The Rich Are Not Like You And Me

Henry Farrell | Programmable Mutter | 27th July 2025

Social scientists are trained to assume that markets and governments are distinct, and that individual whims get smoothed out in the collective. This may not fit the world today. The growing isolation of the billionaire class from mortal concerns recalls sci-fi writer William Gibson‘s words — “she knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human” (1,700 words)

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Efficiency, Fat Ideas, And False Negatives

Ben Reinhardt | Spectech | 24th July 2025

In innovation, “lean ideas” and “fat ideas” are two ends of a continuum. Reusable rockets, electric cars, artificial fertilisers, airplanes, AI are all lean ideas — they’re characterised by assertions of great difficulty with a high payoff at the end. Lasers, cars, the Internet, germ theory are all fat ideas — they’re initially perceived as being niche or useless, involving “a lot of piddling around” (2,400 words)

The Singer Who Skewered America

Yascha Mounk | 28th July 2025

Nazis or lamenting World War III, Tom Lehrer’s political songs — all of which he placed in the public domain — were “laced with countercultural venom”. Despite his songs’ popularity, Lehrer had no interest in fame. “He could never get comfortable with the self-consciously politically engaged comedy which eventually took over big parts of American culture” (2,100 words)

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The Cheapest Unit Of The Uncanny

Ray Newman | Precast Reinforced Concrete Heart | 13th July 2025

Masks are the easiest effective way to play on humans’ instinctive fear of the other. Many slasher horror films like Halloween or Alice, Sweet Alice have relied on cheap, tacky masks to evoke a sense of the uncanny. Serial killers, both fictional and real, have used masks to terrorise their victims. “Masks are scary, among other reasons, because they deny us the cues we rely on to assess threats” (1,000 words)

Podcast: The Art Of Strategic Disappearance | Westenberg. Many ambitious people counterintuitively go through a “status death” at some point in their lives to overcome the limitations imposed by the fear of losing social standing (7m 21s)

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Video: Swiss Glacier Collapses | YouTube | WSJ News | 1m 11s

Extraordinary footage captured when a glacier in Switzerland partially collapsed, swamping a village. People and animals had already been evacuated.

Britain’s Spies-For-Hire Are Running Wild

Mason Boycott-Owen | Politico | 24th July 2025

London is the global capital of the private intelligence industry "thanks to a worldwide fascination with fictional British spies in James Bond films and John le Carré novels". Law firms, City banks, global hedge funds and sometimes foreign governments use these shadowy firms staffed by former intelligence personnel, ex-police officers and erstwhile journalists. The sector is almost entirely unregulated (2,900 words)

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How To Feel

A.J. Daulerio | The Small Bow | 25th July 2025

Daulerio was the editor of Gawker during the Hulk Hogan sex tape litigation and the site's subsequent bankruptcy. Reacting to the news of Hogan's death, Daulerio explains what it has been like to be inextricably linked to such a figure in the popular imagination and to work through years of rage about it. "I feel comfortable admitting that he's partially responsible for so many good things in my current life" (1,700 words)

Rifling Through the Archives

Chris Heath | Smithsonian | 13th February 2025

Robert Caro, the journalist best known for his biographies of Robert Moses and Lyndon B. Johnson, gives a guided tour of his archive. It contains everything from his senior thesis that "stinks" to the calendar showing how many words he writes a day. At the age of 89, his fifth and final volume of about Johnson stands unfinished at 980 pages. He has to know how a book will end before he can start writing it (6,400 words)

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Motet For The Record

Henry Freedland | Lapham's Quarterly | 22nd July 2025

Patchwork essay, formed of quotations from Lewis H. Lapham's writings. The result is profound, in places: "Nothing necessarily follows from anything else. The future comes and goes so quickly that one gets used to surprise entrances and sudden exits. Buy the bicycle or the truck, wrap up the handbag and the dress, take possession of the deck chair or the parrot, and you begin the world all over again" (3,600 words)

An Ancient Ice Age Froze The Entire Earth

Laura Poppick | Literary Hub | 22nd July 2025

During a Svalbard expedition in the 1940s, Cambridge geologist Brian Harland found telltale signs of an ice age so intense and all-encompassing it extended to the tropics at sea level, “the most extreme ice age known in all of Earth’s history”. When he shared his findings, he was not believed by his colleagues, who had trouble imagining an Earth that cold, or how it could have come out of this deep freeze (2,400 words)

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Scapegoating The Algorithm

Dan Williams | Asterisk | 21st July 2025

Is social media to blame for the dysfunctional information environment at present? Not solely or entirely. Polarisation, misperceptions, and conspiracism were rampant before the rise of Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. The causes of these epistemic challenges may lie deeper. “Many of the problems attributed to social media can arise — and have historically arisen — in the absence of social media” (3,600 words)

Genes For Memes

Afra Wang | Reboot | 20th July 2025

He Jiankui — the “mad scientist” who created two genetically edited babies in 2018 — has since lost his academic position and served a three-year jail sentence in China. He is now reinventing himself as a “political dissident martyred by an authoritarian regime”, while disavowing any plans to do gene editing for “super soldiers”. His online following reads like a “who’s who of Silicon Valley’s contrarian wing” (2,600 words)

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Forsaking Industrialism

Conrad Bastable | 3rd April 2025

Regulatory mandates that take a punitive approach to domestic industries without investing the time and resources needed to build capabilities simply end up incentivising monopolies elsewhere. The EU has given European automakers 15 years to fully transition away from gas vehicles. As a result, these companies now invest billions in the only market developing viable batteries at scale: China (12,500 words)

The Number Go Up Rule

Matt Stoller | BIG | 18th July 2025, in which increasing the capitalisation of the stock market to protect the assets of the baby boom generation has become the political default. "Financial capitalism implies risk. But in our era, the government guarantees financial returns with subsidies, regulations and bailouts. It’s a form of statecraft." Turning away from this is society's principal moral challenge (3,000 words)

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I Never Cared Much For Swords

Sandrine Rastello | Walrus | 18th July 2025

Actor's training in historical fencing leads her into the world of historical fencing. Participants use steel replicas of longswords, smallswords and sabres to explore a martial art best described as "a game of chess with swords". It requires both archival research and muscles. Ultimately, a duel is about "looking another human in the eye and summoning survival instincts you didn’t know you had" (2,500 words)

The Daily Life Of A Medieval King

Medievalists | 12th July 2025

Thanks to the medieval writer Christine de Pizan, we know how a 14C king passed his time. Charles V rose by seven, prayed, bantered with his servants and heard mass. Then he divided his time between hearing public petitions, attending council meetings and receiving ambassadors. Meals were snatched in between. Then some time spent reviewing his treasures and seeing his children before vespers and bed (1,500 words)

Metagame 2025, a game and puzzle design conference that is also itself an immersive megagame, is happening September 12-14 at Lighthaven in Berkeley. If you're interested in getting involved, contact Ricki Heicklen or join the Discord.

Drones And Decolonisation

William T. Vollmann | Granta | 17th July 2025

Sweeping essay, which takes in literary criticism, travel writing and political commentary. Reminiscent of Edmund de Waal and Stefan Zweig. Isaac Babel and Joseph Roth, the author of Radetzky March, feel present too. With the help of locals and fixers, Vollman tours Ukraine and explores the layers of "decolonising" narrative he finds there: Austrian, Soviet, Russian and now Putin's version (15,000 words)

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