How To Do Soul-Craft With State Tools

Jac Mullen | After Literacy | 14th May 2025

Writing began as a tool of state control wielded by a small managerial class. Mass literacy was the result of centuries of struggle, made possible by portable alphabetic systems, print technology, public education — a “fragile, unnatural achievement”. It makes a “cognitive commons” possible. If outcompeted by machine intelligence, it may once again become the “province of a specialised elite” (2,600 words)

Nomido is the Browser's daily word game. Play today's before it's gone!

The Tragedy Of Elon Musk

Francis Fukuyama | Persuasion | 31st May 2025

Elon Musk’s disastrous foray into politics illustrates America’s “oligarch problem”: tech entrepreneurs who, because of their success in one arena, are convinced they will be good at anything and stray into areas well out of their depth. The tragedy is that Musk may have destroyed his most outstanding creation, Tesla, which was leading the way to a low-carbon future. “That future may now belong to China” (1,600 words)

Podcast: Will We Ever Prove String Theory? | The Joy Of Why. A theoretical physicist makes a valiant case that the mathematical elegance of string theory is reason enough to keep investigating it (48m 39s)

Video: The Clown Car | YouTube | Cool Ideas | 4m 19s

Genial presentation of the quirky 1943 DAF Mobile Raincoat, a three-wheeled car created in the Netherlands under Nazi occupation. The car was small enough to fit through a doorway, with a front wheel that could rotate 180 degrees. Despite its odd appearance, the car had real innovation — its technology was a precursor to the CVT transmission. Post-war, the car was handed off to a circus.

Nomido is the Browser's daily word game. Play today's before it's gone!

How To Live On $432 A Month In America

A.M. Hickman | Hickman's Hinterlands | 20th May 2025

It's entirely possible, as long as you are willing to live a quieter, rural life of the kind more typical in the mid 20C than the 21C. "By the standards of our great-grandfathers — that is, with a little work here and there, a big garden, a fishing pole, and some venison in the freezer — there’s never been a better time to try to 'make it' in America and live the older version of the American Dream" (2,600 words)

Nomido is the Browser's daily word game. Play today's before it's gone!

The Noble Rhubarb

RJ Evans | Kuriositas | 29th May 2025

Easily mistaken for a triffid, Rheum nobile is a peculiar and fascinating plant. It grows up to two metres tall in a high altitude Himalayan habitat where other plants stay close to the ground. It forms a conical tower of translucent leaves which together act as a natural glasshouse for the flowers and fruit inside. The stems even contain a clear liquid that hikers and yak herders enjoy drinking (1,000 words)

Three Years Of Extremely Remote Work

Brendan Gregg | 22nd May 2025

What it's like to work remotely from another continent. This worker is based in Australia while employed by a US company. He attends a lot of meetings at 2am. Weekends are shifted, because his Saturday morning is his colleagues' Friday afternoon. It is career-limiting — he is "out of sight, out of mind". Too many early mornings upset the stomach. But being where you want to be is worth it (1,400 words)

Nomido is the Browser's daily word game. Play today's before it's gone!

The Top 10 Worst Beatles Songs

Blake Butler | Dividual | 28th May 2025

This list's compiler is not a fan of the band he describes as "basically the Backstreet Boys of the 1950s". The opening of "Here Comes The Sun" is reminiscent of "waking up in a coffee commercial". "Good Day Sunshine" reveals that there is "something so Apple commercial about whenever the Beatles do vocal harmonies". Only "Yellow Submarine" is "so bad it’s almost good depending on your mood" (2,000 words)

DOGE Days

Sahil Lavingia | 28th May 2025

Diary of an engineer at the "Department of Government Efficiency". Initially enthusiastic about joining a "revolutionary force" that would help people, he soon ran into problems. DOGE had no direct authority and only operated at the whim of Trump's appointees. There was no team culture, little information sharing, and even his laptop barely worked. On day 55, he was unexpectedly let go (1,500 words)

Nomido is the Browser's daily word game. Play today's before it's gone!

The Stipend

Deb Olin Unferth | Paris Review | 27th May 2025

On the mental burden of an academic research stipend, which provided "a few grand a year" for five years that could only be spent on certain items by navigating a labyrinthine expenses process. Only books were easy to claim for. And so the recipient bought books: so many books that they took over her house. Still the stipend remained. Eventually, she went to the Arctic, just to get rid of the money (2,200 words)

The Two Achilles Heels Of Complex Systems

The Honest Sorcerer | 25th May 2025

Electric grids exemplify two vulnerabilities in all manmade complex systems: tight coupling and the limits of human comprehension. Cascading collapses happen within seconds of things going slightly wrong, as with the blackout in the Iberian peninsula. “We are lurching towards a post-electric world, where national grids will gradually become unaffordable, and be broken down into smaller local grids” (3,500 words)

Nomido is the Browser's daily word game. Play today's before it's gone!

