Jingle Hell

Tariq Goddard | Quietus | 6th December 2021

Curmudgeonly reviews of the latest festive releases by a disappointed music critic. Full of excellent insults, such as: "When it comes to meaningless trimmings and po-faced renditions that pack the emotional punch of the narrator in a building society advert, Gary Barlow is in his undisputed element, dispassionately attending to every commercial angle like a sniper covering a burning building" (2,929 words)

The Scholarly Pursuit Of Shrek

Jamie Loftus | Paste | 8th December 2021

Stream of consciousness account about spending seven hours at an online academic symposium about the Shrek films. The writer learns a surprising amount about the green ogre's shapeshifting role on the extremist internet, but realises that this kind of ironic over-analysis of popular culture has definitely gone too far. "I think we sometimes fail to see that not everything is something" (4,768 words)

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Becoming A Religion Of The Book

Konrad Schmid and Jens Schröter | Lapham's Quarterly | 13th December 2021

It was only after the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70CE that Judaism became a religion focused on the study of sacred texts, ie a "religion of the book". Prior to that, it had been for centuries a faith centred on places of worship, with a supplementary oral culture of stories, proverbs, songs and prayers. Some traces of these lost texts can still be discerned in the Bible (1,898 words)

🦒:  Beard, Hoax, Democracy, Soul, Dating

Abe Callard | The Viewer | 11th December 2021

At our sister publication The Viewer, Abe Callard selects and summarises five outstanding videos each week. For example, on cryptid hoaxes: P.T. Barnum creates a monkey-fish mermaid, an amateur scientist tricks the world with a human cranium joined to an orangutan jawbone, and "a disgraced actor glues a toy dinosaur head to a toy submarine and photographs the "Loch Ness monster"" (382 words)

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Waltzmania In The Paris Pleasure Gardens

Elizabeth Claire | MIT Press Reader | 6th December 2021

In the aftermath of the French Revolution, a "culture of dancing madness" gripped Paris. The early 19C saw the German fashion for waltzing spreading to France, a moral panic trailing in its wake. This new kind of "closed couple" dancing, in which man and woman embraced as they revolved, threatened established notions of purity, hygiene and social class. The urge to waltz was contagious (1,621 words)

🦒: The Man In Seat 61 On Global Train Travel

Sylvia Bishop | The Browser | 13th December 2021

Sylvia Bishop talks to legendary railway writer and traveller Mark Smith, alias the Man In Seat 61, about the shortage of trains in Antarctica, missed connections in South America, Burmese numerals, the bliss of sleeping-cars, orange juice in Transylvania, and the Best Train Journey In The World — clue: it comes with "haggis, tatties and neeps and a wee dram before you retire" (3,200 words)

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The Afterlife Of Georges Braque

Michael Glover | Hyperallergic | 9th December 2021

This is well said. Braque is grossly undervalued. Outside a relatively small circle of largely academic admirers he is dismissed as a quietist, a dullard. A London show this year draws few visitors and little notice. Yet, in life, Braque was Picasso's rival and equal. With Picasso, Braque invented cubism. "If this were a Picasso show, half the world would have been made to sit up and notice" (1,070 words)

📜: Learning, by John Jay Chapman

republished on Browser Classics | 1911

First in a new series where The Browser republishes classic essays that are worth your time. For artifacts, "monuments, languages, and arts which descend to us out of the past," we can "all concede their importance" even if their full merit is intelligible only to experts in that field. In fact, "all teaching is merely a way of acquainting the learner with the body of existing tradition" (7,758 words)

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Mapping Folklore

Will Mawhood | Deep Baltic | 7th December 2021

Interview about the intersection of folklore and cartography, with a particular focus on the mythical creatures of Lithuania and the Baltic region. These beings have distinct topographical habitats that can be mapped across Europe. Legends about imps are most likely to come from places with bogs and swamps, fairies from lakes, giants from mountains and rocky terrain, and so on (4,542 words)

Every Schubert Song, Ranked

Jeffrey Arlo Brown | Van | 21st January 2021

Comprehensive list, from worst to best. Each song receives only the briefest of reviews, but the phrases add up to a portrait of an oeuvre, from "unnecessary arpeggiation" to "lukewarm melody" to "infinitely average". Of the very best piece, the writer lyrically says: "Sometimes I think if this was the only music that ever existed, things would still somehow be OK" (4,241 words)

Caroline Crampton, Editor-In-Chief; Robert Cottrell, Founding Editor; Jodi Ettenberg, Associate Editor; Uri Bram, CEO & Publisher; Al Breach, Founding Director

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Searching For Sleeper Trains

Stefani Cox | Rumpus | 4th November 2021 | U

Personal history told via moments of connection with the railway. This insomniac writer's great-grandfather was a Pullman porter after the Civil War, ferrying his upwardly mobile son's laundry from university along the track to be washed at the place he had left behind. Now, she dreams of riding the train all the way up the USA's western coast and sleeping peacefully, at last (2,610 words)

🦒: Alexander Berger On Normal Awesome Altruism

Applied Divinity | The Browser | 8th December 2021 | U

Co-CEO of Open Philanthropy on different kinds of altruism. Having and raising kids "seems like an awesome, and very normal, altruistic thing to do." Donating money and kidneys are "relatively rare big decisions that reward thought and diligence," where "you don’t have to get it right in the moment, or the first time, or change a deeply ingrained habit (all of which are things I struggle more with)." (5,235 words)

