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The Best Historical Biography: The 2025 Elizabeth Longford Prize
A good historical biography should help us redefine and rethink what makes a person historically significant, says Roy Foster, chair of the judging panel of the Elizabeth Longford Prize. He talks us through the brilliant books that made the 2025 shortlist, including the lives of various monarchs who left their mark on European history, a portrait of an early modern spymaster, and a biography of Frantz Fanon, the anti-colonial writer. Read more
The Best Russia Books of 2025: The Pushkin House Prize
The Pushkin House Book Prize is awarded annually for a nonfiction book that encourages "public understanding and intelligent debate about Russia." Political scientist Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, chair of this year's judging panel, talks us through the six fantastic books shortlisted in 2025, illuminating different parts of Russia's politics and history — from the memoir of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died in prison in 2024, to a history of the Russian Orthodox Church and its role in propping up political regimes from the Middle Ages to the present. Read more
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Podcast: The Echo in the Machine | Radiolab. Using technology to turn speech to text is now effortless and instant. But it wasn't always so, as this history of the attempts to make it happen shows (32m 42s)
Video: Nick Cave On Hope | YouTube | GodSaveOurTeam | 1m 57s
Nick Cave reads a letter he wrote to a fan who had lost faith in humanity. "Unlike cynicism, hopefulness is hard-earned, makes demands of us, and can often feel like the most indefensible and lonely place on Earth."
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How Common Is Multiple Invention?
Brian Potter | Construction Physics | 5th June 2025
More common than you might think. In this analysis of 190 inventions from 1800 to 1970 — including the telephone, the transistor and the electric tram — over half show evidence of multiple independent attempts at invention. This is a rebuke to the idea that invention requires singular genius. Instead, a confluence of forces including intellectual progress and material availability are likely responsible (2,700 words)
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Who Thought This Was A Good Idea?
Evelyn McDonnell | LitHub | 5th June 2025
The posthumous publication of Joan Didion's private therapy notes feels ethically dubious. "The commercial exploitation of family trauma left me feeling deeply uncomfortable and even ashamed, like I was caught holding a ticket stub for the rubbernecking line at a train crash." Perhaps the most uncomfortable revelation is that Didion did not always tell the truth in her unflinching personal essays (1,100 words)
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Probe Lenses And Focus Stacking
Abby Ferguson | DP Review | 22nd May 2025
Photographer explains how he takes extraordinary images inside musical instruments. In these pictures, the interior of a pipe organ becomes a futuristic city and the space within a violin looks like a historic ship. He uses a homemade stack of medical scopes and magnifiers to get the highest quality image from the smallest possible device. Taking a macro-style image in a tiny space is very hard (1,700 words)
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What Is Post-Fascism?
Sven Reichardt | JHI Blog | 4th June 2025
As David Remnick once said, “Hitler ruined fascism.” What does the term even mean now that it is "vague and worn out by polemical overuse"? The ideologies espoused by the likes of Donald Trump and Girogia Meloni carry some overtones of historical fascism, but lack certain key elements, such as a strong welfare state or an emphasis on uniformed paramilitaries. Hence the rise of "post-fascism" (4,800 words)
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Status, Class, And The Crisis Of Expertise
Dan Williams | Conspicuous Cognition | 31st May 2025
The populist rejection of expertise goes beyond skepticism; it is rooted in status threat and humiliation. Expertise is perceived as “epistemic charity”, a “one-way deference” that concedes the experts’ higher status. “The scientist, academic and fact-checker do not expect to learn anything from ordinary voters.” In response, populists promise a status reversal by elevating “common sense” over “expert authority” (3,700 words)
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Limiting Reason
Richard Chappell | Good Thoughts | 2nd June 2025
On navigating moral uncertainty. The challenge is to not be an Easy Dupe, fooled by “clever-sounding but ultimately facile reasoning”. One way to do this is through Dogmatism: dismiss anything which seems intuitively outrageous. This carries its own moral risk of never questioning one’s cultural blind spots. “We know that many important moral truths sounded ridiculous to past generations” (1,600 words)
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How To Do Soul-Craft With State Tools
Jac Mullen | After Literacy | 14th May 2025
Writing began as a tool of state control wielded by a small managerial class. Mass literacy was the result of centuries of struggle, made possible by portable alphabetic systems, print technology, public education — a “fragile, unnatural achievement”. It makes a “cognitive commons” possible. If outcompeted by machine intelligence, it may once again become the “province of a specialised elite” (2,600 words)
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The Tragedy Of Elon Musk
Francis Fukuyama | Persuasion | 31st May 2025
Elon Musk’s disastrous foray into politics illustrates America’s “oligarch problem”: tech entrepreneurs who, because of their success in one arena, are convinced they will be good at anything and stray into areas well out of their depth. The tragedy is that Musk may have destroyed his most outstanding creation, Tesla, which was leading the way to a low-carbon future. “That future may now belong to China” (1,600 words)
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Podcast: Will We Ever Prove String Theory? | The Joy Of Why. A theoretical physicist makes a valiant case that the mathematical elegance of string theory is reason enough to keep investigating it (48m 39s)
Video: The Clown Car | YouTube | Cool Ideas | 4m 19s
Genial presentation of the quirky 1943 DAF Mobile Raincoat, a three-wheeled car created in the Netherlands under Nazi occupation. The car was small enough to fit through a doorway, with a front wheel that could rotate 180 degrees. Despite its odd appearance, the car had real innovation — its technology was a precursor to the CVT transmission. Post-war, the car was handed off to a circus.
