcome in the family. Black wool is hard to dye; so, over the course of centuries, shepherds selected among their flocks for sheep with white wool, which was easier to dye and thus to sell. But the gene for dark wool is recessive; a white sheep can carry a black-fleece gene and nobody will be any the wiser until the sheep gives birth to a black lamb (1,600 words)

The Savour Of Memory

Laleh Khalili | Merip | 9th February 2021

Delicious survey of Iranian cookery. Major Anglophone cookbooks in this cuisine have come in two waves: first from the Iranians who left after the 1979 revolution, and then in recent years as "the children of those original exiles come of age and begin to search for community, belonging and an unreachable Iranian past". These works contain coded clues about the tensions within the diaspora (3,979 words)

The Secret Of Nanda Devi

Pete Takeda | Rock And Ice | 1st January 2007

Arguably the greatest mountaineering yarn ever told. How the CIA hired a world-class climbing team in the 1960s to place a plutonium-powered spy radio on a Himalayan peak for intercepting data from Chinese missile tests. The device was swept away in an avalanche on the way up. It is still buried somewhere high on the mountain, leaking radiation into the headwaters of the Ganges (4,700 words)

Audio Of The Week: Just Twirl

Episode: "Spaghetti Sucks" | Podcast: The Sporkful | 30m59s

Beginning of a five part series documenting a food writer's years long attempt to create, produce and sell a new and better pasta shape than anything you can currently buy. This first episode is mostly about the problems with what's on offer now — long pasta doesn't hold enough sauce and cooks unevenly, short round shapes easily turn to mush in the pan — and how the process of marketing an alternative is much more complicated than he first imagined. It's all highly entertaining, although Italian culinary purists may disagree (28m58s)

Book Of The Week: How To Live A Good Life

by Massimo Pigliucci, Skye Cleary and Daniel Kaufman | Courtesy of Five Books

Fifteen contemporary philosophers describe a worldview they’ve embraced—Stoicism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Existentialism—and indirectly summarise two-and-a-half-millennia of human wisdom on well-being, relationships, morality, and death. “The real question is not whether you have a philosophy of life, but rather if stands up to scrutiny. That is, whether or not it’s a good philosophy of life” (295 pages)

Afterthought:
“What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?”
― Ursula K. LeGuin

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Organised Lightning

Mario Gabriele | The Generalist | 21st February 2021 | U

Deep dive into the history and workings of Reddit, "conductor of cultural currents" and "town square" of the Internet from the days of Aaron Swartz (who rewrote its code) to those of GameStop. But Reddit's stock-market value is barely one-tenth that of Twitter; it is "one of the most misunderstood and undervalued companies in the world". Can it, should it, reach out to a wider public? (5,950 words)  

Brain Science And Legal Outcomes

Jed Rakoff | Literary Hub | 23rd February 2021 | U

A judge's notes on eugenics, lobotomy, recovered memory syndrome, and their effects in law. "The natural impulse of forward-thinking people to employ the wonders of neuroscience in making the law more 'modern' and 'scientific' needs to be tempered with a healthy skepticism, or some dire results are likely. The history of using 'brain science' to alter the law is not a pretty picture" (2,400 words)

Friends Of Robin Dunbar

Rachel Cooke | Guardian | 21st February 2021 | U

Review of Robin Dunbar's new book, Friends, which "revisits and unpicks" the author's famous conjecture that humans can maintain up to 150 concurrent friendships (the "Dunbar number"), of which five are "intimate". Dunbar did his initial research in the 1990s, before the rise of social media; but he has seen nothing since to change his number; in real life, 150 friends is plenty (980 words)

Drafting Guidance

Office Of The Parliamentary Counsel | June 2020 | PDF

How to draft laws clearly. This is a style guide intended for British lawyers and legislators, but it contains much of more general application and value — for example, advice on syntax in Section 1.2; on gendered pronouns in Section 2.1; on formulae and tables in Section 3.5; on expressions of time in Part 8; and on a miscellany of potentially troublesome words and phrases in Part 11 (27,000 words)

