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Every year, the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards highlight the very best of recently published place writing, and select their 'travel book of the year.' We asked judge Tom Parfitt, the author and former foreign correspondent, to talk us through the six travel books that made the 2025 shortlist. Read more
The 2025 shortlist for the Women's Prize for Fiction features a family saga about formerly rich Iranian refugees, a surprisingly funny tale of ISIS brides and a "weird" midlife crisis adventure in suburban California. We asked the bestselling novelist—chair of this year's judging panel—to talk us through the six finalists.Read more
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Podcast: Mansfield Park | Novel Approaches. Close reading of Jane Austen’s novel, which might be seen as a 19C fairytale about a poor girl marrying a wealthy husband, but is also a shrewd study of income, status, precarity and speculation (32m 41s)
Footage of Leonard Bernstein preparing the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra for a Mahler performance. His spoken German is sporadic, but the musicians understand his gestures and noises perfectly.
Memoir from a teenage worker at The Factory. In the late 1970s, Andy Warhol's reputation was at a low ebb but the atmosphere was one of "slapstick merriment". Her job was part receptionist — fetching sandwiches, answering phones — and part manager of Warhol's emotions. "What pierces my heart is the morning Andy stood by my desk, blushing, face contorted, too angry and hurt to speak" (4,600 words)
Thoughts upon concluding a project that involved listening to all of J.S. Bach's musical work. It is the manifesto of a newly converted completist: if you haven't consumed all of your favourite artist's output, you have "tasted only a morsel of the world’s biggest cake". Bach was astonishingly consistent in style and quality throughout his life. Perhaps his music is a "sideways proof of God’s existence" (1,400 words)
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Henrik Karlsson | Escaping Flatland | 23rd April 2025
Reflections on a late-blooming friendship. The writer's close friend Torbjörn "spent 15 years as an extra in my life before I realised he was a main character". He misread their relationship as being solely a "friendship of utility". Torbjörn wasn't only funny, he was "responsive". The lesson? "If someone seems boring to you, or a bad fit, it might be that you don’t know how to prompt them" (2,200 words)
The best way to move a black rhino to a new habitat is a process known as "translocation", in which the tranquillised 1,300kg animal is dangled upside down from a Vietnam War-era helicopter by long straps around the ankles. This "looks like something out of a Salvador Dalí dream", but research has shown it is the healthiest, fastest and most aerodynamic way to get a rhino from A to B (1,000 words)
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Scathing fourteen-point essay on why tariffs will not bring manufacturing back to the US. Chinese workers have better reading and math abilities, and years of accumulated skill. Manufacturing needs electricity, which has flatlined in the US. Automation won’t save the day; Chinese robots are cheaper. China is working to reduce low-value manufacturing; the US is inexplicably applying tariffs to bring it back (5,300 words)
Reflections on the work of psychiatrist Irvin Yalom, who estimated that about half of all cases of depression might be a “crisis of meaninglessness, an existential sickness”. “If nothing matters, it should not matter that nothing matters, and yet it does matter. The question of meaning in life is, as the Buddha taught, not edifying. One must immerse oneself in the river of life and let the question drift away” (4,600 words)
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Down the rabbit hole of science humour magazines. In 1960, MIT’s Voo Doo magazine featured a semi-serious “stress analysis” of a strapless dress, likely an “attempt to ogle women under the guise of engineering analysis”. Years later, Deborah Henson-Conant, a harpist-turned-humorist set the article to orchestral music and performed it with the Springfield Symphony, for which she wore a strapless gown (2,000 words)
Since its inception in 1829, Scotland Yard pioneered many modern methods of crime patrolling and detection. They used bloodhounds to track evidence. They introduced plainclothes detectives, causing public outcry about spies in their midst. They made advances in forensics and toxicology, learning to distinguish the toxins usually found in Victorian homes — like arsenic and lead — from intentional poisoning (1,800 words)
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An echo of a Marcel Breuer Bauhaus design, it took three names and 40 years for this industrial steel-framed bookcase to hit the zeitgeist. In 1985 it was the "Guide", then in 2002 the "Enetri", and has been rebirth in 2025 as the "Byakorre". The eventual triumph of a democratic design? Or a cynical attempt to take business from "vintage" IKEA resellers? "People are willing to pay $1000 for IKEA now" (1,000 words)
Revealing correspondence from 2013 when Facebook tried to buy Snapchat, filed as part of Meta's anti-trust trial. CEOs should not write emails. A desperate-sounding Zuckerberg offered $6bn. Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel turned it down. Zuckerberg was "disappointed and frustrated". Sheryl Sandberg then suggested telling Spiegel that "leaking this won't help his relationship with you" (2,500 words)
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Oren Cass | Understanding America | 7th April 2025 | U
