Ancient Egyptian Scribes' Skeletal Risk

Petra Brukner Havelková et al | Scientific Reports | 27th June 2024

Sitting still for long periods has always been very bad for us. This study explores the injuries visible in the remains found in 200 tombs at the pyramid complex of Abusir, dating from 2,700BCE. At least 69 of these individuals are thought to have been scribes, who wrote for hours a day in a cross-legged or kneeling position. Their jaws, necks and shoulders show substantial damage (12,000 words)

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Every Pill I Took

Peder Clark | Polyphony | 10th June 2024

Most scholarship about drug use focuses on the bodily and social effects of intoxication. Less attention is paid to the aesthetics. "Nobody has written a social history of the bong, for example." But there is a book documenting the imagery of early 2000s ecstasy pills. Many came with a picture pressed into their surface — everything from Pokemon characters to the Rolls Royce logo (1,400 words)

Podcast: The Lost Subways Of North America | 99% Invisible. Lots of American cities either used to have, or almost had, functional electric railway systems. For a variety of reasons, including racism and bad politics, they fell out of use or were never built at all (26m 26s)

Video: Sun Chasing | YouTube | Posy | 6m 7s

More accurately, sunset chasing — Posy documents his various attempts to film the sun setting over the ocean. Best watched with headphones, so as not to miss the sublime sound design and music.

‘I’m Good, I Promise’

Conor Niland | Guardian | 27th June 2024

On the loneliness of the low-ranking tennis player. This former Irish number one spent his professional career in the lower divisions — the Challenger and Futures tours — that everyone is desperately trying to leave behind. Nobody wants to make friends. The social hierarchy, based on world ranking, is brutal. "Did they know I had nearly beaten a guy who had once beaten Pete Sampras?" (3,800 words)

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A Life-Time Cycle

Stephan Petermann | Archis | 26th June 2024

Interview with a cyclist on a 10,000km ride from Amsterdam to Shanghai. He crossed Germany, Austria, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Iran, Uzbekistan and more to reach the Chinese border. He has found that perseverance is really made up of many mental tricks. The desire to save face, to keep commitments, and to focus just on the next 100 metres combine to keep you going (3,900 words)

Will We Ever Get Fusion Power?

Brian Potter | Construction Physics | 26th June 2024

Probably not, and even if we do it will inevitably be much more expensive than the alternatives. "By the time a reactor is ready, if it ever is, no one will even want it." But that's not a good reason to stop trying. None of the low-carbon technology we will use to generate energy in the future exists yet. All the options are speculative to some degree. Placing lots of bets is the best way to ensure success (8,200 words

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What Happened To People Magazine?

Anne Helen Petersen | Culture Study | 19th June 2024

The decline of People is a case study for the ruination of the media industry. Founded in 1974, it began with the promise to combine the "established journalistic rigour of Time" with "extraordinary stories about ordinary people" who could be the president or your neighbour. Then a series of acquisitions in the 21C turned it into something resembling "a weird SEO farm" (3,000 words)

Thoughts On Ideology

Dan Williams | Conspicuous Cognition | 24th June 2024

“Ideologies do not aim exclusively or even primarily at truth. They must provide simple, shared narratives that lend clarity and coherence to a complex political world. The average citizen does not consistently apply ideological principles in everyday political judgements or behaviour, and in many cases, citizens do not hold the kind of stable political preferences that ideology would imply” (3,000 words)

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Randomised Controlled Trials In Economics

Maia Mindel | Some Unpleasant Arithmetic | 4th June 2024

Proponents of RCTs — aka randomistas — claim they are the gold standard for economics research, allowing for smaller, more tractable questions instead of over-ambitious ones. Critics note that RCTs are expensive and don’t provide generalisable evidence. And then there is the thorny ethical question — a majority of people consider RCTs immoral, “thinking it inappropriate to play dice with outcomes” (3,800 words)

