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)
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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)
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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)
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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)
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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)
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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)
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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)
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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)
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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)
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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)
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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 the Soviet Union
The Soviet Union was the world's first communist country and lasted around seven decades. It played a key role in defeating Nazism in Europe and became a global superpower before collapsing unexpectedly in 1991. Sheila Fitzpatrick, a leading historian of the Soviet Union, recommends books that bring to life different aspects of it, from forced labour in the Glavnoye Upravleniye LAGerey (GULAG) to the heady days of the Khrushchev thaw and including the memoir of Stalin's beloved daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva. Read more
The Best Alien Invasion Books
Alien invasions are one of the most enduringly popular themes in sci fi. Author Seth Dickinson introduces five mind-bending novels that give a fresh take on the idea of the alien: invasions that are so other in their motives, methods, or meaning that they push us to the edges of human understanding. Read more
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The full Browser recommends five articles, a video and a podcast. Today, enjoy our audio and video picks.
Podcast: No Bad News | Love And Radio. The story of hypnotist Larry Garrett, who decided decades ago to cut himself off from the news, and thus ended up accepting an invitation to Baghdad in 2001 from Saddam Hussein's eldest son (62m 01s)
Video: Why Do Wind Turbines Have Three Blades? | YouTube | Minute Physics | 4m 4s
For reasons relating to efficiency, resilience and comfort — well explained here.
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Boarding Group One
JA Westenberg | 18th September 2025
Observations from the airport boarding gate. Obsession with status is one of the last mainstream religions. "It makes me wonder: what would life look like if we stopped boarding by group? If the airline called out, 'Everyone at once,' would we descend into chaos, or would something like order figure itself out? Maybe the whole system depends on our willingness to submit to hierarchies that humiliate us" (1,000 words)
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The Imp Of Optimisation
Sean Voisen | 1st August 2025
We have a high tolerance for tracking and monitoring. Governments and corporations perpetrate much of it, but we also do it to ourselves: sousveillance, not surveillance. Turn off the Apple Watch for a bit. "In a culture obsessed with achievement and self-optimisation, this might be the most countercultural act possible: to leave some things unmeasured, untracked, unoptimised, unpublicised" (2,100 words)
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The Chess Cheating Epidemic
Danny Rensch | Quillette | 16th September 2025
Extract from the memoir of a child chess prodigy turned "chief chess officer" at a successful chess startup. The drive to monetise came from Rensch's adolescence as a "chess gypsy", travelling alone to tournaments all over the world. He saw the most successful players in the game living "wretched lives" because the game had "no economy to speak of" and no way for professionals to earn money (3,800 words)
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Indian Names
Julian Brave NoiseCat | Paris Review | 17th September 2025
Essay that twines together the history of the Salish languages of the Pacific Northwest and the complicated relationship the writer's family has with names. Abandoned at birth, his father reached back into history for a new identity. "Mom says she can still picture the consternation on the face of the clerk at Boston City Hall. On April 23, 1991, Edwin James Archie became Edwin Archie NoiseCat" (4,000 words)
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Are We Living In A Stupidogenic Society?
Daisy Christodoulou | No More Marking | 24th August 2025
“Cognitive offload” is the term for when technology spares us mental effort. “It is a mixed blessing. It will generally let you achieve your immediate goal more efficiently and reliably than otherwise. Frequently offloading cognitive work to devices may cause certain “mental muscles” to atrophy. The cost of physical machines is human obesity; the cost of intelligent machines is human stupidity” (2,500 words)
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Blood Red Rosalia
Catherine Merridale | Engelsberg Ideas | 16th September 2025
Profile of Rosalia Zemlyachka, the Bolshevik revolutionary who proved that “gender was no bar to common sadism”. While in Crimea in 1920, her crew shot as many as 96,000 people in four months. Concerned about bullets being wasted, she came up with a solution which “disgusted even some Bolsheviks” — tie unarmed people up on makeshift barges or planks and drown them wholesale in the Black Sea (2,000 words)
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The Truth Market
Aurelien | Trying To Understand The World | 10th September 2025
Philosophical reflections on truth and truth-seeking methods. “We live in a society which no longer finds the concept of objective truth interesting or useful, and sees truth itself as a commodity. We seek truths that comfort us in our beliefs, confirm our opinions of institutions and people, and most of all do not require us to think too much. Assertions of truth and falsehood are used as weapons” (7,000 words)
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We Are Not Low Creatures
Erik Hoel | Intrinsic Perspective | 12th September 2025
An arrow-shaped rock sitting at the bottom of an ancient dry riverbed on Mars has spots that resemble microbial leftovers — a possible sign that life once existed on the planet. Unlike Earth, where plate tectonics continually rebury the planet and new life muddies evidence of the old, the record on Mars would be preserved unblemished in ice, “a planetary museum for the origins of life” (2,800 words)
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