The Weird World Sauna Championships

Sarah Everts | Walrus | 14th November 2025

If you thought sauna-ing was more about relaxation than competition, think again. At the world sauna theatre championships, competitors stage performances in saunas, complete with music, costumes, acrobatics and fancy towel-twirling. Some write their own stories, others adapt from other media (one entrant this year did Peaky Blinders). Judges award marks for both artistry and technical difficulty (2,300 words)

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What Is A Production Process?

Brian Potter | Construction Physics | 13th November 2025

Anything that isn't taken straight from nature and used in that form has some sort of production process. This useful essay maps this onto a simplified model comprised of five universal factors, from the transformation method used to turn materials into a product to the costs associated with doing so. To improve efficiency, one or more of these factors must become cheaper and/or faster (4,200 words)

Podcast: Liberal Values In Authoritarian Times | The Good Fight. Conversation on authoritarianism in fiction and real life (56m 30s)

Video: My Love-Hate Relationship With Porcelain | YouTube | Florian Gadsby | 15m 51s

A visual essay by a potter about returning to throwing with porcelain clay after several years of using only stoneware. The only thing more mesmerising than his footage of work on the wheel is his speaking voice.

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Woolrich’s Window

Adrian McKinty | CrimeReads | 13th November 2025

On the work of Cornell Woolrich, who provided the "narrative DNA for some of Hollywood’s greatest thrillers". Hitchcock's Rear Window was based on his 1942 story “It Had to Be Murder”. Although he moved the action to Greenwich Village, the claustrophobic style came from Woolrich's years living with his ailing mother on the top floor of the unfashionable Hotel Marseilles at 103rd and Broadway (1,300 words)

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The Gallery Of Maladies

Kate Wagner | Late Review | 6th November 2025

Wonderful essay about experiencing a combination of hypochondria, Long Covid and more generalised health paranoia. "With symptoms so severe, a diagnosis of mere anxiety... seems to its victim insulting. This is one of many tragedies of the hypochondriac, that they defend themselves against the prospect of recovery by flattening an ailment into an emotion or worse, a conspiracy" (5,700 words)

James Watson, Dead At 97

Sharon Begley | Stat10 | 7th November 2025

Begley died in 2021 but left this "B-side" obituary of Watson to be published upon his death. She did not hold back. "His signal achievements, and the way he accomplished them, inflated his belief not only in his genius but also in how to succeed: by listening to his intuition, by opposing the establishment consensus, and by barely glancing at the edifice of facts on which a scientific field is built" (2,000 words)

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A Tale Of Three Chatbots

Cory Doctorow | Pluralistic | Date | 11th November 2025

Customer service is the place to look to understand our AI future. This aspect of business has always been a drain on profits, which is why it has become gradually worse over the past two decades via outsourced call centres staffed by people who have no authority to help customers. The friction, the sludge, is the point because it makes us give up. AI chatbots are the sludgiest sludge of all (1,500 words)

Where Do The Children Play?

Eli Stark-Elster | Unpublishable Papers | 7th November 2025

In most human societies, children have preferred to spend their time playing and exploring with peers in a world separate from adults and their scrutiny. The anthropological evidence for this pattern is rich and widespread. Deprived of this critical phase of unsupervised exploration, the internet has become the only place left where children today "can grow up without adults" (3,100 words)

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What Is The Ozma Problem?

Maloy Das | Fascinating World | 1st November 2025

How do you explain right and left to someone using language alone, without a show of hands or pictures? Kant used handedness to weigh in on the great scientific debates about the nature of space. A hand floating in space, though identical in every possible way to its counterpart, can only be either a right hand or a left hand. “The intrinsic quality of handedness is impossible to explain without showing” (1,500 words)

What Socialism Got Right

Kristen Ghodsee | MIT Press Reader | 6th November 2025

Historian of post-Communism, while acknowledging the enormous harms of the various 20C regimes, enumerates the benefits that are now vanishing under capitalism. These include a powerful sense of community, accessible and subsidised cultural life, improved workplace equality for women and planned neighbourhoods with civic amenities. These are lessons, not political heresy, she argues (1,500 words)

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Unparalleled Misalignments

Ricki Heicklen | 1st January 2018

Continually updated list of unparalleled misalignments, defined by the compiler as "pairs of non-synonymous phrases where the words in one phrase are each synonyms of the words in the other". For example: each word of "American Art" corresponds to that of "Yankee Doodle", but the phrases themselves don't match. Other gems include "father figure/dad bod" and "dark matter/midnight mass" (3,300 words)

Podcast: The Economics Of The Baby Bust | Works In Progress Podcast. Interview with an economic professor about global fertility rates. The Japanese mode of population decline could be the best case scenario (83m 20s)

Video: How Marlon Brando Changed Acting | YouTube | Nerdwriter1 | 9m 57s

Before Brando, actors were trained to perform theatrically, prioritising “instantly legible emotions for the audience”. His gestures and signature mumble reflected a radical departure from this style.

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You Have To Do The Living Yourself

Oliver Burkeman | The Imperfectionist | 30th October 2025

A self-described "recovering personal-development obsessive" lays to rest the idea that there will ever be one easy hack that will "fix" a life. The answers are internal, not external. "It’s a matter of coming back and back and back to the question of what you could do right now that would constitute living the way you aspire to live." Values, not tricks, are what makes a life feel fulfilling in the long term (1,200 words)

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Bible Sales And Chipotle Explain The Economy

Kyla Scanlon | Kyla's Newsletter | 30th October 2025

The US economy has become a casino and monetary policy is now just a mood ring trying to manipulate how people feel about it. "Apparently, the invisible hand also deals cards." Everything has become transactional. Bible sales are way up but church attendance is way down. For everyone other than the super-wealthy, everything is a gamble — their attention, their time and their faith (2,000 words)

What Is A Manifold?

Paulina Rowińska | Quanta | 3rd November 2025

An accessible primer. “Standing in the middle of a field, we can easily forget that we live on a round planet. We’re so small in comparison to the Earth that from our point of view, it looks flat. The world is full of such shapes, ones that look flat to an ant living on them, even though they might have a more complicated global structure. Mathematicians call these shapes manifolds” (1,800 words)

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How To Write About Sudan

Yassmin Abdel-Magied | Good Chat | 2nd November 2025

“Treat Sudan as if it were one homogenous place. Sudan is made up of 18 states, 50 million people and over 70 indigenous languages. Ignore this. Describe what is happening as a “civil war”. The audience will be most comfortable when the Sudanese are seen to be killing each other like unthinking savages, rather than for common reasons like territorial and resource acquisition, political power” (1,800 words)