The full Browser recommends five outstanding articles, a video and a podcast daily. Today, enjoy our latest video and audio picks.
Podcast: The Green Grass | In The Dark. New series of the best investigative journalism podcast, which has now found a new home at the New Yorker. This one explores the death of 24 civilians in Haditha, Iraq in November 2005 and seeks to understand why there was no war crimes investigation (42m 29s)
American English is generally assumed to dominate the Anglosphere — a fact often lamented by critics elsewhere — but the process works in reverse too. "Britishisms" started making inroads into the US vernacular in the 1990s. For example: some Americans say "cheeky" to denote impudence, "gutted" to mean "disappointed" and "early days" to mean that a process is just beginning (3,600 words)
Each attempt is a different eulogy for the writer's father, who was addicted to drugs and had early onset dementia. Some are angry, others forgiving. Contact was cut off when Doyle was 16. Lying, manipulation and threats of murder were commonplace in their relationship. "He was a broken slot machine, a rigged carnival game, Russian roulette with all six chambers loaded" (7,900 words)
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Julia Tellman | Cascadia Daily News | 19th September 2024 | U
A man set off for a one-day hike with his dog and was found alive thirty days later "dangerously emaciated and unable to move but still alive". He had made an impulse decision to go "on a mission of discovery to reach Canada", sending his dog home alone and forging on alone into the woods. His survival, without shoes or food, is described as "improbable, amazing and heroic" (1,700 words)
Michael Makowsky | Economist Writing Every Day | 23rd September 2024 | U
If the quality of restaurant service has gone down, that is a good sign about the state of the world. Slower water refills or ordering via QR code are annoying, but we now prioritise more important things — like food quality — and don't want to pay a premium for a 1950s-style dining experience. "The world is getter better because people’s time and energy are more valuable for it" (640 words)
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Michael Soffer | Chicago Magazine | 3rd September 2024 | U
Profile of Reinhold Kulle, an SS officer who became a high school janitor in Chicago, “one of the most common landing spots for former Nazis” after WWII. So many arrived there that investigators would joke that Nazi-hunting organisations could have simply moved to Chicago. Kulle hid his past from the immigration authorities, and passed himself off as an upstanding member of the Oak Park community (8,000 words)
Richard Chappell | Good Thoughts | 23rd September 2024 | U
Ethicists tend to have an “All or Nothing” view of quantitative tools in practical decision-making. Either they religiously follow the numbers, or they dismiss “soulless number-crunching” as irrelevant. Both approaches are bad. People “should instead use good judgement informed by quantitative considerations”, and admit that sometimes, it is difficult to know which moral action to prioritise (2,300 words)
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Rory Sutherland | Behavioral Scientist | 17th September 2024 | U
Manifesto for reframing time. Our systems are optimised for “faster is better”, with poor results. Rail-ticketing algorithms do not show people the longer, cheaper, more scenic option because it is slower. Emails are instant; the burden of noticing a time-sensitive communication is on the recipient, who is reduced to checking their inbox every 10 or 15 minutes. “We’ve allowed the urgent to drown out the important” (3,800 words)
Grim story of scientists who died of radiation poisoning from experiments to induce criticality in a plutonium core at Los Alamos. Richard Feynman reportedly described these experiments as “tickling the tail of a sleeping dragon”.
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Pamela Harriman was "arguably the most famous diplomat in the world and the most powerful courtesan in history". Born to English aristocrats, she was introduced to Adolf Hitler by Unity Mitford, divorced the son of Winston Churchill, and befriended both JFK and the Gorbachevs. She "played a part in ending the Cold War" and served as Clinton's ambassador to France (1,600 words)
On the origins of Francis Fukuyama's "end of history" thesis. It originated as a Marxist conceit from Alexandre Kojève, a Russian-born French philosopher and apologist for Stalin. Together with Leo Strauss, Kojève taught Fukuyama their "shared misreading" of Hegel. These ideas then went mainstream, informing even the political justification for the 2000s-era "war on terror" (2,800 words)
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Reflections on a course of GLP-1 injections. Seen as "a cheat code for losing weight", the writer battled her prejudices and took the treatment. It worked: "I felt like I could actually live the life I wanted to live." Then the drug and the doctor who administered it were removed from her insurance plan. "Ozempic (technically Mounjaro) was right for me, but I begrudgingly was not right for it" (2,900 words)
Rusty Foster | Today On Trail | 18th September 2024
Moving dispatch from the Appalachian Trail, as a father and son who had planned to hike the 2,200 miles together realise that they are going to part ways. Their speeds are not compatible: the elder needs a slower pace and time to write, while the teenager would never take a rest day if given the choice. "It’s the furthest thing from a betrayal — this is the best possible outcome for a parent" (2,200 words)
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Chris Arnade | Chris Arnade Walks the World | 17th September 2024
Excellent bus and ferry links make it possible to take a relaxed approach to hiking these 18 mountainous islands in the North Atlantic Ocean. The infrastructure is as impressive as the landscape. As well as public transport that makes car ownership non-essential, there is a "three-mile sub-sea tunnel with a roundabout in it" that connects three islands. Income inequality is extremely low (2,700 words)
