The Pleasure Of Patterns In Art
Samuel Jay Keyser | MIT Press Reader | 19th August 2025
Analysis of why Caillebotte's Paris Street; Rainy Day is so pleasant to look at. This painting of a street scene is also an arrangement of geometric objects. Triangles dominate the canvas. There are five umbrellas: rounded triangles containing smaller triangles. The buildings too have triangle motifs. The work delights in “repetition of the same/except variety”, central to how we perceive structure and rhythm (4,800 words)
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Scrappy Theory
Nick Hilton | Future Proof | 18th August 2025
The inhibiting factor with consuming porn used to be embarrassment, which the internet has obviated. How to limit access without a total ban? The UK’s new Online Safety Act has launched age verification on porn, using facial analysis to confirm that a visitor is over 18. This seems to have caused a big drop in traffic to porn websites. Perhaps people have been “discouraged by a collateral requirement” (2,600 words)
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Unreliable Parts Make A Reliable Whole
Kasra | Bits Of Wonder | 17th August 2025
“In living things, unlike in machines, unreliable parts make a reliable whole.” A “mechanical mindset emphasises reduction into simple parts and total control over every aspect of the system” whereas the “organismal mindset emphasises creative autonomy over predictability”. In a society overrun by machines, we should be careful not to let the mechanical mindset take over (1,300 words)
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The Pistachio Croissant And Meaning Of Life
Michael Shindler | Et In Arcadia We Go | 17th August 2025
Why do French patisseries recoil from pistachio croissants, when they are perfectly at ease with pistachios in their macarons, eclairs, and financiers? A delightfully absurd exploration, featuring a potted history of the croissant, an encounter with a man whose face could be a “caricature of a gloomy Teutonic philosopher of the 19C”, plus wild excursions into Kierkegaard, Jung and other worthies (7,300 words)
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The full Browser recommends five articles, a video and a podcast. Today, enjoy our audio and video picks.
Podcast: Cyan | Your Greek Word On A Sunday. Bitesize Hellenic etymology series. Did the Ancient Greeks have a word for "blue" and why did Homer describe the sea as "wine-dark? (1m 58s)
Video: Laura Steenberge: Four Studies | YouTube | Marco Fusi | 11m 16s
Haunting contemporary classical music that makes full use of a Baroque stringed instrument: the viola d'amore.
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The Woman Who Perfected Flower Painting
Zachary Fine | Atlantic | 9th August 2025
Rachel Ruysch, "one of the greatest still-life painters in the history of art", was more famous during her lifetime than Rembrandt or Vermeer. Born in 1664, she lived to 86. Her father was a renowned embalmer and she too had the knack of turning "a perishable commodity into a stable one" — in her case, flowers and fruit, immortalised at the zenith of their beauty in her abundant compositions in oils (2,500 words)
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I Used To Know How To Write In Japanese
Marco Giancotti | Aether Mug | 15th August 2025
When learning Japanese, divide and conquer. Either learn to write the kanji first, or learn how to speak, but don't do both at the same time. This separation can later result in "character amnesia", though. "There is even a term for it, wahpro baka (ワープロ馬鹿), meaning 'word-processor idiot,' from the idea that spending too much time typing into Microsoft Word atrophies handwriting skills" (1,900 words)
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Sex Sells
Robert Foyle Hunwick | China Books Review | 7th August 2025
Review of a book about sex work in China. The author provides an introduction to "the Chinese underworld of surly madams, hard-bitten hookers, predatory policemen and truculent johns" who orbit this illicit trade. Socialism is "not compatible with commodification of the body" and sex work has always been banned in the People's Republic. Other than to serve high-ranking party officials, of course (2,000 words)
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How To Leave A Sinking Nation
Atul Dev | Guardian | 14th August 2025
The highest point in the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu stands at 4.5 metres. By the year 2100, predictions show that 90 per cent of it will be underwater. The heat might make it uninhabitable before then. Although it is one of the least-visited countries in the world, tourists are already arriving to see the place before it disappears. The 11,000 residents of Tuvalu have to decide if, and when, to leave (5,900 words)
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Why Are There So Many Rationalist Cults?
