Aria Schrecker | Works In Progress | 10th February 2026
“There are several measures by which humans are strangely long-lived: size, heart rate, and reproductive window. In general, the more intelligent the species, the longer its lifespan. The average lifespan of a species, across all kingdoms of organisms, tends to increase as it gets bigger. But longevity has tradeoffs, and many of the super-long-lived creatures make big sacrifices to achieve their lifespans” (4,500 words)
On how people living in a culture synchronise their behaviour in arbitrary and self-reinforcing ways — examples ranging from train-boarding in Japan and Italy to English sarcasm. “The basic force behind all culture formation is imitation. This ability is innate in all humans, regardless of culture: we are extraordinarily good imitators. Indeed, we are overimitators, sometimes with unfortunate consequences” (2,900 words)
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Sebastian Stockman | Saturday Letter | 8th February 2026
Memories of a friend who died at the age of only 43. Dan McQuade was a sportswriter in Pennsylvania and a connoisseur of "life’s inconveniences and absurd juxtapositions". This writer met him in college and ever since they had shared a deep love of the "bad lede", the opening paragraph of an article that deploys layers of inappropriately tortured metaphor. Several excellent examples are given (1,100 words)
Editor's note: we apologise for the recent bug in the system! Nomido is back, and with a new meta-challenge: instead of finding a phrase of the day, find four words that share a theme.
Rossetti, Woolf et al | Common Reader | 9th February 2026
As the curator here rightly says, "there is no indifference to Wuthering Heights". Critics have been delighting in or deploring Emily Brontë's only novel since it was first published in 1847. One anonymous reviewer from 1848 considered it to be the author's devilish cheese dream. Dante Gabriel Rossetti thought it a "fiend of a book". Swinburne called it a poem. F.R. Leavis declared Emily Brontë a genius (4,000 words)
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Paul Bloom | Small Potatoes | 9th February 2026 | U
Notes on a post-scarcity utopia. It is oft-said that if all our material needs were satisfied, humans would suffer from ennui and loss of purpose. Struggle gives life meaning — or does it? In a world without want, positional goods, which mark one’s status relative to others, would still matter. The desire to matter in some way and to someone would still remain. Attention itself is a positional good (3,100 words)
Meagan Bojarski | Mental Floss | 10th February 2026 | U
Many languages bias people against left-handedness. In Latin, right is “dexter” and left is “sinister”, which acquired its association with evil in later usage. In Arabic and Hindi, the word for left also denotes “easy”, implying that a task must be easy to be done by the left hand. A clumsy person has “two left feet” in English. “Left luck” denotes bad luck; “getting up with the left foot” is connected to a bad day (1,600 words)
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George McGowan | Mindless Algorithm | 8th February 2026 | U
Science fiction has warped our ideas of how a visit to Earth from aliens might go. Just to get here from the nearest star, let alone further afield, said aliens would have to be far more technologically advanced than us. Unless they wanted us to know, we might not even be aware of their presence. "There is no 'war' and we don't even necessarily realise what is happening. They don't land infantry with laser guns" (1,200 words)
Profile of one Michael van Erp, better known as "Cycling Mikey". When he was 19, his father was killed by a drunk driver. Ever since, he's been trying to catch road offenders in the act. As a "cycling vigilante" who shares his footage with both the Met and his thousands of followers, he is proud to say that he has pulled in £168,568 in fines. His nemesis is a lawyer known as "Mr Loophole" (2,700 words)
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Patrick McKenzie | Bits About Money | 6th February 2026 | U
Thoughts on fraud. Fraudsters tend to repeat themselves: "The dominant next adventure for a former fraudster is… opening up a new fraud." They share the same supply chain and professional services firms. They employ family and close friends, because they need loyalty in the face of threatened prison time. Properly investigating fraud is a vital but underrated function of a healthy democracy (6,700 words)
Writer recalls her bad memories of a traumatic time in nursery school in 1970s Beijing — four-year-olds were threatened with hammers — and finds parallels to 21C politics. "A friend in London talks about the mystifying phrase she keeps hearing these days: ‘This is not America, this is not who we are.’ But this is America, this is life, and this is how human beings behave. American exceptionalism will not save us" (600 words)
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Five Books features in-depth author interviews recommending five books on a theme. You can read more interviews on the site, or sign up for the newsletter.
