The Soul Moved The Pen, And Broke It

Henry Oliver | Common Reader | 18th March 2024

Flaubert wrote about emotions but kept himself apart from them. His most moving writing comes from the "opposite of empathy". "The less you feel a thing... the more capable you are of expressing it. To merely write out your emotions, is, to Flaubert, hardly to write at all. It is not to make Art, not to prioritise style, not to make sacral the aesthetic. Everything is style, he insisted" (1,900 words)

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Spacing The Cans

Rob Horning | Internal Exile | 15th March 2024

Aldi has re-invented the visual style of the no-frills supermarket. Rather than blank packaging, its goods are the wares of imaginary brands that look slightly wrong, such as the "Happy Harvest" tin of tomatoes inspected here. "They seem provisional, desultory, like drafts from a brand-strategist firm, or improvisational parodies, or something that generative AI would spit out" (1,800 words)

All We Have To Fear

Emily Walz | China Book Review | 14th March 2024 | U

US fear of China’s geopolitical role has persisted for over 150 years: “Xi Jinping’s techno-authoritarianism is only the latest model of the China spectre.” Ulysses S. Grant was predicting that China would soon become “dangerous” in 1879. This fear quickly merged with xenophobia, expressed in pop culture via villains like Fu Manchu, and was still extant by the time of the Covid pandemic (1,500 words)

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Why I Hate Pi Day

Oliver Johnson | Logging The World | 14th March 2023 | U

Pi Day, or 3/14 if you write the date in the US style, is a day upon which anyone “science-adjacent” will find themselves being told that the formula expressed in Euler's identity is “beautiful”. This professor disagrees. “It’s like a butterfly pinned to a card by a Victorian collector. You can imagine it taking to the air and flying if you think hard enough, but otherwise it just sits and does nothing” (900 words)

It’s Getting Weirder

Laura Hazard Owen | NiemanLab | 7th March 2024

This timeline of Royal PR missteps is interesting for the interview at the top with a former royal correspondent, who explains some of the eccentricities of the job. There is no unified Royal media team, and different palaces connive and compete. The “royal rota” of core reporters may get direct information, but can never acknowledge it as such. And Royal handlers can silence newspapers (8,700 words)

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Backyard Bird Diary

Amy Tan | Paris Review | 13th March 2024

Illustrated field notes from the author of The Joy Luck Club. Carefully, she cultivates a returning flock of species and “ a menagerie of fledglings” that consider her trustworthy. “The more I observe, the more I realise that every part of a bird and every behaviour has a specific purpose, a reason, and an individual meaning. Instinct does not account for everything that is fascinating” (2,500 words)

United States v. Mackey

Editors | Harvard Law Review | 11th March 2024

Fraud or protected satire? In 2016, Douglass Mackey aka “Ricky Vaughn”, a far-right social media figure, posted memes claiming that voters could vote by text. He was charged and found guilty of conspiring to injure the rights of voters. The jury did not consider whether his memes were satire. The verdict has chilling implications for satirical content in the digital space, outweighing any dubious injury (2,300 words)

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The Placebo Effect’s Evil Twin

Michael Bernstein | Quillette | 11th March 2024

On the Nocebo effect — “when you expect to feel sick, you are more likely to feel sick”. Benjamin Franklin was an early identifier, while working with Franz Mesmer’s patients to “separate the effects of the imagination from those attributed to magnetism”. The test subjects had shivering and convulsions — negative side-effects they viewed as integral to the process, proof that something is working (1,800 words)

An Activist By Fate

Anushe Engineer | Dawn | 11th March 2024

Baloch women protesting enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings in Pakistan. Sammi Deen Baloch began activism at age ten when her father was abducted — taking bus rides alone from Karachi to Quetta for court cases to locate her father. “We completely rewrote the narrative they’ve held against Baloch people, that we’re “terrorists” who want to be separate from Pakistan” (2,100 words)

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The Boy Who Was King Of Vanilla

Elena Kazamia | Nautilus | 1st March 2024

Vanilla was notoriously hard to pollinate, befuddling botanists until 1841 — when Edmond Albius, a 12-year-old Réunion Island slave, invented a way. He used a needle or toothpick to puncture the slim membrane separating the male and female organs of the vanilla orchid — a technique growers use to this day. “Like many brilliant inventions, Edmond’s appears disarmingly simple, but only after the fact” (800 words)

Watching Bradley Cooper Chase An Oscar

Ariella Garmaise | Walrus | 8th March 2024

Cooper ticks all the boxes of a “serious actor” and yet, to date, has no Oscar to show for his twelve nominations. His latest attempt seems to demonstrate his yearning for victory — a biopic of Leonard Bernstein that he co-produced, co-wrote and directed as well as starred in. Cooper’s crime, to some, is that he visibly wants to win. “The only thing more embarrassing than trying is failing” (1,500 words)

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A Bigger World Is Better For Everyone

Jason Crawford | Roots Of Progress | 23rd February 2024

Not only should we not be aiming for a smaller global population, but there are good reasons to desire ever more people populating the world. The biggest one is progress: an expanding population means more researchers, which means more investment and specialisation, which results in better technology and problem-solving. An intriguing, if not completely successful, argument (1,600 words)

Heil Bukowski!

Abel Debritto | 3:AM Magazine | 8th March 2024

On the quest for the “Holy Grail” — at least for Charles Bukowski scholars. The poet was thought to have penned a series of pro-Nazi letters for right-wing newspapers in the early 1940s, but these were missing, if they ever existed. Then, in 2023, this writer found them in a digital database, misfiled thanks to a “tagging error”. The twist? The Nazi persona was fake, “a giant put-on” (3,900 words)

Lessons From The Cyber-Attack

British Library | 8th March 2024 | PDF

The British Library’s account of the ransomware attack that compromised its systems so utterly that readers could not consult the catalogue or access books for almost six months. Interesting throughout. Aside from the attack itself, the biggest problem in recovery has been hard-to-replace legacy software that cannot be restored because it is not compatible with better security measures (8,300 words)

History Of Universal Basic Income

Karl Widerquist | MIT Press Reader | 7th March 2024

Book extract. The idea of allowing “every individual to have access to the resources they need to survive without conditions imposed by others” stems from prehistoric societal dynamics, and is still seen in the “common land” maintained by small agrarian communities. Bertrand Russell and Virginia Woolf were fans. But rising nationalism could derail modern attempts to implement it (4,700 words)

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Rage, Waste And Corruption

David Runciman | Guardian | 7th March 2024

On the lingering effects of Covid-19. “The disease turns out to be its own metaphor. We are all suffering from political long Covid now. The early drama is over. A series of misfortunes has replaced it.” Lockdown solidarity has evaporated, in favour of depleted public finances, a mental health crisis and social stagnation. Although Covid was not a war, it feels as though we are recovering from one (4,700 words)

Can Literature Cure Law? Should It?

Robert Spoo | Public Books | 5th March 2024

What makes a law “a force wielded by persuadable decision-makers” as opposed to a collection of words on a page? Interesting attempt to answer this question via the work of W.H. Auden and Seamus Heaney. Literature can “cure” law, some believe, with legal material enhanced through contact with Kafka or Sophocles. But good writing exists for more than just improving our legal systems (2,800 words)

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When I Was A Hostage

Theo Padnos | Persuasion | 14th February 2024

Journalist on two years spent as a hostage in Syria after being captured in 2012 by a group of “amateur terrorists”. War hymns played in the background at all times. “We couldn’t leave those rooms and we couldn’t talk to one another. A peek at our daily calendars would have shown solitary darkness in the morning, followed by shouting at midday, followed by outbreaks of terror at night” (3,200 words)