America’s Missing Men

Amber Lapp | Commonplace | 27th March 2025

Intimate look at the lives of young men in Ohio, which ranks third in the US for deaths of despair. “Social commentators today emphasise personal and political rights and freedoms. But our current moment makes little sense without understanding the yearning for interior freedom. For the working-class young men I know, there is a political apathy until this more basic freedom is better secured” (3,700 words)

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Silica Gel Took Over The World

Spencer Wright | Scope Of Work | 31st March 2025

They are everywhere: a new pair of sneakers, a packet of potato chips, 3D printer filaments — tiny pouches seemingly the only thing keeping our food and belongings fresh and mold-free. Silica gel beads work by filtering water vapour out of the air. The farther a product is shipped, the more temperature and pressure changes it goes through. Silica gel is a cheap, easy and reliable way to control humidity (2,100 words)

The Mysterious Sinking Of The Bayesian

Floriana Bulfon | Newlines | 31st March 2025

The deaths of British tycoon Mike Lynch, his daughter and five others aboard the megayacht Bayesian are an unsolved mystery. A storm erupted in a placid corner of the Sicilian Gulf, sinking the “unsinkable” yacht with advanced safety systems in minutes. A smaller, older sailing vessel 100 yards away suffered no damage. Lynch was celebrating his acquittal after a year of house arrest for fraud (4,800 words)

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Want Abundance In Housing?

Reihan Salam | City Journal | 27th March 2025

Housing shortages have priced the middle-classes out of neighbourhoods. The rising abundance movement is built on rejecting the politics of scarcity to embrace growth and change. Yet their stances “directly undercut housing abundance” and drive up rents. “Development is fine — as long as it’s architecturally distinguished, eco-friendly, priced well below cost, and morally immaculate” (1,400 words)

Who’s Boring Now?

Nelson Reed | The Flaw | 26th October 2024

Three aspects of boredom — it is bad, experienced individually and distributed equally — have helped corporations "weaponise" it for profit. These are the mechanisms that keep us scrolling, watching, shopping. But what if the people took boredom back? "Boredom can signal that what we are doing at that moment is not meaningful... It doesn’t have to be an opiate. It can be a smelling salt" (4,800 words)

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A Walk Down Victoria Street

Samuel Hughes | Works In Progress | 28th March 2025

Rarely seen by tourists, this thoroughfare provides a superb slice of urban history — "an unusually complete panorama of London’s inner-urban mid-rise architecture over the last 200 years". A walk from Parliament Square to Victoria Station passes the Neo-Byzantine Westminster Cathedral, a zone of "overwhelming ugliness", and some signs that British design is recovering from its 20C nadir (3,700 words)

Podcast: Kapitia Skink | Bad At Goodbyes. A series dedicated to critically endangered flora and fauna takes a look at this rare reptile found on the South Island of New Zealand (29m 41s)

Video: Sunset On The Lunar Surface | YouTube | Firefly Aerospace | 1m 00s

Images of what sunset looks like from the moon, captured on 16th March 2025 by a lunar lander carrying out NASA research.

It’s The Only Face I Have

Corey Robin | 26th March 2025

The archives of McCarthyism contain a lesson about fear. It stems not just from our need to survive, but from a hope to preserve our best selves. "We tend to think that fear works on our basest, most elemental selves, reduced to a purely physical being. It’s often quite the opposite. Fear works most potently when it threatens our highest sense of ourselves. We’ll do anything to preserve that" (600 words)

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Flushed Away

Anna Gibbs | Slate | 25th February 2025

The evolution of the modern toilet is a success story that deserves more attention. As long as you don't need fancy lights or a heated seat, for about $200 it is possible to purchase a water efficient model that will work as intended every day for decades. And yet in the US, people still blame low-flow, environmentally friendly toilets for their "bathroom problems". More water does not make a flush better (4,200 words)