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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 Historical Novels Set in the 18th Century
It was the century of the American Revolutionary War and the French Revolution. In the Scottish Highlands, there were multiple rebellions in favour of the deposed Stuart dynasty. Ariel Lawhon, author of The Frozen River, recommends five of her favorite novels set in the 18th century, a tumultuous era that doesn't always get the shelf space it deserves when it comes to historical fiction. Read more
The Best Politics Books of 2025: The Orwell Prize for Political Writing
From conspiracy theories wreaking havoc in US politics to poignant memoirs of painful events around the globe, the books shortlisted for the 2025 Orwell Prizes, the UK's most prestigious awards for writing about politics, have been announced. These are the eight books shortlisted for the 'Orwell Prize for Political Writing,' awarded annually to a nonfiction book. The comments are from the judging panel, chaired by UK diplomat and former ambassador to the US Kim Darroch. Read more
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How To Live On $432 A Month In America
A.M. Hickman | Hickman's Hinterlands | 20th May 2025
It's entirely possible, as long as you are willing to live a quieter, rural life of the kind more typical in the mid 20C than the 21C. "By the standards of our great-grandfathers — that is, with a little work here and there, a big garden, a fishing pole, and some venison in the freezer — there’s never been a better time to try to 'make it' in America and live the older version of the American Dream" (2,600 words)
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The Noble Rhubarb
RJ Evans | Kuriositas | 29th May 2025
Easily mistaken for a triffid, Rheum nobile is a peculiar and fascinating plant. It grows up to two metres tall in a high altitude Himalayan habitat where other plants stay close to the ground. It forms a conical tower of translucent leaves which together act as a natural glasshouse for the flowers and fruit inside. The stems even contain a clear liquid that hikers and yak herders enjoy drinking (1,000 words)
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Three Years Of Extremely Remote Work
Brendan Gregg | 22nd May 2025
What it's like to work remotely from another continent. This worker is based in Australia while employed by a US company. He attends a lot of meetings at 2am. Weekends are shifted, because his Saturday morning is his colleagues' Friday afternoon. It is career-limiting — he is "out of sight, out of mind". Too many early mornings upset the stomach. But being where you want to be is worth it (1,400 words)
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The Top 10 Worst Beatles Songs
Blake Butler | Dividual | 28th May 2025
This list's compiler is not a fan of the band he describes as "basically the Backstreet Boys of the 1950s". The opening of "Here Comes The Sun" is reminiscent of "waking up in a coffee commercial". "Good Day Sunshine" reveals that there is "something so Apple commercial about whenever the Beatles do vocal harmonies". Only "Yellow Submarine" is "so bad it’s almost good depending on your mood" (2,000 words)
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DOGE Days
Sahil Lavingia | 28th May 2025
Diary of an engineer at the "Department of Government Efficiency". Initially enthusiastic about joining a "revolutionary force" that would help people, he soon ran into problems. DOGE had no direct authority and only operated at the whim of Trump's appointees. There was no team culture, little information sharing, and even his laptop barely worked. On day 55, he was unexpectedly let go (1,500 words)
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The Stipend
Deb Olin Unferth | Paris Review | 27th May 2025
On the mental burden of an academic research stipend, which provided "a few grand a year" for five years that could only be spent on certain items by navigating a labyrinthine expenses process. Only books were easy to claim for. And so the recipient bought books: so many books that they took over her house. Still the stipend remained. Eventually, she went to the Arctic, just to get rid of the money (2,200 words)
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