“Populism is an attack on elite institutions when they fail to fulfill their obligations in a society.” Leaders must maintain public trust by balancing advocacy and acquiescence. A leader will have his own values and make their case. He must also recognise when his case has not yet won the day and look beyond personal preference, rather than impose it — “the essence of noblesse oblige in a liberal society” (2,300 words)
Brian Potter | Construction Physics | 17th April 2025 | U
Reflections drawn from writing 600,000 words about construction and technological progress. Interesting throughout. Bricks haven't become cheaper since the 19C. The roads in Los Angeles and San Francisco are the worst of any US metro area. Tenants of skyscraper apartments tend not to care what the building's exterior looks like. Construction has become safer at a faster rate than other industries (1,900 words)
Kaushik Patowary | Amusing Planet | 1st April 2025 | U
In his dying days, Mozart was convinced he had been poisoned by Aqua Tofana, a colourless, tasteless, odourless liquid that could be mixed into food undetected. In gradual doses, it mimicked flu-like symptoms, eventually causing death. The poison was believed to have been invented by an Italian woman, quickly gaining notoriety in southern Italy amongst women seeking to be rid of their husbands (1,500 words)
Profile of "Vegas Matt", a professional gambler who has created a way to win by losing: he posts videos of his disastrous hours in the casino for his millions of fans. The advertising revenue alone makes him an "enviable living". He once lost $147,000 on a slot machine in three hours. People love to watch him lose. Casinos and sponsors just love him. And he laughs all the way to the bank (5,400 words)
Jack Maden | Philosophy Break | 14th April 2025 | U
Erich Fromm on love. “One of our most insidious misconceptions is that success or failure in love hinges entirely on the qualities of a prospective partner. We think that love is the problem of an object, not of a faculty. We browse people like products on a personality market. We’d do better if we approached love not like a once-in-a-lifetime transaction, but like an art, the mastery of which takes work” (1,900 words)
Podcast: Seven Crashes | Library Of Mistakes. Chronicle of the economic crises that shaped globalisation, from a podcast that documents history’s costliest financial mistakes (41m 22s)
Mesmerising footage of a juvenile specimen of Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni, the colossal squid. Although first identified a century ago, this is the first confirmed live observation.
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Brian Potter | Construction Physics | 17th April 2025
Reflections drawn from writing 600,000 words about construction and technological progress. Interesting throughout. Bricks haven't become cheaper since the 19C. The roads in Los Angeles and San Francisco are the worst of any US metro area. Tenants of skyscraper apartments tend not to care what the building's exterior looks like. Construction has become safer at a faster rate than other industries (1,900 words)
This 1966 song rewards a closer look for what it reveals about the Lennon-McCartney partnership. "Nobody had created a pop song like this before. Its cultural ubiquity has stopped us from noticing how strange it is... Both John and Paul were living up to Arthur Schopenhauer's definition of genius: unlike talent, which hits a target nobody else can reach, genius hits a target nobody else can see" (2,600 words)
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For centuries, East Asian cuisines used sugar like any other spice — an ingredient to combine with others to enhance the final flavour of a dish. A touch of sweetness is traditional across the region as a way to deepen savouriness or tamp down spice. Globalisation has ushered in a "great sweetification", as Western culinary tastes spread. This is most noticeable in restaurants and in processed foods (2,000 words)
Profile of "Vegas Matt", a professional gambler who has created a way to win by losing: he posts videos of his disastrous hours in the casino for his millions of fans. The advertising revenue alone makes him an "enviable living". He once lost $147,000 on a slot machine in three hours. People love to watch him lose. Casinos and sponsors just love him. And he laughs all the way to the bank (5,400 words)
Not done browsing? The full Browser recommends five outstanding articles, a video and a podcast daily, for less than $1 a week.
Erich Fromm on love. “One of our most insidious misconceptions is that success or failure in love hinges entirely on the qualities of a prospective partner. We think that love is the problem of an object, not of a faculty. We browse people like products on a personality market. We’d do better if we approached love not like a once-in-a-lifetime transaction, but like an art, the mastery of which takes work” (1,900 words)
Reflections on life, technology and the soul in the present. Acedia is the malaise of our times, often translated as “sloth”, though the experience of it feels like the opposite. We are all struggling with speed because we live in a global village. In this unhealthy restlessness, even escapes are “high pressure affairs with a ticking clock”. “Everything is fast, so we feel we must be moving fast too — at all times” (2,200 words)
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The full Browser recommends five articles, a video and a podcast. Today, enjoy our audio and video picks.
Podcast: April | As The Season Turns. A compilation of seasonal nature observations, including time spent with oak trees, bats and a blossoming orchard (33m 54s)
Short film about the celebrated photographer's artistic practice, including perspectives from her children, who discuss the impact her focus on her work had on family life: "I think we lost to some extent a mother, but we gained a friend and an artistic accomplice."