Born To Be Posthumous

Julie Phillips | 4Columns | 11th February 2021 | U

Sporting a long fur coat, rings on all his fingers, and the full beard of a Victorian intellectual, Edward Gorey incarnated the "gothic camp aesthetic" of his own illustrations, which were populated by Firbankian men, long-skirted women, and hollow-eyed children. "Where in his psyche did all those fey fainting ladies and ironic dead tots come from? And, not unrelatedly: Was Gorey gay?" (1,120 words)

Video: It Was A Very Good Year (In Studio) | Frank Sinatra. Short film of the singer expertly recording the 1965 hit with a live orchestra (7m 11s)

Audio: Lady Henrietta Spencer-Churchill Of Blenheim Palace | Duchess. An insight into today's aristocracy, who have to share their stately homes with the public to survive (36m 25s)

Afterthought:
"He who cannot howl will not find his pack"
—Charles Simic

Editor's note: This week's Spectator features an action-packed review of As We Were, the magnificent week-by-week chronicle of the First World War by David Hargreaves and Margaret-Louise O’Keeffe, which began life as a series of weekly despatches on The Browser's sibling website, Century Journal, and grew over the years into a monumental achievement falling somewhere between Tolstoy's War And Peace and Vasily Grossman's Stalingrad. As We Were is now available for order in book form, as a four-volume edition with slip case, price £100. You can find a short video introduction here: https://youtu.be/GEwZXo_ormg

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Torching For Newts

Anita Roy | Dark Mountain Project | 10th February 2021 | U

All about newts, and their near-magical ability to regenerate severed body parts. The biggest comon newt, the Great Crested Newt, is the size of an adult human hand, with a "lurid orange" underside and striped black-and-orange toes "looking like mittens". One long-suffering newt in a Japanese laboratory had the same eye cut out 18 times in 16 years, and regrew a new eye each time (2,505 words)

Why We Build New Nukes

Elizabeth Eaves | Bulletin Of The Atomic Scientists | 8th February 2021 | U

Overview of America's nuclear arsenal, still being modernised and upgraded. The Air Force recently contracted for 600 new land-based long-range missiles costing $100 billion over ten years. Land-based missiles are scattered across the American West in silos that are left "intentionally vulnerable", with a view to attracting and absorbing inbound enemy missiles that would otherwise target cities (9,170 words)

I Am A Heroin User

Mark MacNamara | Nautilus | 17th February 2021 | MP 2/m

Interview with Carl Hart, professor of neuroscience at Columbia University, who presents himself as a "model drug user", and says the dangers of heroin, and of addiction in general, are overstated. “I am now entering my fifth year as a regular heroin user. I do not have a drug-use problem. I pay my taxes, serve as a volunteer in my community on a regular basis. I am better for my drug use” (2,720 words)

Between The State And The Multitude

Sam Popowich | 12th February 2021 | U

Marxist analysis of the free community book boxes that have appeared while state libraries are closed. To some they are an ideal expression of localism and mutual aid, to others a dangerous undermining of government provision. An ideology is at stake: "Under capitalism, the contradiction between local and public goods, between privatisation and state control, cannot be resolved" (1,289 words)

Resurrection Of The Dead

Jeremy Brown | Talmudology | 28th January 2021 | U

An assemblage of esoteric knowledge worthy of Sir Thomas Browne, this essay on resurrection and resuscitation which begins with Talmudic scholarship and advances via an overview of Abrahamic theology towards paediatric medicine, the Society for the Recovery Of Drowned Persons, galvanism, defibrillators, CPR, and the reanimation of decapitated pigs at Yale School Of Medicine (4,340 words)  

Video: Infinite Adam Curtis | Tom Scott. Brilliant parody of Curtis's film-making style, and his habit of exposing or creating conspiratorial views of the world, using loosely-assembled chains of images and assertions (no fixed length)

Audio: The Anti-Vaccine Movement | You're Wrong About. Three journalists debunk the myths perpetuated by today's anti vaxxers and explore how this early example of "fake news" originated (45m 54s)

Afterthought:
"All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster's autobiography."
—Federico Fellini

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This week's Browser Conversation is with Samira Shackle, a feature writer and the editor of the New Humanist magazine. She is the author of Karachi Vice: Life and Death in a Contested City; the discussion will centre on her reporting in Pakistan and her perspective on contemporary longform journalism. Please join us this Sunday at our usual time of 10am PT / 1pm ET / 6pm GMT; RSVP at thebrowser.com/conversations, and feel free to share with friends who would enjoy.

