10 Observations About Tokyo

Quico Toro | Persuasion | 19th February 2025

American resident in Tokyo reflects on the city's norms. Interesting throughout. Unlike elsewhere, a polite and formal manner projects warmth, rather than frosty reserve. The more casual affect commonly used with strangers can seem aggressive to the unfamiliar. Most important is the prosocial consensus, which ensures that every interaction has a clear script and set of expectations (1,500 words)

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Bayes Is Not A Phase

Dynomight | 27th February 2025

In defence of Bayesian reasoning. There is a good explanation here of this method of statistical inference popular with certain segments of the "techie" population. Far from being a "hipster fad", this combination of aleatoric uncertainty and epistemic uncertainty is very useful for optimising decisions. Unfortunately, building a trustworthy formal model takes far too long for real life (2,200 words)

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Is God A Mushroom?

John Last | Long Now | 26th February 2025

Dead Sea Scrolls scholar John Marco Allegro certainly thought so. His 1970 book about the influence of psychoactive mushroom extracts on early Christianity, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, "is remembered as a quintessential example of academic suicide". But in the 21C, psychedelic science has caught up with him. Jesus wasn't a mushroom, but the human sense of the divine could be (4,100 words)

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The Hardest Working Font In Manhattan

Marcin Wichary | Aresluna | 14th February 2025

Gorton, an unassuming and unfashionable monoline typeface, is everywhere. Institutions including the US military and national parks service use it; it also appears on thousands of typewriter keyboards, warning signs and elevator controls. It seems to be have been especially popular in Manhattan. This beautifully-illustrated essay explores the history of the font and celebrates its imperfections (6,500 words)

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The West Lost The War It Thought It Had Won

Natalia Antelava | Coda Story | 24th February 2025

“Putin’s success stems from the collective failure of the Western establishment, convinced of its own invincibility, to recognise his systematic dismantling of the order they claimed to defend. The values the West claimed for itself — defense of individual rights, rule of law, democratic values — were worth fighting for. But having “won” the Cold War, Western establishments grew complacent” (1,800 words)

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Curious Correspondence With Edward Gorey

Cynthia Rose | Comics Journal | 24th February 2025

“My father chanced on his works back when they were small, slight booklets that seemed handmade. With them came an entire world, curious and enticing, fashioned out of the finest pen strokes. I saw his kohl-eyed vamps as shady White Russians and his muscular villains as figures out of Bram Stoker.” Filled with delightful asides on the epistolary life — “ours was a family who liked filling envelopes” (1,400 words)

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Podcast: The Nazi Block | 99% Invisible. Berlin’s Tempelhof-Schöneberg district is home to this abandoned relic of a Nazi plan to rebuild the city as a grand imperial capital (37m 37s)

Video: Competitive Foursome | YouTube | Salut Salon | 3m 24s

Four musicians turn a musical competition into an acrobatic virtuoso performance.

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What I’ve Learned

Jay Rayner | Observer | 20th February 2025

Veteran food columnist signs off after 15 years with a series of firmly-held opinions. Brown food is the best food. Picnics are bad and buffets "are where taste goes to die". Every meal can be made better with the addition of salt and probably bacon. Tipping should be abolished because "it’s wrong that restaurant staff should be dependent on the mood of the customer for the size of their wage" (600 words)

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Can’t Decide?

Anne Kadet | Café Anne | 3rd February 2025

Interview with a professional decision coach, who charges clients $247 per decision. Unlike a therapist or a friend, she won't just talk you through a tricky scenario — she will tell you what to do. She handles a lot of career, baby and divorce questions, but also more niche ones about whether to paint the kitchen. She won't work with everybody or on anything, though. Sometimes therapy is a better fit (2,900 words)

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The Fork In The Road

Mark Greif | n+1 | 19th February 2025

Advice to the US civil servants who are living through what the writer likens to the Gleichschaltung or "coordination" phase of Nazification undertaken in 1930s Germany. The aim of funding freezes and contradictory commands is paranoia. To resist is to create a collective atmosphere of courage, where agencies can be quietly decoupled from each other to prevent the spread of the contagion (3,500 words)

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McCartney Rocks The Bowery

Jake Coyle | Associated Press | 12th February 2025

Report from an impromptu Paul McCartney gig in New York City, capacity 575. Tickets sold out in half an hour. At 82 years old and playing on only one rehearsal with his band — he said — McCartney still rocks his way very effectively through Beatles, Wings and solo hits. He won't play for too long anymore, though, or commit to future tours. "Some of us need to get some sleep, you know" (1,000 words)

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The Shop Cats Of Hong Kong

Isaac Muk | Huck | 17th February 2025

One of Hong Kong’s oldest districts with merchant trade dating back to the 19C, Sheung Wan is known for its array of dried seafood shops. It is even more well-known for its feline guardians. Dried seafood is an expensive delicacy in Hong Kong, and one that is really attractive to rats. Lounging on billing counters and shelves in the traditional shops, the cats help keep the rats away (1,100 words)

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Reparations For Slavery In The 18th-Century

Julia Jorati | Philosophers’ Magazine | 16th February 2025

What reparations proposals can learn from activists who made their case on the eve of the American Revolution. One 1773 petition asked the provincial government to give all enslaved people some unused, vacant land as a settlement. Another group argued for a tax exemption on the grounds that they weren’t allowed to vote, using the revolutionaries’ cherished principle: no taxation without representation (3,600 words)

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The Legitimacy Barrier

Kaiser Y Kuo | Sinica | 15th February 2025

US policy has long questioned the legitimacy of China’s political system, based on the notion that democratic processes are the only truly legitimate way that governments earn their right to rule. China was supposed to grow wealthier through market reforms and democratise. Yet something else has happened: China’s development has proven to be a “profound rupture in the American self-conception” (6,400 words)

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Conspiracy Theories Of Ignorance

Dan Williams | Conspicuous Cognition | 16th February 2025

Reflections on Karl Popper’s warning about the dangers of “manifest truth”, the optimistic view that humans can readily perceive the truth. It makes truth seem like the default and “creates the need to explain falsehood” when the inverse is often the case. It also gives rise to the “conspiracy theory of ignorance”, the idea that nefarious powers conspire to keep people ignorant of the truth (3,300 words)

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A Short History Of English Waymarks

Barry Sharples | 3rd May 2016

Everything you could ever want to know about signposts, beginning with the standing stones erected by the Romans and ending with the roadside LED panels erected in the 21C. Changing solutions to an enduring problem. From the earliest times not getting lost has been an important factor in moving from one place to another: long-distance travellers could easily die if they missed their way (3,200 words)

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The Cat’s Meat Man

Kathryn Hughes | Public Domain Review | 12th February 2025

Profile of an extinct tradesperson, "who pushed a cart of cheap offal and horsemeat around residential streets while calling out something that sounded like 'CA-DOE-MEE!'". In the 19C, it was a good job, if a highly territorial one. With a good "walk", one could even build up savings. This peculiar economic role has always been "a gift to investigative journalists of an anthropological turn" (2,300 words)

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Podcast: Service Denied | The Black Hum. In 1914, Canadian recruiting offices turned away Black Canadians who answered the call for all able-bodied men to enlist for military service. Why did Canada not want a so-called "checkerboard army"? (19m 38s)

Video: Winslow Homer: Force Of Nature | YouTube | National Gallery | 14m 29s

Curator's film about a quintessentially American artist who in 1881 moved to Tyneside in England and found fresh inspiration among the fishing industry there.

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