Can Literature Cure Law? Should It?

Robert Spoo | Public Books | 5th March 2024

What makes a law “a force wielded by persuadable decision-makers” as opposed to a collection of words on a page? Interesting attempt to answer this question via the work of W.H. Auden and Seamus Heaney. Literature can “cure” law, some believe, with legal material enhanced through contact with Kafka or Sophocles. But good writing exists for more than just improving our legal systems (2,800 words)

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When I Was A Hostage

Theo Padnos | Persuasion | 14th February 2024

Journalist on two years spent as a hostage in Syria after being captured in 2012 by a group of “amateur terrorists”. War hymns played in the background at all times. “We couldn’t leave those rooms and we couldn’t talk to one another. A peek at our daily calendars would have shown solitary darkness in the morning, followed by shouting at midday, followed by outbreaks of terror at night” (3,200 words)

Notes On Awe

David Gross | Less Wrong | 5th March 2024 | U

Children start off with a lot of natural awe, but adults become mired in ennui — an acquired defence against the mysterious. Some tips to rekindle awe: “take an awe walk, go somewhere new each week. With the right outlook, it can be found almost anywhere but most likely in places with vastness and novelty. Attend a spectacle — cathedrals and rock concerts have their own apparatuses of awe” (11,000 words)

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A Manual For Adversity

Darran Anderson | City Journal | 2nd March 2024 | U

Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations may have inspired the self-help genre, but the book endures for reasons beyond its maxims on life, war, and death: “a real person is there, in actual places and granular moments — examining bread or figs, staring into a fire, watching ears of corn bending toward the soil or waves crashing on headlands — intimacies which bring us within a breath or a thought of him” (3,800 words)

Logical Consistency Is A Social Burden

From Narrow To General AI | 1st March 2024 | U

“Why be consistent? What personal benefit does it bring, except to justify your thinking to others? Formal logic is behind the curve compared to common sense, and must play catch up. You must make decisions on scant information, your beliefs driven by spurious associations and flawed deductions. Maintaining logical consistency is restrictive when it is advantageous to fly by the seat of your pants” (2,100 words)

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In The Market For Embalmed Brain

The Threepenny Guignol | 3rd March 2024 | U

Scandal at Harvard Medical School prompts questions about the ethics surrounding the use of human cadavers. Despite evidence of corpse trafficking and abuse, the accused were charged with mail fraud and transportation of stolen property. The sale of human remains is legal under US law, unless they are Native American. Bodies donated to science are in a grey area with hazy oversight (2,300 words)

A Return To The Dismal 1980s

Michael Schaffer | Politico | 1st March 2024

After 25 years of municipal comeback, urban decay is again “the dominant civic storyline” in Washington DC. The homicide rate in 2023 was at its highest since 1998. Transport systems are crumbling and vacant shops are everywhere. Hybrid work at federal agencies is part of the issue. With 200,000 people no longer commuting full time to the city, tax revenues are down (2,300 words)

The Scientific Integrity Sleuth

Deborah Balthazar | Stat | 28th February 2024

Interview with Elisabeth Bik, a microbiologist and a full-time “science sleuth”. She specialises in finding cases where “image duplication” has been used to falsify results. So far, she has analysed over 100,000 papers and found about 8,000 with problems. “Of the three forms of misconduct — which are plagiarism, falsification, and fabrication — I feel plagiarism is the least bad” (2,200 words)

Kinda Nice

Damola Morenikeji | More! | 19th February 2024 | U

It is better to be kind than it is to be nice. A kind person is supportive while still being honest, whereas the “nice” person will avoid the responsibility of delivering accurate feedback for the future for fear of awkwardness or hurting feelings in the present. “Happiness, for them, is zero-sum and immediate,” whereas the kind person understands that happiness is “collective flourishing” (750 words)

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Julius Caesar's Year of Confusion

Martha Henriques | BBC Future | 28th February 2024 | U

By 200BC, the Roman calendar — which was based on both the lunar year and a superstition about the wrongness of even numbers —  had gone “catastrophically wrong”. Harvest festivals fell in spring and eclipse predictions were four months out. Julius Caesar fixed it in 46BC with a year of 445 days. Leap days now keep us broadly on track. Until the 56C, when we will be out by a day again (1,600 words)

Tools For Thinking About Censorship

Ada Palmer | Reactor | 21st February 2024

“The majority of censorship is self-censorship, but is intentionally cultivated by an outside power. Real censorship regimes see themselves as constantly underfunded and understaffed while attempting to seem all-reaching and all-knowing. Censorship aims to be visible, talked about, feared. This increases its power. We must cut through the Orwellian illusion and remember the realities of how it works” (4,400 words)

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The World’s First Computer

Evaggelos Vallianatos | Classical Wisdom | 23rd February 2024

Ever since it was unearthed from a shipwreck in 1900, the Antikythera Mechanism has perplexed scientists. This dictionary-sized device with bronze-toothed gears had a calendar for Greece’s major annual events; an eclipse calculator; and an Olympiad dial for sports. Likely built 2100 years ago by the astronomer Hipparchos, it is “the most complicated piece of scientific machinery known from antiquity” (1,400 words)

Military Failures Of Fascism

Bret Devereaux | Unmitigated Pedantry | 23rd February 2024

“Being good at war is central to fascism in all its forms. Despite this positioning, fascist governments are generally bad at war. A shocking percentage of these regimes started wars of choice, which resulted in the absolute destruction of their state. We miss this fact because fascism heavily prioritises all the signifiers of military strength, the pageantry rather than the reality — which beguiles people” (3,300 words)

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Common Law And Regulating Social Media

Morgan Ricks & Ganesh Sitaraman | LPE Project | 26th February 2024

Case for designating social media platforms as common carriers. The core idea: businesses which provide essential services to commerce and tend towards monopoly need to be governed by special rules in public interest. Some believe this might prevent deplatforming. While there are fears about unmoderated content, common carriers have always been able to exclude users as long as it was reasonable (1,100 words)

The Great Pretenders

Sarah Treleaven | Toronto Life | 14th February 2024 | U

On a case of “pretendian” fraud in Canada. The Tanzanian mother of a pair of academically gifted twins falsely registered them as adoptees, listing an Inuit woman as their “birth mother”. No proof was required. This made them eligible for many educational and business subsidies intended for indigenous people. They received at least $160,000, until online sleuths cracked the case (6,200 words)

Hex Marks The Spot

Jon-Paul Dyson | Museum Of Play | 13th December 2019 | U

Games in which pieces are moved by being picked up, such as chess, work well on a board divided into squares. But as simulation games became popular after WW2, this no longer worked. Pieces in these games slide from place to place, mimicking army units occupying territory. The mathematician John Nash and the polymath Piet Hein independently arrived at the same solution: hexagons (900 words)

What Is Left?

Rebecca Solnit | LitHub | 23rd February 2024

To be on the left “has long meant a grab bag full of contradictions”. Since 1917, the left has both opposed and supported authoritarianism, stood up for universal human rights while ignoring rights-based oppressions, and both supported and scorned organised religion. Perhaps this is just “a problem of nomenclature”? The aim should be “truth in labelling and clarity in categories” (1,900 words)

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Of Chairs And Pomeranians

Michael Glover | Hyperallergic | 22nd February 2024

Flâneur’s progress. On Sundays, London’s Pomeranians and their owners meet by the Albert Memorial. After viewing these “ridiculous fluff-balls of varying sizes”, the writer enjoys a Barbara Kruger retrospective before contemplating the screwed-down chairs that have now appeared at odd angles on pavements all over the city. “To meet a lover’s gaze, you have to crane your neck” (1,000 words)