Rifling Through the Archives
Chris Heath | Smithsonian | 13th February 2025
Robert Caro, the journalist best known for his biographies of Robert Moses and Lyndon B. Johnson, gives a guided tour of his archive. It contains everything from his senior thesis that "stinks" to the calendar showing how many words he writes a day. At the age of 89, his fifth and final volume of about Johnson stands unfinished at 980 pages. He has to know how a book will end before he can start writing it (6,400 words)
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Motet For The Record
Henry Freedland | Lapham's Quarterly | 22nd July 2025
Patchwork essay, formed of quotations from Lewis H. Lapham's writings. The result is profound, in places: "Nothing necessarily follows from anything else. The future comes and goes so quickly that one gets used to surprise entrances and sudden exits. Buy the bicycle or the truck, wrap up the handbag and the dress, take possession of the deck chair or the parrot, and you begin the world all over again" (3,600 words)
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An Ancient Ice Age Froze The Entire Earth
Laura Poppick | Literary Hub | 22nd July 2025
During a Svalbard expedition in the 1940s, Cambridge geologist Brian Harland found telltale signs of an ice age so intense and all-encompassing it extended to the tropics at sea level, “the most extreme ice age known in all of Earth’s history”. When he shared his findings, he was not believed by his colleagues, who had trouble imagining an Earth that cold, or how it could have come out of this deep freeze (2,400 words)
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Scapegoating The Algorithm
Dan Williams | Asterisk | 21st July 2025
Is social media to blame for the dysfunctional information environment at present? Not solely or entirely. Polarisation, misperceptions, and conspiracism were rampant before the rise of Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. The causes of these epistemic challenges may lie deeper. “Many of the problems attributed to social media can arise — and have historically arisen — in the absence of social media” (3,600 words)
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Genes For Memes
Afra Wang | Reboot | 20th July 2025
He Jiankui — the “mad scientist” who created two genetically edited babies in 2018 — has since lost his academic position and served a three-year jail sentence in China. He is now reinventing himself as a “political dissident martyred by an authoritarian regime”, while disavowing any plans to do gene editing for “super soldiers”. His online following reads like a “who’s who of Silicon Valley’s contrarian wing” (2,600 words)
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Person Do Thing is a simple, friendly party game for two or more players (made by Browser Publisher Uri Bram). Try to describe a word using only some very simple words (like Person, Do and Thing). Browser readers get 15% off selected decks with code BROWSER at checkout.
Forsaking Industrialism
Conrad Bastable | 3rd April 2025
Regulatory mandates that take a punitive approach to domestic industries without investing the time and resources needed to build capabilities simply end up incentivising monopolies elsewhere. The EU has given European automakers 15 years to fully transition away from gas vehicles. As a result, these companies now invest billions in the only market developing viable batteries at scale: China (12,500 words)
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The Number Go Up Rule
Matt Stoller | BIG | 18th July 2025, in which increasing the capitalisation of the stock market to protect the assets of the baby boom generation has become the political default. "Financial capitalism implies risk. But in our era, the government guarantees financial returns with subsidies, regulations and bailouts. It’s a form of statecraft." Turning away from this is society's principal moral challenge (3,000 words)
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I Never Cared Much For Swords
Sandrine Rastello | Walrus | 18th July 2025
Actor's training in historical fencing leads her into the world of historical fencing. Participants use steel replicas of longswords, smallswords and sabres to explore a martial art best described as "a game of chess with swords". It requires both archival research and muscles. Ultimately, a duel is about "looking another human in the eye and summoning survival instincts you didn’t know you had" (2,500 words)
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Five Books features in-depth author interviews recommending five books on a theme. You can read more interviews on the site, or sign up for the newsletter.
Classic Fantasy Books
A fantasy ‘classic’ is a book that enables a new kind of story to be written, says fantasy scholar Matthew Sangster. He introduces five classics, and explains how they both build on and subvert our shared stock of stories to create wonderful new worlds – worlds that are not made to be admired from a distance, but rather to be lived inside, and shared. Read more
Books About the Salem Witch Trials
In 1692-3 in Salem Village, Massachusetts, a widespread moral panic resulted in nearly 200 residents being accused of practicing witchcraft. In the end, 20 of them were executed. Since then, the name Salem has been associated with paranoia, betrayal and religious extremism, and the Salem Witch Trials have served as the inspiration for many books, both fiction and nonfiction. Read more
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The Daily Life Of A Medieval King
Medievalists | 12th July 2025
Thanks to the medieval writer Christine de Pizan, we know how a 14C king passed his time. Charles V rose by seven, prayed, bantered with his servants and heard mass. Then he divided his time between hearing public petitions, attending council meetings and receiving ambassadors. Meals were snatched in between. Then some time spent reviewing his treasures and seeing his children before vespers and bed (1,500 words)
Metagame 2025, a game and puzzle design conference that is also itself an immersive megagame, is happening September 12-14 at Lighthaven in Berkeley. If you're interested in getting involved, contact Ricki Heicklen or join the Discord.
Drones And Decolonisation
William T. Vollmann | Granta | 17th July 2025
Sweeping essay, which takes in literary criticism, travel writing and political commentary. Reminiscent of Edmund de Waal and Stefan Zweig. Isaac Babel and Joseph Roth, the author of Radetzky March, feel present too. With the help of locals and fixers, Vollman tours Ukraine and explores the layers of "decolonising" narrative he finds there: Austrian, Soviet, Russian and now Putin's version (15,000 words)
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The full Browser recommends five articles, a video and a podcast. Today, enjoy our audio and video picks.
Podcast: Madness, Mysticism and Philosophy | Pop Apocalypse. Wide-ranging conversation on the philosophy of madness. “The philosopher is not meant to help either the psychotic or the psychiatrist. Indeed, it is the mad person who can help the philosopher by means of “thought experiments” or “world constructions”” (1h 18m)
Video: Hundreds Of Robots Move Shanghai City Block | YouTube | South China Morning Post | 1m 45s
Timelapse footage of 432 "crawler robots" moving an entire city block of historic houses at the rate of 33 feet a day. The buildings were temporarily shifted so that an underground mall could be built, and then moved back on top.
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Five Books features in-depth author interviews recommending five books on a theme. You can read more interviews on the site, or sign up for the newsletter.
Endangered Languages
Of the world's 7000 languages, around half are expected to be extinct by the end of this century. Samantha Ellis's mother tongue is one of them. We asked her to reflect on what we lose when we lose a way of speaking—culturally, linguistically, emotionally—and to recommend five books about endangered languages. Read more
The Best 20th-Century Chinese Fiction
While rooted in specific Chinese contexts, these books transcend cultural boundaries and speak to universal questions about dignity, freedom, identity, and the longing to be seen, says novelist and writer Lijia Zhang. She talks us through five of the best works of fiction to come out of mainland China in the twentieth century. Read more
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