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Dawn In Damascus

Kareem Shaheen | Newlines | 8th December 2024

Whatever is to follow in Syria, this outpouring of emotion in the wake of Assad’s fall deserves its day. “How do you distil the meaning of what happened in the last ten days, as Syria’s rebels staged the greatest insurgent comeback in history to end sixty years of Baathist rule? How do you distil the liberation of Aleppo, one of the world’s oldest cities? Damascus, it is from you that the morning flows” (1,300 words)

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Publisher's note - Apologies to anyone who found words were missing in yesterday's game. We've corrected the error — the latter half of the alphabet is restored!

Do General Audiences Exist?

Ernie Smith | Tedium | 8th December 2024 | U

History of the American film industry’s “safe-for-everyone” G-rating. Introduced in 1968 by the Motion Picture Association, its early days produced some puzzling choices — 2001: A Space Odyssey got a G rating, apparently considered safe for eight-year-olds to watch. Once PG-13 and NC-17 were added to the roster, the G-rating devolved into meaning films specifically made for kids, not just safe for everyone (2,900 words)

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52 Things I Learned In 2024

Tom Whitwell | 1st December 2024

Anticipated annual list, always worth reading. A few highlights: China maintains registries of haunted apartments. In the US, table saws cause around 4,300 amputations per year, more than all other tools put together. Swimming to work is a popular means of commuting in Switzerland. Ozempic is changing the secondhand clothes market. Mongolians rave on horseback (1,500 words)

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Women Of A Certain Age

Debbie Cameron | Language: A Feminist Guide | 6th December 2024

Academic linguist examines the nuances of an off-the-cuff insult to so-called "women of a certain age". In a literal sense, everyone alive is "of a certain age", but historically this idiom has been applied to middle-aged women and men. It is not necessarily negative, either: as life expectancy has lengthened and attitudes to ageing shift, it can signify one who "lives with zest and elan" (2,100 words)

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The World Of Tomorrow

Virginia Postrel | Works In Progress | 5th December 2024

In the mid 20C, imagined versions of the future as depicted in exhibitions, films, novels and more were glamorous. A utopian combination of effortless, rapid transportation, idealised urban life, technological solutions for domestic drudgery and avant-garde fashions informed a bold, sleek, silvery design aesthetic. And yet, when the 21C arrived, it looked nothing like this. What happened? (6,300 words)

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How Should A Person Be?

Sam Kahn | Castalia | 4th December 2024

Tongue-in-cheek overview of the seven moral personalities in existence today. Runs the gamut from the market-obsessed, inward-looking "Social Darwinist" to the member of the "educated elite" who is "very comforted by the editorial page of the New York Times and its sense of steadily-unfolding progress". Others adhere to "the wisdom of traditions" or whatever Silicon Valley is doing (1,900 words)

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In The Shadow Of The State

Lorenzo Warby | Lorenzo From Oz | 16th November 2024

Marx propagated the view that gunpowder, the printing press, and the compass ushered in bourgeois society. Yet, these were all originally invented in China, where a bourgeoisie did not develop. Why? The social dynamics in China and medieval Europe were driven not by technological developments, but by differences in state structures. “The state structures society, it is not a reflection or product of society” (1,700 words)

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The Big Guide To Fusion

Ben James | 8th November 2023

Engaging primer on what is needed to make fusion power happen. Tritium is hard to source and radioactive. All reactor work must hence be done by robots. Fusion reactors are inordinately expensive, requiring big turbines, vacuum pumps, and thick concrete shielding. This writer’s prognosis: we should be able to build fusion power plants before 2050; that doesn’t mean they will be commercially viable (4,400 words)

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Against The Dark Forest

Erin Kissane | Wreckage/Salvage | 29th November 2024 | U

The internet today comprises a “perilous aboveground” — the dark forest of predatory advertisers, tracking bots, clickbait creators, and a “cozyweb refuge underground” — private spaces of retreat. But what about people without those forms of access and capital? Should they “just hack their way through that forest — which is so much gnarlier now than it was when we built it?” (4,700 words)

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Black Hole Puzzle

John Carlos Baez | Azimuth | 30th November 2024 | U

“101 starship captains, bored with life in the Federation, arrange their starships in a line, equally spaced, and let them fall straight into an enormous spherically symmetrical black hole — one after the other. What does the 51st captain see?” At all times, he sees 50 starships in front of and behind him. He never sees any starship hit the singularity, because the singularity is always in his future (1,200 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.

