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Podcast: Civility, Trash Talking And More Sociable Cities | Future Tense. Urban spaces can be designed in ways that shape and constrain how civil people are to each other (28m 38s)

Video: Baggage | Vimeo | Lucy Davidson | 5m 22s

Animated short that uses the baggage check in and security procedures at an airport to tell a story about self doubt. At the "insecurity check", a character with too-heavy luggage is forced to reveal what is inside.

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Five Books features in-depth author interviews recommending five books on a theme. You can read more interviews on the site, or sign up for the newsletter.

Books on Modern Greek History

If you're heading to Greece this summer, it might be worth learning more about the modern history of the country you're visiting. Yanni Kotsonis, a professor of history at NYU and author of The Greek Revolution, recommends a variety of books to get you started, from a short history of Greece to a novel by one of the country's greatest writers. Read more

The Best 21st Century Korean Novels

From K-pop bands to webtoons, from award-winning cinema to blockbuster dramas such as Squid Game, Korean culture has taken the world by storm in recent years. But how about Korean literature? We asked Kim Ho-Yeon, author of bestselling novel The Second Chance Convenience Store, to introduce us to five unmissable 21st-century Korean novels. Read more

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Endometriosis Is Incredibly Interesting

Abhishaike Mahajan | Owl Posting | 13th June 2025

From a purely scientific perspective, endometriosis is one of the most intriguing human maladies. It is widespread but research is underfunded. Diagnosis takes on average between seven and ten years. Its progressive lesions and inflammation are functionally very similar to cancer, yet the treatment options are much worse. For the right researcher, this is an opportunity to make medical history (4,900 words)

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You Can't Buy An Original Bob Ross

Zachary Crockett | Hustle | 2nd May 2021

The smooth-voiced instructional painter may well have been one of the most prolific artists in history, producing around 30,000 works. He did three for each of the 381 episodes of The Joy of Painting alone. But his work almost never comes to market. Hundreds of canvases are still in boxes at his company's headquarters, no doubt to help drive up the prices. When they do sell, it's for five or six figures (1,900 words)

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Highways And Horizons

Reinhold Martin | Places Journal | 17th June 2025

The US Interstate Highway System dates back to the early 20C, "the crest of the liberal era". Rethinking it could provide a way both of restoring what Alexis de Tocqueville called "democracy in America", and divesting from fossil fuels. Why not nationalise Tesla and fold it into the network? This would signal that "profit, including the vast inequalities it requires, is not necessary. It is a political choice" (7,300 words)

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The Wet History Of Media In The Bathroom

Rachel Plotnick | MIT Press Reader | 12th June 2025

On the rise of "bathroom culture" beyond hygiene. This came into being in the 1980s as several factors collided: the growth in size of the average American bathroom, the craze for personal fitness, and the vogue for gadgets. The "good" body was a clean one. Water resistant entertainment devices, like shower stereos and "executive" radios that fitted around the toilet paper holder, soon followed (2,100 words)

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Notes On Managing ADHD

Fernando Borretti | 12th June 2025

A software engineer offers sage advice on managing ADHD. “The difficulty class of the tasks you can perform declines throughout the day. Keep in regular contact with long-running projects. Journalling is good for detecting maladaptive patterns and tracking your progress. If you’re a software engineer I strongly advise against building your own tools, which is a terrible form of procrastination for creative types” (7,700 words)

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Facts About Indigo

Thing Magazine | 16th June 2025

Ancient Japanese had three distinct words for red, black and white; all other colours were grouped under the word for “blue”. Traditional indigo dyeing involves fermentation similar to using a sourdough starter — the colour changes slightly from day to day. Synthetic indigo was first made in 1878. Scientists are now working on “bio-indigo”, a method which uses bacteria to produce the colour (1,200 words)

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I Was A Juror On A Murder Trial

Ozy Brennan | Thing Of Things | 13th June 2025

Observations from jury duty. Most of the evidence in the case would not have existed twenty years ago: Instagram posts, ShotSpotter. The jury instructions present a dilemma: “how could I be sure that I wasn’t changing my opinion based on struck testimony?”. Mainly, these rules are meant to constrain which arguments are allowed in jury deliberations. Ultimately, the jury is hung due to a Kantian (7,600 words)

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The Jumping Frenchmen Of Maine

Kaushik Patowary | Amusing Planet | 16th June 2025

In the late 19C, French-Canadian lumberjacks in Maine exhibited dramatic involuntary reactions to sudden movement or loud noise: leaping into the air, repeating words, screaming, instantly obeying shouted commands — traits later observed in other lumbering communities. Neurologist George Beard noted that these “jumpers” were “as powerless as apoplectics or hysterics” (2,000 words)

