All Stars

Jessica Flack & Cade Massey | Aeon | 27th September 2020

How do you build the best sports team? "Hire the best players" is the simple part; individual players' strengths and weaknesses are easy to track. The hard part is "collective dynamics" — knowing how well a given set of players will interact as a team. This is far more complex; it calls for a "more mechanistic understanding of collective behaviour" than we possess in sport or anywhere else (3,700 words)

Briefing Memorandum: US-Soviet Relations

Richard Burt | Department Of State | 5th April 1985

"Briefing note" for US Deputy Secretary Of State Michael Armacost ahead of a meeting with Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko. "Nature of man: He’s a commie. Also, suspected Trilateralist. To watch: Has lied to nine Secretaries of State. Wife: Short, lovely, high boots. Young by old Sov standards, old by new Sov standards. Avocations: Dissembling, repressing Eastern Europe" (680 words)

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Ovia Pregnancy Tracker

Kea Krause | Believer | 1st December 2020

An expectant mother reviews a pregnancy-tracking app. "In the beginning, there was a blueberry. The following week, a strawberry. After that, a green olive. The fruits were offered to signify the growing size of my baby. At twenty-seven weeks, my baby was a sweet potato — and also a croissant, a slingshot, and a sugar glider. At thirty-one weeks, she was a head of romaine lettuce" (1,006 words)

Redemption And Catastrophe

Jonathon Catlin | JHI | 2nd December 2020

Admiring appreciation of Ruth Kluger — Auschwitz survivor, Princeton professor, and critic of Holocaust remembrance culture. She feared that "brutal historical reality" was being turned into "redemptive kitsch". "She was a bit too hard on those who visited Holocaust memorials and Holocaust museums, because she said that they were trying to admire themselves for hating the Nazis” (2,600 words)

By Their Epithets Shall Ye Know Them

Michael Maar | New Left Review | 2nd December 2020

In defence of adjectives. Voltaire considered them "the enemies of nouns"; as did Hemingway, who carried the habits of good journalism — brevity, clarity — into his books. But in the right hands — Nabokov was a modern master — adjectives have a power and beauty all their own. "Cut out the adjectives in Stifter or Keller, Proust or Woolf, Rudolf Borchardt or Thomas Mann, and the work is dead" (2,300 words)

Video: If Trees Could Speak | Elif Shafak. What trees might say about us if they could learn to talk — or, perhaps if we humans could learn to listen  (3m 58s)

Audio: Zachary Carter | Conversations With Tyler. Biographer of John Maynard Keynes discusses Keynes's life and work with Tyler Cowen (54m 57s)

Afterthought:
"If your contribution has been vital, there will always be somebody to pick up where you left off"
— Walter Gropius

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The Synchronicity Of Pauli And Jung

Paul Halpern | Nautilus | 18th November 2020

Wolfgang Pauli was a world-renowned particle physicist destined for a Nobel prize; but he was also drunk, divorced, and depressed. He turned for therapy to his neighbour in Zurich, Carl Jung. Pauli and Jung became friends, then collaborators, honing Jung's theory of synchronicity. Some colleagues thought them mad. Pauli came to agree, when Jung became obsessed with flying saucers (2,800 words)

Utah's Exceptionalism

Natalie Gochnour | American Affairs | 21st November 2020

Utah has the strongest economy among America states this year, the best record of containing Covid, and the lowest rates of inequality — not to mention high rates of volunteerism, of educational attainment, and of trust in institutions. Utah also has a Mormon-majority population, whose moral values would seem to have shaped these outcomes by encouraging compromise and fellow-feeling (6,250 words)

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The Second Law Of Thermodynamics

Eigil Rischel | 22nd November 2020

Newtonian physics is time-symmetrical; but entropy is commonly said to increase over time. Both cannot be true. Entropy increases only in a limited space over a limited time. "If you start with a low-entropy state and watch this unfold for a really long time, you’ll eventually see it become a low-entropy state again. It’s just extremely unlikely to happen in a short amount of time" (2,080 words)

