Profile of Mary Midgley, who famously remarked that philosophy had been shaped by bachelors who had no experience living with women or children. Descartes questioned the existence of his friends, family and everything external, concluding that his only certainty was, “I am thinking”. Midgley was unimpressed — “people leading a normal domestic life would not have fallen into this sort of mistake” (3,300 words)
The Medici of Florence suffered from a hereditary condition causing joint pain and restricted mobility — “it was agony to stand, walk or even hold a pen”. Florence was a merchant republic; the Medici men had to “perform humility” and could not be seen being carried by servants. They built a long ramp with a gentle incline, minimal turns, and stairs a horse could climb — a study in accessible architecture (3,000 words)
A retired stripper reminisces. First responders make for the best clients, “as no one appreciates a smiling professional party girl more than a person who regularly bears witness to the worst day of peoples’ lives.” Never trust your safety to guards who are usually overworked, under-slept and underpaid. Conduct a TSA-style search on clients — “a fun silly one that didn’t read as a search, but a search nonetheless” (2,500 words)
William Deresiewicz | Hinternet | 9th February 2025
“We read in, around, about, for, and against, but rarely is the preposition or the pretence dropped, the book actually read.”Can a new humanities emerge out of alternative institutions where people engage in reading that is “utterly non-instrumental” — “no papers, no grades, none of the habits that come with them”? “It would be just us and the book and what we could make of it” (7,200 words)
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Callie Petch | Little White Lies | 7th February 2025
There are too many bland music biopics, thanks to Hollywood's "toxic addiction to recognisable IP". Whether it is Timothée Chalamet's turn as Bob Dylan or Sam Mendes' planned quartet of films about The Beatles (one member per film), most are made to be safe and dull. Rejoice, then, in Better Man, in which singer Robbie Williams is played throughout by a CGI ape for no stated reason (1,400 words)
Tariffs can be a useful part of a national security strategy, protecting existing civilian industries that can then be quickly flipped into military production mode in a time of war. Highly targeted tariffs can also foster "national champions" and create world-leading companies in their niche. This also applies to nurturing new entrants to a market. Broad tariffs do nothing for these goals (2,500 words)
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The history of Brazil is closely connected with the history of the slave trade, with nearly half the 12.5 million enslaved Africans transported to the Americas ending up there. Ana Lucia Araujo, a historian at Howard University and author of Humans in Shackles, talks us through the books that shed light on that history and how Brazil's past cannot be understood without also studying its connections with Africa. Read more
China's dramatic landscapes, rich culture, and tumultuous political history serves as a rich seam for historical novels. Here, we've drawn together a list of recommended titles, selected by and discussed with Five Books interviewees over the years. Read more
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Stern critique of the philosophy popular among Silicon Valley tech leaders. "In many ways, rationalism is the result of people with STEM educations attempting to tackle questions that had long been the purview of the humanities, guided by a stubbornly autodidactic conviction that definitive answers could be reached through a rigorous application of logic untainted by psychological biases" (3,700 words)
Open letter from a former CIA officer to JD Vance, imploring the US Vice President to stop wearing a device that "offers unique data collection and access for exploitation and even manipulation" — an Apple Watch. This expert would be "genuinely surprised" if other intelligence services haven't already hacked Vance's device, leaving it vulnerable to being transformed into a "hot mic" (1,300 words)
Alessandro Ford | Politico | 3rd February 2025 | U
…Coined by American physiologist Ancel Keys who studied working-class residents of Nicotera, a coastal Italian town. His research supposedly uncovered a mostly plant-based diet based on moderation, communal eating, negligible salt and sugar. A more iconoclastic theory claims that the diet was not discovered so much as invented. The Nicoterans’ leanness was because of a different reason: hunger (3,000 words)
Tariffs can be a useful part of a national security strategy, protecting existing civilian industries that can then be quickly flipped into military production mode in a time of war. Highly targeted tariffs can also foster "national champions" and create world-leading companies in their niche. This also applies to nurturing new entrants to a market. Broad tariffs do nothing for these goals (2,500 words)
Concert pianists are in a bind: should they risk severe muscular spasms with practice or let their skills atrophy? Perhaps try a robotic exoskeleton, a fingerless glove that can open and close the wearer's fingers individually up to four times a second. Expert pianists who practised with the exoskeleton reported an increase in playing speed – an ability which surprisingly transferred to the untrained hand as well (1,000 words)
Nail-biting yet beautiful footage of an expert downhill skateboarder reaching speeds of up to 100km/h on a mountain road in Switzerland.
