America Sanitises The Horror Of Its Wars

Noam Chomsky | LitHub | 16th October 2024 | U

Chomsky is still writing at 95, albeit now with the assistance of co-author Nathan J. Robinson. This extract from their latest book looks at the ways in which the US has "curated" accounts of its post-war military exploits to hide their full impact from citizens. "Americans are never shown what it actually looks like when a US drone strike hits a wedding party, or a child is crushed by a US tank" (1,800 words)

Ignorant But Confident

John Timmer | Ars Technica | 15th October 2024 | U

On the illusion of adequate information, a corollary to the Dunning-Kruger effect. People tend to believe that they have enough data to make an informed decision, regardless of the information they actually have. This leads to an unearned confidence in their conclusions. The good news: people do change their minds once given more information. You can find the highly readable research article here (1,200 words)

Podcast: Tartans | Omnibus. Everything tartan, from the distinctive plaid patterns of various Scottish clans to the mythologised narratives around their choices (1h 27m)

Video: The Exchange | YouTube | Birdbox Studio | 2m 22s

Animated short of a ransom situation gone hilariously awry, all seen through the lookout’s binoculars.

Why Do We Get The Wrong Leaders?

James Vitali | Engelsberg Ideas | 10th October 2024

Political leaders in the West seem to be lacking the elusive quality of judgement. For Max Weber, it was “the ability to strike a balance between two divergent ethical imperatives”. Judgement is not to be conflated with expertise, for this presumes that with enough knowledge, a person may become an expert in politics. Rather, it involves making decisions responsibly without knowing whether they are correct (2,500 words)

Empty Vessels Of Time

Heidi Lasher | The Good Question | 7th October 2024

A “culture of busyness” has replaced leisure as the new status symbol. The “harried leisure class” is always pursuing a “hectic agenda, filled with productive and edifying activities”. This author ekes out an afternoon watching the shadows play on her walls. “My kids drifted into the room as if magnetised by my lack of agenda. Like butterflies landing on my hand, they stayed and watched the shadows with me” (2,000 words)

Plutocrat Archipelagos

Jack Self | MacGuffin | 28th September 2024 | U

The ultra wealthy, especially those who inherited money rather than made it, cut themselves off from the world by walls by visible and invisible. The physical barriers include "razor wire fences; galvanised spikes; electrified perimeters; soaring planes of solid brickwork, blockwork and concrete". The intangible separation is achieved through "paranoia, distrust and fear" (2,100 words)

The First Billion Years Comes Into View

Rebecca Boyle | Quanta | 9th October 2024 | U

The "firehose" of new, bright images from the James Webb Space Telescope is not even fully open yet. Much of what we have seen so far is strange. "Galaxy size, brightness, mass and shape are all weird. Black holes are weird. The efficiency of star formation is weird; the correlation between brightness, astronomical power and an object’s mass are not as astrophysicists expected" (3,900 words)

Why Is Everything So Ugly?

Editors | n+1 | 20th September 2024

A century ago, H. L. Mencken deplored the American "libido for the ugly". Matters have not improved. Even with better design and construction techniques than ever, we have managed to produce a homogenous world of unoriginality. "Our built environment tends overwhelmingly toward the insubstantial, the flat, and the grey, punctuated here and there by the occasional childish squiggle" (3,900 words)

Written On The Body

Rumaan Alam | Esquire | 8th October 2024

In praise of a tattooed middle age. "Most of us have some instinct to capture these things; that’s why we save ticket stubs and outgrown baby clothes, take photographs of every memorable taco. We want to remember. This is a losing battle, and we know it. Maybe if I inscribe this stuff on my very body, it will last however long my body does. Maybe I’ve landed on a workaround" (1,400 words)

The Coal Conquest

Anton Howes | Age Of Invention | 4th October 2024

Why did coal become the predominant fuel in industrial Britain? From ironmaking to glassmaking, industry after industry replaced wood with coal in the late 16C. This wasn’t for a dearth of trees. Coal freed up woodland that had to provide fuel, allowing for their conversion to agriculture. “The rise of coal was not caused by deforestation. Deforestation was caused by the arrival of cheap coal” (9,500 word

China’s Sentinel State

Minxin Pei & Dalia Parete | China Media Project | 7th October 2024

Interview about China’s unique surveillance methods. Instead of a large, centralised security apparatus, tasks are decentralised across security agencies. During the pandemic, China used cell phone monitoring and “grid management”, dividing communities into grids to be monitored by an individual. The Party now plans to introduce a cyber ID scheme, hoping to increase self-censorship (1,900 words)

An Undulating Thrill

Douglas Small | Aeon | 4th October 2024

Cultural history of cocaine. In the 1880s, it was fashionable as pain relief and as a stimulant. It was so popular that the cost per ounce briefly exceeded that of gold. Its anaesthetic properties had knock on effects: tattoo artists flourished, now that the pain of being inked could be easily numbed. By the 1920s, though, it had become "a frightening and corrupting source of addiction" (3,300 words)

What’s In A Gateway?

