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A Death Full Of Life

Gabrielle Anctil | Beside | 3rd November 2021

Visits to cemeteries are in decline; few people today trouble to walk among the tombstones or lay tributes to loved ones. Since the heyday of the out-of-town burial ground in the 19C, "the cemetery has lost its nobility". Now that burial is being replaced by cremation or even "aquamation" for environmental reasons, a new purpose is required for these abandoned places of death (2,147 words)‌

The Wonder Of Epiphanic Writing

Teju Cole | LitHub | 26th October 2021

Musings on literary epiphanies. Beautifully written. "The secret reason I read, the only reason I read, is precisely for those moments in which the story being told is deeply and almost mystically alert to the world, an alertness that sees things as they are or dreams them as they could be. Those moments that are like a dark forest, a wide sky, or a landscape full of human history" (2,552 words)

The Magnificent Bribe

Zachary Loeb | Real Life | 25th October 2021

On the philosophy of Lewis Mumford, in particular his thinking on why rational actors will willingly swap autonomy for convenience. Conceived decades before the advent of today's privacy trading tech industry, Mumford's idea of "the bribe" has great resonance now. The metastasising power of the "megamachine" he foresaw is such that once we take the bribe, "no other choices remain" (3,338 words)

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Audio: How To Reduce Suffering | Persuasion. Philosopher Peter Singer talks to Yascha Mounk about utilitarianism, altruism, poverty, animal rights, freedom of speech, and how to live a reasonably virtuous life (53m 40s)

Video: Act II Pas De Deux, Giselle | YouTube | Royal Opera House. Close up footage of an outstanding duet danced by Carlos Acosta and Natalia Osipova at Covent Garden in 2015 (5m 11s)

Afterthought:
"The superior artist is the one who knows how to be influenced"
— Clement Greenberg

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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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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.

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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