The full Browser recommends five articles, a video and a podcast. Today, enjoy our audio and video picks.
Podcast: Nature, Nurture And Identical Twins | EconTalk. Famous studies about identical twins reared apart seem to indicate that genetics is destiny. This conversation unravels the problems with those studies (1h 4m)
Henrik Karlsson | Escaping Flatland | 28th January 2026 | U
Thoughts after reading the first volume of Robert Caro's Lyndon B. Johnson biography. Political power is not, as the writer had thought, endowed by jobs or institutions. Real political operatives understand that it "is something you frack, something you force out of the stone by pumping fluid into the cracks". Every drop adds up. Johnson saw the world this way, and had done since he was a toddler (2,700 words)
No text captures Iran's contradictions as well as the 1936 novella The Blind Owl. Sadegh Hedayat's book holds the distinction of having been banned both before and after the 1979 revolution. Its ambiguous, symbol-laden narrative follows a mediocre painter through his obsession with a beautiful woman, whom he kills, and then his awakening as "the old, Quran-reciting man he most despises" (3,700 words)
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Good population data is hard to come by. As such: "We simply have no idea how many people live in many of the world’s countries." Conducting a good census is expensive, difficult and, often, politically fraught. Corrupt officials can inflate the numbers for gain. Satellites are useful to an extent, but they can't look inside dwellings to see who lives there. We know less about the world than we think (3,700 words)
Graphic designer describes the process of creating a new font inspired by the displays on a specific San Francisco train route. Owing to the proliferation of transit agencies, the city is "an eclectic patchwork of typography". This sign has "a raw, analogue quality" thanks to its fixed grid and fluorescent backlighting. The eventual font was created by stacking elements "like Lego" to build letters (1,700 words)
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A Waymo and a Tesla Cybercab, both self-driving cars, see the world very differently. The Waymo uses lidar and radar for a detailed 3D model of its environment beyond what humans can see. A Cybercab has no lidar or radar. It has 8 cameras which send video feeds to a neural network to identify objects and gauge dimensions. “Which technology wins out will determine the future of self-driving vehicles” (6,100 words)
In a rented room in Hastings, John Logie Baird built the first TV-signal-transmitting equipment using a hatbox, tea chest, darning needles and bicycle light lenses. It caused a 1000-volt electric shock which burned his hand. Three years later, he gave the first official demonstration of a television from his attic workshop in London. Most present failed to realise the significance of what they had just seen (1,400 words)
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What links a 1980s British playground rhyme — "Oompa-Loompa stick it up your jumper" — and the Nazi slogan "Arbeit Macht Frei"? A 1935 comic song about defying authority, which began "Twas Christmas Day at the workhouse and you know how kind they are..." and the headline of this piece, which is emblazoned on a surviving London workhouse, where "city paupers were farmed" as poverty relief (900 words)
On climate change as a class problem, building on the work of Marx, Engels and left-wing ecologist Barry Commoner. "Like the free lunch, the free gift of nature is an illusion. Its costs always appear elsewhere in the system. The question is not whether they are paid, but what form they take and who — or what — pays them." Pollution should be considered and priced as a product of capitalism (4,000 words)
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The full Browser recommends five articles, a video and a podcast. Today, enjoy our audio and video picks.
Podcast: Why We Still Trust Wikipedia | GZERO World. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales describes what it takes to build trustworthy institutions and addresses recent controversies around the site’s neutrality on hot-button issues (37m 15s)
Carney's speech to the World Economic Forum is well worth reading in full. For "middle powers" like Canada, he argues, the "bargain" offered by an international order dictated by American hegemony "no longer works". "If we're not at the table, we're on the menu." The old order will not come back. One of his country's most valuable assets, he says, is "the capacity to stop pretending" (2,500 words)
Felice Basbøll | Engelsberg Ideas | 19th January 2026 | U
On 20C tussles between Denmark and Norway over Greenland, via a profile of explorer Knud Rasmussen. In 1917, the US recognised Danish sovereignty in northern Greenland as a condition for buying the Virgin Islands from Denmark. Other countries followed suit, except for Norway. Rasmussen was held up as a mascot of Danish-Greenlandic relations to challenge Norwegian aspirations to Greenland (1,900 words)
Scott Alexander | Astral Codex Ten | 16th January 2026 | U
Lengthy eulogy for Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert. “Adams knew, deep in his bones, that he was cleverer than other people. God always punishes this impulse, especially in nerds. He created Adams only-slightly-above-average at everything except for a Mozart-tier skill at making silly comics about hating work. Too self-aware to deny it, too narcissistic to accept it, he spent his life searching for a loophole” (10,400 words)
Jean Hannah Edelstein | Thread | 21st January 2026 | U
Genealogical musings. "I am struck in particular by a photo of Bertha, a woman who was born in Minsk, in 1866. The photo was taken towards the end of her life, and the hardness of it seems written on her body and her face. She endured so much." Dozens of people are alive today because this great-great-grandmother decided to flee instead of remain, and was lucky enough to survive (800 words)
Roger’s Bacon | Secretorum | 17th January 2026 | U
Compendia of Jisei, a centuries-old Japanese tradition of poems written in one’s last moments. Some are vivid: “Cherry blossoms fall on a half-eaten dumpling”. Some are prosaic: “I wake up from a seventy-five-year dream to millet porridge”. Some are humorous: “Raizan has died to pay for the mistake of being born: for this he blames no one, and bears no grudge”. Nearly all of them are astonishing (2,600 words)
Podcast: Why We Still Trust Wikipedia | GZERO World. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales describes what it takes to build trustworthy institutions and addresses recent controversies around the site’s neutrality on hot-button issues (37m 15s)
A skateboarder, a spider, a motorcyclist, a person on a tilting chair — all share a sense of balance that must be maintained in every moment, as demonstrated in this visual meditation on the concept.
