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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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)

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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

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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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John Brennan On Life In The CIA

Tyler Cowen | Conversations | 16th December 2020

Former CIA director interviewed. Interesting throughout. Topics include Catholicism, clandestine operations, UFOs, lie-detectors, punctuality, forecasting, counter-terrorism, family life, forgery, torture, Arabic, Palestine, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Le Carré, James Bond. John Brennan on UFOs: "I’ve seen some of those videos from Navy pilots, and they are quite eyebrow-raising" (10,170 words)

The Big Thaw

Abrahm Lustgarten | Pro Publica | 16th December 2020

Where many countries see climate change as an existential threat, Russia sees it as mostly good news. Rising average temperatures and longer growing seasons are awakening Siberia from centuries of barrenness. Forests, swamps and grasslands are being transformed into soybean, corn and wheat fields. Food production could supplant oil and gas as a warming Russia's primary export industry (7,400 words)

How should you respond to the new AI wave? The Business of Big Data, by Browser Publisher Uri Bram and Oxford Said Business School Professor Martin Schmalz, shows you how to think strategically about the economic impacts of AI, and to complement the latest technologies instead of competing against them.

The Grace Of This World

Brad Rassler | Outside | 10th December 2020

Retracing the last days of a beloved uncle who abandoned his Michigan law office , made a new life as a ski bum and bartender in Colorado in his mid-fifties, then returned unannounced to Michigan, filled himself with drugs, walked into a river, and drowned. A mystery story in which the mystery is that of the human condition: Why would a man so full of life want to bring that life to an end? (10,500 words)

The Lost Last Supper

Cees Noteboom | Yale University Press | 16th December 2020

A Venetian tale that is all the better in this retelling. In 1573 the Holy Inquisition demanded that Paolo Veronese correct his Last Supper; he had enlivened the biblical scene with dozens of comic interlopers and a dog; the inquisitors wanted these painted over. Veronese had a better idea: He renamed the work Feast In The House Of Levi, instantly placing it outside the inquisitors' purview (1,200 words)

A Life-Lesson In Concentration

Jonathan Rowson | Aeon | 6th January 2020

Chess grandmaster explains how a top chess-player thinks. "I don’t see one square or piece at a time. Instead, I see the whole position as a situation featuring relationships between pieces in familiar strategic contexts; a castled king, a misplaced knight, an isolated pawn. It’s a kind of conceptual grammar. My search to do the right thing feels fundamentally aesthetic in nature" (3,000 words)

Video: Tony The Tiny Pony | Oneedo. The ballad of a tiny horse, sung by a tiny man, the moral of which is that even tiny horses can do great things (3m 50s)

Audio: Stalin's Wine Cellar | Outlook. A wine merchant hears that Stalin's wine collection, including bottles looted from the Tsars, is quietly up for sale, after being hidden for decades in Georgia. He decides to investigate (35m 01s)

Afterthought:
"I basically only read books that are over 2,000 years old"
— Hans-Georg Gadamer

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America, The Exceptional?

Steve Lagerfeld | Hedgehog Review | 8th December 2020

American exceptionalism is an "honourable idea" with a "long and productive life";  but it should be retired, "put on a stretcher" and "carried back to the intellectual world where it was born". Belief in exceptionalism thrived after both World Wars, when power and prosperity put America in a category of its own. Now, any claim to exceptionalism is neither obviously true, nor obviously useful (3,500 words)

The Impossibility Of Memory

Theo Dorgan | Dublin Review Of Books | 6th December 2020

Keening, or public lamentation for the dead, is a tradition from antiquity that was flourishing in Ireland within living memory. Though never formally recognised as such, keening was an art form, blending song and poetry and performance. Keening may have been the closest thing to ancient Greek poetry — oral, tribal, dramatic, plastic — still current in 20th-century Western Europe (4,800 words)  

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Unrepentant Baguette Merchant

Niccolo Soldo | Fisted By Foucault | 2nd December 2020

Tongue-in-cheek, provocative but revealing interview with right-wing French pundit Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry. Politically incorrect throughout; but Gobry is in on the joke, and makes his points well. "I'll let you in on a little secret we don't share with foreigners: nobody in France believes in "laïcité", it's all a code to say we don't like Islam. We have a concordat, for crying out loud!" (4,200 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 art, if we think it ephemeral. "His achievement is immense, historic, and will be remembered for centuries if anything will ... There are very few artists in history, in any field, who have produced so much work at a high level over such a span" (9,700 words)

On Marlon Brando

Molly Haskell | Village Voice | 6th December 2020

From the archives, an epic profile first published in 1973 when Brando shocked the film world by spurning an Oscar in protest at the fate of Native Americans. "He is intensely physical, strong, sensual. And yet there is, in his stillness, the hesitation of a troubled soul. He watches like nobody else watches, and behind the glare is a mind that knows more than it will ever, can ever, utter" (17,400 words)

Video: Rules For Rulers | C.G.P. Grey. Machiavelli for stick figures. How outsiders think political power works; and how it actually works (18m 13s)

Audio: How We Get What We Value | Mark Carney. BBC Reith Lecture. Ex-governor of the Bank of England talks about the ascendancy of financial values over human values (57m 50s)

Afterthought:
"Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you"
— Jean-Paul Sartre

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