Podcast: I Know What You Know | KERA’s Think. Steven Pinker on the importance of common knowledge in maintaining the social contract (46m 18s)

Video: The Scythe | Vimeo | Fiona Jane Burgess | 4m 59s

Music video for a song about grief and love by British indie rock band The Last Dinner Party. The black and white film shows an older couple on a journey through the English countryside, quietly revelling in the closeness of their connection.

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Joint Review: Class

Jane Psmith & John Psmith | Mr And Mrs Psmith’s Bookshelf | 22nd September 2025

Book reviewers discuss Paul Fussell's 1983 work on the American class system, which divides US society into nine layers: "Top out-of-sight, upper, and upper middle classes all constituting relatively high, then middle class and three degrees of proletarian in the middle, with destitute and bottom out-of-sight at, well, the bottom." Class is a form of culture, determined by taste as much as by net worth (8,000 words)

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Death And The Gardener

Georgi Gospodinov, trans. Angela Rodel | LitHub | 2nd October 2025

Novel extract from the Booker-winning Bulgarian writer. A son reflects on his elderly father's later years and wonders if he should have visited more, stopped him working in his garden sooner, even though the plants were his friends. Told with spare prose and economy of expression. The opening line alone is an argument to read this novel: "My father was a gardener. Now he’s a garden" (1,400 words)

21 Facts About Throwing Good Parties

Uri Bram | Atoms Vs Bits | 22nd September 2025

Facilitating enjoyable and productive socialisation is a public service. People will likely feel less lonely and maybe, long-term relationships and children will result from your efforts. To host well, "prioritise your ease of being over any other consideration", make your start time quarter-to the hour, repeatedly emphasise to attendees that they will know other people there, and be sure to account for the "flake rate" (1,000 words)

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How I Read

Henrik Karlsson | Escaping Flatland | 1st October 2025

Notes on a personal reading system. Karlsson starts about 300 books a year, but only finishes around 50, skimming the rest before rejecting them as inferior candidates. He rarely carries a smartphone and turns off the internet when it isn't needed. The ability to read complex prose can be trained as if it is an endurance sport. LLMs, although imperfect, can help with unfamiliar vocabulary and concepts (2,600 words)

The Opposite Of The Opposite Of Loneliness

Evan Harkness-Murphy | Republic Of Letters | 29th September 2025

Commencement address for people who were sad in college. “For most of their lives they have felt something like homunculi; they look human and sound human, but they don’t have the instinctual wetware the others do, the gyri and special ventricles that somehow guide real people to friends, to grabbing something to eat after class, and to every social activity of increasing complexity outward from there” (2,200 words)

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Speaking Apartment

Jane Stern | Paris Review | 30th September 2025

On the woes of finding a new apartment. Includes, helpfully, a glossary of basic apartment speak — “Cozy: so small you will keep your clothes in a plastic box under the bed. Built-ins: previous tenants added weird cabinets and shelves you can never remove. Turnkey: way overpriced with the charm of a corporate office. Hidden gem: so far from any stores or schools the police can’t find it on their map” (1,700 words)

The Product Of The Railways Is The Timetable

Benedict Springbett | 26th September 2025 | U

The railways’ main offering to the public is the intricate mapping of space, time and networks distilled into a timetable. Both track infrastructure and the rolling stock of trains have to be planned around the timetable. When infrastructure is separated from operations, this link is broken. The two most successful railway systems in the world — Switzerland and Japan — understand this principle (1,900 words)

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Overcoming Our Politics Of War

David D. Corey | Law & Liberty | 24th September 2025 | U

Manifesto to abandon politics as war. People in pluralist societies “live radically different lives because they hold divergent ideas about what is good. Some treasure religious freedom. Others treasure economic freedom. Still others prize expressive freedom. The problem is that freedoms are not always compatible. The result is a perception that people who differ from us pose an existential threat” (2,000 words)

America Against China Against America

Jasmine Sun | Jasmi News | 28th August 2025

Notes on travelling in China, to Shenzhen, Hangzhou, Yuyao and Shanghai. "There’s a saying that 'After one week in China, you feel you could write a book. After one year, you think you could write an article. After ten years, you realize you know nothing.' Expats there are all addicted to the pace of change; everywhere else is slow in comparison.... China is a place where things actually happen" (6,900 words)

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In Defence Of Dan Brown

Brian Klaas | Garden Of Forking Paths | 26th September 2025 | U

The author of The Da Vinci Code is eccentric. He has his computer programmed to freeze for sixty seconds every hour so he can do push-ups and his prose is a paean to the dictum of "tell, don't show". He may not be a good writer but he is an effective one. Millions are entertained and intrigued by his books, which serve as a "gateway drug to untapped joys of the mind for less naturally committed readers" (2,400 words

Podcast: How Stigma Shapes Psychiatry | The HPS Podcast. Mental illnesses have frequently been stigmatised from the outside. This conversation focuses on stigma as shaping psychiatry from within, through the definition of psychiatric categories (26m 9s)

Video: O Solitude | YouTube | Brandon Acker | 5m 21s

Henry Purcell’s classic, soulfully rendered here by countertenor Reginald Mobley.

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Who's Getting Rich Off Your Attention?

Kyla Scanlon | Kyla's Newsletter | 24th September 2025

Reframing of political polarisation and outrage as a product of the manipulation of media market structures. Too few people own too many outlets."You can’t fact-check your way out of a system designed to reward misinformation. You can’t educate your way around algorithms optimised for polarisation. You can’t moderate your way past economic incentives that make confusion profitable" (2,600 words)

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Cure For The Fear of Death

Cyril Connolly | London Magazine | 15th August 2025

Logical demolition of morbid fear, written in 1949. "The opposite of fearing death is to love life, and the painful consideration of non-existence will be found to disappear when life is lived fully and to arise chiefly when apathy and fear of life exist as well. Lovers hardly fear death at all, which is why they can afford so closely to contemplate it. If you cannot cultivate love, then cultivate courage" (600 words)