Dear friend,
Tomorrow, Sunday 18th April, at 6pm UK (10am PT / 1pm ET), we are honoured to welcome Stephen Dubner, co-author of the Freakonomics books and host of Freakonomics Radio, to talk about the (freak)onomics of health care and so much more.
Please do reserve your spot at https://thebrowser.com/conversations/, and feel free to invite friends who would be interested.
Best,
Uri Bram
Publisher
The Browser
Your weekly free edition of The Browser, perusing the internet for writing worth reading. Want to get five outstanding article recommendations each day, hand-chosen and beautifully summarised, with no ads and no fuss? Join now.
On Sunday 18th April at 6pm UK(10am PT / 1pm ET), we are honoured to welcome Stephen Dubner, co-author of the Freakonomics books and host of Freakonomics Radio, to talk about the (freak)onomics of health care and so much more. Please do reserve your spot at https://thebrowser.com/conversations/
Jeanna Kadlec | Longreads | 13th April 2021
Dissection of how pop culture communicates power, as shown by Disney's use of queer stereotypes to separate villains from heroes. The antagonist is the character who will not assimilate into the happily ever after. "In Pocahontas, Disney pulls off the magic trick of telling a story about colonisation and genocide where the only thing that’s actually punished is the 'wrong' kind of masculinity" (2,999 words)
Jeff VanderMeer | Orion | 7th April 2021
As a sickly child, this novelist was dragged around the world by warring parents engaged in a "ten year divorce". Bedridden in Cuzco, Peru, he had a sudden vision of two hummingbirds at the window, a pair of "iridescent flames, feathered in red and gold and black and emerald, hovering there". Rare, direct writing about craft and a writer's perpetual attempt to verify an unreliable memory (3,108 words)
Mikel McCavana | 99% Invisible | 6th April 2021
Unveiling the "bootleg bible of jazz", an anthology of sheet music for "hundreds of common jazz tunes" compiled by two students at Berklee and known to all jazz musicians since the 1970s as The Real Book. It was photocopied and passed from hand to hand because it was illegal, a "totally unlicensed publication", created "without permission from music publishers or songwriters" (2,270 words)
Episode: "Meet The Stranded Australians" | Podcast: The Signal | 17m 40s
Elsewhere, the way that Australia has handled the pandemic is much admired — a draconian quarantine system and swift local lockdown measures have meant many aspects of life in person can resume. But for some Australian expats stuck abroad, this regime has effectively locked them out of their own country. This is the moving personal story of one couple trapped in the Covid bureaucracy (17m 40s)
by Chris Bail | Courtesy of Five Books
A sociologist who runs a ‘polarisation lab’ takes issue with some of the common social media narratives we now take for granted. Echo chambers, foreign interference, microtargeting, all-knowing algorithms: little of it is backed up by any evidence. “Our focus upon Silicon Valley obscures a much more unsettling truth: the root source of political tribalism on social media lies deep inside ourselves” (132 pages)
Afterthought:
"The correct lesson to learn from surprises is that the world is surprising"
— Morgan Housel
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Allan Stratton | The Walrus | 31st March 2021
Playwright argues that diminishing the role of Shakespeare in literary education would increase the chance of school students developing a love of literature. The Bard's plays have "too much baggage". His sonnets can stay, though. "We should focus on the books most likely to spur kids’ love of the written word. Shakespeare may be our finest writer, but what schools do in his name is a crime" (1,328 words)
Kelly Pendergrast | Real Life | 1st April 2021
Arguably the best article I have ever read about the moral economy of corkscrews (or corkpulls, as they are called here). They are skinny and they break, or they are swole and they clutter up the kitchen drawer. Worst-case scenario, it's a big one, it's a gift, and you can never throw it away. Rivalled in its rivalrousness only by old extension power cords and Container Store paper-towel holders (3,500 words)
Vitalik Buterin | 18th February 2021
The inventor of Ethereum tries his hand at betting on politics, and wonders why he won so easily. "The game is very lopsided in favor of those who are trying to push the probability away from the extreme value. And this explains not just Trump; it's also the reason why all sorts of popular-among-a-niche candidates with no real chance of victory frequently get winning probabilities as high as 5%" (5,200 words)
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Episode: "Fronds With Benefits (With Jason Mantzoukas)" | Podcast: Home Cooking | 50m32s
This show about home cookery was one of the only good things to happen in 2020. It isn't publishing new regularly episodes anymore — although it's worth subscribing in the hope that a surprise special will drop one day — but relistening to Samin Nosrat and Hrishikesh Hirway chat about what they like to cook and eat is still a delight. This episode with universal podcast guest Jason Mantzoukas is a particular highlight, as he brings his novice questions to the hosts, but you can also select one from the feed at random and still enjoy it (50m32s)
by Susanna Clarke | Courtesy of Five Books
A lone amnesiac wanders the infinite, ruined halls of an unknown world, sharing detailed notes on ‘The House’ and what can be found there with ‘The Other’ – his only company, unless you include the thirteen skeletons secreted between the statues of the halls and vestibules. “Since the World began it is certain that there have existed fifteen people," he writes. “Possibly there have been more; but I am a scientist and must proceed according to the evidence” (272 pages)
