The Case For Political Neutrality

Dust To Dust | 4th July 2024

Is silence violence? Intervening in a controversy one knows little about can increase suffering. For example: it seems intuitive to support a ban on the rhino horn trade in South Africa. Yet, such a ban caused horn prices to soar, resulting in increased poaching of rhinos. Political neutrality does not mean withdrawing from politics; it involves cultivating informed opinions before taking action (1,700 words)

A Bug’s Life

Natalie Lawrence | Public Domain Review | 9th July 2024

On Book of Monsters, a 1914 collection of macrophotographs of insects. Its authors, David and Marian Fairchild, created cameras with extension tubes up to twenty feet long to magnify the images, transforming “jumping spiders, weevils, dragonfly nymphs, and other arthropods” into fantastical beasts. The text imagined insects’ perspectives — “a spider from the fly’s point of view is a terrible monster” (1,400 words)

Why Haven’t Biologists Cured Cancer?

Ruxandra Teslo | 6th July 2024

A common explanation is that the field of biology suffers from a dearth of talent. Biologists are blamed for being bad at maths, yet the integration of mathematics and computing into genomics, for instance, has not resulted in comparable advancements in biology or medicine. This could be due to “long feedback loops” — lab experiments and clinical trials take a long time to yield results (5,400 words)

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A Book To Read Out Loud

Henry Oliver | The Common Reader | 7th July 2024

On the joys of reading The Hobbit out loud. “Tolkien breaks many rules of writing. He says “suddenly” all the time. He uses “he” multiple times in a sentence, referring to two different people. He constantly breaks the fourth wall to say “of course such and such”. He repeats words, relatively close together. But Tolkien does all of this deliberately. He is not a mere spinner of tales, but a worker of lost languages” (900 words)

Gilded Age Privacy

Sohini Desai | Smithsonian | 5th July 2024

The debut of the first Kodak camera in 1888 transformed the way that Americans thought about their own image. Suddenly, anyone could be snapped or "Kodaked" anywhere. By 1905, a third of people in the US were amateur photographers. There were no stock photos nor any laws dealing with this, so companies regularly stole the images of private citizens for their advertisements (1,500 words)

The DMZ At 70

Matthew Longo | LARB | 2nd July 2024

The Demilitarised Zone between North and South Korea was meant to be temporary. Nobody imagined that the ceasefire line would still be there 70 years on, nor that it would have become a tourist attraction: militarised, yet Instagrammable. It is more than a border. It has a culture and a spirit. "It doesn’t just enforce division but also creates, performs, and maintains it" (2,500 words)

Video: Fran Lebowitz On Great Writing | YouTube | The Morgan Library | 5m 12s

Fran Lebowitz in her element here — “the closest thing to a human being is a book. I know people think it’s a dog, but they’re wrong”.

Podcast: How Grinders Work Deep Inside | The Science Of Coffee. Debunking myths about grinding coffee, via a detailed look at what happens to the beans inside the device. The conclusion is that after a certain point, spending more money on grinding won't produce a better-tasting cup of coffee (47m 24s)

Revolution In The Air

Mark Miodownik | Guardian | 4th July 2024

History of nitrous oxide, also known as laughing gas. Interesting throughout. Samuel Colt funded the development of his revolver by travelling the US giving laughing gas demonstrations. Edgar Allen Poe's cousin George worked out a way to manufacture it as a liquid and distribute it to dentists in canisters. If you give birth in a hospital today, you will still be offered the gas for pain relief (3,700 words)

Moral Luck

Arianne Shahvisi | LRB Blog | 3rd July 2024

On the false comfort of counterfactuals. We tend to assume we would easily pass the moral tests of history — refusing the lure of dictators, declining to join the Nazi Party — but perhaps we are just lucky not to have to decide. "Recognising the role of moral luck encourages empathy and humility, but it also threatens the notions of culpability that help us to make sense of evil" (1,000 words)