Making Vaccine

John Wentworth | Less Wrong | 3rd February 2021 | U

Step-by-step guide to making an anti-Covid vaccine at home, using an open-source vaccine design and ingredients available on Amazon. "All of the materials and equipment to make the vaccine cost us about $1000. We did not need any special licenses or anything like that. I do have a little wetlab experience from my undergrad days, but the skills required were pretty minimal" (1,700 words)

Postures Of Transport

Hunter Dukes | Public Domain Review | 3rd February 2021 | U

A cultural history of armchairs and rocking chairs. Much about Joris Huysmans and Xavier de Maistre, pioneers of armchair travel, and Vilhelm Hammershøi, Danish painter of subdued interiors. "Rocking chairs (and seats that rocked) carried an erotic charge in the nineteenth century. For a certain type of Victorian mind, easy chairs made easy women. Polite society sat erect" (5,600 words)

Intrepid Navigators

Robert Paxton | New York Review Of Books | 4th February 2021 | MPR

How birds think, nest, and navigate. Clever birds have the "problem-solving ability of a five-to-seven-year-old child". Crows can "hide over 30,000 seeds and recall their precise locations many months later". Birds can detect the earth’s magnetic field, "a sense that humans lack entirely". They can also see ultraviolet light: "Some birds that look plain to us probably shine and sparkle to other birds" (3,540 words)

The Lion And The Polygamist

Vince Beiser | Wired | 2nd February 2021 | MP

Fundamentalist Mormon with failed biodiesel plant teams up with Armenian-born truck-stop tycoon to steal $500 million from the US government in bogus tax credits for non-existent fuel. Well-paced yarn with all the ingredients of a classic heist, including private planes, bags of money, guns, bodyguards, and a gold Ferrari. “It was tax fraud on an almost unimaginable scale” (7,500 words)

New Light On The Pentagon Papers

Stephen Engelberg | Pro Publica | 3rd February 2021 | U

Neil Sheehan of the New York Times stole photocopies of the Pentagon Papers from Daniel Ellsberg of RAND Corporation; Ellsberg had stolen his copies from the Pentagon. The papers, a "deeply critical secret history" of the Vietnam War, showed that successive US presidents had lied to the public. Did Sheehan and Ellsberg act ethically? Ellsberg, arguably; Sheehan, arguably not (2,360 words)

Video: 3.45pm | Alisha Liu. Two friends in Central Park discuss the meaning of life (2m 30s)

Audio: Loophole | The Experiment. Julia Longoria and guests discuss the "zone of death" in Yellowstone National Park, where, thanks to a jurisdictional loophole, you might commit murder and go unprosecuted (25m 31s)

Afterthought:
"To achieve great things you need a plan and not quite enough time"
— Leonard Bernstein

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Pssst.... you don't have to wait all week hoping for another of the occasional free editions of the Browser – you can get a daily dose of surprising and delightful writing for just $5 a month or $48 a year. Browser members are always interested and always interesting, and so are you:

A selection from this week's editions of The Browser

Against Relevance In Art

Garth Greenwell | Harper's | 15th October 2020

Thoughtful counterargument to the contemporary critical insistence that a piece of good art align with the current social and political context. Something is lost by making this “a condition of our interest”. “Anytime we praise the relevance of a particular novel, we are positing, at least implicitly, the irrelevance of other novels; and often enough we make this judgment explicit” (4,443 words)

