This Is 81

Sari Botton | Oldster | 11th June 2025

Interview with the writer Jon Carroll about age and ageing. Interesting throughout. "I refuse to vegetate, to lose interest in things, to let my curiosity atrophy. It’s a danger that we all face. It’s not an unreal temptation. How do you fight it? You talk. You think. You speculate. My granddaughter, who is 23, comes over here to hang out, not because we asked her to help but because she enjoys it" (3,000 words)

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A Day In The Life Of A Bottle Collector

Giulia Gotti | Eurozine | 13th June 2025

The annual Roskilde Festival is so big that for a week it becomes Denmark's fourth largest city. It has its own secondary economy based on exchanging trash for cash under the Danish refund system. Bottle collectors, mostly from Romania and West Africa, travel to the festival for this purpose. They pay for admission so they can clean up what others discard. There are tensions and turf wars, too (4,300 words)

What Xi Jinping Learned From His Father

Joseph Torigian | China Books Review | 12th June 2025

When Xi Jinping became leader of the CCP in 2012, moderates in the party hoped that he would be a reformist voice like his father before him. Xi Zhongxun was purged from the party several times because of his views. It soon emerged that his son had learned a different lesson: “My father entrusted me with two things: don’t persecute people and tell the truth. The first is possible, while the second is not” (2,800 words)

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The Talented Ms. Highsmith

Elena Gosalvez Blanco | Yale Review | 9th June 2025

The subheading of this piece alone thrills and intrigues: "I worked for the novelist in her final months. I thought she wanted to kill me." Highsmith was in her 70s, sick with lung cancer, and did not like people. This writer became her live-in assistant at her Brutalist house in Switzerland. Duties included grocery shopping, cat feeding, using as little electricity as possible, and being screamed at about Ernest Hemingway (6,400 words)

Inside Britain’s Underworld

David Rose | UnHerd | 20th May 2025

For thirty years, hobbyist British cavers have been painstakingly exploring previously unknown territory "under a sheep-grazed meadow in Gloucestershire’s Forest of Dean". Down a vertical shaft that took months of digging to clear lies a cave system that extends for at least 20km. Among the chambers discovered is "the White Forest", which contains crystalline stalactites that look like Venetian glass (1,900 words)

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Is Theology Dying?

Beatrice Marovich | Other Journal | 11th June 2025

Despite stable enrolment numbers at seminaries and colleges, some theologians are plagued by the feeling that their discipline — academic theology — is "dying". Explanations for this offered here include: the wider decline of the humanities, the increasing polarisation of religion in American society, and the possibility that theology has always been dying and exists as a "nowhere space" (5,500 words)

Falsehoods About Aviation

Ben Burwell | Angle Of Attack | 2nd June 2025

Organising aviation data is a herculean task, as programmers cannot assume that any of the following are constants — flights take off and land at airports; flights only depart from a gate; flights only leave their gate once; no two flights use the same flight number at the same time; each runway is only used by one airport; there is one agreed-upon definition of altitude; airports don’t move (1,000 words)

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A Rural Public Transit Odyssey

A.M. Hickman | Hickman’s Hinterlands | 5th June 2025

Dispatches from a trip across rural New York entirely by public buses. The routes are “cockamamie and improvised”, hard to find on Google Maps. The bus stops are “tiny shanties in the middle of nowhere”; the bus fare is often vague. One rider seemed to be paying in the form of car wash tokens. “To be young in a place like this is to be a kind of celebrity.” People stare, wordlessly saying, “Look — young people!” (5,700 words)

The Best Historical Biography: The 2025 Elizabeth Longford Prize

A good historical biography should help us redefine and rethink what makes a person historically significant, says Roy Foster, chair of the judging panel of the Elizabeth Longford Prize. He talks us through the brilliant books that made the 2025 shortlist, including the lives of various monarchs who left their mark on European history, a portrait of an early modern spymaster, and a biography of Frantz Fanon, the anti-colonial writer. Read more

The Best Russia Books of 2025: The Pushkin House Prize

The Pushkin House Book Prize is awarded annually for a nonfiction book that encourages "public understanding and intelligent debate about Russia." Political scientist Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, chair of this year's judging panel, talks us through the six fantastic books shortlisted in 2025, illuminating different parts of Russia's politics and history — from the memoir of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died in prison in 2024, to a history of the Russian Orthodox Church and its role in propping up political regimes from the Middle Ages to the present. Read more

How Common Is Multiple Invention?

Brian Potter | Construction Physics | 5th June 2025

More common than you might think. In this analysis of 190 inventions from 1800 to 1970 — including the telephone, the transistor and the electric tram — over half show evidence of multiple independent attempts at invention. This is a rebuke to the idea that invention requires singular genius. Instead, a confluence of forces including intellectual progress and material availability are likely responsible (2,700 words)

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Who Thought This Was A Good Idea?

Evelyn McDonnell | LitHub | 5th June 2025

The posthumous publication of Joan Didion's private therapy notes feels ethically dubious. "The commercial exploitation of family trauma left me feeling deeply uncomfortable and even ashamed, like I was caught holding a ticket stub for the rubbernecking line at a train crash." Perhaps the most uncomfortable revelation is that Didion did not always tell the truth in her unflinching personal essays (1,100 words)

Probe Lenses And Focus Stacking

Abby Ferguson | DP Review | 22nd May 2025

Photographer explains how he takes extraordinary images inside musical instruments. In these pictures, the interior of a pipe organ becomes a futuristic city and the space within a violin looks like a historic ship. He uses a homemade stack of medical scopes and magnifiers to get the highest quality image from the smallest possible device. Taking a macro-style image in a tiny space is very hard (1,700 words)

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What Is Post-Fascism?

Sven Reichardt | JHI Blog | 4th June 2025

As David Remnick once said, “Hitler ruined fascism.” What does the term even mean now that it is "vague and worn out by polemical overuse"? The ideologies espoused by the likes of Donald Trump and Girogia Meloni carry some overtones of historical fascism, but lack certain key elements, such as a strong welfare state or an emphasis on uniformed paramilitaries. Hence the rise of "post-fascism" (4,800 words)

Status, Class, And The Crisis Of Expertise

Dan Williams | Conspicuous Cognition | 31st May 2025

The populist rejection of expertise goes beyond skepticism; it is rooted in status threat and humiliation. Expertise is perceived as “epistemic charity”, a “one-way deference” that concedes the experts’ higher status. “The scientist, academic and fact-checker do not expect to learn anything from ordinary voters.” In response, populists promise a status reversal by elevating “common sense” over “expert authority” (3,700 words)

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Limiting Reason

Richard Chappell | Good Thoughts | 2nd June 2025

On navigating moral uncertainty. The challenge is to not be an Easy Dupe, fooled by “clever-sounding but ultimately facile reasoning”. One way to do this is through Dogmatism: dismiss anything which seems intuitively outrageous. This carries its own moral risk of never questioning one’s cultural blind spots. “We know that many important moral truths sounded ridiculous to past generations” (1,600 words)