When The Lore Defeated The Law

David Allen Green | Law And Policy Blog | 1st January 2025

Until the 1700s, the English legal and political establishments enforced a calendar in which the 25th March was the first day of the year. Most official instruments, including laws, contracts and wills, reflected this. But ordinary people just kept celebrating the new year's arrival on 1st January, and in 1750 the officials gave up and passed an Act of Parliament making this "lore" official law (600 words)

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H5N1: More Than You Wanted To Know

Scott Alexander | Astral Codex Ten | 1st January 2025

Enter any conversation about the possibility of a global bird flu pandemic with confidence after reading this primer on the history of influenzas, the pathogens involved in H5N1, and its potential impact on our lives and health. It's already a pandemic in birds and cows, and the writer forecasts a 5 per cent chance of a sustained pandemic in the human population in the next year (4,500 words)

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The Heroic Industry Of The Brothers Grimm

David Mason | Hudson Review | 8th November 2024

The lives of Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm have become surrounded by legend to the point that they seem like "quaint Hobbit-like creatures trawling the peasantry for stories". The biography under review here rather casts them as "complicated heroes" in troubled times. Beset by aristocratic patrons in the dying years of the Holy Roman Empire, their labour produced results against the odds (3,700 words)

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The World Of Tomorrow

Virginia Postrel | Works In Progress | 5th December 2024

In the mid 20C, imagined versions of the future as depicted in exhibitions, films, novels and more were glamorous. A utopian combination of effortless, rapid transportation, idealised urban life, technological solutions for domestic drudgery and avant-garde fashions informed a bold, sleek, silvery design aesthetic. And yet, when the 21C arrived, it looked nothing like this. What happened? (6,300 words)

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The First Billion Years Comes Into View

Rebecca Boyle | Quanta | 9th October 2024

The "firehose" of new, bright images from the James Webb Space Telescope is not even fully open yet. Much of what we have seen so far is strange. "Galaxy size, brightness, mass and shape are all weird. Black holes are weird. The efficiency of star formation is weird; the correlation between brightness, astronomical power and an object’s mass are not as astrophysicists expected" (3,900 words)

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The Survival Skills Of Helena Valero

Tove K | Wood From Eden | 30th September 2024

Valero is "one of the most important anthropologists of the 20C". Of indigenous and European ancestry, she was kidnapped at the age of 11 in 1937. For the next 19 years she survived among sometimes violent uncontacted tribal groups in the Amazonas. She emerged in 1956 with her four sons and told her story to an Italian anthropologist. A decade later, she returned to live in the forest (6,000 words)

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The Augustinian Settlement

Nathan Goldwag | Goldwag’s Journal On Civilisation | 1st July 2024

Historians mark 27 BCE as the year the Roman Republic transitioned into the Roman Empire, when Augustus became its first Emperor — without actually establishing an “Empire” or the office of “Emperor”. The Republican system was retained, while a dynasty that would last centuries was formed. How was this done? Extraordinarily detailed account of the forces that shaped Rome’s turning point (3,600 words)

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Free At Last?

George Scialabba | Hedgehog Review | 16th August 2024

Wading into an old debate with new insights. “What is free will? Mitchell shows how our reasoning power evolved over billions of years; acting for reasons is our defining property. Sapolsky’s rejoinder is simple: Where do reasons come from? From childhood, our genome, ancestral culture, species history. It’s a rare intellectual confrontation: both sides deeply informed, fair-minded, incisively argued” (2,500 words)

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Research As Leisure Activity

Celine Nguyen | Personal Canon | 27th May 2024

“It's fundamentally personal, a style of research well-suited for people okay with being dilettantes, who are comfortable with an idiosyncratic, non-comprehensive education in a particular domain. It’s fine, better even, if the topic isn’t explicitly intellectual or academic. Research as leisure activity is exuberantly undisciplined, and isn’t constrained by disciplinary fiefdoms and schisms” (4,000 words)

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I Will Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again

Nikhil Suresh | Ludic | 19th June 2024

Data scientist's rage-filled refutation of AI boosters (contains strong language). "This entire class of person is, to put it simply, abhorrent to right-thinking people. They're an embarrassment to people that are actually making advances in the field, a disgrace to people that know how to sensibly use technology to improve the world, and should be thrown into Thought Leader Jail" (4,700 words)