The Bird Detectives

Andrew Zaleski | Washingtonian | 3rd July 2024

When a bird flies into a aeroplane's engine, whatever "gunk" is leftover is posted to a team of forensic ornithologists in Washington DC. These "bird detectives" inspect 11,000 dead birds a year. They identify bird corpses, sometimes just from a single feather. Their suggestions about pest control and habitat management aim to reduce the number of fatal bird strikes and improve air safety (2,500 words)

The Shareholder Supremacy

Edward Zitron | Where's Your Ed At? | 1st July 2024

It is not your imagination: today's companies don't care about customers. Instead, the shareholder reigns supreme. "Our economy is run by people that have never built anything, running companies that they contort to make a number go up for shareholders they rarely meet." This is all a short-termist shell game, in which the only winning moves are those that increase company value (11,000 words)

Like Shining From Shook Foil

Shore Leave | 30th June 2024

Make travel intrepid again. “Pursue your personal canon to its obscure points of origin. Assign yourself highly personalised and esoteric errands. There are more people crossing the seas on vessels of their own creation than in any previous age — improvised rail carts and mine shafts. Embed yourself in odd institutions, real or invented. Take jobs that let you into the back rooms of cities” (2,200 words)

American Dream Is Cursed

Meghan Boilard | Off-Topic | 1st July 2024

Visual history of American Dream, a New Jersey colossus that had once promised a staggering catalogue of amenities. The developers originally called it Xanadu, possibly dooming the project with the ill-fated name. Beset by difficulties, the space is now a maze of “deserted corridors, stairways abruptly interrupted by ceiling, unsettling murals, and an eerily quiet Nickelodeon Universe indoor theme park” (5,000 words)

The Augustinian Settlement

Nathan Goldwag | Goldwag’s Journal On Civilisation | 1st July 2024 | U

Historians mark 27 BCE as the year the Roman Republic transitioned into the Roman Empire, when Augustus became its first Emperor — without actually establishing an “Empire” or the office of “Emperor”. The Republican system was retained, while a dynasty that would last centuries was formed. How was this done? Extraordinarily detailed account of the forces that shaped Rome’s turning point (3,600 words)

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Elite Misinformation Is An Underrated Problem

Matthew Yglesias | Slow Boring | 26th June 2024 | U

Case in point: fossil fuel subsidies. For years, the mainstream press have reported on governments subsidising fossil fuel companies to the tune of trillions. These stories are based on an International Monetary Fund report, in which the majority of subsidies mentioned are “implicit subsidies” — in other words, governments’ failure to impose a carbon tax being characterised as a subsidy (1,900 words)

Ancient Egyptian Scribes' Skeletal Risk

Petra Brukner Havelková et al | Scientific Reports | 27th June 2024

Sitting still for long periods has always been very bad for us. This study explores the injuries visible in the remains found in 200 tombs at the pyramid complex of Abusir, dating from 2,700BCE. At least 69 of these individuals are thought to have been scribes, who wrote for hours a day in a cross-legged or kneeling position. Their jaws, necks and shoulders show substantial damage (12,000 words)

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Every Pill I Took

Peder Clark | Polyphony | 10th June 2024

Most scholarship about drug use focuses on the bodily and social effects of intoxication. Less attention is paid to the aesthetics. "Nobody has written a social history of the bong, for example." But there is a book documenting the imagery of early 2000s ecstasy pills. Many came with a picture pressed into their surface — everything from Pokemon characters to the Rolls Royce logo (1,400 words)

Podcast: The Lost Subways Of North America | 99% Invisible. Lots of American cities either used to have, or almost had, functional electric railway systems. For a variety of reasons, including racism and bad politics, they fell out of use or were never built at all (26m 26s)

Video: Sun Chasing | YouTube | Posy | 6m 7s

More accurately, sunset chasing — Posy documents his various attempts to film the sun setting over the ocean. Best watched with headphones, so as not to miss the sublime sound design and music.