The Two Achilles Heels Of Complex Systems

The Honest Sorcerer | 25th May 2025

Electric grids exemplify two vulnerabilities in all manmade complex systems: tight coupling and the limits of human comprehension. Cascading collapses happen within seconds of things going slightly wrong, as with the blackout in the Iberian peninsula. “We are lurching towards a post-electric world, where national grids will gradually become unaffordable, and be broken down into smaller local grids” (3,500 words)

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Ice Sculpted Canada

Tomas Pueyo | Uncharted Territories | 13th May 2025

“In the far north, it rains less. The ice sheets dig deep holes into the ground, strip the sediments away, leaving the soil bare, which tends to produce hills and valleys. The stripped land is more hermetic. Water stays there and ponds. The ice pushes the mantle down. When it melts, the land bounces back unevenly, forming peaks and valleys. This is why Canada hosts 60% of all of the world’s lakes” (2,500 words)

Life’s Ancient Bottleneck

Jack Lohmann | Quillette | 21st May 2025

On the role played by phosphorus in the continuation of life. It is one of six elements that is absolutely essential, and the most scarce. "Because of its rarity, it controls life — it determines who grows and shrinks, who lives and dies, what areas become biologically wealthy and which ones will be biologically poor." The phosphorus we contain originally came from molten lava that became rock, then soil (1,900 words)

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Three Encounters In Taipei

Winnie Lim | 11th May 2025

Closely observed travel writing about a trip to Taiwan, told in three vignettes. Written, the writer says, solely to solidify her own memories. "Is this taiwanese hospitality? I cannot tell you how many times we were told unpleasantly we cannot dine outdoors even when there were actual tables because nobody wants to service that area. This is an exceptional experience that I will always remember" (1,100 words)

The Era Of The Business Idiot

Edward Zitron | Where's Your Ed At? | 21st May 2025

Critique of today's business leaders, who are so detached from reality that they don't participate in the very economy from which they seek to profit. "Everything is dominance, acquisition, growth and possession over any lived experience, because their world is one where the journey doesn’t matter, because their journeys are riddled with privilege and the persecution of others in the pursuit of success" (13,400 words)

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The Terrible Truth About Sherita

Debbie Nathan & Alyssa Katz | The City | 19th May 2025

Sherita, "a hot-pink brontosaurus with a long neck and a face that looked part amphibian, part simian and mostly saucy young woman", was once a familiar sight on Brooklyn billboards. Without context, she became a hipster icon, replicated in tattoos and drag shows. In fact, those billboards were part of a systematic real estate manipulation operation that targeted desirable industrial buildings (6,000 words)

Can We Trust Social Science Yet?

Ryan Briggs | Asterisk | 20th May 2025

Using evidence to arrive at policy decisions seems obviously right. But would the world improve if decision makers based their choices solely on the "evidence" produced by economists and political scientists? Most likely not. The reason being that even the top social science journals still regularly publish research that is wildly inaccurate, a product of a system that seems to be rigged for failure (4,100 words)

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The Fleeing To Europe Industrial Complex

Kate Wagner | Late Review | 18th May 2025

Astute analysis of a rising tide of "just get out of America" commentary. Those advocating flight are mostly not trying to help, but rather to instil fear or sell a relocation consultancy service (sometimes both). Which is not to say that emigrating is an invalid choice; it isn't. Being honest about it is the right thing to do, though. Acknowledge how much it costs. Or stay and use the cash to help (3,100 words)

We’re All Viennese Now

Ian Leslie | The Ruffian | 17th May 2025

Fin-de-siècle Vienna might beat all other cities for its great impact on world culture. It was a famously nervous place full of “intense over-thinkers, overstrung status-seekers, apocalyptic doomers. Suicide was aestheticised and competitive. Vienna’s intellectually inclined inhabitants had the sense of living in a city of brittle illusions, increasingly detached from the rest of rapidly industrialising Europe” (1,900 words)

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Superstition In A Godless State

Ansel Li | Sinopsis | 13th May 2025

Post-pandemic China is seeing a “tidal wave of superstition” among the young and educated. Astrology, tarot, and crystals are popular, despite government crackdowns. In 2021, China banned religious content on e-commerce sites and restricted spiritual services. The market adapted. Now, tarot readers call themselves “emotional consultants”; horoscope sellers have moved to platforms like Discord (2,200 words)

Podcast: The Making Of William Shakespeare | Book Club. “The Dream Factory”, London’s first playhouse built for purpose, played a pivotal role in Shakespeare’s craft and Elizabethan drama at large (50m 9s)

Video: One Carrot Peeler Revolutionised Design | YouTube | American Experience | 6m 19s

The vegetable peeler commonly in use today was designed by and for a woman with arthritis, a good example of the “Curb Cut Effect” — a change made for people with disabilities ends up benefitting everyone.

