Numinous Response

Lamorna Ash | Amulet | 3rd March 2025

The 12C story of doomed lovers Héloïse and Abelard is a sacred text. Their correspondence, after they had been separated and had entered holy orders, apart, is as stirring as it was centuries ago. A medieval academic feared its resonance would fade with passing years, but the "intense passion and suffering" are still fresh. "Sacred texts are this: a glimpse of love’s eternality" (2,100 words)

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The World Of Professional Slap Fighting

Ander Monson | Esquire | 23rd May 2024

Dispatch from a fast-growing new combat sport. "Phillips’s eyes are closed, all 255 pounds of him anticipating the blow, hoping to endure it so he can return fire. He can’t move to evade the slap. That’s not allowed. Flinching is a foul — spiritually, the greatest foul in slap fighting — and the penalty is that your opponent gets an extra chance to smash you in the face. So you just have to take the blow" (6,500 words)

Self-Domesticated Ape

Kevin Kelly | Technium | 2nd March 2025

The first animals domesticated by humans weren’t dogs, but ourselves. Humanity selected for rounder faces, wider eyes, and broadly the retention of juvenile traits into adulthood. Human evolution is a story of Survival of the Friendliest. "We self-selected our character, and crafted this being called human. We invented ourselves. I contend this is our greatest invention" (1,500 words)

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The Walnut Tree

David Blake Knox | Dublin Review Of Books | 4th March 2025

Survivors of a massacre in Croatia identify the man who directed it: the town’s mayor. He has eight sworn alibi witnesses and a video with a burnt-in time-code showing him elsewhere. Except that a Czech detective, an English silviculturist, and the angles on the branches of a walnut tree collectively prove that the video had been doctored: at the crucial moment he was driving in to town, not out (2,000 words)

Always Look Up Everybody’s Mom

Ada Palmer | Ex Urbe | 12th February 2025

Two Renaissance cardinals claimed rags-to-riches stories, but Franscesco della Rovere was more like "a son of the 1% climbing to join the 0.01%" as Pope Sixtus IV. (One historical tip for identifying hidden nepotism: consider people’s mothers, not just their fathers). By contrast, Jorge da Costa’s farming family was truly dirt poor; as such, his slow grind to success required living to age 102 (4,000 words)

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Magnet Fishing Has Beef

Robbie Armstrong | Glasgow Bell | 1st March 2025

"Lobbing high-powered magnets on ropes into waterways to retrieve discarded metal objects" might seem like wholesome fun, but legally it's considered "unauthorised work on a scheduled monument." A group in Glasgow skirts the law and irks the regulators at Scottish Canals. "I don’t like backstabbing and I’m no keen on authority figures telling me what tae dae, especially wi ma hobby" (2,700 words)

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Sorry Not Sorry

Michelle Cyca | Walrus | 28th February 2025 | U

The apology statement is ubiquitous after any mistake or tragedy. Individuals and institutions fire them out, eager to be seen to be saying the right thing while less keen to do anything concrete. "Forgiveness for mistakes should be possible in a just society, but it should follow from genuine remorse and reparations — not from outsourced platitudes wielded like a tranquiliser dart for outrage" (1,400 words)

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Flashback On The New Yorker's Birthday

Tina Brown | Fresh Hell | 24th February 2025 | U

Editor's victory lap. Tina Brown took over the New Yorker in 1992 with a remit from the publisher "to clean house and blood-change the reader demographic". She found a magazine that was "easier to praise than to read", still paying staff writers who hadn't filed a piece in over 30 years. She fired 71 people, "rewired the management as a matriarchy" and increased circulation by 22 per cent (2,900 words)

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Podcast: Ghana’s Exiled King | It's A Continent. Audio profile of Asantehene Prempeh I, who ruled the Ashanti Empire in the late 19C, defied the British Empire, and spent 28 years exiled in the Seychelles (29m 52s)

Video: Ernest Wright | YouTube | Sheffield Museums | 9m 12s

A craftsman in the historic steel-making city of Sheffield, Yorkshire, demonstrates the process for making the perfect kitchen scissors.