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Big Gods

Brian Klaas | The Garden Of Forking Paths | 21st March 2024

Humans lived in small bands of fewer than a hundred people until 12,000 years ago, when large, complex civilisations emerged. What changed? The “Big Gods” theory holds that it is the belief in omniscient beings who watched and punished moral transgressions — “supernatural monitoring” which acted as social glue, preventing individuals from acting against the group’s interests (3,700 words)

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Secrets Of Japanese Urbanism

Noah Smith | Noahpinion | 26th March 2024

There are many: “Zakkyo” buildings — neon high-rises stacked with miscellaneous retailers; “pocket” neighbourhoods — mazes of streets and low-rise buildings shielded by large walls; mixed-use zoning aiding self-regulated residential areas. All of this is ideal for small businesses and makes for a varied urban life. Tokyo has 160,000 restaurants versus New York’s 25,000 or Paris’s 13,000 (3,200 words)

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Tools For Thinking About Censorship

Ada Palmer | Reactor | 21st February 2024

“The majority of censorship is self-censorship, but is intentionally cultivated by an outside power. Real censorship regimes see themselves as constantly underfunded and understaffed while attempting to seem all-reaching and all-knowing. Censorship aims to be visible, talked about, feared. This increases its power. We must cut through the Orwellian illusion and remember the realities” (4,400 words)

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Casting Light On Relief Map Shading

Felix Frey | Swiss National Museum | 9th January 2024

In 1927, Albert Heim denounced Switzerland’s official maps for a “lie that flew in the face of nature”: mountains were shaded as if lit from the northwest, where factually in Switzerland the sun shines from the south. The convention arose from the convenience of right-handed illustrators, as revealed by older maps where east is on the left and south is at the top but the shading stays the same (1,100 words)

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Hashtags And Hit Lists

Colin Wright | Reality’s Last Stand | 23rd December 2024

Public opinion has shifted towards accepting violence as a “legitimate response to perceived systemic injustices”, hitherto found in small extremist communities. A study shows that heavy social media use correlates with high justification rates for violence, mainly on platforms like Bluesky. A generational divide exists as well: people aged 18–27 largely endorsed the United Healthcare CEO’s murder (2,100 words)

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Let The Games Begin

Tolga İldun | Archaeology | 2nd November 2024

Gladiators in ancient Anatolia, unpacked. The games weren’t about killing; both participants mostly left the arena on their feet. There was a detailed set of rules, overseen by arbiters. They were often held in theatres, where they coexisted with other cultural activities. Wealthy aristocrats and religious officials sponsored games to curry public favour — easier than opening aqueducts (3,700 words)

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The Colour Of Memory

Grace Linden | Public Domain Review | 11th December 2024

The autochrome, invented by the Lumière brothers in 1903, transformed early colour photography. The camera had a glass negative covered in dyed grains, through which light would pass, creating a fully coloured image. “Autochromes always feel more real than reality. The blues are bluer, the reds brighter, what is faded is even more subdued. Everything appears to have been summoned from a dream” (4,000 words)

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Missing Links In American History Textbooks

Jim Mamer | Scheerpost | 15th September 2024

“High school American history textbooks contain virtually no dialogue between the present and the past.” Out of a desire to avoid controversy, they misrepresent the colonists’ encounters with Native Americans, and reasons for the Cold War. Often, they omit information altogether, like Chelsea Manning’s leak about human rights abuses in Iraq. “The result is highly diminished textbooks and students bored silly” (5,400 words)

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Who Will Own My Digital Twin?

Todd A. Carpenter | Scholarly Kitchen | 19th December 2024

If a company trains an AI model on an employee's output, can it continue to be used long after that person has resigned or died? "Companies are well positioned to continue to profit from the employee’s experience and intellectual contributions... The economic model in which the profits of intellectual labour are time-bound or even constrained is rapidly being transformed" (1,800 words)

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At Lady Violet’s

Hilary Spurling | Hudson Review | 8th November 2024

Zesty biographical essay about Violet Pakenham: writer, aristocrat and wife of Anthony Powell. She was a connoisseur of parties and the possessor of a profound talent for friendship. Closer examination proves her to have been no mere "social secretary and telephone receptionist", though. She acted as a "human index" to her husband's great work, the 12-volume A Dance to the Music of Time (4,300 words)

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