Not Who She Seems to Be

Ashley Abramson | Allure | 22nd January 2025 | U

Journalist's attempt to verify the expertise of a source sends her on a post-truth journey into the dark heart of the "slop-infested" internet. A therapist presented by a supposedly reliable portal for connecting writers with experts turns out not to exist at all. This discovery is just the tip of an iceberg made up of fakery, fuelled by the way that search engines rank results and products (4,600 words)

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Solidarity In Retreat

Luis Feliz Leon | n+1 | 4th February 2025 | U

Labour struggles in the US are historically fought along class lines, but in an era when "only one class is on a war footing" — the ruling elite — it is hard to see what unions can offer. Tempting as it is to give in to the forces of "nationalism, nativism, and protectionism" in the prevailing political weather, a more productive focus would be investment in "strike school", to teach the workers how to fight back (6,000 words)

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Podcast: Kristoffer Tjalve | Inventory-ing. Interview with curator and strategist, from a podcast which explores hidden corners of the internet (1h 28m)

Video: Changelings | YouTube | Storied | 10m 33s

The folklore behind changelings — creatures who replace humans with eerie copies — and the societal fear of impostors.

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Why North England Is Poor

Tom Forth | 26th January 2025

A little over a century ago, the north of England was one of the richest places in the world. Today, it is "very poor by North European standards", overtaken in the last decade by East Germany and Poland. Reasons for this include: the Norman conquest, the centuries-long ban on founding new universities in the region, and the privatisation and centralisation of industrial assets under Thatcher (8,000 words)

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The Divine Engineer Of Ancient Sichuan

Jonah Dunch | Chris Arnade Walks The World | 31st January 2025

The Dujiangyan irrigation system, built in around 256 BCE and still in use today, is a survival of the old China: "The China of awesome empire and ancient gods." Above Chengdu stands a temple to Li Bing, the engineer who "defeated the god" of the Min River. He did this either in a duel or by building a series of clever levees and islands to redirect the stream, depending on your taste in mythology (2,800 words)

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Life In A Desert Of Death

Nick Hunt | Noema | 30th January 2025

Journey to the vanished inland Aral Sea of Uzbekistan, which began shrinking in the 1960s when the two rivers that fed it were diverted by the Soviets to irrigate cotton farms. This rapid drying out created the Earth's newest desert. It looks like the setting of Mad Max and became what ecologists call a "sacrifice zone". But life is returning, in the form of hardy shrubs and tiny squiggling crustaceans (3,900 words)

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Life With My Aunt Avril

Richard Blair | Orwell Society | 27th October 2011

George Orwell's son describes his childhood. Orwell and his wife Eileen adopted their son at his birth in 1944. Ten months later, Eileen died. Some of Orwell's friends suggested he "unadopt" his son, but he and his sister Avril refused. They moved to the Hebridean island of Jura while Nineteen Eighty-Four was written, to a house with no telephone that was eight miles from the nearest proper road (6,800 words)

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Departing The New York Times

Paul Krugman | Contrarian | 28th January 2025

Economist's take on the state of US opinion commentary, as seen through the lens of his own decision to end his association with the Gray Lady after more than a quarter of a century. "I used to say, only half-jokingly, that if a column didn’t generate a large amount of hate mail, that meant that I had wasted the space. Yet what I felt during my final year at the Times was a push toward blandness" (1,600 words)

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On Having A Maximum Wealth

Hamilton Nolan | How Things Work | 25th January 2025

Acquiring and maintaining a level of extreme wealth for a tiny proportion of the global population is a ludicrous idea around which to organise a human society. Consider a thought experiment: what if, instead of tinkering around the edges of this unfettered capitalism with laws and regulations, we simply made it illegal for any one individual to have a net worth of over a billion dollars? (1,700 words)

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The Populist Phantom

Larry M. Bartels | Inside Story | 18th January 2025

The metaphor of a “populist wave” — in the US, Brazil, Hungary, India, Italy, and Sweden — exaggerates the successes of populism. In Europe, the average vote share for right-wing populist parties has increased by less than half a percentage point per year since the turn of the century. Populist gains in the West are less about a genuine public shift in political beliefs and more about changing elite politics (5,700 words)

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My Cat Mii

Mayumi Inaba | Paris Review | 20th January 2025

Memoir excerpt of author’s relationship with her cat, translated from Japanese. “It was the end of summer, 1977. I found a cat, a little ball of fluff. Her face was the size of a coin, split by her huge wide-open mouth. She was stuck inside the fence of a school on the banks of the Tamagawa River. I hugged her to my chest and a sweet scent filled my nostrils. Her body was infused with the smell of milk and summer” (2,200 words)

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Algorithmic Ranking Is Unfairly Maligned