The Communist As Hedonist

Christopher Sandford | Modern Age | 23rd November 2020

Friedrich Engels was a "dandified young textile merchant" working in Manchester when he met Marx in 1848. To his friends in later life Engels was the "clubbable manager of the family firm" whose pleasures included fox hunting, poetry, cricket, wine and philandering. It says much about the complexities of human nature that such a man could also be co-author of the Communist Manifesto (4,700 words)

Herding Cats And Free Will Inflation

Daniel Dennett | APA | 22nd November 2020

On free will and freedom, self-control and remote control, causation, puppets and responsible agents. A PDF, but well worth the inconvenience. Here is my summary of Dennett's own summary: Control is not causation; determinism does not rule out autonomy; autonomy is dangerous; most humans are autonomous but not particularly dangerous; some puppets have free will (6,700 words)

Video: Eric Cantona, Existentialist | Aeon. Nigel Warburton argues that French footballer Eric Cantona exemplified existentialism, on and off the field (2m 38s)

Audio: What Is The Meaning Of Life? | Alles Gesagt. Yuval Noah Harari leads a marathon discussion of just about everything. Dip in, even if you can't spare half a day. "The conversation is only over when the guest says it's over" (3h 43m 22s)

Afterthought:
"It is not a bad thing in a tale that you understand only half of it"
— Isak Dinesen

Where but the Browser would you read about a drunk Nobel prize winner, a dandified communist, and puppets with free will? Paid subscribers get outstanding recommendations every single day. Read differently; read the Browser.

For Mary Wollstonecraft

Vic Clarke | History Workshop | 16th November 2020

Another statue, another row; but this time it is a new work that gives offence — an "anatomically detailed" nude figure in London commemorating 18C feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. Does such female nudity challenge, or indulge, the "male gaze"? If the sculpted body is "idealised", does this increase or decrease the risk of offence? Why have nude statuary in public, if we do not have nude people? (1,320 words)

A Feline History Of Europe

Paul Koudounaris | Literary Hub | 13th November 2020

A history of European civilisation narrated by cats; the first of which were brought from Egypt to Greece by Phoenician traders around 800 BC. "We were seen as a living miracle. Greeks knew only of wild cats. They were entranced by the softness of our fur and our gentle personalities. Why, we were amenable to the touch, and even — well, depending — allowed humans to hold us in their arms" (2,040 words)

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What Is A Particle?

Natalie Wolchover | Quanta | 12th November 2020

Interesting throughout. There is a large field of science called "particle physics", but no agreement as to what constitutes a "particle" — if, indeed, particles exist at all; they may be an obsolete concept of which science has yet to rid itself. Current working definitions of particles include an "irreducible representation of a group", a "collapsed wave function", and a "quantum excitation" (4,200 words)

Magical Thinking And Moore's Law

Venkatesh Rao | Ribbonfarm | 10th November 2020

Moore's Law was coined to describe the growth of computing power; but for those who grew up with it, it came to feel like a new law of nature, a model or a test for almost every enterprise. "We got used to the primary thing in our lives getting better and cheaper every single year. We acquired exponential-thinking mindsets. Thinking in terms of compounding gains came naturally" (830 words)

How Do You Describe TikTok?

Kyle Chayka | Substack | 9th November 2020

A rich and thoughtful essay on what, I admit, had seemed at first glance an unpromising topic — the workings of the video platform TikTok. "You sink into its depths like a 19th-century diver in a diving bell. More than any other social network since MySpace it feels like a new experience, the emergence of a different kind of technology and a different mode of consuming media" (3,400 words)

Video: Heroes Of The Covid Winter. A master-class from the German government in how to make a public service announcement (1m 36s)  

Audio: In Bed With An Assassin | Outlook. Jason, a British war photographer, tells of his love-affair with Marilyn, a Colombian professional killer (26m 37s)

Afterthought:
“Good history upsets everyone”
— David Silverman

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