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Van Gogh’s Satirical Herrings

Martin Bailey | Art Newspaper | 3rd December 2021 | U

Biographical vignette from December 1888, when Van Gogh mutilated his own ear at the home he shared with Paul Gauguin in Arles, the Yellow House. The gendarmes who attended the incident unwittingly inspired Van Gogh's next still life, Two Herrings, and a pair of Gauguin caricatures. The French for smoked herring, hareng saur, is also a slang term for police officers (1,108 words)

📚: This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends, by Nicole Perlroth

via FiveBooks | Best Business Books 2021

A thriller-paced offering from the New York Times' cybersecurity reporter to wake the world up to the dangers of the cyberarms race, in particular the booming global market in ‘zero day’ exploits or critical vulnerabilities. The book is intended to terrify, and the author herself is no exception: “One too many times I caught myself staring suspiciously at anything with a plug, worried it was a Chinese spy” (528 pages)

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Reasons To Study The History Of Ideas

N.N. | Good Optics | 16th November 2021

Short and pleasingly subtle discussion of why we should read the original works of great thinkers rather than relying on selective and secondary accounts. Reading the canonic texts is the surest way to discover the failings and weaknesses of even the noblest minds, the questions they could not resolve, the outmoded and repugnant elements downplayed by sympathetic followers and editors (735 words)

?: Léa Steinacker on Ada and ada

Baiqu Gonkar | The Browser | 5th November 2021

Léa Steinacker is co-founder and chief operations officer of ada, a learning platform for innovative corporate training. She wrote her PhD on the social implications of artificially intelligent systems and was chief innovation officer at WirtschaftsWoche. She talks here about working in eastern Congo, being a founder, Ada Lovelace, Chimamanda Adichie, cognitive biases, and Facebook (7,007 words)

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All Placebos Are Not Created Equal

Sam | All That Is Solid | 16th November 2021 | U

Clinical studies suggest that the placebo effect has become stronger over time in the United States: People are responding more positively to the idea of medical treatment, relative to treatment as such. In 1996 pain-relief drugs beat placebos by 27.3% in clinical trials. In 2013 the margin was down to 8.9%. It may get harder for new drugs to win FDA approval if placebos work almost as well (1,020 words)

?: Milk Of Paradise, by Lucy Inglis

via Five Books | Best History Books of 2018

The entire history of opium, and the many different ways it was consumed – as morphine, heroin, OxyContin – from Neolithic times to the current opioid epidemic. The earliest evidence of its use as a narcotic or for pain relief was in Spain around seven millennia ago. The Mughal emperor Jahangir, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker were all shaped by it (480 pages)

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Pushed Around By Stars

Raghuveer Parthasarathy | The Eighteenth Elephant | 29th November 2021

Building upon the astronomical work of early 20C French mathematician Émile Borel, this piece explores the idea that the answer to the question "Does X affect Y?" is always yes, and is thus useless. Better questions for scientists to be asking include "how much?" and "do I care about the magnitude of the effect?". Borel is verbose and vague, but this writer is neither (2,321 words)

Learning Sixteenth-Century Business Jargon

Edmond Smith | Lapham's Quarterly | 29th November 2021

Communication failure could spell disaster for the merchant adventurer in the 16C, wiping out an entire voyage's profit. Linguistic skill was highly prized, as was knowledge of local customs and etiquette. Handwriting mattered too: in 1636, a factor omitted the "r" from the phrase "2 or 3 apes", meaning that over 200 primates were shipped to London instead of the desired two or three (1,971 words)

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Queen Of Clean

Maddy Crowell | Afar | 18th November 2021

Interview with a hotel housekeeper who estimates that she has cleaned over 60,000 rooms. She is on her feet for eight hours a day and the goal is to be indispensable but invisible. The anonymity of the job appeals to her; she loves a perfectly arranged room. She aims to leave rooms "as untouched as when she last cleaned them, as if she had never even been there at all" (2,556 words)

?: Agnes Callard and Robin Hanson On Communication

Uri Bram and Applied Divinity | The Browser | 1st December 2021

A professor of philosophy and and a professor of economics discuss their new podcast, and the lessons it holds for communication and expertise. "It is actually pretty amazing that we can communicate at all. We are hardly ever clear, so our listeners have to work to figure out what we could be saying. Spending half our time checking if we understand each other isn’t at all implausible" (5,296 words)

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A Meditation On Psoriasis

André van Loon | Spectator | 27th November 2021 | MP

Brief but information-packed review of Skin, an essay on psoriasis by Sergio del Molino, who suffers from the condition, as, apparently, did Josef Stalin, John Updike, Pablo Escobar and Vladimir Nabokov. Del Molino "slowly guides us into his world of intense physical discomfort; most treatments of psoriasis only deal with its symptoms, rather than healing its immunological causes" (670 words)

?: The Night Witches

via The Viewer | Carter Dishman | YouTube | 23rd November 2021

A story that would make a great movie: Wearing hand-me-down male uniforms, an all-female squad of Soviet soldiers flew plywood planes ("certified death traps") into Germany, without instruments to guide them through the darkness. "The sound of the wind on their canvas wings supposedly sounded like a broomstick flying through the air"—hence the moniker, the Night Witches (8m 18s)

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