Some Contemporary Heresies

Kevin Kelly | KK | 6th April 2026

List of 84 heretical statements — if you define heresy as "something you believe that the people you most admire and respect don’t believe and reject out of hand". Thought-provoking throughout. Examples include: "GMO food is better for you", "the US Civil War was a mistake, the Confederate South should have been allowed to secede", "obesity is contagious", and "fancy wines are a scam" (1,000 words)

Puzzle: Play Nomido, the Browser’s daily word game.

Gamer’s Dilemma

Arianne Shahvisi | LRB Blog | 9th April 2026

Revisiting a thorny moral question. "Why is virtual killing morally acceptable in computer games while virtual child sex abuse is not, given that no real person is harmed in either case?" Murder-based games are normalised, as is the military strategy of killing civilians remotely with bombing missions and drones. The same "wonky moral arithmetic" is present in the reaction to the Epstein files (1,500 words)

Podcast: The US-China Crypto Split | Asia Specific. Analysis of the US and China's differing attitudes to crypto trading: Trump is all for it, while Xi Jinping has instituted a ban (16m 40s)

Video: Artemis II Launch | YouTube | National Geographic | 8m 50s

Slow-motion, highly detailed recording of the launch of Artemis II.

Puzzle: Play Nomido, the Browser’s daily word game.

Wit, Unker, Git

Sophie Hardach | BBC Future | 9th April 2026

English used to have more pronouns. A thousand years ago, speakers had more options than simply singular and plural, such as "wit", which meant "we two" and was used to refer collectively to the speaker and one other person. Another dual option, "unc", roughly translates as "us two". Why do we no longer use these options? Because "language tends towards simplicity" rather than nuance (1,700 words)

Puzzle: Play Nomido, the Browser’s daily word game.

‘I Had Poked The Bear Right In The Eye’

Sergey Radchenko | Guardian | 9th April 2026

How to renounce Russian citizenship. "It required years of painstaking work. I worked through proxies in Russia to collect all the necessary spravkas. Some of them would expire before they reached me, and I’d have to start anew, frustrated but determined... I regarded renouncing my Russian passport as a liberation, a bit like ridding oneself of a toxic relationship or having surgery to remove kidney stones" (5,100 words)

The Private Credit Cartels

Maureen Tkacik | American Prospect | 6th April 2026

Private credit funds are in a contradictory position: investors are fleeing funds with too great an exposure to software company loans, but the default rate for said loans is not rising. Yet. AI is the industry's scapegoat of choice, since such tools look likely to make other solutions obsolete. In fact, the incipient credit crisis is being caused by something much older and more familiar: sheer greed (3,600 words)

Puzzle: Play Nomido, the Browser’s daily word game.

The Best Seat In Town

Alissa Walker | Torched | 6th April 2026

Ode to a public toilet. A self-cleaning bathroom in Paris by the Jardin du Luxembourg, to be exact. It feels like "a fancy hotel powder room" and the automatic cleansing process keeps it functional for hundreds of visits a day. This is "a piece of infrastructure that unlocks access to the city for seniors walking laps, disabled commuters, moms of lemonade-chugging toddlers, and the club kids at 1am" (1,500 words)

The Busiest Place You’ve Never Seen

Nick Schönfeld & Julia Gunther | NPR | 4th April 2026

Dispatches from Tristan da Cunha, the Scottish island in the South Atlantic roughly midway between South Africa and South America. 221 people live there in a single village called Edinburgh of the Seven Seas — descendants of sailors, settlers and shipwreck survivors. Extreme isolation has made the island a study in egalitarian self-reliance. Skills, tasks and stores are shared daily (4,100 words)

Puzzle: Play Nomido, the Browser’s daily word game.