Brutal Birth

Hamish McDonald | Inside Story | 20th June 2024

Review of Revolusi, new account of the Indonesian struggle for independence. It has caused a shock in the Netherlands, where 50% of the Dutch public were still proud of their colonial empire, per a 2019 survey. “Indonesia was crucial to the birth of the modern world. It inspired anticolonial movements in Africa, and the 1955 Bandung conference was a seminal moment for what is now the Global South” (3,400 words)

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Therapy Isn’t The Only Answer

Naomi Kanakia | Woman Of Letters | 20th June 2024

Discursive story-essay that calls for a return to straightforward storytelling. “In modern prose fiction, we are very embodied within the subject. We construct images, describe feelings, physical sensations. But this is quite recent! It isn’t until early 20th-century modernism that fiction gains the intensely interior, embodied quality. And I’m a bit tired of it. Sometimes I just want to sit down and tell a story” (3,800 words)

Why Do People Persecute City Pigeons?

Zaria Gorvett | BBC Future | 21st June 2024

Charles Darwin adored pigeons. A Mughal emperor had 20,000 of them. During WW2, we gave them medals. Humans domesticated them into their current form, yet the average city dweller today considers feral pigeons to be "dirty, disease-addled and akin to flying rats". Our dislike is recent, and based on faulty information. These birds are clever, caring and disease-resistant (2,600 words)

An Anatomy Of Algorithm Aversion

Cass R. Sunstein & Jared H. Gaffe | Social Science Research Network | 15th June 2024

Algorithm aversion is the impulse to distrust forecasting or decision-making done by machine learning or language models. This effect persists even when the algorithms can be proven to outperform humans on the same task. It has to do with "a desire for sovereignty over one’s own life", it is theorised. It feels better to do a bad job ourselves rather than have a machine do a better one (9,000 words)

Review: The Iliad

Phil Hazelden | A Reasonable Approximation | 18th June 2024

First time reader reviews his experience, which was not favourable. "It feels blasphemous, but by modern standards I don't think the Iliad is very good. Sorry Homer." There are a lot of long lists and dull battle commentary. Why is it a classic? Not for the quality of entertainment it offers, but because it provides a "window into the past". Read it with "copious historical notes" (3,600 words)

Apostrophe’s Dream

Yiyun Li | Dial | 4th June 2024

Short fiction, in the form of a dialogue between "a small cluster of movable type, all of them punctuation marks" that lives together in a typesetter's drawer. The type is trying to determine what their collective noun is. "A hope of punctuation marks. A love of punctuation marks. A solidarity of punctuation marks. An empowerment of punctuation marks," the comma suggests (2,500 words)

The Enduring Mystery Of How Water Freezes

Elise Cutts | Quanta | 17th June 2024

Ice requires more than subzero temperatures. It needs a nucleus around which water molecules can arrange themselves into a crystal structure. This unpredictable process often involves microbial activity — the reason distilled water almost never crystallises. Bacteria and fungi are great ice nucleators. The bacterium Pseudomonas syringae is so effective that it is used for artificial snowmaking (1,700 words)

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The Shape Of Information

Adam Kucharski | Understanding The Unseen | 17th June 2024

Concise, elegant explanation of how to extract insights from data with limited resources. “Imagine you have been gifted 100 wine bottles. You discover that one of the bottles has been poisoned, and have no idea which one. You have a test that can detect poison, with only 7 tests available. What should you do?” The solution proffered is akin to how epidemiology tests for infectious diseases in large groups (800 words)

The Most Dangerous Law In America

Joseph Nunn | Democracy Journal | 13th June 2024

“The Insurrection Act is a nuclear bomb hidden in the United States Code”, giving the President unrestrained authority to use the military to quell “domestic revolts”. Deeply mistrustful of the use of the military against their own citizens, the Founders struck a balance by giving Congress the power to regulate the military. This, and other guardrails against a rogue President have been gradually eroded (5,700 words)

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, and even better, if the topic isn’t explicitly intellectual or academic in nature. Research as leisure activity is exuberantly undisciplined, and isn’t constrained by disciplinary fiefdoms and schisms” (4,000 words)