Legacy Of The Angels

Rebekah Wallace | Aeon | 18th March 2025

Everything we understand about the cosmos can be traced back to angels. Medieval debates about bodiless celestial beings that were nonetheless located in time and space forced an update to Aristotelian notions of physics. In the thinking of Duns Scotus, Isaac Newton and others, an invisible force such as God's will could act on such a body. This laid the framework for modern physics (3,200 words)

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The Mana Of Digging A Grave

Liam Rātana | Spinoff | 24th July 2024

Arresting from the opening line: "It has been almost a decade since I was called on to help dig my first grave." Drafted in first at the age of 19 when an uncle died, the craft of gravedigging was quickly and simply communicated at 5am at the urupā, a Māori burial ground. Mark out your hole, remove the grass first — ideally in one piece — and then just keep shifting earth until you're six feet down (2,800 words)

The Managerial Class Has No Future

Peter Wei | Ecumene | 8th March 2025

Unlike traditional elites who can pass down land, family businesses, or social networks, this class’s only transferable asset is earning potential, which their children must re-earn through education and training. Education has become more expensive; professional training is lasting longer — “a wage cut by other means”. “The result is a class that, despite its high incomes and social prestige, is unsustainable” (1,700 words)

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The Great Hobby Lobby Artefact Heist

Meghan Boilard | Off-Topic | 12th March 2025

In 2010, thousands of cuneiform texts were smuggled into Oklahoma City, to the headquarters of evangelical arts and crafts empire Hobby Lobby. The Green family, Hobby Lobby’s owners and one of the largest donors to Evangelical causes, were creating an interactive museum on biblical history. Their ethically questionable, bulk acquisition of over 40,000 relics shook the artefact market as a whole (4,400 words)

The Prehistoric Psychopath

John Halstead & Phil Thomson | Works In Progress | 13th March 2025

New research reveals that hunter gatherers were considerably less violent than previously believed, despite lacking the modern state apparatus for managing violence: no code of law, no judges, no police. This upends Hobbesian beliefs that human nature is innately warlike and that our ancestors were perennially in a state of conflict. “Nomadic foragers rarely glorify the warrior” (6,300 words)

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The Blue Bus Paradox

Adam Kucharski | Understanding The Unseen | 17th March 2025

Suppose a pedestrian gets hit by a bus, but cannot recall the colour of the bus responsible. The pedestrian sues the Blue Bus Company, as they own 75% of the buses in town, and the odds are high it was one of their buses. Should the pedestrian win? “If we were to let baseline probabilities dictate verdicts, we’d risk punishing the likely without evidence — instead of proving who was guilty” (1,100 words)

The Spice Islands

Jimmy Maher | The Analog Antiquarian | 14th March 2025

Instalment in an ongoing serialised history of the voyage of Magellan. Although the explorer himself had died several months before, in November 1521 what remained of his crew finally arrived at their intended destination: the Spice Islands, also known as the Maluku Islands. In the 16C, this archipelago in the South Pacific was the only known place that nutmeg, mace, and cloves could be grown (6,000 words)

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The Golden Age Of Japanese Pencils

Carson Monetti | Studio Notes | 2nd March 2025

Many of the greatest pencils of all time were produced in Japan between 1952 and 1967. Two manufacturers, Tombow and Mitsubishi Pencil, went head to head in "the Great Tokyo Pencil Rivalry", vying to produce premium writing implements that married superlative form and function. Every detail, from the exterior colour and typography to the graphite and clay within, was honed and optimised (4,600 words)

A Unified Theory Of The Handbag

Audrey Wollen | Yale Review | 11th March 2025

Ambitious reframing of human existence, from pre-history to Oscar Wilde's Miss Prism, around the necessity to carry infants somehow until they can walk independently. "What if the first human tool wasn’t a weapon of some kind — a bashing stick or a sharpened stone — but a bag, to keep one hand free for the baby and another for the world?" The truth of this is hard to prove, like all the best folklore (5,400 words)

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On Troubleshooting

Curiositry | Autodidacts | 22nd February 2025

Troubleshooting is an underrated skill, especially if it isn't a natural part of the work in a field (as for a programmer or an electrician). But one can get better at it, as these steps explain. Done well, troubleshooting can improve all aspects of life. Take it slowly, even when in a hurry. Look at the flow of the system and isolate the problem. Implement fixes carefully. Then ask why it broke in the first place (4,900 words)

Ways To Spot A Fake Masterpiece

Kelly Grovier | BBC Culture | 12th March 2025

AI tools are all the rage in art fraud investigation, but the human eye and some chemical analysis are all you need. Pigments give the forger away — Rembrandt did not have access to titanium white. If the work's provenance is unverifiable, it could be because it doesn't have one. Laboured, stiff brushwork is the trademark of a mediocre copyist. And always check the spelling of the signature (2,200 words)