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This Is 81

Sari Botton | Oldster | 11th June 2025

Interview with the writer Jon Carroll about age and ageing. Interesting throughout. "I refuse to vegetate, to lose interest in things, to let my curiosity atrophy. It’s a danger that we all face. It’s not an unreal temptation. How do you fight it? You talk. You think. You speculate. My granddaughter, who is 23, comes over here to hang out, not because we asked her to help but because she enjoys it" (3,000 words)

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A Day In The Life Of A Bottle Collector

Giulia Gotti | Eurozine | 13th June 2025

The annual Roskilde Festival is so big that for a week it becomes Denmark's fourth largest city. It has its own secondary economy based on exchanging trash for cash under the Danish refund system. Bottle collectors, mostly from Romania and West Africa, travel to the festival for this purpose. They pay for admission so they can clean up what others discard. There are tensions and turf wars, too (4,300 words)

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The full Browser recommends five articles, a video and a podcast. Today, enjoy our audio and video picks.

Podcast: Ageing, Onions, And Matters Of The Heart | Bedside Manners. Actor Miriam Margolyes talks about ageing — with all her trademark candour — in a podcast about people overcoming grave health challenges (50m 57s)

Video: Honey Bees In Ultra Slow Motion | YouTube | Michigan Shooter | 4m 03s

Extraordinary slow motion footage of honey bees, taken at 150,000 frames per second. Every movement of the wings is visible, making it appear as if the bees swim through the air.

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Five Books features in-depth author interviews recommending five books on a theme. You can read more interviews on the site, or sign up for the newsletter.

The best books on Long-Distance Journeys

Travelling over long distances offers extraordinary opportunity for reflection and re-orientation, explains Louis Hall—the equestrian travel writer whose new book, In Green, describes his trek through the Alps and Pyrenees. Here, he recommends five classic travel books about long journeys that have stood the test of time. Read more

The Best John le Carré Books

John le Carré—often credited as the best spy novelist of all time—wrote 26 books over the course of his career. We asked Nick Harkaway, his son and the author of Karla's Choice (the best spy thriller of 2024, according to our interview with spy book expert Shane Whaley), to select the five best John le Carré novels: from the Cold War espionage stories that made his name to more contemporary thrillers set in a world of international crime syndicates. Read more

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What Xi Jinping Learned From His Father

Joseph Torigian | China Books Review | 12th June 2025

When Xi Jinping became leader of the CCP in 2012, moderates in the party hoped that he would be a reformist voice like his father before him. Xi Zhongxun was purged from the party several times because of his views. It soon emerged that his son had learned a different lesson: “My father entrusted me with two things: don’t persecute people and tell the truth. The first is possible, while the second is not” (2,800 words)

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The Talented Ms. Highsmith

Elena Gosalvez Blanco | Yale Review | 9th June 2025

The subheading of this piece alone thrills and intrigues: "I worked for the novelist in her final months. I thought she wanted to kill me." Highsmith was in her 70s, sick with lung cancer, and did not like people. This writer became her live-in assistant at her Brutalist house in Switzerland. Duties included grocery shopping, cat feeding, using as little electricity as possible, and being screamed at about Ernest Hemingway (6,400 words)

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Inside Britain’s Underworld

David Rose | UnHerd | 20th May 2025

For thirty years, hobbyist British cavers have been painstakingly exploring previously unknown territory "under a sheep-grazed meadow in Gloucestershire’s Forest of Dean". Down a vertical shaft that took months of digging to clear lies a cave system that extends for at least 20km. Among the chambers discovered is "the White Forest", which contains crystalline stalactites that look like Venetian glass (1,900 words)

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Is Theology Dying?

Beatrice Marovich | Other Journal | 11th June 2025

Despite stable enrolment numbers at seminaries and colleges, some theologians are plagued by the feeling that their discipline — academic theology — is "dying". Explanations for this offered here include: the wider decline of the humanities, the increasing polarisation of religion in American society, and the possibility that theology has always been dying and exists as a "nowhere space" (5,500 words)

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Falsehoods About Aviation

Ben Burwell | Angle Of Attack | 2nd June 2025

Organising aviation data is a herculean task, as programmers cannot assume that any of the following are constants — flights take off and land at airports; flights only depart from a gate; flights only leave their gate once; no two flights use the same flight number at the same time; each runway is only used by one airport; there is one agreed-upon definition of altitude; airports don’t move (1,000 words)

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A Rural Public Transit Odyssey

A.M. Hickman | Hickman’s Hinterlands | 5th June 2025

Dispatches from a trip across rural New York entirely by public buses. The routes are “cockamamie and improvised”, hard to find on Google Maps. The bus stops are “tiny shanties in the middle of nowhere”; the bus fare is often vague. One rider seemed to be paying in the form of car wash tokens. “To be young in a place like this is to be a kind of celebrity.” People stare, wordlessly saying, “Look — young people!” (5,700 words)

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