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10 Observations About Tokyo

Quico Toro | Persuasion | 19th February 2025

American resident in Tokyo reflects on the city's norms. Interesting throughout. Unlike elsewhere, a polite and formal manner projects warmth, rather than frosty reserve. The more casual affect commonly used with strangers can seem aggressive to the unfamiliar. Most important is the prosocial consensus, which ensures that every interaction has a clear script and set of expectations (1,500 words)

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Bayes Is Not A Phase

Dynomight | 27th February 2025

In defence of Bayesian reasoning. There is a good explanation here of this method of statistical inference popular with certain segments of the "techie" population. Far from being a "hipster fad", this combination of aleatoric uncertainty and epistemic uncertainty is very useful for optimising decisions. Unfortunately, building a trustworthy formal model takes far too long for real life (2,200 words)

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Is God A Mushroom?

John Last | Long Now | 26th February 2025

Dead Sea Scrolls scholar John Marco Allegro certainly thought so. His 1970 book about the influence of psychoactive mushroom extracts on early Christianity, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, "is remembered as a quintessential example of academic suicide". But in the 21C, psychedelic science has caught up with him. Jesus wasn't a mushroom, but the human sense of the divine could be (4,100 words)

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The Hardest Working Font In Manhattan

Marcin Wichary | Aresluna | 14th February 2025

Gorton, an unassuming and unfashionable monoline typeface, is everywhere. Institutions including the US military and national parks service use it; it also appears on thousands of typewriter keyboards, warning signs and elevator controls. It seems to be have been especially popular in Manhattan. This beautifully-illustrated essay explores the history of the font and celebrates its imperfections (6,500 words)

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The West Lost The War It Thought It Had Won

Natalia Antelava | Coda Story | 24th February 2025

“Putin’s success stems from the collective failure of the Western establishment, convinced of its own invincibility, to recognise his systematic dismantling of the order they claimed to defend. The values the West claimed for itself — defense of individual rights, rule of law, democratic values — were worth fighting for. But having “won” the Cold War, Western establishments grew complacent” (1,800 words)

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Curious Correspondence With Edward Gorey

Cynthia Rose | Comics Journal | 24th February 2025

“My father chanced on his works back when they were small, slight booklets that seemed handmade. With them came an entire world, curious and enticing, fashioned out of the finest pen strokes. I saw his kohl-eyed vamps as shady White Russians and his muscular villains as figures out of Bram Stoker.” Filled with delightful asides on the epistolary life — “ours was a family who liked filling envelopes” (1,400 words)

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Podcast: The Nazi Block | 99% Invisible. Berlin’s Tempelhof-Schöneberg district is home to this abandoned relic of a Nazi plan to rebuild the city as a grand imperial capital (37m 37s)

Video: Competitive Foursome | YouTube | Salut Salon | 3m 24s

Four musicians turn a musical competition into an acrobatic virtuoso performance.

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What I’ve Learned

Jay Rayner | Observer | 20th February 2025

Veteran food columnist signs off after 15 years with a series of firmly-held opinions. Brown food is the best food. Picnics are bad and buffets "are where taste goes to die". Every meal can be made better with the addition of salt and probably bacon. Tipping should be abolished because "it’s wrong that restaurant staff should be dependent on the mood of the customer for the size of their wage" (600 words)

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Can’t Decide?

Anne Kadet | Café Anne | 3rd February 2025

Interview with a professional decision coach, who charges clients $247 per decision. Unlike a therapist or a friend, she won't just talk you through a tricky scenario — she will tell you what to do. She handles a lot of career, baby and divorce questions, but also more niche ones about whether to paint the kitchen. She won't work with everybody or on anything, though. Sometimes therapy is a better fit (2,900 words)

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