Podcast: Kapitia Skink | Bad At Goodbyes. A series dedicated to critically endangered flora and fauna takes a look at this rare reptile found on the South Island of New Zealand (29m 41s)

Video: Sunset On The Lunar Surface | YouTube | Firefly Aerospace | 1m 00s

Images of what sunset looks like from the moon, captured on 16th March 2025 by a lunar lander carrying out NASA research.

It’s The Only Face I Have

Corey Robin | 26th March 2025

The archives of McCarthyism contain a lesson about fear. It stems not just from our need to survive, but from a hope to preserve our best selves. "We tend to think that fear works on our basest, most elemental selves, reduced to a purely physical being. It’s often quite the opposite. Fear works most potently when it threatens our highest sense of ourselves. We’ll do anything to preserve that" (600 words)

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Flushed Away

Anna Gibbs | Slate | 25th February 2025

The evolution of the modern toilet is a success story that deserves more attention. As long as you don't need fancy lights or a heated seat, for about $200 it is possible to purchase a water efficient model that will work as intended every day for decades. And yet in the US, people still blame low-flow, environmentally friendly toilets for their "bathroom problems". More water does not make a flush better (4,200 words)

A Job You Can Buy And Sell

No Dumb Ideas | 25th March 2025 | U

What if the job market was a true market, where jobs could be bought by the highest bidder? An intriguing thought experiment. Applicants would seek financing and apply to purchase an entry-level job, say, from someone ready to trade upwards in their career — similar to how the housing market works now. Recruiters become brokers. A great system for job-holding incumbents, terrible for everybody else (2,500 words)

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Granular Power

Michaela Büsse | e-flux | 25th March 2025

The politics of sand is "gritty". Once just sediment, it is now precious. Cities like Dubai and Singapore are built on imported sand. There is a black market in sand, sand mafias, and sand crimes. We use it to reclaim land and stave off coastal erosion as well as to build roads and skyscrapers. Sand shapeshifts: a cheap resource in one place, it becomes valuable land and property elsewhere (3,600 words)

She Who Helps See

George Saunders | Paris Review | 24th March 2025

Celebrated writer pens admiring portrait of artist Inka Essenhigh. “Her work, sacramentally, reminds me that most of the time I’m coasting, on perceptual autopilot. It says: “George, let me help you see better, with more acuity and less habituation. Let me help you expand the miracle of your awareness and become a more generous noticer. Try to know less. Stay with the not-knowing a little longer”” (2,300 words)

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I Spent Seven Years In Search Of Freedom

Pouya Nikmand | Outliving Iran | 23rd March 2025

Harrowing account of a young man’s escape from Iran to America. Wherever he goes — South Korea, Poland — immigration laws bar him from study or work. A middle-aged European man preys on his precarity, trapping him in a cycle of rape and abuse. Out of options, he plans to enter Germany illegally and kill himself. At last, his US visa arrives, though it would be two more years before he is allowed to work (4,000 words)

Podcast: The Leprechaun Impersonator | Let’s Not Meet. Anthology of true horror stories recounted in the first person. In this episode, an almost-kidnapping, a peeping tom, an eerie fog, and a hiking trail called “the hellfire club” (51m 39s)

Video: Hangman’s Reel | YouTube | Shane Cook & Emily Flack | 1m 33s

Perfectly synchronised fiddle and step-dancing duet.

