An accessible primer. “Standing in the middle of a field, we can easily forget that we live on a round planet. We’re so small in comparison to the Earth that from our point of view, it looks flat. The world is full of such shapes, ones that look flat to an ant living on them, even though they might have a more complicated global structure. Mathematicians call these shapes manifolds” (1,800 words)
Yassmin Abdel-Magied | Good Chat | 2nd November 2025
“Treat Sudan as if it were one homogenous place. Sudan is made up of 18 states, 50 million people and over 70 indigenous languages. Ignore this. Describe what is happening as a “civil war”. The audience will be most comfortable when the Sudanese are seen to be killing each other like unthinking savages, rather than for common reasons like territorial and resource acquisition, political power” (1,800 words)
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Casey Jo Graham Welmers | Pangyrus | 31st October 2025
Nursing student muses on the sterile way modern medicine treats dead bodies. It goes against centuries of human tradition. "Where was the ritual and care? I wanted anointing oils and purifying waters, incense and burning sage. Where were the murmured prayers, holy paints, burial shrouds? He should have been leaden down with silver or gold, sent off on a funeral pyre, entombed in marble" (2,500 words)
Irina Dumitrescu | Serious Eats | 18th October 2025
Defence of "picky eating", by someone who refused to eat most foods until the age of twelve. This was especially fraught because her family lived in Ceaușescu-era Romania and food was hard to come by. After a teenage phase of eating only her own peculiar concoctions, she grew out of it. Now her son refuses all but the blandest foods. It's difficult not to pass on the same shame and the judgement (3,000 words)
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Christi VanSyckle | Car And Driver | 27th October 2025 | U
The contest is held annually in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, "a lighthearted yet fiercely battled competition that celebrates the everyday art of parking". There are handicaps and officials with measuring tapes. Hitting the curb means instant disqualification. Scores are calculated based on speed and distance from the curb. The winner says the key is confidence: "Those bumpers are called bumpers for a reason" (1,500 words)
Peter Caddick-Adams | Engelsberg Ideas | 30th October 2025 | U
Insights about the Nobels, drawn from conversations with Odvar Nordli, late Norwegian prime minister and member of the prize committee. Trump is unlikely to succeed in his quest for the Peace Prize simply because he has publicly lobbied for it; the committee likes to reward "underdogs". Winston Churchill had the same problem. He did receive the Literature Prize as a consolation offering, though (2,500 words)
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Naomi Alderman | Whatever Works | 24th October 2025
This critique of a popular AI-generated list of ways to "disgustingly educated" is frenetic, earnest and astute. "Don’t give in to the AI bigotry of low expectations! Learn how to find good stuff and put it into your brain!" Make good use of Wikipedia's referencing system, look for multiple reputable perspectives, and do subject matter searches rather than following personalities (3,700 words)
Simple yet provocative argument for not consuming animal products. "If it’s wrong to do something, then it’s wrong to pay other people to do it." You would not personally use the techniques of factory farms on your own animals — the debeaking, the cramped cages, the slaughtering — so you should not pay someone else to do it for you. Especially not just because you like the taste (700 words)
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What went relatively unnoticed in Dylan’s many polite snubs to the Swedish Nobel Academy was an essay he gave them months later, about the literature that had influenced him. In it, he paid tribute to All Quiet on the Western Front, writing: “it’s a book where you lose your childhood, your faith in a meaningful world”. “Dylan makes the point that it’s about the failures of civilisation” (1,500 words)
William J. Long | The Immanent Frame | 8th October 2025
Democracy in the modern world is largely a competition of votes between self-interested actors aggregated by interest groups and political parties. The Buddhist idea of sangha offers an alternative model of deliberative governance that it probably sustained for centuries. In contrast to Western liberal democracies today, sangha emphasised duties to others as much as rights for oneself (2,800 words)
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Henrik Karlsson | Escaping Flatland | 23rd October 2025
Famous mathematicians have reported thinking not through words, images or equations but such ineffable things as “vibrations in their minds, nonsense words in their ears, or blurry shapes in their heads”. Breakthroughs resulted from this state of “deep, conscious-blurry concentration”. They were reluctant to use words because “they were afraid of the false precision writing forces onto thinking” (3,400 words)
Laura Tripaldi | MIT Press Reader | 27th October 2025
Once dominated by human-like bodies and rigid materials, robotics is embracing flexible materials with a range of appearances — octopus-like, pachydermic. Their movements are not pre-programmed but emerge from the material’s response to the environment. Instead of triggering the uncanny valley, they “evoke a sense of sublime otherness, like swimming alongside a whale in the sea” (1,900 words)
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Greti Dinkova-Bruun | Medievalists | 22nd October 2025 | U
Pre-Enlightenment, frogs were both shunned and desired. Their Biblical association with plague and sin, as well as their slimy nature, made them something to avoid. But at the same time, they were thought to have healing properties. One fifth century remedy calls for a live frog to be placed on the patient's stomach so as to transfer the illness to the amphibian. In the 13C, frog bile could cure ear ache (1,100 words)