Afterthought:
"A ship is safe in harbour, but that's not what ships are for"
— John Shedd
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Anatole Lieven | Responsible Statecraft | 23rd March 2021
The new Cold War, updated. "A tacit agreement has been reached between NATO and Russia: NATO will not defend any non-NATO country that Russia might actually attack, and Russia will not attack any country that NATO might actually defend". But rivalrous flashpoints remain, such as Transdniestr. If Moldova and Ukraine try to blockade Transdniestr, Russia will go to war, and win (1,120 words)
Packy McCormick | Not Boring | 22nd March 2021
If you passed up a chance to buy Bitcoin when it was thirty cents, and only heard about NFTs after the $69 million sale at Christie's, you may now be wondering what comes next. The answer may well be DAOs, and here is an accessible guide for the general reader. In brief: A DAO is "a group organized around a mission that coordinates through a shared set of rules enforced on a blockchain" (6,500 words)
Stefan Mancuso | Longreads | 23rd March 2021
Just-so tales from the world of evolution. "Mice are among the principal enemies of bumblebees. They eat their larvae and destroy their nests. On the other hand, as everyone knows, mice are the favorite prey of cats. One consequence of this is that, in proximity to those villages with the most cats, one finds fewer mice and more bumblebees. So far so clear? Good, let’s go on" (3,300 words)
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Episode: "Hamlet's 'Advice To The Players' With Randall Duk Kim And Annie Occhiogrosso" | Podcast: The Working Actor's Journey | 22m08s
Practical advice podcast in which experienced actors share their wisdom with the next generation in their industry. This is a short episode, extracted from a longer conversation elsewhere on the feed. It focuses in on a particular text: the monologue from Hamlet in which the hero gives advice to the actors he has hired. "Let your own discretion be your tutor," he says, and the experts here speak to the necessity for actors to hone their own sense of discretion — an instinct and judgement to what each moment of a play needs (22m08s)
by Sherry Buchanan | Courtesy of Five Books
Stories from the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the legendary 10,000 mile network used by the North Vietnamese to supply the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War. Sixty thousand ‘Youth Volunteers’, many of them teenage girls and young women, defused bombs, repaired roads and tunnels, and were critical to victory despite “the mass message that the conflict was primarily a man’s war, pumped-up, vulgar, a telegenic dystopia accompanied by raucous rock ’n’ roll.” (252 pages)
Afterthought:
"The worse the villain, the better the film"
— Alfred Hitchcock
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Dear reader,
An exceptional Browser Zoom Conversation awaits us today: 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 tonight 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
Best,
Uri Bram
Publisher
The Browser
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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)
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)
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)
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)
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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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)
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)
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)
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)
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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Dear friend of the Browser,
Our guest for this week's Browser Conversation will be with Helen Lewis, author of Difficult Women and a staff writer at The Atlantic.
Please do join us tomorrow, Sunday 14th March, at 6pm GMT – please note, due to daylight savings in the US this is 11am PT / 2pm ET, an hour later than usual. RSVP at https://thebrowser.com/conversations/ to receive the Zoom link.
Find the book at:
Best,
Uri Bram
Publisher
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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)
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)
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)
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)
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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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)
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)
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)
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)
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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Join the BrowserDear friend of the Browser,
For our Browser Conversation on Monday 1st March we welcome Matt Yglesias, author of One Billion Americans, making the case that massive population growth could allow the United States to "do it all, and stay on top forever."
Please join us this coming Monday at 10am PT / 1pm ET / 6pm GMT. Reserve your spot at https://thebrowser.com/conversations/, and feel free to invite any friends who might be interested.
Find the book at:
Best,
Uri Bram
Publisher
The Browser
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)
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)
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)
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)
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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