I Hate That I Love You

Chiara Bressan | Mapping Ignorance | 20th November 2024

On the neuroscience of heartbreak. Dopamine and norepinephrine levels rise as attraction is frustrated. The stress of separation suppresses serotonin, which adds to the feeling of being "high on love" as it is taken away. Aggression and rage set in as the brain processes the abandonment, followed by despair. The brain pathways are similar to those when recovering from substance addiction (1,100 words)

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On Bonfire Night

Sam Jennings | Hinternet | 21st November 2024

Argument for great literature as a social good, woven into a fictional speech delivered at 5th November festivities. Oddly charming. "Why would I give up this belief so easily? Why wouldn’t I be like some early Christian, looking around at my culture and beginning to conceive of ways to show people what I’ve experienced— what I believe to be the deep, spiritual truth of my transformation?" (3,500 words)

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The Super-Rich And Their Secret Worlds

Isobel Cockerell | Coda | 19th November 2024

Interview about the hidden spaces and loopholes used by the ultra-wealthy to skirt laws and norms. Digital courtrooms, ships with creative flags of convenience, freeports, diplomatic compounds, tax havens, charter cities — these are all considered. "If you look at the map of the world, you’ll see 192 countries. But what isn’t shown is all the stuff in between and above and beneath" (2,000 words) | Share this on X

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November 17, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters From An American | 18th November 2024

At noon on Sunday 18th November 1883, the railroads of the United States changed time. Having previously operated in a confusing muddle of 53 different time schedules, on this day they all moved to a standardised set of five time zones. Clocks moved everywhere: forward 16 minutes in Boston, back four in New York, and forward six minutes and twenty-eight seconds in Baltimore (850 words) | Share this on X

Podcast: Risky Science And Public Consent | Entanglements. Determining the role that democratic processes should play in high-risk science, like gain-of-function research. One proposal is something akin to jury duty for citizen deliberations on thorny issues (28m 23s) | Share this on X

Video: Australia’s Cassowaries | YouTube | ABC Science | 6m 29s

How deadly can they be? Quite, as entertainingly explained here. | Share this on X

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A Case Against The Placebo Effect

Literal Banana | Carcinisation | 13th November 2024

Evidence does not support the scientific consensus that the placebo effect is a real healing effect. “A placebo pill has almost no effect when administered by researchers who do not care about the placebo effect, but the same pill has an enormous effect when administered by a researcher who wants it to be real. The most parsimonious explanation is that it is the research practices, rather than the placebo” (17,500 words) | Share this on X

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What’s Wrong With My Wine?

Dan Keeling | Esquire | 15th November 2024

It’s not you, it’s the wine. No matter how expert the sommelier or how expensive the wine, it can go bad in a multitude of ways. Like “mouse taint”, a bacterial infection from rotten grapes detected when the drinker’s saliva activates its aromas. Or too much oxygen, which at the wrong time turns wine into vinegar. Or heat damage. Just request another bottle. “You won’t be the jerk at the table — you’ll be the hero” (1,600 words) | Share this on X

The End Of The 20th Century

Jason Steinhauer | History Club | 10th November 2024

If the “Long 20th Century” began in 1920 with a world emerging from the wreckage of WWI, it ended in November 2024 when Donald Trump was elected for a second term. The systems that have ordered the world for the past hundred years have been replaced. The candidate who knows how to become "a meme for the infinite scroll of social media" is the one who triumphs (3,700 words) | Share this on X

Porygon Was Innocent

AJ | Anime Feminist | 13th November 2024

Over 600 children were hospitalised in December 1997 after suffering seizures following the broadcast of an episode of Pokémon that included a scene with flashing lights. The so-called "Pokémon Shock" was much mocked internationally, but the Japanese TV station hired a UK neurology expert to develop a test to make sure this could never happen again — a test that is still in use (2,500 words)| Share this on X

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Why Luxury Cheese Is Targeted By Criminals