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Jean Hannah Edelstein | Thread | 21st January 2026 | U
Genealogical musings. "I am struck in particular by a photo of Bertha, a woman who was born in Minsk, in 1866. The photo was taken towards the end of her life, and the hardness of it seems written on her body and her face. She endured so much." Dozens of people are alive today because this great-great-grandmother decided to flee instead of remain, and was lucky enough to survive (800 words)
Account of an attempt to cope with extreme nerve pain by playing a very hard videogame extremely slowly. Hollow Knight: Silksong has "the energy of a horror-tinged European animated TV show you only half-remember from your childhood". Usually, long periods of immersion would be required to defeat it. Playing just 20 minutes at a time teaches valuable lessons about the nature of pain (2,300 words
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Carney's speech to the World Economic Forum is well worth reading in full. For "middle powers" like Canada, he argues, the "bargain" offered by an international order dictated by American hegemony "no longer works". "If we're not at the table, we're on the menu." The old order will not come back. One of his country's most valuable assets, he says, is "the capacity to stop pretending" (2,500 words)
Data scientist investigates what Google Maps is doing to the restaurant scene in London. The app is so powerful that it now decides which establishments succeed. "It is organised by visibility that compounds, rent that rises when discovery arrives, and algorithms that allocate attention long before consumers ever show up. What looks like 'choice' is increasingly the downstream effect of ranking systems" (1,900 words)
Want more? The full Browser recommends five outstanding articles, a video and a podcast daily, for less than $1 a week.
Felice Basbøll | Engelsberg Ideas | 19th January 2026
On 20C tussles between Denmark and Norway over Greenland, via a profile of explorer Knud Rasmussen. In 1917, the US recognised Danish sovereignty in northern Greenland as a condition for buying the Virgin Islands from Denmark. Other countries followed suit, except for Norway. Rasmussen was held up as a mascot of Danish-Greenlandic relations to challenge Norwegian aspirations to Greenland (1,900 words)
Alas, it is a relic of the past. Whether you were watching a classic or a dud, you could take solace in the fact that the rest of the day was yours to do what you wanted. It is survived by the “this-assuredly-shouldn’t-be-more-than-two-hours Netflix streamer and the three-hour prestige-Oscar-play-picture directed by a guy in his 80s that lost the studio $100 million. And of course, the modern superhero movie” (1,000 words)
Want more? The full Browser recommends five outstanding articles, a video and a podcast daily, for less than $1 a week.
Scott Alexander | Astral Codex Ten | 16th January 2026
Lengthy eulogy for Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert. “Adams knew, deep in his bones, that he was cleverer than other people. God always punishes this impulse, especially in nerds. He created Adams only-slightly-above-average at everything except for a Mozart-tier skill at making silly comics about hating work. Too self-aware to deny it, too narcissistic to accept it, he spent his life searching for a loophole” (10,400 words)
Compendia of Jisei, a centuries-old Japanese tradition of poems written in one’s last moments. Some are vivid: “Cherry blossoms fall on a half-eaten dumpling”. Some are prosaic: “I wake up from a seventy-five-year dream to millet porridge”. Some are humorous: “Raizan has died to pay for the mistake of being born: for this he blames no one, and bears no grudge”. Nearly all of them are astonishing (2,600 words)
Want more? The full Browser recommends five outstanding articles, a video and a podcast daily, for less than $1 a week.