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Concert pianists are in a bind: should they risk severe muscular spasms with practice or let their skills atrophy? Perhaps try a robotic exoskeleton, a fingerless glove that can open and close the wearer's fingers individually up to four times a second. Expert pianists who practised with the exoskeleton reported an increase in playing speed – an ability which surprisingly transferred to the untrained hand as well (1,000 words)
Timothy Taylor | Conversable Economist | 1st February 2025
The ancient Roman calendar only had 304 days. To sync it with the lunar calendar, king Numa Pompilius added January and February, and subtracted a day from the 30-day months. Why? The Romans considered even numbers unlucky. To get to the required 355 days, at least one month would have to have an even number of days. Numa chose February, the Roman month for honouring the dead (1,800 words)
Journalist's attempt to verify the expertise of a source sends her on a post-truth journey into the dark heart of the "slop-infested" internet. A therapist presented by a supposedly reliable portal for connecting writers with experts turns out not to exist at all. This discovery is just the tip of an iceberg made up of fakery, fuelled by the way that search engines rank results and products (4,600 words)
Labour struggles in the US are historically fought along class lines, but in an era when "only one class is on a war footing" — the ruling elite — it is hard to see what unions can offer. Tempting as it is to give in to the forces of "nationalism, nativism, and protectionism" in the prevailing political weather, a more productive focus would be investment in "strike school", to teach the workers how to fight back (6,000 words)
A little over a century ago, the north of England was one of the richest places in the world. Today, it is "very poor by North European standards", overtaken in the last decade by East Germany and Poland. Reasons for this include: the Norman conquest, the centuries-long ban on founding new universities in the region, and the privatisation and centralisation of industrial assets under Thatcher (8,000 words)
Jonah Dunch | Chris Arnade Walks The World | 31st January 2025
The Dujiangyan irrigation system, built in around 256 BCE and still in use today, is a survival of the old China: "The China of awesome empire and ancient gods." Above Chengdu stands a temple to Li Bing, the engineer who "defeated the god" of the Min River. He did this either in a duel or by building a series of clever levees and islands to redirect the stream, depending on your taste in mythology (2,800 words)
Journey to the vanished inland Aral Sea of Uzbekistan, which began shrinking in the 1960s when the two rivers that fed it were diverted by the Soviets to irrigate cotton farms. This rapid drying out created the Earth's newest desert. It looks like the setting of Mad Max and became what ecologists call a "sacrifice zone". But life is returning, in the form of hardy shrubs and tiny squiggling crustaceans (3,900 words)
Richard Blair | Orwell Society | 27th October 2011
George Orwell's son describes his childhood. Orwell and his wife Eileen adopted their son at his birth in 1944. Ten months later, Eileen died. Some of Orwell's friends suggested he "unadopt" his son, but he and his sister Avril refused. They moved to the Hebridean island of Jura while Nineteen Eighty-Four was written, to a house with no telephone that was eight miles from the nearest proper road (6,800 words)
Economist's take on the state of US opinion commentary, as seen through the lens of his own decision to end his association with the Gray Lady after more than a quarter of a century. "I used to say, only half-jokingly, that if a column didn’t generate a large amount of hate mail, that meant that I had wasted the space. Yet what I felt during my final year at the Times was a push toward blandness" (1,600 words)
Hamilton Nolan | How Things Work | 25th January 2025
Acquiring and maintaining a level of extreme wealth for a tiny proportion of the global population is a ludicrous idea around which to organise a human society. Consider a thought experiment: what if, instead of tinkering around the edges of this unfettered capitalism with laws and regulations, we simply made it illegal for any one individual to have a net worth of over a billion dollars? (1,700 words)
Larry M. Bartels | Inside Story | 18th January 2025
The metaphor of a “populist wave” — in the US, Brazil, Hungary, India, Italy, and Sweden — exaggerates the successes of populism. In Europe, the average vote share for right-wing populist parties has increased by less than half a percentage point per year since the turn of the century. Populist gains in the West are less about a genuine public shift in political beliefs and more about changing elite politics (5,700 words)
Memoir excerpt of author’s relationship with her cat, translated from Japanese. “It was the end of summer, 1977. I found a cat, a little ball of fluff. Her face was the size of a coin, split by her huge wide-open mouth. She was stuck inside the fence of a school on the banks of the Tamagawa River. I hugged her to my chest and a sweet scent filled my nostrils. Her body was infused with the smell of milk and summer” (2,200 words)
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