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The Seed Of Elon Khan

Ed West | Wrong Side Of History | 11th March 2025

Unscrupulous men — from Genghis Khan to the Irish warlord Niall of the Nine Hostages, and now, Elon Musk — have always sought to produce large numbers of children. Historically, the easiest way to accomplish this was via polygamy. Christianity tightened the constraints of marriage, but the decline of patriarchy and advent of assisted conception are making prolific parenthood possible again (2,100 words)

I’ve Been Meaning To Call

Paul Crenshaw | Melt With Me | 6th March 2025

“Forgive me, friend, I’ve been meaning to call. I am not avoiding you. I thought about you this morning on my way to work. The snow made me think of you, the frost on the trees. Maybe it was the way the sun came up, etching the world into shape. Maybe it was the contemplative quiet of early morning highways. Maybe it was the longing in the grayness of dawn, the belief that something better is coming” (1,100 words)

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Bags

Diego Alfaro Palma & Claudia Nuñez de Ibieta | Offing | 11th March 2025

Satire of the bag. “Bags can live for years high in a tree, much like other creatures of the plastic animal kingdom. Bags form colonies that absorb other colonies of marine mammals and reptiles, who — in confusion — eat them, believing them to be jellyfish or Medusas. Bags eat away at the beliefs held by human beings regarding usefulness. Through this tactic, they determine their multiplication and survival” (1,300 words)

The City That Forgot Itself

Iason Athanasiadis | Critic | 10th March 2025

In a bid to be “resolutely Greek”, the historically cosmopolitan Thessaloniki is in self-inflicted amnesia about its past. Bustling with minarets and synagogues, this once majority-Jewish city was nicknamed the “Jerusalem of the Balkans”. It was emptied of Jews during a 1931 pogrom. Its two main universities have been built over Jewish and Muslim cemeteries. One last Muslim mausoleum remains today (4,000 words)

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Do You Want To See?

Alice Gribbin | Cluny Journal | 3rd March 2025 | U

Manifesto for the nude. Representations of the human form are as old as art itself, and reached their pinnacle with the Greeks of the 5th century BCE. A generation of feminist critics have reduced the artistic nude to an object stripped of humanity, a victim of the male gaze. Today, people’s primary visual encounters with the nude are not through art or worship but advertising, entertainment and porn (3,600 words)

Two Americas, A Bank Branch, $50,000 Cash

Patrick McKenzie | Bits About Money | 5th March 2025

Last year, a magazine published a viral feature about a financial advice columnist who fell for a scam and ended up handing a shoebox containing $50,000 cash to a stranger. This finance writer didn't feel that the account of this large cash withdrawal rang true. So he devoted months of his life to fact-checking it. It's a long and winding road, but the destination is surprisingly satisfying (6,700 words)

Luxury Beliefs

Scott Sumner | The Pursuit Of Happiness | 26th February 2025

America contains a "hidden aristocracy". These people are so insulated by their wealth that they may not even realise the extent to which they exist in a different legal reality to the rest of the country. Drug offences are the classic — rich buyers don't go to jail but poor sellers do. Other matters that are consequence-free for the wealthy include divorce scandals and illegal immigration (1,900 words)

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Podcast: What If You Survived The Burundian Genocide? | This Is Actually Happening. First person account from a survivor of the 1993 mass killing of Tutsis in Burundi. Very informative about an under-reported moment in history (49m 30s)

Video: The Disturbing Current | YouTube | Joel Blackledge | 5m 39s

Illuminating visual analysis of how director Leo McCarey used shot composition to enhance the themes of dissolution and reconciliation in his 1937 screwball comedy The Awful Truth.

The World Was Flat. Now It's Flattened

Ted Gioia | Honest Broker | 5th March 2025

Critic's annual "state of the culture" speech. Homogeneity is the name of the game. "Every big web platform feels the same. That rich tapestry of my friends and family and colleagues has been replaced by the most shallow and flattened digital fluff. And this feeling of flattening is intensified by the lack of context or community. The only ruling principle is the total absence of purpose or seriousness" (1,800 words)

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One Of Florida’s Most Lethal Python Hunters

Lindsey Liles | Garden & Gun | 15th October 2024

Profile of Donna Kalil, a 62-year-old professional python hunter in the Florida Everglades. Burmese pythons began arriving in the 1970s, as imported pets that escaped or were released. They are extremely efficient predators: in the Everglades National Park, 90 per cent of fur-bearing animals have disappeared since the early 2000s. But as a snake bounty hunter, Donna is more dangerous still (3,300 words)