Dynomight | 24th January 2025

The algorithms in the platforms we use are tuned to create the maximum profit. This is fine if the user's tastes and goals align with the company's profitability, but mostly produces a degraded experience. It doesn't have to, though. "If all the information that enters your brain is being filtered by an algorithm, it seems important that you know the algorithm is on your side" (2,000 words)

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Bitter: A Map

Janan Alexandra | Offing | 26th November 2024

Poet's take on the word "bitter", via both etymological and emotional resonances. The word came from two Old English words: biter, meaning "having a harsh taste, sharp, cutting; angry, full of animosity; cruel" and bitan, "to bite". It's a word felt in the place where it is spoken. "Bitter thus situates us firmly in the mouth, between tongue and teeth, if we weren’t convinced of that already"(900 words)

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Innit Innit Boys And Super Eagles

Aniefiok Ekpoudom | Guardian | 23rd January 2025 | U

Football is integral to British-Nigerian identity. Such professionals have long chosen to travel abroad to play for Nigeria. They are known as "the innit innit boys". "Families spread across continents, frayed by the aftershocks of colonialism and war and political turbulence and economic turmoil, reuniting briefly under the banners of the Super Eagles. For 90 minutes, Nigeria is whole" (3,400 words)

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How Art Lost Its Way

William Deresiewicz | Persuasion | 6th January 2025 | U

Lament for the lost art of criticism, which was killed by the triple threat of journalism cutbacks, writers distracted by "the discourse", and consumers' unwillingness to expand their horizons. "What’s missing is a broader sense that art is urgent business, that your life, in some sense, depends on it. With that goes not only the possibility of meaningful criticism, but also its point" (2,500 words)

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The Strange Power Of Laughter

Kirsten Bell | Sapiens | 21st January 2025

Nobody knows why we laugh, pushing our repeated puffs of air to make a noise others register as amusement. Other primates laugh, but it is giving meaning to laughter that seems unique to the human condition. Disapproval of laughter also seems to be one of our defining characteristics, perhaps because it sometimes occurs outside our conscious control — "cracking up" is alarming (1,500 words)

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Chimes At Midnight

Alec Nevala-Lee | Asterisk | 21st January 2025

A visit to "The Clock of the Long Now", an underground timepiece designed to run for 10,000 years. The clock face is eight feet across and the mechanism stands 200 feet high. Designed by the inventor Danny Hillis with input from science fiction writer Neal Stephenson, it was funded by Jeff Bezos and built under a Texas mountain range he owns. Getting inside is "illegal but not difficult" (5,000 words)

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Twenty Lessons On Tyranny

Timothy Snyder | Thinking About | 20th January 2025

“Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. Beware the one-party state. They exploited a historic moment to make political life impossible for their opponents. Notice the swastikas. Do not get used to them. Remember professional ethics. Authoritarians need obedient civil servants, and concentration camp directors seek businessmen interested in cheap labour” (1,300 words)

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The Trouble With Aggregates

Reuven Brenner | Law & Liberty | 20th January 2025

Macroeconomics uses national aggregate numbers to gauge living standards but pays little attention to their reliability in concept or measurement. “Too much aggregation mixes the unmixable and gives us models that are easy to handle but with low, if any, power of resolution.” Governments can use these statistics to justify bad policy. “In many ways, the macroeconomic sector is comparable to astrology” (3,200 words)

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The Wild Heart Of David Lynch

Matt Feeney | UnHerd | 20th January 2025

“In every Lynch film there are shots and scenes that make you want to throw your head back and laugh at their sheer audacious beauty. His whimsical sayings — some hybrid of a seven-year-old boy and ninety-year-old man — travelled with the internet’s most wholesome memes. And his art sat at the heart of contemporary culture as its most searching examinations of human fallenness and depravity” (2,600 words)

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Do We Need A Second New Deal?

Nathan J. Robinson | Current Affairs | 20th January 2025

On how FDR got public and legislative support for sweeping changes. “Any president or party who wants to be successful should take that lesson from Roosevelt: give people things they can see and feel, and tell them you’ve given it to them. He made them feel that with him in the White House they shared the presidency. The New Deal did not just give monetary handouts. It fostered culture and belonging” (3,900 words)

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Loskop To Swakop

Stan Engelbrecht | Radavist | 15th January 2025 | U

Travel diary covering a cycling trip across Namibia, one of the most sparsely populated places in the world. There are practical challenges and travelling with a support vehicle seems wise, but the wonders of the place make up for it. The so-called "Moon Landscape" is breathtaking and the occasional subterranean boom from the mining industry only adds to the eerieness (2,300 words)

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A Shoddy Work Of History

Stefan Gužvica | Jacobin | 7th January 2025 | U

The Black Book of Communism is a 1997 essay collection by a group of European academics. It was intended to be "a massive compendium of crimes and deaths committed in the name of communism" but is riddled with incorrect data, including the disputed "one hundred million deaths" figure. Yet the book's popularity endures, influencing people who have never heard of it (2,700 words)

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