Is Everyone Getting Their Tattoos Removed?

Carrie Battan | GQ | 24th April 2025

The vivid opening of this piece speaks for itself: "The worst part of getting a tattoo removed, apart from the searing pain and the two-year commitment, is the sound the laser makes as it hits your skin: a violent, unnatural popping and crackling that could soundtrack an animated video of someone being electrocuted... It feels as if your body is a stretch of New York City sidewalk being torn into by a torch" (4,600 words)

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The Trouble With Dangling Modifiers

Stan Carey | Sentence First | 6th May 2025

Grammar experts deplore them, but must we always avoid dangling modifiers? Sentences like "While replying to your email, the doorbell rang" are technically incorrect but surely harmless. Most examples seem "ambiguous only with a feat of imagination", or to those looking for misreadings. A common remedy is to use the passive voice instead — which many grammarians also hate (1,500 words)

28 Slightly Rude Notes On Writing

Adam Mastroianni | Experimental History | 29th April 2025

Less a list than a begrudging appreciation of the never-ending grind that is trying to produce good creative work. "Some people think that writing is merely the process of picking the right words and putting them in the right order, like stringing beads onto a necklace. But the power of those words, if there is any, doesn’t live inside the words themselves...The beauty ain’t in the necklace. It’s in the neck" (3,300 words)

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An 80,000-Year History Of The Tomato

Evan DeTurk | Works In Progress | 7th May 2025

80,000 years ago, a tomato was a blueberry-sized fruit that grew only in Central and South America. Being small they were time-consuming to pick and some variants were toxic to humans, so Native Americans began breeding for a better plant. The cherry tomato was an intermediate product of this process. The first tomato suitable for commercial growing appeared only in 1870 (1,500 words)

The Benevolent Bureaucracy

Ben | Flyover Takes | 5th May 2025

Philanthropy shifted from personal aid to professionalised intervention during the American Gilded Age. Carnegie argued that the rich should act as “trustees for the poor” by funding libraries, universities, hospitals — a form of aristocratic stewardship. Foundations today echo his vision: interventions at scale rather than direct handouts. Is this generosity, or is it the rich usurping the role of government? (2,200 words)

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Plucked To Perfection

Nicole Garrison | Serenade | 6th May 2025

Potted history of the harpsichord. Unlike the piano, which strikes strings with hammers, the harpsichord plucks its strings with quills or plectra. Its main role in early music was as a continuo instrument — “far from simply filling in chords”, harpsichordists would “shape the harmonic texture” of the piece. It was eventually eclipsed by the piano, until a historically informed revival in the 20C (1,400 words)

The Anglo-Nazi Empire That Almost Was

Kit Klarenberg | Global Delinquents | 4th May 2025

The prevailing narrative in the West today is that appeasement was a well-intentioned but catastrophic attempt to avoid WWII. In reality, Britain was pursuing a “world political partnership” with Nazi Germany. An industry summit took place in London on the same day as Kristallnacht, which proved to be no deterrent for continued discussions. A month later, an Anglo-Nazi coal cartel was created (2,500 words)

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Possibly A Serious Possibility

Adam Kucharski | Understanding The Unseen | 3rd May 2025

Intelligence communication offers lessons on dealing with the language of uncertainty. In 1951, a CIA report noted that Soviet aggression against Yugoslavia “should be considered a serious possibility”, a phrase whose probability was interpreted by some to be as high as 80%, others as low as 20%. A NATO study showed officers had a dozen different understandings of the word “likely” (1,000 words)

Import, Immature

Spencer Wright | Scope Of Work | 28th April 2025

Surely one of the most beguiling essays ever to be written about globalisation and reciprocal tariffs, by someone who thinks professionally about manufacturing. "I turn a can of tuna over in my hand, and my entire understanding of it changes. I buy a pair of shoes, make myself a drink, take a sip of water — it all has so much meaning. But every time I think I know what the meaning is, it seems to change" (3,600 words)

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Does A Magician Reveal Their Tricks?