Ice Sculpted Canada

Tomas Pueyo | Uncharted Territories | 13th May 2025

“In the far north, it rains less. The ice sheets dig deep holes into the ground, strip the sediments away, leaving the soil bare, which tends to produce hills and valleys. The stripped land is more hermetic. Water stays there and ponds. The ice pushes the mantle down. When it melts, the land bounces back unevenly, forming peaks and valleys. This is why Canada hosts 60% of all of the world’s lakes” (2,500 words)

Life’s Ancient Bottleneck

Jack Lohmann | Quillette | 21st May 2025

On the role played by phosphorus in the continuation of life. It is one of six elements that is absolutely essential, and the most scarce. "Because of its rarity, it controls life — it determines who grows and shrinks, who lives and dies, what areas become biologically wealthy and which ones will be biologically poor." The phosphorus we contain originally came from molten lava that became rock, then soil (1,900 words)

Nomido is the Browser's daily word game. Play today's before it's gone!

Three Encounters In Taipei

Winnie Lim | 11th May 2025

Closely observed travel writing about a trip to Taiwan, told in three vignettes. Written, the writer says, solely to solidify her own memories. "Is this taiwanese hospitality? I cannot tell you how many times we were told unpleasantly we cannot dine outdoors even when there were actual tables because nobody wants to service that area. This is an exceptional experience that I will always remember" (1,100 words)

The Era Of The Business Idiot

Edward Zitron | Where's Your Ed At? | 21st May 2025

Critique of today's business leaders, who are so detached from reality that they don't participate in the very economy from which they seek to profit. "Everything is dominance, acquisition, growth and possession over any lived experience, because their world is one where the journey doesn’t matter, because their journeys are riddled with privilege and the persecution of others in the pursuit of success" (13,400 words)

Nomido is the Browser's daily word game. Play today's before it's gone!

The Terrible Truth About Sherita

Debbie Nathan & Alyssa Katz | The City | 19th May 2025

Sherita, "a hot-pink brontosaurus with a long neck and a face that looked part amphibian, part simian and mostly saucy young woman", was once a familiar sight on Brooklyn billboards. Without context, she became a hipster icon, replicated in tattoos and drag shows. In fact, those billboards were part of a systematic real estate manipulation operation that targeted desirable industrial buildings (6,000 words)

Can We Trust Social Science Yet?

Ryan Briggs | Asterisk | 20th May 2025

Using evidence to arrive at policy decisions seems obviously right. But would the world improve if decision makers based their choices solely on the "evidence" produced by economists and political scientists? Most likely not. The reason being that even the top social science journals still regularly publish research that is wildly inaccurate, a product of a system that seems to be rigged for failure (4,100 words)

Nomido is the Browser's daily word game. Play today's before it's gone!

The Fleeing To Europe Industrial Complex

Kate Wagner | Late Review | 18th May 2025

Astute analysis of a rising tide of "just get out of America" commentary. Those advocating flight are mostly not trying to help, but rather to instil fear or sell a relocation consultancy service (sometimes both). Which is not to say that emigrating is an invalid choice; it isn't. Being honest about it is the right thing to do, though. Acknowledge how much it costs. Or stay and use the cash to help (3,100 words)

We’re All Viennese Now

Ian Leslie | The Ruffian | 17th May 2025

Fin-de-siècle Vienna might beat all other cities for its great impact on world culture. It was a famously nervous place full of “intense over-thinkers, overstrung status-seekers, apocalyptic doomers. Suicide was aestheticised and competitive. Vienna’s intellectually inclined inhabitants had the sense of living in a city of brittle illusions, increasingly detached from the rest of rapidly industrialising Europe” (1,900 words)

Nomido is the Browser's daily word game. Play today's before it's gone!

Superstition In A Godless State

Ansel Li | Sinopsis | 13th May 2025

Post-pandemic China is seeing a “tidal wave of superstition” among the young and educated. Astrology, tarot, and crystals are popular, despite government crackdowns. In 2021, China banned religious content on e-commerce sites and restricted spiritual services. The market adapted. Now, tarot readers call themselves “emotional consultants”; horoscope sellers have moved to platforms like Discord (2,200 words)