Podcast: Frostbite | Tiny Matters. On the origins of frostbite treatment, following the fortunes of a French soldier during Napoleon's ill-fated march on Moscow (27m 26s)


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Video: Neanderthal Bone Flute Music | YouTube | Primoz Jakopin | 8m 37s

Musician Ljuben Dimkaroski plays a replica of the Neanderthal flute of Divje babe, which was excavated in Slovenia in 1995. Includes melodies by Albinioni, Beethoven and Ravel.

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The Life Of Herod The Great

Zora Neale Hurston | LitHub | 7th January 2025

Extract from Hurston's historical novel about the villain of the nativity story. “But how did the admirable Herod appear? Accused of murder, he stood before us clothed in purple, with his hair finely trimmed, and adorned with the most costly ornaments. His armed men were about him. Neither the president of this body, nor yet Hyrcanus our high priest, dared open the trial for terror” (1,100 words)

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The Dictionary Of PC

Adrian Daub | Slate | 5th January 2025

Panic about "political correctness" was a major American export in the 1980s and 1990s: many other countries, including the UK, France, Germany and Russian, seized upon the idea and created new variants. The strangest consequence is the appearance of "dictionaries of political correctness" in many languages, which tend to rehash culture war grievances in an alphabetical format (2,800 words)

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Hedgehog Highways

Stephanie Castellano | Reasons To Be Cheerful | 7th January 2025

England has lost a third of its hedgehogs since 2000, largely to habitat loss and roadkill. In response, homeowners are connecting their urban gardens with “hedgehog highways”, by cutting tiny holes in garden fences for the animals to squeeze through. Getting people on board is easy — hedgehogs are irresistibly cute. “You mention hedgehog to most people, and they go, ‘Aww, Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle’” (1,600 words)

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Shoot, Ask…And Run!

Chris Stowers | China Underground | 7th January 2025

Interview with photojournalist on conflict zones. “I discovered that people in war zones soon accept the presence of photographers. We are welcomed as a sign that their plight hasn’t been forgotten. I’ve found that countries run by dictators have been some of the safest to travel. But it is fascinating to see how short people’s memories can be. The fondness for the hardships of a mythologised youth is strong” (5,200 words)

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Against Optimisation

Brian Klaas | Garden Of Forking Paths | 6th January 2025

“The new god is called Optimisation — and the disciples are legion. The problem is that there’s a trade-off being ignored. Rather than a demon to be slayed by a McKinsey exorcism, slack is required for robustness. From modern systems to our individual lives, we are over-optimised, courting disaster because we are deliberately slicing away the sinews that make ourselves and our world sturdier” (4,000 words)

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The Values Gap

Scrupulous Pessimism | 5th January 2025

Any talk of “shared values” between the US and other Western nations is cliché, not truth. In many ways, the US is an outlier: Americans are exceptionally desensitised to violent crime. Much of the developed West has a “safety-first mentality”; Americans are social Darwinists. On religion, they are more likely to identify with Erdogan’s Turkey than the “desert of godlessness that is modern Europe” (2,800 words)

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The Torture Of An Unphilosophical Life

Agnes Callard | UnHerd | 26th December 2024

How hard should a philosopher be thinking? "You could think of a mind as having a dial that is usually turned way down, except on those occasions when we need to solve a specific problem, but even then, we only turn it up a little. What would happen if you set it to maximum, all the time? It would chew through everything — through the thin scaffolding of reason that holds life together" (1,600 words)

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The Thin Side Of Heavy

Tim Riley | Can't Get Much Higher | 2nd January 2025

Rock critic's horrified review of a "supposedly authoritative" new CD box set of Led Zeppelin's complete studio recordings. "The band have become even more a corporate entity than a cultural emblem... Don’t let this recycled Trojan horse, driven by accountants, through the gate." There is spectacular "Zep" music to be enjoyed, but it's much better in the context of the original albums (1,900 words)

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When The Lore Defeated The Law

David Allen Green | Law And Policy Blog | 1st January 2025

Until the 1700s, the English legal and political establishments enforced a calendar in which the 25th March was the first day of the year. Most official instruments, including laws, contracts and wills, reflected this. But ordinary people just kept celebrating the new year's arrival on 1st January, and in 1750 the officials gave up and passed an Act of Parliament making this "lore" official law (600 words)

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H5N1: More Than You Wanted To Know

Scott Alexander | Astral Codex Ten | 1st January 2025

Enter any conversation about the possibility of a global bird flu pandemic with confidence after reading this primer on the history of influenzas, the pathogens involved in H5N1, and its potential impact on our lives and health. It's already a pandemic in birds and cows, and the writer forecasts a 5 per cent chance of a sustained pandemic in the human population in the next year (4,500 words)

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The Heroic Industry Of The Brothers Grimm

David Mason | Hudson Review | 8th November 2024

The lives of Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm have become surrounded by legend to the point that they seem like "quaint Hobbit-like creatures trawling the peasantry for stories". The biography under review here rather casts them as "complicated heroes" in troubled times. Beset by aristocratic patrons in the dying years of the Holy Roman Empire, their labour produced results against the odds (3,700 words)

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The World Of Tomorrow

Virginia Postrel | Works In Progress | 5th December 2024

In the mid 20C, imagined versions of the future as depicted in exhibitions, films, novels and more were glamorous. A utopian combination of effortless, rapid transportation, idealised urban life, technological solutions for domestic drudgery and avant-garde fashions informed a bold, sleek, silvery design aesthetic. And yet, when the 21C arrived, it looked nothing like this. What happened? (6,300 words)

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The First Billion Years Comes Into View

Rebecca Boyle | Quanta | 9th October 2024

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)

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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)

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The Augustinian Settlement

Nathan Goldwag | Goldwag’s Journal On Civilisation | 1st July 2024

Historians mark 27 BCE as the year the Roman Republic transitioned into the Roman Empire, when Augustus became its first Emperor — without actually establishing an “Empire” or the office of “Emperor”. The Republican system was retained, while a dynasty that would last centuries was formed. How was this done? Extraordinarily detailed account of the forces that shaped Rome’s turning point (3,600 words)

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Free At Last?

George Scialabba | Hedgehog Review | 16th August 2024

Wading into an old debate with new insights. “What is free will? Mitchell shows how our reasoning power evolved over billions of years; acting for reasons is our defining property. Sapolsky’s rejoinder is simple: Where do reasons come from? From childhood, our genome, ancestral culture, species history. It’s a rare intellectual confrontation: both sides deeply informed, fair-minded, incisively argued” (2,500 words)

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Research As Leisure Activity

Celine Nguyen | Personal Canon | 27th May 2024

“It's fundamentally personal, a style of research well-suited for people okay with being dilettantes, who are comfortable with an idiosyncratic, non-comprehensive education in a particular domain. It’s fine, better even, if the topic isn’t explicitly intellectual or academic. Research as leisure activity is exuberantly undisciplined, and isn’t constrained by disciplinary fiefdoms and schisms” (4,000 words)

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I Will Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again

Nikhil Suresh | Ludic | 19th June 2024

Data scientist's rage-filled refutation of AI boosters (contains strong language). "This entire class of person is, to put it simply, abhorrent to right-thinking people. They're an embarrassment to people that are actually making advances in the field, a disgrace to people that know how to sensibly use technology to improve the world, and should be thrown into Thought Leader Jail" (4,700 words)

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