Pablo Picasso’s Stunning Repetitions

Jillian Hess | Noted | 7th April 2025

Picasso was a master realist until the advent of photography. His response was “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon”, a painting that “set the art world on fire”. He carried out 809 preliminary studies and filled 16 different sketchbooks, moving from realistic representations to geometric forms, collapsing perspectives, using shapes that didn’t belong together — birthing what would become known as cubism (1,600 words)

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

Return Of The Dire Wolf

Jeffrey Kluger | Time | 7th April 2025

Bioscience company Colossal claims to have genetically engineered the birth of three dire wolves. With domestic dogs as surrogate mothers, 20 edits in the gray wolf’s genes were made to create the dire wolf, but the species differences are many: white coat, larger size and vocalisations — “a howl that hadn’t been heard on earth in over 10,000 years”. Efforts to create a woolly mammoth are underway (5,400 words)

Oh, Tariffs

Kyla Scanlon | 4th April 2025

Economist who coined the term “vibecession” demystifies tariffs. The US last imposed mass tariffs in 1828 and 1930, and “faced a deepening depression after each one”. “History shows that large-scale protectionism can backfire spectacularly. We could be staring at higher consumer costs, a potential trade war, and an economic slowdown. We’re not doomed, but the road ahead is bumpy” (4,100 words)

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

The Art Of Too Much

Graham McKay | Misfits’ Architecture | 6th April 2025

Ode to maximalism in Gio Ponti’s designs. “There’s an art to saying something with an economy of means but there’s also an art in using all the means at one’s disposal to create something equally simple. Every part of this bottle from 1949 is an opportunity for more design. These interiors are of their times and places but abundance never seems to go out of fashion. It’s what I mean about the art of excess” (1,400 words)

Small Countries Should Not Exist

Thomas R. Wells | 3 Quarks Daily | 4th April 2025

The collective population of the forty smallest sovereign states is only 20 million. These places are too small to have effective governments that can protect citizens against invasion or cope with natural disasters. Their economies are perpetually vulnerable. The one route to revenue is a by-product of their sovereignty: economic parasitism via money laundering, tax avoidance, golden passports, and more (1,200 words)

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

Something Unsettling About the Neighbours

Amie Souza Reilly | Electric Literature | 3rd April 2025

To hawk. To badger. To ferret. To peacock. To hog. To wolf. To fish. The list of animal nouns turned into verbs of physical action and violence is long. This linguistic investigation was inspired by a pair of very unpleasant neighbours: "The smirks, the repetitive door slamming, the dumped yard waste, the positions of their bodies as they stood in our yard and stared appeared to be strategic moves" (3,500 words)

Slow Fade Of The Formatting Fetish

Oliver Reichenstein | iA | 31st March 2025

Part love letter to Markdown syntax, part history of document formats. Interesting throughout, with the caveat that this is published by the makers of a Markdown app. Traditionally, file formats like .docx, .pptx, and .pdf were proprietary and intended to reinforce users' commercial relationships with paid software. They also instilled in us an obsession with fonts that has taken years to begin to fade (4,700 words)

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

The Department Of Everything

Stephen Akey | Hedgehog Review | 14th September 2024

Former librarian remembers his time working at the Telephone Reference Division of the Brooklyn Public Library in the 1980s. All sorts of people, from journalists and detectives to "park bench crazies" could call up and ask for "ready reference" facts. Each caller got five minutes or three questions. Answers were found by using "logic, inference, imagination, and a tall pile of reference books" (1,900 words)

Divorce Does Not Make You A Hero

Laura Limpus | Deez Links | 2nd April 2025

Polemical repudiation of "divorce literature", part of a series of provocations titled "Hate Read". This genre is not for women, and especially not for divorced women. "These authors say they want us to 'learn' from their mistakes, but really, they want us to witness their transformation from damsel in distress to hero, and then simultaneously pity them while also idolising their transcendence" (1,000 words)

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

William And Henry James

Peter Brooks | Paris Review | 1st April 2025

Book extract, focusing on the strained relationship between these two famous brothers. Henry was well used to his brother's rebuffs and harsh words — "the scenarios established in childhood don’t die" — and yet they still rankled. Responding to a needlessly brutal critique of The Golden Bowl, he wrote: "I’m always sorry when I hear of your reading anything of mine, & always hope you won’t" (2,400 words)

America’s Missing Men

Amber Lapp | Commonplace | 27th March 2025

Intimate look at the lives of young men in Ohio, which ranks third in the US for deaths of despair. “Social commentators today emphasise personal and political rights and freedoms. But our current moment makes little sense without understanding the yearning for interior freedom. For the working-class young men I know, there is a political apathy until this more basic freedom is better secured” (3,700 words)

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

Silica Gel Took Over The World

Spencer Wright | Scope Of Work | 31st March 2025

They are everywhere: a new pair of sneakers, a packet of potato chips, 3D printer filaments — tiny pouches seemingly the only thing keeping our food and belongings fresh and mold-free. Silica gel beads work by filtering water vapour out of the air. The farther a product is shipped, the more temperature and pressure changes it goes through. Silica gel is a cheap, easy and reliable way to control humidity (2,100 words)

The Mysterious Sinking Of The Bayesian

Floriana Bulfon | Newlines | 31st March 2025

The deaths of British tycoon Mike Lynch, his daughter and five others aboard the megayacht Bayesian are an unsolved mystery. A storm erupted in a placid corner of the Sicilian Gulf, sinking the “unsinkable” yacht with advanced safety systems in minutes. A smaller, older sailing vessel 100 yards away suffered no damage. Lynch was celebrating his acquittal after a year of house arrest for fraud (4,800 words)

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

Want Abundance In Housing?

Reihan Salam | City Journal | 27th March 2025

Housing shortages have priced the middle-classes out of neighbourhoods. The rising abundance movement is built on rejecting the politics of scarcity to embrace growth and change. Yet their stances “directly undercut housing abundance” and drive up rents. “Development is fine — as long as it’s architecturally distinguished, eco-friendly, priced well below cost, and morally immaculate” (1,400 words)

Who’s Boring Now?

Nelson Reed | The Flaw | 26th October 2024

Three aspects of boredom — it is bad, experienced individually and distributed equally — have helped corporations "weaponise" it for profit. These are the mechanisms that keep us scrolling, watching, shopping. But what if the people took boredom back? "Boredom can signal that what we are doing at that moment is not meaningful... It doesn’t have to be an opiate. It can be a smelling salt" (4,800 words)

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

A Walk Down Victoria Street

Samuel Hughes | Works In Progress | 28th March 2025

Rarely seen by tourists, this thoroughfare provides a superb slice of urban history — "an unusually complete panorama of London’s inner-urban mid-rise architecture over the last 200 years". A walk from Parliament Square to Victoria Station passes the Neo-Byzantine Westminster Cathedral, a zone of "overwhelming ugliness", and some signs that British design is recovering from its 20C nadir (3,700 words)

Podcast: Kapitia Skink | Bad At Goodbyes. A series dedicated to critically endangered flora and fauna takes a look at this rare reptile found on the South Island of New Zealand (29m 41s)

Video: Sunset On The Lunar Surface | YouTube | Firefly Aerospace | 1m 00s

Images of what sunset looks like from the moon, captured on 16th March 2025 by a lunar lander carrying out NASA research.