Ozy Brennan | Asterisk | 11th August 2025
The rationalist community was drawn together by Eliezer Yudkowsky’s The Sequences, a set of essays about thinking more rationally. Ironically, the same community has played host to groups with very strange beliefs, including claims of interacting with demons. The Zizians, a loose group of vegan anarchist transhumanists, have been linked to six violent deaths. Why? Analysed here by an insider (5,400 words)
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ChatGPT And The Meaning Of Life
Harvey Lederman | Shtetl-Optimised | 4th August 2025
On the dread of a life without work, as more of it is automated. “If mechanised minds consume all the empty space on the intellectual map, lives dedicated to discovery won’t be lives that humans can lead. The post-instrumental world could be a much better place. But its coming means the death of my culture. We may be the last to enjoy this spell, before all exploration is done by fully automated sleds” (5,100 words)
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The full Browser recommends five articles, a video and a podcast. Today, enjoy our audio and video picks.
Podcast: Whispering Pines | Charlie's Place. Beginning of a five-part series about Charlie Fitzgerald, a Black businessman who operated a popular integrated nightclub in the Jim Crow South during the 1940s (32m 43s)
Video: Departure Diary | YouTube | All Arts TV | 6m 11s
Rehearsal footage and reflections from prima ballerina Gillian Murphy as she prepares for her retirement performance in Swan Lake after a career spanning 29 years.
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Bored
Nick Lynch | Bowling Broke | 5th May 2025
Not-at-all boring essay about the nature and utility of boredom, which is "the substrate without which peace is impossible". Eliminate it at your peril. "We think we’re escaping boredom by filling every silence, every pause, every flicker of inconvenience. But it’s the other way around. What we’re escaping is everything else — depth, clarity, attention, the work of tolerating discomfort" (8,500 words)
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Joan Of Arc
Anonymous | Astral Codex Ten | 1st August 2025
Lengthy and heavily footnoted review of the evidence for the miraculous life and career of Joan of Arc. She was an "artillerist, fraudbuster, confirmed saint, and Extremely Documented Person". There is no other saint with such a paper trail. This makes Joan fascinating: even this agnostic writer has to admit that "she’s such unusually good evidence for miracles". Could we see her like again? (24,000 words)
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To Know A Tree
Lamorna Ash | Kismet | 6th August 2025
Thoughts arising from a visit to the Totteridge Yew, London's oldest tree. It can be found in a churchyard in Barnet, at the northern end of the Northern Line. It is somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 years old. "It is a ridiculous sort of tree, its character faintly lunatic, all those branches pointing out in different directions under a shaggy coat, a kind of manginess to its self-presentation" (2,600 words)
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The Great Sword Heist Of 2025
Talia Lavin | The Sword And The Sandwich | 1st August 2025
Post-burglary debrief. During a break-in that did not disturb any of the four people or the dog asleep in the writer's apartment, the malefactor unmounted and made off with ten huge swords that had been fixed to the wall. None were especially valuable and much pricier electronics were left undisturbed. The police "manfully refrained from laughing" because "I am the victim of an extremely silly crime" (1,800 words)
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What’s This, A Door?
Hormeze | 30th July 2025
Musings on laughter, oft-equated with happiness when it should be seen as a form of release found in any visceral experience — sex, grief, horror. The Auschwitz prisoners who found humour there proved that it can be found in any place. When her hair was shaved, one prisoner laughed and explained that it was her first time getting a free hairdo. To laugh amidst suffering is a great spiritual accomplishment (1,800 words)
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Myths Of American Automaking
Adam Ozimek | Economic Innovation Group | 1st August 2025
The protectionist case for the US auto industry to be insulated from foreign competition rests on a few myths, debunked here. The auto industry has not been decimated by globalisation, it is alive and well. 10.3 million vehicles are made annually, with the value of cars at all-time highs. Detroit’s decline was caused not by trade but by local unions’ militancy and factories moving to other parts of the US (6,600 words)
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You Know More Finnish Than You Think
Danny L. Bate | 3rd August 2025
Despite its apparent strangeness to speakers of Indo-European languages, there are many similar words in Finnish. Hamppu, haukka, kakku, leipä and valas resemble hemp, hawk, cake, loaf and whale respectively. The English same and the Finnish sama are essentially the same. That most Finnish of words, sauna, may have derived from a Proto-Germanic word that has given English stack (2,200 words)
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100 Years Of Art Deco
Matt Alagiah | Observer | 31st July 2025
It has been 100 years since the Paris Expo which gave Art Deco its name. The French, keen to reassert their role as arbiters of taste, wanted to disallow Le Corbusier’s pavilion for being too “austere” and “stark”. Le Corbusier, for his part, was dismissive of Art Deco: “decorative art is the final twitch of the old manual mode. Our pavilion will contain only standard things created by industry and mass-produced” (1,400 words)
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