Kerri Culhane & Yin Kong | Urban Omnibus | 2nd October 2024

Chinatown neighbourhoods are often marked by a gateway built in a traditional Chinese architectural style. Along with other signifiers like culturally relevant businesses and bilingual street signage, these edifices help make clear an otherwise ill-defined boundary. Manhattan’s Chinatown is about to get such a structure. Should it look like a traditional paifang, or something new? (3,200 words)

The Survival Skills Of Helena Valero

Tove K | Wood From Eden | 30th September 2024

Valero is "one of the most important anthropologists of the 20C". Of indigenous and European ancestry, she was kidnapped at the age of 11 in 1937. For the next 19 years she survived among sometimes violent uncontacted tribal groups in the Amazonas. She emerged in 1956 with her four sons and told her story to an Italian anthropologist. A decade later, she returned to live in the forest (6,000 words)

Phasing Out Coal Power

Molly Lempriere & Simon Evans | CarbonBrief | 27th September 2024

The UK opened the world's first coal power station in 1882, and in 2024 has become the first major economy to cease burning coal to generate electricity. During this time, the country's coal plants emitted more CO₂ than most countries have ever produced from all sources. The next challenge? Getting rid of gas, which makes up 22 per cent of the UK's current power generation (6,000 words)

The Naming Of America

Jonathan Cohen | The American Voice | 1988

Why is America called "America"? Not necessarily because of its "discovery" by Amerigo Vespucci. "To hear the African in the Mayan iq' amaq'el; to hear the Scandinavian Ommerike, as well as Amteric, and the Algonquin Em-erika; to hear Saint Emeric of Hungary; to hear Armorica, the ancient Gaulish name meaning place by the sea; and to hear the English official, Amerik..." (5,600 words)

The River Rukarara

Scholastique Mukasonga | Paris Review | 2nd October 2024 | U

Rwandan author's memoir of her home river, a magical waterway whose protections followed her into exile. "We, the older ones, who were born near the river were inoculated against all sorts of ailments, most evil spells, and all the poisons with which the envious would season our food; we might even avoid some of the inevitable misfortunes that weaved the fabric of every life" (5,000 words)

The Influence Of Furniture On Love

John Maynard Keynes & Adam Tooze | Chartbook | 29th September 2024

Delightful find from the archives. Keynes dispenses wisdom on love and interior spaces. “In what sort of rooms does one fall in love? Take this room. Could any human hope to fall in love here? There is nothing very aphrodisiac, is there? Chintz within walls of pale green. This room is cool and reasonable. Consider some of the rooms in Trinity, dark and secret. It is in them that I should choose to fall in love” (2,700 words)

Math From Three To Seven

John Psmith | Mr. And Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf | 30th September 2024

Book review. Why do Russians excel at maths? One reason could be the prevalence of “mathematical circles” from the days of the Russian Empire: informal groups of teenagers and adults who spend time jamming mathematics. Their interest is not in exercises with answers à la standardised tests, but in solving problems — where there are “no guardrails, no hints or answers at the back of the book” (4,300 words)

What’s A Brain?

Claire L. Evans | Wild Information | 30th September 2024

Cognition is not limited to vertebrates with language, reasoning, or self-awareness. It happens all along the evolutionary ladder. The emerging field of minimal cognition studies decision-making and memory in cellular forms like amoeba, bacteria, yeast, and slime moulds. Instead of asking top-down questions about “consciousness”, minimal cognition tackles the enigma of the brain from the bottom up (1,400 words)

In Defense Of Megalomania

Kat Rosenfield | Free Press | 28th September 2024

On Francis Coppola’s new film Megalopolis and his insistence on owning the rights to his projects. He sold a portion of his Sonoma vineyard for an estimated $500 million to finance the film, which has since been universally panned by critics. “We should applaud, not condemn, his ambition. Unruly though Megalopolis may be, it’s the movie Coppola wanted to make.” Without great risks, there can be no great art (1,700 words)