Studio Ghibli’s 1989 animated masterpiece is about a 13-year-old witch who survives on her own by running a broomstick-based delivery service. As she succeeds, she struggles to manage the workload and have leisure time. This is the perfect case study for those seeking a greater understanding of the economic concepts of cost and choice. Kiki wrestles continually with subjective opportunity costs (1,600 words)
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From the terrorists who came up with the idea of hijacking planes to get attention to a biography of the Scottish novelist Muriel Spark, the books in the running for this year's Baillie Gifford Prize, as always, display a wonderful breadth. Robbie Millen, literary editor of the Times and chair of the 2025 judging panel, talks us through the shortlist of the UK's most prestigious nonfiction book prize. Read more
In the past five years, over 30 books have been published on black holes for a popular audience—testimony to our enduring fascination with these areas of spacetime from which nothing, not even light, can escape. Lynn Gamwell, author of Conjuring the Void—a beautiful book that looks at both scientific and artistic images of black holes—talks us through five of her favourites, including a PhD thesis that has not yet been published as a book. Read more
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“The familiar framing of China as “rising” or “catching up” no longer holds. China is now shaping the trajectory of development economically, technologically and institutionally. There’s always a “but” when recognising China’s accomplishments, a reflex to tick off the costs and enumerate the failings, to pull back just when the scale of transformation becomes clear. The greater risk lies in saying too little” (5,100 words)
April Owens | Hedgehog Review | 22nd October 2025 | U
Simone Weil, philosopher, political activist, and quasi-Catholic mystic, considered attention to be something akin to prayer. Not just a cognitive tool, but one of the highest forms of human expression. Developing the ability to pay attention should be the primary purpose of education, she argued. The content of the lessons matters less than honing attention as a skill. A lesson that is still worth learning (1,200 words)
Simon Goldstein & Harvey Lederman | Lawfare | 17th October 2025 | U
Philosophical critique of Anthropic’s decision to give its chatbot the ability to end conversations which cause it “apparent distress”, the first product decision ostensibly driven by AI welfare. If each LLM instance only exists through and in a conversation, this policy is “uninformed self-termination” and leads to even tougher ethical questions — “are we as users killing something every time we end a chat?” (2,600 words)
Adam Mastroianni | Seeds Of Science | 22nd October 2025 | U
Because what we think of as intelligence is really just the ability to solve "well-defined problems". Fluency in a language or an understanding of complex electrical circuitry is achieved by solving a succession of such problems. Questions like “how do you live a good life” are poorly defined and good solutions require different qualities. This is thought of as "folksy" wisdom rather than intelligence (3,600 words)
David Mason | Hudson Review | 21st October 2025 | U
Anecdotally rich appreciation of R.L. Stevenson. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde caused a row between him and his wife Fanny, who pointed out that “Louis had ruined the story by turning it into a mere tale about a secret life…what was needed was something far more profound: a character struggling with a deeper hidden self that breaks loose and fights for supremacy”. The revised draft was a masterpiece (3,900 words)
Three friends from across the world talk to each other on a video call, made all the more poignant by the ending.
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Adam Mastroianni | Seeds Of Science | 22nd October 2025
Because what we think of as intelligence is really just the ability to solve "well-defined problems". Fluency in a language or an understanding of complex electrical circuitry is achieved by solving a succession of such problems. Questions like “how do you live a good life” are poorly defined and good solutions require different qualities. This is thought of as "folksy" wisdom rather than intelligence (3,600 words)
Fever has existed as a reaction to infection in vertebrates for over 600 million years, but we did not understand it until the 20C. Elevating the body temperature for a short period is a central part of the human immune response, with white blood cells working more efficiently and neural pathways shifting signals more quickly. It's only if the high lasts too long that it becomes a harm rather than a cure (2,000 words)
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Simone Weil, philosopher, political activist, and quasi-Catholic mystic, considered attention to be something akin to prayer. Not just a cognitive tool, but one of the highest forms of human expression. Developing the ability to pay attention should be the primary purpose of education, she argued. The content of the lessons matters less than honing attention as a skill. A lesson that is still worth learning (1,200 words)
Celine Nguyen | Personal Canon | 21st October 2025
On chatbots. Unless you are talking to another being with agency, you are not having a conversation. "This is the fundamental hazard of the conversational metaphor: that it might weaken our understanding of other minds, and our capacity to resolve the conflicts between different people’s needs. It may weaken, in other words, our ability to uphold the ethical obligations that we have to each other" (8,600 words)
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