How Do You Sleep At Night?

Nick Cave | The Red Hand Files | 13th May 2026 | U

The musician explains his somewhat complicated, bifurcated nighttime sleep schedule. "This podcast generally amounts to one person who doesn’t know what they’re talking about, talking to another person who doesn’t know what they’re talking about, about something I know absolutely nothing about, and this triumvirate of stupidity generally lulls me into some approximation of sleep" (400 words)

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Ban Non-Compete Clauses

Tim Wu | Democracy Journal | 14th May 2026 | U

Non-compete clauses, which limit an employee's ability to leave their job and work elsewhere, are both more common and more harmful that people realise. They have proliferated to the point where the system begins to resemble "indentured servitude", it is argued here. Moving jobs is the main way workers can increase their earnings over time. Allowing these clauses is only to the benefit of employers (1,500 words)

What Makes A Great Bookshop?

Rebecca Marks | Culture Dump | 12th May 2026

Character and the possibility of serendipitous discovery. Both are more often found in independent, secondhand bookshops, although a well-curated chain store like Waterstones or Daunt Books can still do the trick. Specialist shops, such as those that stock only volumes on the occult or that cater to the LGBT community, also rank highly. Steer clear of obvious tourist traps and viral popularity (1,400 words)

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Shun Them, Ban Them, Beat Them!

Adam Mastroianni | Experimental History | 12th May 2026

Thoughts on Juvenal's 2,000-year-old conundrum about legal and social regulation: Who watches the watchmen? "At some point, there has to be an Unwatched Watchman, someone who will do the right thing not because they are forced to, but because they want to. Instead of asking, 'How we can get people to do the right thing,' we should ask, 'How can we get people to want the right thing?'" (2,800 words)

Morel Of The Story

The Browser recently recommended The Last Incorruptible Thing by Sarah Kendzior, about the incorruptibility of an elusive type of mushroom. Today, The Browser shares this short video capsule: Morel Of The Story.

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The House Of Suntory

Rachel King | Town & Country | 11th May 2026

Japan’s oldest whiskey company was founded by a young Osaka merchant who noticed that European liquors were too strong and dry for Japanese tastes. In 1923, he set up a distillery in Yamazaki, which had a humid, misty climate suitable for spirit maturation. Post WW-II, the company launched a blended whiskey with the anglicised name ‘Torys’, positioning it as the drink of the emerging salaryman class (2,700 words)

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Ted Turner, Entrepreneur Of His Age

Thomas W. Hazlett | Reason | 10th May 2026

Ted Turner, founder of CNN, TBS, Cartoon Network and TNT, was “a bon vivant, Playgirl’s man of the year and a public embarrassment”. He bought backwater radio stations and failing TV stations, turned them into successes, and used the money from their sales to found new cable networks. His wild bets arguably freed American broadcasting from the chokehold of licensed media (1,700 words)

Roadside Attraction

Zoe Kurland | Offing | 8th May 2026

As more Americans began to drive in the 1920s, demand emerged for things that they could stop and look at. The resulting attractions are usually either the world's largest something — "chair, duck, teapot, ball of stamps, ball of twine, etc" — or paranormal or sci-fi curiosities. Occasionally, you find something weirder and more evocative, like a giant empty picture frame for looking at mysterious lights (4,500 words)

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A Love Letter To Hawaii (And Japan)

Leanne Ogasawara | Dreaming In Japanese | 6th May 2026

Hawaii is a translator's paradise. "Every time I come to Hawaii, I feel like I’ve slipped sideways in time — back toward something I thought I’d left behind in Japan. It is probably the most remote place in the world. Where is the nearest landmass? California? Easter Island? Or is it Japan? Hawaii is truly in the middle of nowhere, and maybe that is why it has always felt like a time slip to come here" (1,500 words)

The Golden Age Of The Don

David Vaiani | Engelsberg Ideas | 6th May 2026

The archetypal mid 20C Oxbridge don had a "good war", then returned to the day job of moulding the minds of Britain's future elites and becoming a media personality. "Snobbery, social competitiveness and obsessive conformism" ran rife and, unlike elsewhere, the overall project was to burnish the Establishment, not interrogate it. Then Thatcher came along, and the golden age came to an end (1,400 words)

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The Corporate Thriller Lied To Us

Eileen Jones | Jacobin | 5th May 2026

The period in cinema from 1980 to 2010 produced some "remarkably solid dramas that insist on the dark, serious malevolence of our capitalist world". Certain tropes recur: the inexorable corruption of an innocent male protagonist, the twisted mentor-mentee relationship, the gorgeous young female love interest. These films are good at showing America's "rotten core", but the happy endings are pure fiction (2,600 words)

What Can We Gain By Losing Infinity?