A Pox On The Poor

Steven Shapin | LRB | 28th Jauary 2021

The eradication of smallpox may have been "the greatest success story in the history of medicine", but it was a long time in coming. Almost 200 years elapsed between Edward Jenner's invention of an effective vaccination technique in 1796 and the last known smallpox fatality in Somalia in 1977 — and, in the meantime, smallpox killed half a billion people in the 20th century alone (4,474 words)

Worse Than You Can Imagine

Elizabeth Weil | ProPublica | 25th January 2021

An American scientist dedicates his life to raising public awareness of climate change. He starts at home, introducing his family to dumpster diving and composting toilets. He lectures and networks, buttonholes colleagues and nags neighbours. His success rate: Nil, perhaps negative. Even his loyal wife rebels when he starts teaching their children that the world is ending (4,500 words)

The Dunning-Kruger Effect Is Probably Not Real

Jonathan Jarry | McGill | 17th December 2020

Reassessment of the Dunning-Kruger effect. First identified in 1999, it describes a bias affecting how ability interacts with prediction of performance — or “why dumb people don’t know they’re dumb”. It's a pleasing theory, but parts of the study don't hold up. Does it still have value? “The lesson of the effect was always about how we should be humble and cautious about ourselves” (2,081 words)

Suck It, Wall Street

Matt Taibbi | TK News | 29th January 2021

In praise of the GameStop exploit as public spectacle and poetic justice — "an updated and superior version of Occupy Wall Street". Crowds can humble hedge funds because social media has solved co-ordination problems. "They’re piling on, and it’s delicious, not so much because they’re right, but because the people running for cover are so wrong, and still can’t admit it" (2,530 words)

The Browser Crossword: Cryptic #5, set by Andrew J. Ries: .pdf, .puz  
Solution to last week's cryptic: .pdf

Past puzzles and solutions at thebrowser.com/crossword-archive/

Audio Of The Week: Opera's Romantic Nationalism | Behind The Curtain. Musicologist explores the links between 19C ideas of masculinity, Wagner's Tannhäuser, and the use of medieval symbology by contemporary political movements (45m 59s)

Video Of The Week: Dyatlov Pass | Nature. New theories about how and why nine students died horribly while hiking in the Ural Mountains in 1959 (9m 33s)

Wonder Of The Week: The Circassian language Ubykh has two vowels and 76 consonants (though its last speaker die in 1992)

Recommendations From Friends: Ory Okolloh recommends Lagos - A Pilgrimage in Notations, by Chris Abani [PDF]: "A beautiful piece of writing that captures that complex nature of the contemporary African city for its residents, former residents and nostalgic diaspora... what does place mean when you are both from and not from a place?"

As a completely independent publisher, the Browser showcases fascinating, under-appreciated writing from around the world. It's only possible thanks to our wonderful paid subscribers, who get a daily dose of fascinating reading with no ads and no fuss. We'd love to have you with us.

Editor's note: Martin Vander Weyer, business editor of The Spectator, legendary Daily Telegraph obituarist, poet, amateur actor and reformed banker, is our guest in this week's Browser Zoom conversation on Sunday 24th January at 10am PT; 1pm ET; 6pm GMT. Please email uri@thebrowser.com for a link if you would like to join us

The Acting Defence Secretary Takes His Leave

Chris Miller | Defence Department | 14th January 2021

From the transcript of US defence secretary Chris Miller's final press briefing. On his Pentagon colleagues: "A lot of people just want to continue doing the same old thing again and again. I think that’s the definition of insanity, isn’t it? Oh, did I say that out loud?" On the F-35: "We have created a monster, but you know that". On his own future: "I cannot wait to leave this job, believe me" (1,400 words)

Nihilism For Oligarchs

Sophie Pinkham | New Left Review | 1st September 2020

A Russian oligarch bankrolls an enfant terrible director to shoot the life-story of a Soviet scientist. Madness ensues on a closed set in Ukaine, including "the killing and torture of animals, the use of orphans and prisoners, unplanned sex scenes with intoxicated participants [and] the presence of neo-Nazis". The result is DAU, one of the most deranged attempts at art since Nero burned Rome (7,500 words)