Baillie Gifford Prize-Winning Nonfiction Books

It's a prize that has been awarded annually since 1999 to a book that speaks to an important issue but is also highly readable. Below you'll find all the winners of the Baillie Gifford Prize, the UK's most prestigious non-fiction book award—from a gripping account of a turning point in World War II to a terrifying forest fire in an oil town in Canada. Read more

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Award-winning Fantasy Novels of 2024

This year’s award-winning fantasy books offer something for every taste, from melancholic fairy tales to gripping horror. Our fantasy and sci fi editor Sylvia Bishop introduces the winning titles. Read more

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The Great Abandonment

Tess McClure | Guardian | 28th November 2024

Hundreds of villages have been deserted across Bulgaria, offering a glimpse of the natural world unimpeded by humans. After communism, people moved to cities for work. The country's population has declined by almost a third since 1989. Bramble vines are swallowing buildings whole. Invasive species create temporary monocultures, until tree canopies expand and wildflowers appear (4,100 words)

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The Art And Mathematics Of Genji-Kō

Oran Looney | 26th November 2024

Genji-kō is a parlour game played with incense, invented by Japanese nobles of the Muromachi period (14C-16C) and named for a literary classic that describes an incense appreciation party. Guests smell five samples and then guess which are the same scent, using a notation formed from vertical lines — Genji-mon — to express their answers. These symbols shed light on art, but also equations (4,300 words)

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Who Can Claim Aristotle?

Edith Hall | Aeon | 25th November 2024

Enthusiast for the work of "the most brilliant philosopher ever to have lived" considers whether Aristotle truly belongs to the left or right-wing political traditions. His words have been borrowed by everyone from Charles II to early 20C suffragettes. The "complexity of his thought" has been vital in the formation of new ideas and, ultimately, contributed to greater equality in society (2,900 words)

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Private Chefs For Silicon Valley’s Elite

Priya Anand | San Francisco Standard | 15th November 2024

Seven chefs who have served "tech industry royalty" share their experiences. One client liked only the first sip of a can of Coca-Cola, leaving the rest to go to waste. In another house, binders were kept on every single guest's preferences. A chef might be accused of secretly sneaking sugar into dishes, or asked to scrap a menu with 30 minutes' notice. Interacting with such people is "an art" (1,400 words)

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The Myth Of The Loneliness Epidemic

Claude S. Fischer | Asterisk | 25th November 2024

Alarms about the decline of friendship are not new. They have been sounded often over decades, even as the claims have been challenged. Friendship rates are harder to track than marriage and divorce rates, not least because people have varying notions of “friend”. Social media magnifies the “Friendship Paradox”: “most of us have friends with more friends than we do”, as the most popular recur on many lists (4,100 words)

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Imperfect Parfit

Daniel Kodsi & John Maier | Philosophers’ Magazine | 22nd November 2024 | U

Critique of David Edmonds’ biography of Derek Parfit. “Philosophers tolerate a high degree of strangeness in one another. Individual eccentricity sometimes becomes too overwhelming to escape remark. In the case of Parfit, one of the first things either a critic or admirer will acknowledge is just how odd a man he was. The book is an entertaining exercise in psychological portraiture by means of anecdote” (4,900 words)

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The AI Turing Test

Scott Alexander | Astral Codex Ten | 20th November 2024 | U

Fifty pictures of various styles — are they human art or AI-generated images? See the test here. Results: most people struggled to tell the two apart. Genre biases persisted; many associated impressionist painting with human art and digital images with AI art. “Humans keep insisting that AI art is hideous slop. But when you peel off the labels, many of them can’t tell AI art from the greatest artists in history” (3,300 words)

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Were All Slave Societies Brutal?

Lipton Matthews | Aporia | 23rd November 2024 | U

It depended on “production systems and crop requirements, rather than individual malice”. In Ancient Greece, skilled slaves were allowed to earn wages and buy their freedom. Sparta, fearing rebellion from their huge agrarian slave population, had periodic state-sponsored purges. Specific crops fuelled brutality: those growing labour-intensive cash crops like sugar subjected slaves to gruelling conditions (1,500 words)

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How To Give A Good Speech

Tim Harford | 21st November 2024 | U

There is no one right way. It is best, though, to have a point and connect every other element, including jokes, to it. Trying to say something will always go down better than saying nothing. "People who talk when they’ve nothing to say are an annoyance, but those who do have something important to say, yet duck their opportunity to say it are less of an annoyance and more a tragedy" (1,000 words)

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The ‘Mad Egghead’ Who Built A Mouse Utopia

Lee Alan Dugatkin | Guardian | 21st November 2024 | U

John Bumpass Calhoun, ecologist turned psychologist, created Universe 25, which he described as "a utopian environment constructed for mice". In an attempt to study human overpopulation, Calhoun became a rodent city planner. There were 16 apartment buildings for the mice, plus all their food and water. For three years, he watched over his mouseopolis as it became "a mouse hell" (2,900 words)

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