Magical Systems Thinking

Ed Bradon | Works In Progress | 12th September 2025

Complex megasystems tend to begin as simple, working systems. The first power grid was "a handful of electric lamps hooked up to a water wheel" in 1881. Tinkering with something massive and complex and constantly operational, like a national healthcare system, is not often the best way to fix it. Creating something new and straightforward in parallel to the behemoth, though, can do the trick (3,300 words)

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Illustrated Guide To Folding Fitted Sheets

Dave Gauer | Ratfactor | 8th August 2025

Folding a fitted sheet into a neat rectangle is a skill that takes patience and time to acquire. "I do not recommend learning anything, and especially not anything that involves elastic, when you’re in a hurry." This writer can confirm that carefully following this step-by-step process, which is augmented with charming ghostly illustrations and links to historical sheet patents, will result in a well-folded sheet (3,700 words)

Podcast: The First King Of England | Princeton UP Ideas. Biography of Æthelstan, the medieval king whose rule witnessed the nascent rise of an English culture (39m 15s)

Video: The Worst City On Earth, Built In Minecraft | YouTube | Sluda Builds | 13m 42s

Minecraft aficionado documents the creation a precise replica of Kowloon Walled City within the game. It involves blueprints, 3D modelling and archival research.

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The Bomber’s View Of The Past

Benjamin Thomas White | History Workshop | 11th September 2025

Aerial archaeology is impossible to separate from its military and colonial heritage. One of its earliest practitioners, Antoine Poidebard, was a Jesuit priest and a French intelligence officer as well as an archaeologist. His photographs were instrumental in uncovering hitherto-unknown Roman remains in Syria, but they also informed the management of France's imperial frontier in Syria after WWI (1,500 words)

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Why Do We Collect Things?

Elsie Morales | Cazadora | 28th August 2025

Over 100,000 years ago in the Kalahari, people were collecting crystals. Today, people collect everything from labubus to jigsaw pieces. Artists are especially prone to the habit: Joan Didion collected sea shells, Vladimir Nabokov collected butterflies, Joseph Cornell collected everything. Why? Many reasons, including childhood trauma, unquenchable curiosity, and the desire to express identity (2,800 words)

The Idea Of The West

Andrew Kaufmann | Mere Orthodoxy | 10th September 2025

The "West" is a recent construct, first articulated clearly by French philosopher Auguste Comte in the 1820s. It gained meaning in the 1890s as a justification for colonial expansion, and then further traction from the "East vs West" narratives of the Cold War. Its assumed connections to liberal democracy, via inheritance from Ancient Greece and the Renaissance, are not borne out by the historical record (2,000 words)

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The Myth of “Risk-Free” Gold

Giselle Figueroa de la Ossa | Sapiens | 9th September 2025

Gold is seen as a risk-free asset. A safe harbour in a volatile market. But it is only risk free for those managing the investment portfolios. The people who mine and refine it expose themselves to unsafe industrial practices as well as the violence and smuggling that afflicts the gold supply chain. Poor attempts to incentivise ethical production and end "dirty" gold have, arguably, made matters worse (2,100 words)

Super-Fit Super-Sick Syndrome

Desmolysium | 7th September 2025

Wonkish analysis of super-fit individuals who diet down to low levels of body fat presenting with symptoms of poor wellbeing — low blood pressure, fatigue, brain fog, and in the case of women, irregular periods. Our bodies have an “army of regulatory systems that detect caloric flux” and adapt to starvation. “It is incredibly difficult if not impossible to outsmart these systems over long periods of time” (6,400 words)

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The Argument Against A Theory Of Everything

Ethan Siegel | Big Think | 9th September 2025

The Holy Grail of physics is to have one equation that would describe the whole universe. But every attempt at a Theory of Everything so far has conflicted with what’s already known about the Universe. With “loose, superficial analogies, “mathematical hand-waving” and no connection to observable reality, they are like “a puzzle where a wild child painted all the pieces independently of one another” (3,700 words)

Is Mary Oliver Embarrassing?