A Job You Can Buy And Sell

No Dumb Ideas | 25th March 2025 | U

What if the job market was a true market, where jobs could be bought by the highest bidder? An intriguing thought experiment. Applicants would seek financing and apply to purchase an entry-level job, say, from someone ready to trade upwards in their career — similar to how the housing market works now. Recruiters become brokers. A great system for job-holding incumbents, terrible for everybody else (2,500 words)

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Granular Power

Michaela Büsse | e-flux | 25th March 2025

The politics of sand is "gritty". Once just sediment, it is now precious. Cities like Dubai and Singapore are built on imported sand. There is a black market in sand, sand mafias, and sand crimes. We use it to reclaim land and stave off coastal erosion as well as to build roads and skyscrapers. Sand shapeshifts: a cheap resource in one place, it becomes valuable land and property elsewhere (3,600 words)

She Who Helps See

George Saunders | Paris Review | 24th March 2025

Celebrated writer pens admiring portrait of artist Inka Essenhigh. “Her work, sacramentally, reminds me that most of the time I’m coasting, on perceptual autopilot. It says: “George, let me help you see better, with more acuity and less habituation. Let me help you expand the miracle of your awareness and become a more generous noticer. Try to know less. Stay with the not-knowing a little longer”” (2,300 words)

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I Spent Seven Years In Search Of Freedom

Pouya Nikmand | Outliving Iran | 23rd March 2025

Harrowing account of a young man’s escape from Iran to America. Wherever he goes — South Korea, Poland — immigration laws bar him from study or work. A middle-aged European man preys on his precarity, trapping him in a cycle of rape and abuse. Out of options, he plans to enter Germany illegally and kill himself. At last, his US visa arrives, though it would be two more years before he is allowed to work (4,000 words)

Podcast: The Leprechaun Impersonator | Let’s Not Meet. Anthology of true horror stories recounted in the first person. In this episode, an almost-kidnapping, a peeping tom, an eerie fog, and a hiking trail called “the hellfire club” (51m 39s)

Video: Hangman’s Reel | YouTube | Shane Cook & Emily Flack | 1m 33s

Perfectly synchronised fiddle and step-dancing duet.

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The Cult Of The American Lawn

Oliver Milman | Noema | 20th March 2025

The well-tended suburban lawn is more than just grass. It has become a symbol of the right sort of American "good life" — one involving home ownership and "moral rectitude". European colonists originally carried the lust for smooth grass across the Atlantic. The upkeep of this harmful, highly fertilised, pesticide-maintained monoculture has become a vicious source of neighbourhood disputes (2,900 words)

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Navigation Queues, Navigation Cues

Domitille Debret | HTML Review | 20th March 2025

Essay about the arrival of infinite scroll on the web, presented in a clever circular design that the reader can scroll through forever. "The scrollbar solved the web’s first scaling problem: how to situate yourself within content that stretched beyond the visible screen. Somewhere along the way, the usage changed and became a fuel for motion. A motion I can’t really control and a motion I can’t really resist" (1,800 words)

The Lost Art Of Research As Leisure

Mariam Mahmoud | Kasurian | 9th March 2025

The 21C world of audio-visual distractions was predicted by major 20C figures like E.B. White, Virginia Woolf and Susan Sontag. Leisure, not as pure idleness but as an inheritor of the Greek concept of scholē or "school", is under threat. As the German philosopher Josef Pieper argued, this takes the form of "a style of unconstrained research". Don't just read — read playfully, purposefully and curiously (3,500 words)

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A Brief History Of Accelerationism

Matt Southey | Latecomer | 27th August 2024

Originally a pejorative term for weary Marxists. The 2010s branch "effective accelerationism" favoured by techno-optimists such as Marc Andreessen is a "rebranded form of libertarianism". A more interesting version is espoused by "ultra-doomer" philosopher Nick Land, who thinks capitalism is the true protagonist of the universe, with humanity as a mere temporary component of the story (2,800 words)