The Opposite Of The Opposite Of Loneliness

Evan Harkness-Murphy | Republic Of Letters | 29th September 2025

Commencement address for people who were sad in college. “For most of their lives they have felt something like homunculi; they look human and sound human, but they don’t have the instinctual wetware the others do, the gyri and special ventricles that somehow guide real people to friends, to grabbing something to eat after class, and to every social activity of increasing complexity outward from there” (2,200 words)

Nomido is the Browser's daily word game. Play today's before it's gone!

Speaking Apartment

Jane Stern | Paris Review | 30th September 2025

On the woes of finding a new apartment. Includes, helpfully, a glossary of basic apartment speak — “Cozy: so small you will keep your clothes in a plastic box under the bed. Built-ins: previous tenants added weird cabinets and shelves you can never remove. Turnkey: way overpriced with the charm of a corporate office. Hidden gem: so far from any stores or schools the police can’t find it on their map” (1,700 words)

The Product Of The Railways Is The Timetable

Benedict Springbett | 26th September 2025 | U

The railways’ main offering to the public is the intricate mapping of space, time and networks distilled into a timetable. Both track infrastructure and the rolling stock of trains have to be planned around the timetable. When infrastructure is separated from operations, this link is broken. The two most successful railway systems in the world — Switzerland and Japan — understand this principle (1,900 words)

Nomido is the Browser's daily word game. Play today's before it's gone!

Overcoming Our Politics Of War

David D. Corey | Law & Liberty | 24th September 2025 | U

Manifesto to abandon politics as war. People in pluralist societies “live radically different lives because they hold divergent ideas about what is good. Some treasure religious freedom. Others treasure economic freedom. Still others prize expressive freedom. The problem is that freedoms are not always compatible. The result is a perception that people who differ from us pose an existential threat” (2,000 words)

America Against China Against America

Jasmine Sun | Jasmi News | 28th August 2025

Notes on travelling in China, to Shenzhen, Hangzhou, Yuyao and Shanghai. "There’s a saying that 'After one week in China, you feel you could write a book. After one year, you think you could write an article. After ten years, you realize you know nothing.' Expats there are all addicted to the pace of change; everywhere else is slow in comparison.... China is a place where things actually happen" (6,900 words)

Nomido is the Browser's daily word game. Play today's before it's gone!

In Defence Of Dan Brown

Brian Klaas | Garden Of Forking Paths | 26th September 2025 | U

The author of The Da Vinci Code is eccentric. He has his computer programmed to freeze for sixty seconds every hour so he can do push-ups and his prose is a paean to the dictum of "tell, don't show". He may not be a good writer but he is an effective one. Millions are entertained and intrigued by his books, which serve as a "gateway drug to untapped joys of the mind for less naturally committed readers" (2,400 words

Podcast: How Stigma Shapes Psychiatry | The HPS Podcast. Mental illnesses have frequently been stigmatised from the outside. This conversation focuses on stigma as shaping psychiatry from within, through the definition of psychiatric categories (26m 9s)

Video: O Solitude | YouTube | Brandon Acker | 5m 21s

Henry Purcell’s classic, soulfully rendered here by countertenor Reginald Mobley.

Nomido is the Browser's daily word game. Play today's before it's gone!

Who's Getting Rich Off Your Attention?

Kyla Scanlon | Kyla's Newsletter | 24th September 2025

Reframing of political polarisation and outrage as a product of the manipulation of media market structures. Too few people own too many outlets."You can’t fact-check your way out of a system designed to reward misinformation. You can’t educate your way around algorithms optimised for polarisation. You can’t moderate your way past economic incentives that make confusion profitable" (2,600 words)

Nomido is the Browser's daily word game. Play today's before it's gone!

Cure For The Fear of Death

Cyril Connolly | London Magazine | 15th August 2025

Logical demolition of morbid fear, written in 1949. "The opposite of fearing death is to love life, and the painful consideration of non-existence will be found to disappear when life is lived fully and to arise chiefly when apathy and fear of life exist as well. Lovers hardly fear death at all, which is why they can afford so closely to contemplate it. If you cannot cultivate love, then cultivate courage" (600 words)

Knights Vs Samurais: Who Would Win?