Heroic explorer or harbinger of doom? The impact of Christopher Columbus has become the focus of intense debate—in both academia and the arena of popular opinion—in recent years. We asked noted scholar of colonial Latin American history Matthew Restall to recommend five of the best books that explore Columbus's life and legacy. Read more
In order to have fewer failed projects, we need to address some of the deep structural incentives in the system, argues Jonathan Simcock, who spent 16 years leading and advising on large UK government projects. He talks us through books to read to understand more about big projects and why they go wrong, and how to do better in future. Read more
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Madysan Weatherspoon | Fascinating World | 29th January 2026 | U
In 1970, a Japan Airlines flight from Tokyo to Fukuoka was hijacked by nine university students who wanted to start a Marxist revolution. They ordered the pilots to fly to Cuba, seen then as a utopia by communists. But their Boeing 727 could not fly that far without refuelling. So the hijackers pivoted to North Korea. This gave the Japanese authorities the chance to plan a masterly deception and rescue (1,200 words)
Turner Brooks | Paris Review | 4th February 2026 | U
Account of a young architect's obsession with the New Haven, Connecticut, coke plant. It was 1966 and the J.M.W. Turner-esque cloud of steam that the factory produced — "so thick it looked like one could climb into it" — was mesmerising. He started making nocturnal visits to stare at the giant mechanised ovens, each seventy-five feet deep, that transformed coal into coke. Highly evocative writing (1,300 words)
The tech singularity — the point at which technology becomes a black hole of self-perpetuating creations — “will always appear as if it is about to happen”. “The singularity is simply a phantom that will materialise anytime you observe exponential acceleration retrospectively. In a thousand years from now, all the 11-dimensional charts at that time will show that ‘the singularity is near’” (2,400 words)
Chris Arnade | Chris Arnade Walks The World | 3rd February 2026 | U
There is an "expanding sterility" to 21C life. Instead of ordering food from humans, we use a frustrating app. Getting a flight rebooked traps us in a maze of chatbots. The doctrine of hyper efficiency has both made us less efficient and sucked the soul out of day-to-day interactions. Machines are good at many tasks, but not at interacting with humans. It's a mistake to outsource that work to them (3,000 words)
Paul Sagar | Diary Of A Punter | 1st February 2026 | U
Climber ponders the fall that left him tetraplegic with bitter honesty. “I took more risks than most. But there are others who took far, far more than I ever would have dreamed of.” One of those risks was free solo climbing, a controversial topic even amongst climbers. Why did he do it? His best explanation is akrasia — “situations in which a person apparently acts against their own professed best judgement” (3,300 words)
Chris Arnade | Chris Arnade Walks The World | 3rd February 2026
There is an "expanding sterility" to 21C life. Instead of ordering food from humans, we use a frustrating app. Getting a flight rebooked traps us in a maze of chatbots. The doctrine of hyper efficiency has both made us less efficient and sucked the soul out of day-to-day interactions. Machines are good at many tasks, but not at interacting with humans. It's a mistake to outsource that work to them (3,000 words)
Science fiction is just that — fiction. The ships in Star Trek and Star Wars run on magic, not engineering. "Expecting science to develop real warp drives, hyperspace or wormhole travel is asking it to utterly break the fundamental laws of the universe, no different than expecting to someday have a time machine, or a portal to a parallel dimension." Yet the belief persists that we will one day colonise the stars (2,900 words)
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There are two conversational dogmas: the Church of Interruption and the Church of Strong Civility. Interrupters speak until interrupted, breaking in on others when they understand the point being made. Their counterparts speak briefly, using physical cues to indicate that they'd like to speak next. Everyone belongs to one or the other. Conversation is easy within each church, but hard across the divide (900 words)
Account of a young architect's obsession with the New Haven, Connecticut, coke plant. It was 1966 and the J.M.W. Turner-esque cloud of steam that the factory produced — "so thick it looked like one could climb into it" — was mesmerising. He started making nocturnal visits to stare at the giant mechanised ovens, each seventy-five feet deep, that transformed coal into coke. Highly evocative writing (1,300 words)
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The tech singularity — the point at which technology becomes a black hole of self-perpetuating creations — “will always appear as if it is about to happen”. “The singularity is simply a phantom that will materialise anytime you observe exponential acceleration retrospectively. In a thousand years from now, all the 11-dimensional charts at that time will show that ‘the singularity is near’” (2,400 words)
Antonio Melechi | MIT Press Reader | 2nd February 2026 | U
Miscellaneous reflections on the intriguing “borderlands between sleep and wakefulness”. When French President Paul Deschanel found himself wandering at night along a railway line several miles south of Paris, bloody-faced and disoriented, nobody could confirm what had precipitated the episode. Could the sleepwalker be considered to have a nocturnal self that can act independently? (2,400 words)
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Part product guide, part explainer. The feeling of being tear gassed while reporting on a protest is "excruciating, like your lungs are trying to kill you from the inside out", but after it has happened a few times "you mostly just resent the inconvenience". A good gas mask covers the whole face, is very durable, and is comfortable enough to wear for long periods without chafing at the face or hair (2,200 words)
Twelve-year-old casts a critical eye over the tech involved in his education. Instructors can cast presentations onto students' personal computers, track their grades and assignments, set them videos to watch, and annotate material on interactive whiteboards. The verdict? "I don’t necessarily feel like any of them really help me learn." AI is forbidden for students but teachers can and do use it (1,200 words)
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Five Books features in-depth author interviews recommending five books on a theme. You can read more interviews on the site, or sign up for the newsletter.
The Holy Roman Empire was a loose confederation of heterogeneous states that lasted a thousand years, from 800 to 1806. In the early modern period, it developed some common institutions, but these failed to contain the forces of disunity. Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, a professor of history at the University of Münster, recommends books to learn more about an empire that played a key role in European history but is often absent from national narratives. Read more
It's an ideal combination: literary ambition and a rollicking good plot packed with intrigue and drama. We asked deputy editor Cal Flyn to pull together a list of five Booker Prize-nominated mystery novels, from an astrologically-inspired murder mystery set in goldrush-era New Zealand to an unusually intellectual noir starring a jaded reporter in rustbelt America. Read more
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