Maggie Millner | Yale Review | 2nd September 2025

Mary Oliver is of a “small class of commercially successful poets whose audience consists primarily of people who do not write poems themselves”. Yet the literary consensus seems to be that she was “middlebrow, accessible, placatory”. Her poems are read aloud at weddings and funerals to smirks and lowered eyes from the poets in the room. “This embarrassment soon began to interest me” (3,700 words)

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All The Lonely People

Nick Haslam | Inside Story | 8th September 2025

Loneliness is often defined as “not getting the social contact we desire”, yet this “could work equally as a definition of boredom or dissatisfaction”. It can be paradoxical: social trust reduces loneliness, but the “highly cohesive” Japanese suffer high rates of it. Loneliness entails a lasting sense of disconnection from others, yet brief, shallow interactions with baristas have been shown to alleviate it (1,300 words)

The First Settlers Weren’t Human

Sophie Holloway | New Lines | 5th September 2025

The tourism boom on Greece's islands has resulted in major strides forward in prehistoric archaeology. As digs raced to capture knowledge from ancient sites before the developers started pouring concrete, experts uncovered startling evidence that early humans had settled there as far back as 200,000 years ago. The Aegean islands could have been used for migration from Africa to Europe (3,000 words)

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Wikipedia Is Resilient Because It Is Boring

Josh Dzieza | Verge | 4th September 2025

Wikipedia is "basically the only place on the internet that doesn’t function as a confirmation bias machine". It provides "factual ballast to an increasingly unmoored internet" and is a major reason why search engines and AI products are functional. Hostile governments and groups attack it for bias, but make little headway because the site runs on an engine of painstaking, earnest procedure (9,700 words)

Podcast: Legacies Of Covid-19 | Gateway To Global China. Informative discussion between three China researchers about the ongoing fallout from how the country handled the 2020 pandemic (63m 07s)

Video: This Is A Story Without A Plan | Vimeo | Cassie Shao | 7m 35s

Animation as high art. Every frame of this mesmeric piece demands a closer look.

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The Death Of The Corporate Job

Alex McCann | Still Wandering | 29th August 2025

Anecdotal analysis. For some corporate workers, the illusion of job security is no longer a fair trade for days spent shuffling papers. One says: "I manage a team of twelve who create documents for other teams who create documents for senior leadership who don't read documents. I make £150k a year. It's completely absurd, and I'm riding it as long as I can while building something real on the side" (1,300 words)

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How To Build A Medieval Castle

Ben O'Donnell | Archaeology | 12th August 2025

First, assemble dozens of craftspeople and archaeologists in an abandoned quarry. Then, put them to work on "one of the world’s most comprehensive and longest-running experimental archaeology projects": building a 13C castle using only 13C tools, techniques, and materials. It will take at least two decades. For many years, they won't know how to make windows. But the result will be breath-taking (3,400 words)

Bound for Glory

Damian Thompson | World Of Interiors | 30th August 2025

Glimpse inside an unusual bookshop. The Aysgarth Old Youth Hostel in Yorkshire contains over 150,000 secondhand and antiquarian volumes. Its proprietor lives in the Philippines half the year. He has never advertised the shop and has scant regard for profit. "Unlike the more commercially oriented of his peers, he has sold books primarily so that he could acquire more for himself" (1,900 words)

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My Mom And Dr. DeepSeek

Viola Zhou | Rest Of World | 2nd September 2025

On the appeal of an AI chatbot for medical consultation, especially in parts of China where patients routinely travel for days to attend three-minute appointments with overstretched doctors. DeepSeek is never impatient. "I don’t have to spend money. I don’t have to wait in line. I don’t have to do anything... Even though it can’t give me a fully comprehensive or scientific answer, at least it gives me an answer" (4,700 words)