Astrophysicist explains how string theory, the Planck scale and the "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics intersect to suggest the possibility of a multiverse. If the inflationary universe is truly infinite, there will be copies of our own within it. This is a philosophically intriguing idea, but "there is no evidence at all that this has any tie to the reality that we inhabit" (3,600 words)
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Martin Butler | 3 Quarks Daily | 16th September 2024
A long-standing question, given fresh life here: what is the role of the spiritual in the rational age? “The spiritual is not weird because it is completely familiar. We become acutely aware of this dimension of reality when entranced by a piece of music, moved by a great work of art, overcome with love for someone, engrossed in a work of literature, or witnessing profoundly heroic or altruistic action” (3,500 words)
Mustafa Akyol | Law & Liberty | 16th September 2024
2024 marks 100 years since the Ottoman Caliphate was abolished. Was it a good decision? Atatürk’s admirers agree. Counter-arguments note that the Caliphate represented a tolerant and modernising Islam. Its vacuum has been filled by “secular autocrats and reactionary Islamists”, trapping the Middle East in a “vicious cycle of conflict”. Case in point: the Caliphate’s “forgotten friendship with Jews” (2,400 words)
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Financial thriller. A private detective takes a case, investigating an attack on a geologist who died when his car was set alight and became a raging fireball. The trail leads into the murky financial affairs of a mining multinational and an alleged case of bribery and fraud over a mine acquisition in Congo. The oligarchs involved took on the UK's Serious Fraud Office — and they have triumphed (9,000 words)
Don't be fooled by the asinine title. The very format of this article is a clever piece of satire about the parlous state of the ad-supported internet. Once the text flips sideways, the banners close in, and you have clicked "no" on a push notifications pop up for the fifth time, you have entered the doom-spiral of internet commerce and there is no escape. Just keep scrolling, if you dare (3,100 words)
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Profile of "a haphazard collection of international acquaintances" who expose misinformation in science. Some are scientists, like Elisabeth Bik, who is known for her identification of manipulated images. Others are "general-interest vigilantes" who have learned advanced pattern recognition skills. All are motivated by their horror at the amount of fraud in scientific research (6,600 words)
American Patriots Three Percent is one of the largest militias in the US. Despite expanding hugely since the January 6th riot, AP3 has remained largely under the radar. Its leaders have forged alliances with law enforcement, and attracted a new wave of recruits. Members practise storming buildings together with semi automatic rifles, and debate whether to “engage in mass-scale political violence” (7,600 words)
Lawrence Person et al | Bulwer Lytton | 19th August 2024 | U
The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest highlights the worst possible opening lines for imaginary novels. It is named for the novelist Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who actually did actually begin a book in 1830 with "it was a dark and stormy night". The Grand Prize this year goes to: "She had a body that reached out and slapped my face like a five-pound ham-hock tossed from a speeding truck" (3,700 words)
Chess is “a game where a gnat may swim and an elephant may drown”. Its storied history might comprise princes and aristocrats, but the chess this author encounters is something else: competitive kids, old-time New York hustlers, broke Russian émigrés, two-minute street games with bets. “There are a lot of people out there who are very intelligent and just don’t succeed. That’s who I started coming across” (2,800 words)
Brian Evenson | Electric Lit | 9th September 2024 | U
Superbly creepy ghost story. A new father remembers the terrifying bedtime stories his mother used to tell him and wonders why she wanted to scare a child. She denies doing so. Regardless, he recalls those tales and worries that, given the opportunity, she will repeat the experience for her grandson. But what if both mother and son are telling the truth? Who is telling the stories? (3,500 words)
Podcast: The Transdimensional Haboob | Midnight Burger. Opening chapter of a surreal, clever science fiction series. The protagonist, Gloria, has been made unemployed by the pandemic and so takes a humdrum job at a lonely diner outside Phoenix, Arizona. Except it turns out that the diner is only visiting Earth temporarily, and at the end of each shift it moves to a new place in space and time. Fans of Douglas Adams will enjoy this (37m 47s)
Superbly creepy ghost story. A new father remembers the terrifying bedtime stories his mother used to tell him and wonders why she wanted to scare a child. She denies doing so. Regardless, he recalls those tales and worries that, given the opportunity, she will repeat the experience for her grandson. But what if both mother and son are telling the truth? Who is telling the stories? (3,500 words)
Deleted from Wikipedia because it contained "nonsense phrases thought up by people who apparently find this sort of thing terribly clever", this list of pangrams is a marvel. The "perfect" ones contain only one each of English's 26 letters and don't make much sense. But "Fox nymphs grab quick-jived waltz" (28) and "Bright vixens jump; dozy fowl quack" (29) sit pleasingly on the tongue (10,700 words)
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