Joe Biden's America

Fintan O'Toole | Guardian | 16th January 2021

On Joe Biden's star-crossed life and Irish heritage. Interesting throughout. "Biden the Irish pol is a revenant from a dead era. His skills as an operator, a problem-solver, a fixer, are finely honed, but redundant. He is a horse-whisperer who has to deal with mad dogs. He has the paradoxical freedom of knowing that nothing that lies ahead of him is likely to be as bad as what lies behind him" (2,500 words)

Loving Animals

Joanna Bourke | Notch | 7th January 2021

An historian asks why sex with other species is such a taboo. "While all other arguments about human exceptionalism have been dismantled, bestiality remains off-limits. It is only in very recent years that some people have begun to undermine the prohibition on zoosexuality. Are their arguments dangerous? What does it mean to love animals? More pertinently: What does it mean to love?" (990 words)

The Parent-Child Relationship

John Danaher | Philosophical Disquisitions | 15th January 2021

Who owes what to whom in a parent-child relationship? Is it ethical for people to become parents in the hope that doing so will make them better people? Should parental love be unconditional even if one's child becomes a serial killer? "The potential harms of parenthood seem to outweigh the potential benefits. If there are other paths to a flourishing life, why not try those instead?" (3,400 words)

Video: How To Restore A Book | Shuri Bakaseru. A Japanese craftsman restores a battered dictionary to near-mint condition (10m 37s)

Audio: How Cultures Think | Parlia. Julian Baggini talks to Turi Munthe about schools of philosophy outside the Western tradition, and what they can tell us about the universality, or cultural specificity, of human nature (48m 56s)

Afterthought:
"No one wants a lecture. Everyone wants a story"
— Morgan Housel

As a completely independent publisher, the Browser showcases fascinating, under-appreciated writing from around the world. It's only possible thanks to our wonderful paid subscribers, who get a daily dose of fascinating reading with no ads and no fuss. We'd love to have you with us.

All That Man Is

Ezequiel Zaidenwerg | Baffler | 6th January 2021

Remembering Diego Maradona as myth and metaphor. He may have been the best football player ever, not because of his individual genius, nor because of his team spirit, but because he inspired entire stadiums, spectators included. "Messi is a genius who makes his teammates better, but Maradona’s gift was more precious: he made everyone believe they were great and could be greater" (1,655 words)

Lost Paradise Of Purity

Jonathan Gaisman | Standpoint | 23rd December 2020

Schubert was modern history's greatest instance of genius cut off before its prime. He caught syphilis at 25, the age at which Keats died having peaked as a poet; and he died at 31, by which age Haydn had written none of the music for which we now revere him. "Schubert's genius was to draw us in to the melancholy of his interior world, and to set before us a vision of unattainable beauty" (1,970 words)

Tandem.chat is a virtual office for remote and distributed teams. You can see who's around, get a sense for what they're working on, and talk/video/screenshare in one click. It allows for spontaneous conversation, water cooler moments, and being more connected to your team. In "how did you hear about us," list The Browser and get 6 months free!

Presupposition

David Beaver et al | SEP | 7th January 2021

When we say or write something, how much context do we assume listeners or readers to know? The answer is a subject of fascination for philosophers. If, in comparing these sentences — "It’s the knave that stole the tarts, but there is no knave", and, "It’s the knave that stole the tarts, but he didn’t do anything illegal" — you find no discussable distinction, pass by on the other side (20,100 words)

Is Light A Wave Or A Particle?