Dan Saladino | BBC News | 10th November 2024 | U

In October 2024, 950 cheddas truckles worth £35,000 were stolen from an artisanal retailer in London, the latest in a string of such crimes. Lorries have been hijacked on the road and live lobsters abducted from a facility in Scotland. Prices for high-end foods are soaring and Russia retaliated to economic sanctions by banning fresh food imports, supercharging the black market (2,300 words) | Share this on X

The Problem Of Thinking Too Much

Persi Diaconis & Barry C. Mazur | Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences | 11th December 2002 | PDF

Decision theorist interrogates his concerns that earnest analysis leads to a total loss of contact with the original problem. Part of this paper is a case study, in which his idle curiosity about whether coin flips can be predicted spirals into hours of experimentation, all for no appreciable illumination. The conclusion? When in doubt, don't think too much and follow the rule of thumb (3,500 words) | Share this on X

The First Virtual Meeting Was In 1916

Allison Marsh | IEEE Spectrum | 13th November

Almost a century before there was Zoom, 5,000 electrical engineers in eight US cities across four time zones took part in a virtual meeting that was "a triumph of engineering". Each auditorium was linked by telephone, with handsets for listening at each seat. A telegram from Woodrow Wilson, a welcome by Alexander Graham Bell, and local musical interludes enlivened the proceedings (1,500 words) | Share this on X

Maximising Time For Reading

Blake Butler | Dividual | 11th November 2024

To cultivate a habit of regular reading, it is necessary to read more. A truism, perhaps, but not untrue. Reading a single page at a time counts. Keep a book of poetry in the car or beside the toilet. Read with the TV on mute during the adverts. Don't only read books by dead people, or people from your own country, but do be picky about what you read. In an age of output, input still matters (3,600 words) | Share this on X

Carl Jung’s Midlife-Crisis Notebooks

Jillian Hess | Noted | 11th November 2024 | U

At the peak of his life, Jung began to experience psychotic visions: “a monstrous yellow flood bearing garbage and corpses piling up against the Alps”. Despairing, he began to write them down in his famous Black Books, “trying to get at what exists when we turn off our consciousness”. In the process, he developed some of his most influential theories, of the archetypes and the collective unconscious (2,200 words) | Share this on X

Seeds Of Hope

Simon Parkin | Guardian | 12th November 2024 | U

How do you protect a precious food source in a famine? During the siege of Leningrad, the botanists managing the world’s first seed bank showed by heroic example, protecting a vast collection from fire, voracious rodents, and hunger. At least 19 staff members died. “It wasn’t difficult not to eat the collection. It was impossible to eat this, your life’s work, the work of the lives of your colleagues” (4,700 words) | Share this on X

Visualising The Past

Nathan Goldwag | Goldwag’s Journal On Civilisation | 26th October 2024

On the maps that newspapers featured to help their readers follow the course of WWII. In the wake of Blitzkrieg, the LA Times had a cut-and-preserve map of the theatre of war. Details included potential rail and sea corridors from the Allied powers to Poland, naval bases, fortifications, and the aerial distance between cities, “as the artist tried to grapple with the new kind of warfare still being born” (3,000 words) | Share this on X

Hemingway And The Good Samaritan

William E. Cain | Slant Books | 11th November 2024

Hemingway wrote on the “principle of the iceberg — 1/8th above the surface, 7/8th below”. He excelled at this demanding aesthetic, showing writers “how to use the silences between words”. An overlooked influence in Hemingway’s “art of omission” is the King James Bible. “A good writer knows what not to say, an insight he absorbed from years of experience reading and listening to the Bible” (1,400 words) | Share this on X

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) | Share this on X

What It’s Like To Experience Polar Night

Cecilia Blomdahl | Smithsonian | 17th October 2024

In Longyearbyen, the world's northernmost settlement, the Earth's tilted axis means that the sun stays hidden for almost three months of the year. The inhabitants of the polar island of Svalbard largely enjoy this seasonal plunge into darkness, strapping on their headlamps and enjoying the crisp scent of snow. "Life in the darkness seems to follow a slower, more relaxed rhythm" (1,500 words) | Share this on X