Gregory Barber | Quanta | 29th April 2026

Profile of Doron Zeilberger, mathematician and proponent of "ultrafinitism", a contrarian theory which holds that there is, ultimately, a largest number. Thus, the lines our equations describe will eventually meet somewhere. Without the mysterious concept of "infinity", mathematics becomes more realistic and more practical, he argues. Centuries of history, and most of his peers, disagree (4,300 words)

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Social Media Is Now Parasocial Media

danah boyd | Social Media + Society | 16th April 2026

Tech researcher looks back on twenty years of analysing the internet. In the 2000s, the terminology was still unclear: what phrase could accurately describe both distributed online communities formed around special interests and the earliest incarnation of Twitter? "Social media" became the default. It's no longer accurate. People scroll far more than they post. Online spaces are no longer "social" (2,600 words)

About Pain And Other Ailments

Andrea Petkovic | Finite Jest | 24th April 2026

In the life of an athlete, there are injuries and there are “injuries”. There is the kind of injury that ends your season — ligament tears, muscle ruptures, broken bones. Though devastating initially, there is hope for a return with time. Then there is the other kind of injury, “the one that’s ‘not so bad’ and will ‘surely fade soon’”. This kind of injury is worse, for it can destroy the very foundation of an athlete (1,600 words)

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Socrates Is Mortal

Benjamin Ross Hoffman | Compass Rose | 26th April 2026

The Socratic method was not really a method or form of cross-examination; it was his quality of being wholly alive to the goings-on of Athenian society in a time when the Sophists were using rehearsed scripts to perform wisdom. “People had stopped being alive to each other. The ‘method’ was just how aliveness was memorialised by a city that still cared enough to be ashamed of being dead” (3,800 words)

If America’s So Rich, How’d It Get So Sad?

Derek Thompson | 23rd April 2026

“The United States was a reasonably happy country for a long time. It is not happy now.” The pandemic has left a “permademic” in its wake. These “tragic twenties” are characterised by years of above-average inflation, a news tone that is “more surprisingly negative than at any period of news on record” and the “breaking apart of social trust”. The last one has historically been an effect of pandemics (3,900 words)

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Ignorant Art Historian: View Of Notre Dame

Hal Foster | Paris Review | 28th April 2026

Art critic demystifies the act of seeing an artwork. “As we approach this painting, we have little idea of what it depicts, or whether it depicts anything at all. The title offers a kind of lifeline: View of Notre Dame. But what kind of view and from where? Neither abstract nor representational, the painting requires a shift in our way of looking: its elements are less images of things than signs for them” (800 words)

The Importance Of The Battle Of Savo Island

John Severini & Stephen Biddle | War On The Rocks | 27th April 2026

Other than Pearl Harbor, the Battle of Savo Island in 1942 is the worst defeat in US naval history. The American fleet was superior in every way — more ships, with more advanced weapons and technology — but was rapidly outgunned by Japan because of failures in command and operation. It's a valuable lesson: "Acquiring a weapon or a sensor is not the same as knowing how to use it" (3,000 words)

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Withnail's Coat & I

Adam Scovell | On The Row | 24th April 2026

The full-skirted, increasingly battered tweed coat that Richard E. Grant's character wears in Withnail and I is "one of the most famous items of men’s clothing to grace British screens". It always looks fantastic, even when Withnail himself is at his lowest ebb, railing against the world through an alcoholic stupor. The coat had a strange afterlife: auctioned for charity, worn by a DJ, endlessly recreated (3,600 words)

United States vs Keirans

Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals | 23rd April 2026

Court document. Contains more twists that most thrillers. Two men — Matthew Keirans and William Woods — met in the 1980s working at a hotdog cart. Keirans then executed an extraordinary identity theft. As Woods, he took out loans, got a six-figure job, got married and had a child, who received the victim's surname. In 2019, the real Woods tried to fight back — and was imprisoned for his trouble (2,000 words)

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The Art Of Photographic Deception: From The Browser Team

The full Browser recently recommended The Art Of Photographic Deception. Today, Browser publisher Uri Bram shares his response in this video.