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The Missing Lynx

Phoebe Weston | Guardian | 28th April 2025

Hostility to human migrants impacts animals too. Border barriers split migratory populations, causing "genetic bottlenecks", inbreeding and habitat deterioration. The wall on the Poland-Belarus border separated the lynx population that lives in that ancient forest. Pygmy owls can't fly high enough to get over the US-Mexico border wall. Red deer still don't cross the former iron curtain line in Germany (1,400 words)

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Against Reporting

Sam Kahn | Castalia | 15th May 2025

Intriguingly optimistic "state of journalism" survey. Yes, the old model of reporting is almost gone. But that doesn't have to be the end of the story. "'Journalism' doesn’t have to mean a boring, detached, clinical, telegraphic, faux-lab-coat-wearing style. Journalism can just be a curiosity about the world — an interest in talking to different kinds of people, in finding creativity within the non-fictional" (3,400 words)

Mushroom Cloud Over Manhattan

Mark Lynas | Literary Hub | 12th May 2025

Sobering explanation of how the first few hours of a nuclear war might go. Everyone who sees the light of the initial explosion will be blinded. A fireball "roughly the width of Manhattan" will then spread 1.5km off the ground. Everything within ten square kilometres, except steel and concrete, will be vaporised. Then, retaliation. "Once the detonations begin, the logic of escalation is inexorable" (3,800 words)

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The World's 'Poorest President'

Gerardo Lissardy | BBC News | 14th May 2025

Obituary for José Mujica, president of Uruguay from 2010 to 2015. He was known for his modest lifestyle: refusing to move into the presidential palace, driving himself in a 1987 Volkswagen Beetle and giving away a large portion of his annual salary. As a leftist guerilla in the 1970s he survived being shot six times and escaped twice from prison, once through a tunnel with 105 fellow inmates (1,200 words)

21 Observations From People Watching

Shani Zhang | Skin Contact | 2nd April 2025

Wedding artist makes notes on how strangers move through a room. “Some people are more like closed fists, others are more like open palms. Many of the driven people I have met are closed fists: warm, charming and ready to punch through a wall at any point in time. My favourite kind of person has an elasticity in their movements. There is an openness that does not need to be announced” (1,900 words)

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Anonymous Interview: The Indie Producer

The Vane | 13th May 2025

State of filmmaking today. Small movies are getting smaller, made with micro-donations from GoFundMe campaigns. Movies look worse today than they did fifteen years ago for many reasons: digital video is lit differently from celluloid with many “plasticky” elements; scenes are relocated after being shot due to script rewrites; the “production pipeline is ultimately adverse to specificity” (6,000 words)

The Forgotten Post-War Decree

Jon Neale | Birmingham Dispatch | 10th May 2025

Birmingham was booming in the 1900s until post-war policy tried to force industry into more deprived parts of the UK. New factories now required an “Industrial Development Certificate”, which the government routinely refused to grant. Existing companies fragmented, and new ones could find no foothold. By the 1990s, Birmingham went from being the UK’s second richest city to being infamous for decline (2,500 words)

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The Airplane ‘Barf Bag’

Mercedes Streeter | Autopian | 8th May 2025

Tribute to an “unsung hero of aviation”. In 1949, plastics pioneer Schjeldahl designed a polyethylene bag with ridges that folded and sealed with a hot iron. Originally meant for food storage, Northwest Orient Airlines repurposed the bag for motion sickness. Barf bags are collectibles today, perhaps for their jokes: German airline Hapag-Lloyd once had bags saying “thank you for your feedback” (2,900 words)

11 Things I Hate About AI

Marie Le Conte | Young Vulgarian | 9th May 2025

Well-expressed scepticism. Perhaps the daily friction of life that AI tools promise to eliminate is a crucial part of the human experience. We learn skills by trying to acquire them, and from starting with a blank canvas that gradually gets filled via our effort. Painting an original work is not the same as completing a paint-by-numbers exercise. We need "tough love", too, which a "digital courtier" will not provide (4,400 words)

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'Tone Deaf, Self-Important, Incredibly Bad Art'

Eddy Frankel | Guardian | 6th May 2025

A really furious one-star review can be a thing of beauty. By the end of this one about an art show by former Take That member Robbie Williams, the critic is questioning whether today's art landscape has degraded beyond saving. "On a basic, artistic level, the work looks bad and expresses incredibly superficial ideas very poorly. It’s a 'live, laugh, love' sign slowly strangling you with its self-importance" (900 words)