Ethan Siegel | Starts With A Bang | 8th January 2021

The answer is neither, exclusively, as far as we can say, which probably means our categories are deficient. This history of the double-slit experiment, a foundation of quantum mechanics, finds that the experiment is infinitely tweakable but never quite conclusive. "The goal was to catch the photon in a paradox: acting like a wave when it should’ve been acting like a particle, or vice versa" (2,300 words)

Sherlock Holmes And Father Brown

Charles Foster | Practical Philosophy | 8th January 2020

Sherlock Holmes is "rigorous, empirical, and relies on induction", making him a model for many scientists and philosophers. But in practical terms he is not all that much use. His cases tend to be outliers. Most of the time he is not a patch on his fictional rival, G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown, who is faster, more efficient, and, for the criminal, deadlier — because Brown understands emotion (650 words)

Video: Gradations| Daihei Shibata. No two things are unrelated, visually at least. An exercise in finding the missing links between apparent opposites (2m 24s)

Audio: The Father of Art History | Stephanie Bastek. Ingrid Rowland talks about Giorgio Vasari, whose notebooks are our main source for the lives of the great  Renaissance artists, and of a few naughty monkeys besides (19m 59s)

Afterthought:    
"Prophesying catastrophe is banal. The original move is to assume that it has already happened"
— Jean Baudrillard

Enjoying The Browser? Paid subscribers get recommendations every day, and full access to our archive of over 800 posts.

In this issue, we're delighted to announce the start of a new Browser tradition: a weekly cryptic crossword, edited by legendary cruciverbalist Dan Feyer.

This week's crossword is set by Andrew Ries: download now as pdf or .puz. Answers for this week's crossword will be released next week. Happy solving!

More Lasting Than Bronze

Jack Hitt | VQR | 8th September 2020

Letter from Republika Srpska, the Serb-dominated part of Bosnia-Herzegovina, where Serbs waged genocidal war against Muslim Bosniaks in the mid-1990s. The Serbs are still in charge, and are rewriting history in their favour. The mass graves of their victims are unmarked; their torture chambers have been converted into a health spa; the only war memorials honour Serb soldiers (8,470 words)

Uncanny Vulvas

Diana Santos Fleischman | Dianaverse | 10th October 2020

On sex-robots. The sex industry has been a leader in online and virtual tech. What is it signalling now about robotics? That men want sex-robots as more obedient alternatives to human partners. "Men can build alternatives to a sexual market made less navigable by ideology. Substitutes are built, bargaining power dissipates. Sex robots are to gender politics as scabs are to labour relations" (2,800 words)

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Lord Of Misrule

Ed Simon | Public Domain Review | 24th November 2020

When we imagine early New England, we think of stern-faced Puritans and black-hatted Pilgrims. But not all settlers were so straitlaced. In 1626 Thomas Morton founded a breakaway community called Merrymount, described variously as a "neo-pagan experiment" and a "fountainhead of erotic energy". Appalled Puritans shut it down after two fun-filled years. Morton went home in fetters (2,400 words)

When Birds Migrated To The Moon

Alice Gorman | MIT Press Reader | 1st December 2020

The ancient Greeks knew that birds came and went with the seasons, but it was only in the late 18th century that European naturalists worked out where the birds went to each winter. Conjectures that they hid and hibernated, or went to the moon, were still common in the 17th century. The lunar theory assumed that a round trip to the moon would take the birds a couple of months (1,330 words)

64 Reasons To Love Paul McCartney

Ian Leslie | The Ruffian | 8th December 2020

Let us first agree that Paul McCartney is the best and the best-loved British songwriter of the past century. Even so, we risk undervaluing his achievement, if we think it ephemeral. McCartney is arguably the greatest songwriter since Schubert, perhaps the greatest of all time. "His achievement is immense, historic, and will be remembered for centuries if anything will" (9,700 words)

If It Hadn't Been For The Medics

Bellingcat | 21st December 2020

Russian agents discuss how they tried to kill opposition leader Alexey Navalny, and why Navalny survived. They poisoned Navalny's underwear with Novichok; he survived because his plane made an emergency landing and the medics who met the plane were not in on the plot. This information is extracted by Navalny himself, who telephones the agents while posing as a Russian investigator (16,200 words)

Editor's note: The polymathic prognosticator and Axios columnist Felix Salmon will be joining our editor Robert Cottrell for an open Zoom conversation on Sunday 3rd January at 5pm GMT (noon ET, 9am PT); Robert will be asking Felix what we can expect from the year to come. Non-paying subscribers can purchase tickets for $10 here  — Raymond Douglas

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