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The Cult Of The American Lawn

Oliver Milman | Noema | 20th March 2025

The well-tended suburban lawn is more than just grass. It has become a symbol of the right sort of American "good life" — one involving home ownership and "moral rectitude". European colonists originally carried the lust for smooth grass across the Atlantic. The upkeep of this harmful, highly fertilised, pesticide-maintained monoculture has become a vicious source of neighbourhood disputes (2,900 words)

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Navigation Queues, Navigation Cues

Domitille Debret | HTML Review | 20th March 2025

Essay about the arrival of infinite scroll on the web, presented in a clever circular design that the reader can scroll through forever. "The scrollbar solved the web’s first scaling problem: how to situate yourself within content that stretched beyond the visible screen. Somewhere along the way, the usage changed and became a fuel for motion. A motion I can’t really control and a motion I can’t really resist" (1,800 words)

The Lost Art Of Research As Leisure

Mariam Mahmoud | Kasurian | 9th March 2025

The 21C world of audio-visual distractions was predicted by major 20C figures like E.B. White, Virginia Woolf and Susan Sontag. Leisure, not as pure idleness but as an inheritor of the Greek concept of scholē or "school", is under threat. As the German philosopher Josef Pieper argued, this takes the form of "a style of unconstrained research". Don't just read — read playfully, purposefully and curiously (3,500 words)

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A Brief History Of Accelerationism

Matt Southey | Latecomer | 27th August 2024

Originally a pejorative term for weary Marxists. The 2010s branch "effective accelerationism" favoured by techno-optimists such as Marc Andreessen is a "rebranded form of libertarianism". A more interesting version is espoused by "ultra-doomer" philosopher Nick Land, who thinks capitalism is the true protagonist of the universe, with humanity as a mere temporary component of the story (2,800 words)

Legacy Of The Angels

Rebekah Wallace | Aeon | 18th March 2025

Everything we understand about the cosmos can be traced back to angels. Medieval debates about bodiless celestial beings that were nonetheless located in time and space forced an update to Aristotelian notions of physics. In the thinking of Duns Scotus, Isaac Newton and others, an invisible force such as God's will could act on such a body. This laid the framework for modern physics (3,200 words)

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The Mana Of Digging A Grave

Liam Rātana | Spinoff | 24th July 2024

Arresting from the opening line: "It has been almost a decade since I was called on to help dig my first grave." Drafted in first at the age of 19 when an uncle died, the craft of gravedigging was quickly and simply communicated at 5am at the urupā, a Māori burial ground. Mark out your hole, remove the grass first — ideally in one piece — and then just keep shifting earth until you're six feet down (2,800 words)

The Managerial Class Has No Future

Peter Wei | Ecumene | 8th March 2025

Unlike traditional elites who can pass down land, family businesses, or social networks, this class’s only transferable asset is earning potential, which their children must re-earn through education and training. Education has become more expensive; professional training is lasting longer — “a wage cut by other means”. “The result is a class that, despite its high incomes and social prestige, is unsustainable” (1,700 words)

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The Great Hobby Lobby Artefact Heist

Meghan Boilard | Off-Topic | 12th March 2025

In 2010, thousands of cuneiform texts were smuggled into Oklahoma City, to the headquarters of evangelical arts and crafts empire Hobby Lobby. The Green family, Hobby Lobby’s owners and one of the largest donors to Evangelical causes, were creating an interactive museum on biblical history. Their ethically questionable, bulk acquisition of over 40,000 relics shook the artefact market as a whole (4,400 words)

The Prehistoric Psychopath

John Halstead & Phil Thomson | Works In Progress | 13th March 2025

New research reveals that hunter gatherers were considerably less violent than previously believed, despite lacking the modern state apparatus for managing violence: no code of law, no judges, no police. This upends Hobbesian beliefs that human nature is innately warlike and that our ancestors were perennially in a state of conflict. “Nomadic foragers rarely glorify the warrior” (6,300 words)

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The Blue Bus Paradox

Adam Kucharski | Understanding The Unseen | 17th March 2025

Suppose a pedestrian gets hit by a bus, but cannot recall the colour of the bus responsible. The pedestrian sues the Blue Bus Company, as they own 75% of the buses in town, and the odds are high it was one of their buses. Should the pedestrian win? “If we were to let baseline probabilities dictate verdicts, we’d risk punishing the likely without evidence — instead of proving who was guilty” (1,100 words)