Andrew Coletti | Atlas Obscura | 1st May 2025

Frank interview with a magician. Interesting throughout. The best way to learn to do magic is still by reading books and then practising in front of a mirror. With a mastery of the fundamentals, you can create your own novel tricks. Magicians keep their methods secret "for the audience’s benefit, not for our own". Most of the time, the explanation is "confoundingly simple" and kills the fun (2,000 words)

Inventing Japanese Braille

Wei Yu Wayne Tan | History Workshop | 1st May 2025

Louis Braille's tactile reading and writing system was devised with alphabetic languages in mind, such as English or French. Japanese Braille came later, as its late 19C adopters wrestled with the problem of codifying a phonetic and semantic script with a limited number of Braille dots. Matching the dots to the kana syllabaries rather than kanji characters proved to be the key (1,600 words)

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The Alabama Landline That Keeps Ringing

Emily McCrary | Oxford American | 23rd April 2025

In 1953, the Dean of Students at Auburn University in Alabama opened a help desk phone line that students, and then the general public, could call to get answers to any query. Seven decades later, people are still phoning in. Many callers are people who, for whatever reason, don't use the internet. Some have troubles and just want to talk. And of course, some are drunk people at parties (2,100 words)

I’d Like To Report A Murder

Hannah Baer, Lauren Oyler & Brandon Taylor | Pioneer Works | 23rd April 2025 | U

The literary takedown is "having a renaissance", supposedly, and this conversation between two critics well known for their splashy, negative reviews is both tense and illuminating. Neither holds back. Some interesting advice emerges, applicable beyond the literary sphere, such as "It’s fine to make enemies, but make sure they’re the right ones" and "Let people hate in peace" (3,600 words)

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The Freestylist

Florian Pütz | Der Spiegel | 17th April 2025 | U

Career retrospective for chess grandmaster Magnus Carlsen, aged 34. He has been World Chess Champion five times. Only Garry Kasparov has spent longer as the world's highest-ranked chess player. Yet Carlsen seems to be bored of classical chess. He pours his energy into online play and a new Freestyle format in which the starting position is randomly selected from 960 different possibilities (3,900 words)

Art Of The Hedgerow

Richard Negus | Engelsberg Ideas | 28th April 2025

The English hedgerow seen through “sporting art”. Victorian aristocrats called the “Meltonians” would commission paintings of their horse, hound or friend and the landscape across which they galloped. If one looks past the shiny thoroughbreds and sharp coats, the hedges in the paintings reveal that farms were ravaged by recession in the 1820s, compared to their Georgian counterparts in the 1790s (1,400 words)

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Science Might Help Keep Wild Places Wild

Sarah Scoles | Undark | 28th April 2025

Much thought goes into how people experience the great outdoors, by forest service rangers and experts who balance protecting fragile ecosystems with making public lands accessible. Historically, this meant visitor caps through permits or fees, which can create other problems. Faced with an online permit portal for a peak, people may choose instead to climb a mountain next door, “displacing their damage” (3,400 words)

To Live And Be Perplexed By Los Angeles

Joel Stein | The End Of My Career | 25th April 2025

Humorous account of the bizarre events after a hit-and-run in LA. The driver flees with his clothes in one hand and a guitar in another, with a brother-sister duo in hot pursuit. He hides in a posh neighbourhood, watering plants. As cops search the backyards, a woman points a gun at them. She is Jillian Lauren, bestselling author of a memoir about being in the Prince of Brunei’s harem (1,300 words)

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Human Creativity As A Natural Resource

Benj Edwards | Ars Technica | 25th April 2025

Case for protecting human creativity as a scarce natural resource in the age of AI. Suggestions include licensing or royalty systems to compensate humans and opt-out registries for AI training. Japan’s “Living National Treasures” offer a model, funding artisans to preserve vital skills. We might have an “AI commons” — AI models trained on publicly scraped data should be owned as a shared public domain (2,500 words)

The Timeless Allure Of Tintin's Aesthetics

Ryan M. Allen | College Towns | 6th January 2025

Tintin creator Georges Remi used a consistent colour palette and the dark outlines of the "ligne claire" style to make each panel of his comic a work of art. The Adventures of Tintin exhibit "a sense of scaled urbanism as well as the naturalistic world in fantastical yet real places". It is hard not to feel emotional, for instance, at the drawing of Tintin and Snowy seeing the skyline of New York City for the first time (1,700 words)

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Wild Animal Tales

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya | Paris Review | 24th April 2025

Petrushevskaya, now into her eighties, grew up in the Soviet Union under Stalin "shuttling between orphanages, Young Pioneer camps, and tuberculosis sanatoria". In 1993, she produced a series of uncategorisable tales populated by animal characters who would seem to belong in a children's book, except for the fact that they have adult lives and concerns. These extracts are weird and compelling (2,600 words)