Jordan Long | History Defined | 23rd December 2023

It is unlikely that a medieval European knight ever actually crossed swords with a Japanese samurai. If they did, as this counterfactual analysis makes clear, it is not immediately obvious which swordsman would win. The samurai is light and quick, while the knight's heavy armour and sword reduces his speed but shields him from harm. In full armour, the knight would likely triumph. Eventually (1,100 words)

Nomido is the Browser's daily word game. Play today's before it's gone!

Welcome To Syria’s Fragile Paradise

Paloma de Dinechin | New Lines | 24th September 2025

At Wadi Qandil, a would-be Mediterranean beach resort on the Syrian coast, an alliance of influencers and professional party starters is trying to make the dream of "Syria 2.0" a reality. The political transition from the Assad regime is fragile and people are still dying. But on social media, they are constructing a fantasy world of shirtless horseback rides, midnight swims and beers around the bonfire (2,400 words)

It Never Worked Before

Linch Zhang | The Linchpin | 18th September 2025

Nine intellectual jokes and a coda on what makes humour intellectual. It has to be layered, accessible to those who get the surface meaning with deeper rewards for those who see the additional levels. Jokes about intellectuals and jargon are not intellectual humour; they are “smart people jokes” based on stereotypes and in-group solidarity. If your appetite is whetted, head to the comments for more (1,400 words)

Nomido is the Browser's daily word game. Play today's before it's gone!

The Brief Life Of Longtermism

Jesús Zamora Bonilla | Mapping Ignorance | 22nd September 2025

A popular notion of moral progress is the “expansion of the circle of empathy”, from a small group in the past to more humans and nonhumans over time. Its latest version is the theory that future generations living millions of years from now deserve the same consideration as people alive today or a century from now, an apparent “corollary of the principle that all human lives are equally valuable” (1,600 words)

Creatures Of The Abyss

Judith Tarr | Reactor | 22nd September 2025 | U

For an exercise in science fictional thinking, look no further than this planet. The ocean depths host truly fantastical creatures — like the zombie worm, which lives on the fat inside the bones; or the anglerfish, her mate quite literally fused to her to make babies; or the cute dumbo octopus, with ear-like fins to propel 23,000 feet below the surface. They live their lives in a world “as alien to us as the storms of Jupiter” (1,300 words)

Nomido is the Browser's daily word game. Play today's before it's gone!

Stick To The Beat

Chris Dalla Riva | Tedium | 21st September 2025 | U

Appraisal of the drum machine, which simulates the sounds of acoustic drums and other percussive instruments, invented in the late 1970s. Its impact on pop music was subtle, but huge. It “entrenched our obsession with 4/4 time”. It also influenced how rhythms were played. Naturally perfect and programmed to play at 117 beats per minute, the drum machine caused human drummers to play as rigidly (3,200 words)

House Arab

Ismail Ibrahim | Bidoun | 16th September 2025

Fact checker's account of being the only Arab on the editorial staff of a prominent US magazine (the New Yorker, although the writer is too polite to say) after the October 7th attacks on Israel. The work of calling people in Palestine and asking "how, precisely, their relative had been killed" fell to him, the sole Arabic speaker. Soon, the limits of a supposedly neutral verification process became apparent (2,700 words)

Nomido is the Browser's daily word game. Play today's before it's gone!

The Hair Theory

Andrea Petkovic | Finite Jest | 19th September 2025

Former tennis pro explains why a male player's confidence in their hair is a predictor of good performance on the court. Athletes' bodies receive extreme scrutiny, never more so than in the smartphone era. For men, this intense critique is often centred on their hair. When Carlos Alcaraz easily brushed off mockery of his accidental buzzcut, he exhibited the kind of confidence necessary to win the US Open (1,000 words)