Menace On The Streets

Caitlin Walsh Miller | Maclean’s | 6th April 2026

E-bikes are causing a spike in accidents in Canada. In theory, they are ideal for urban areas: cheap, quiet and clean. Many cities have partnered with companies to launch scooter-rental programmes. Young people and delivery workers love them. But they’re much faster than bargained for (“from 0 to 100 in four seconds”) and blur the boundary between street and pavement, causing chaos everywhere (5,400 words)

Think Tanks Have Defeated Democracy

Samuel Hammond | Palladium | 2nd April 2026

As the social base for membership-driven political parties has eroded in the US, think tanks have filled the vacuum. “The nonprofit advocacy world helps grease the wheel of party cohesion by mobilising activists, lobbyists, pollsters and grassroots outreach whenever a big vote is afoot.” Nonprofit workers and funders are insulated from electoral realities. The result is political alienation for the bulk of voters (2,600 words)

Puzzle: Play Nomido, the Browser’s daily word game.

The Image Boards Of Hayao Miyazaki

Animation Obsessive | 6th April 2026

Miyazaki has reinvented himself again and again over the course of his storied career. What has stayed the same is his habit of making “image boards”. The Japanese term imēji bōdo, made up of loan words from English, denotes “a mental image, an impression, an idea”. Since the 1960s, he has stuck to pencil-and-watercolour with the occasional inks to make his image boards (3,400 words)

Finding The Cattle Queen

Rachel Ossip | n+1 | 3rd April 2026

An investigation into the history of a "scandalous" 1967 advertisement for a Manhattan steakhouse, which showed a naked woman painted with lines dividing her into cuts of meat, leads to some astute observations about meat consumption, masculinity and body politics. "To eat steak is to be virile; to be virile is to eat steak. The butchered woman at the centre is simply a meal, the means to this end" (4,000 words)

Puzzle: Play Nomido, the Browser’s daily word game.

Just ‘English with Hanzi’

JingYu | Old North Whale Review | 9th February 2026

Modern Mandarin has undergone an "invisible revolution". European-style syntax, conjunctions and passive voice have been mapped onto the fluid parataxis of Classical Chinese. "One cannot uninstall an operating system update that has been running for a hundred years. China did not just translate Western books; it translated the Western mind, disassembled it, and rebuilt it inside the modern tongue" (1,800 words)

Podcast: Man Around The Moon | 13 Minutes Presents: Artemis II. Pre-launch interview with Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, now on his first spaceflight around the moon (41m 19s)

Video: How To Spot The Upper Class | YouTube | That’s Life! | 5m 23s

Enjoyable find from the archives: a reporter and a body language expert have a laugh trying to spot the upper classes in the streets of London.

Puzzle: Play Nomido, the Browser’s daily word game.

The Subprime AI Crisis Is Here

Ed Zitron | Where’s Your Ed At? | 31st March 2026

The 2008 housing crisis was caused by the illusion of value. We are on the cusp of something similar with AI, which is being subsidised and sold at a vastly discounted rate while using infinite resources. “The AI industry has done a great job in obfuscating exactly how brittle its economics really are.” The crisis begins “when somebody actually needs to start making money, or stop losing quite so much” (11,200 words)

Puzzle: Play Nomido, the Browser’s daily word game.

Negative Tennis

Owen Lewis | n+1 | 31st March 2026

Djokovic is frequently compared to a machine. Jannik Sinner, who took the number one ranking from him, “hits the ball harder than Djokovic, plays with less variation, emotes even less than Djokovic on the latter’s most subdued day, and is far less likely to participate in any match worthy of preserving in a time capsule. Perhaps we should have been more grateful that Djokovic made us feel anything at all” (4,200 words)

Why Scotland Succeeded

Anton Howes | Age Of Invention | 24th March 2026

Before the 1740s, Scotland was significantly poorer than England. It transformed subsequently — trade grew in the ports, manufacturing and retail expanded in the cities, farming became more efficient and profitable. How did Scotland punch so far above its weight as a “seedbed of globally significant ideas”? Its law and institutions were “uniquely supportive of the raising and deploying of capital” (3,900 words)

Puzzle: Play Nomido, the Browser’s daily word game.

Unsubscribe From The Church Of Graphs

Kitten | Adorable And Harmless | 13th March 2026

“The Church of Graphs is dedicated to the meta-belief that knowledge must be formalised and quantifiable to be worthy of consideration. It demands that its adherents reject the evidence of their own eyes in favour of official facts and figures stamped with the imprimatur of a priestly expert class. Church members have curious blind spots in their understanding that strike non-believers as ridiculous” (5,700 words)