I Make Good Money. Why Do I Still Feel Like This?

Hanna Horvath | Your Brain On Money | 11th March 2026

The hollowing out of the middle class has created two versions of the same squeeze. Some are facing material precarity — “the basics are genuinely falling out of reach”. Others are facing positional precarity — despite making good money on paper, they are in a “state of disenfranchisement”. “Neither group is accumulating capital”, which is what matters in an economy organised around returns to ownership (4,100 words)

Puzzle: Play Nomido, the Browser’s daily word game.

Jürgen Habermas’ Lost World

Ioannes Chountis De Fabbri | Engelsberg Ideas | 16th March 2026

“The obituaries will honour Habermas as one of the great philosophers of the 20th century. But the work that will endure longest is the one that began in the coffee-houses of Georgian London, and whose deepest insight was, in the end, a conservative one: that the conditions of rational public life are fragile, historically contingent, and not easily recovered once lost” (2,400 words)

Systems Thinking Is Brain Rot For Analysts

Timber Stinson-Schroff | Blundercheck | 18th September 2025

Recovering systems thinker explains why adopting this model of analysis is harmful, especially to young, impressionable analysts who think they have the whole world worked out. "Despite the language it’s cloaked in, systems thinking puts you in a minigame mindset. Immediately you’re looking for shortcuts. Leverage points = silver bullets. The only game worth playing is the long game" (2,000 words)

Puzzle: Play Nomido, the Browser’s daily word game.

The Secret Police Playbook

Christian Gläßel & Adam Scharpf | Can We Still Govern? | 13th March 2026

The most powerful tool for an authoritarian regime wanting to build a loyal and efficient secret police force is not extremism, but career anxiety. "Career-pressured officers 'detour' through repressive units not because they are fanatics, but because the detour is the only viable path upward." Create a system that offers advancement to low-quality officers with stagnant careers and... voila (2,600 words)

Podcast: A Scandal in Königsberg | Bookstack. About two 19C Prussian clerics and their alleged involvement in a sex cult (26m 42s)

Video: The World's Most Stressful Objects | YouTube | Culture Trip | 1m 42s

Architect Katerina Kamprani showcases her designs for everyday objects that are ever so slightly wrong in the most chaotic way possible.

Puzzle: Play Nomido, the Browser’s daily word game.

Middlemarch And Moral Beauty

George Scialabba | 11th March 2026 | U

Everything one needs to know about moral beauty can be found in George Eliot's masterpiece of a novel. "Middlemarch is virtually a chrestomathy of moral wisdom, proffered in a narrative voice that is all-seeing, all-comprehending, all-forgiving: the closest approximation to God's voice in English literature. It is also exquisitely witty, which we are free to imagine God being as well" (2,200 words)

Puzzle: Play Nomido, the Browser’s daily word game.

A Plain Anabaptist Story: The Hutterites

Ulmer | 23rd February 2026 | U

The unlikely demographic story of how a tiny group of 16C Swiss Christians became a 58,000-strong sect concentrated in communal colonies in North America. Initially, they found a haven in Moravia, then shifted to Transylvania, then Ukraine, then South Dakota, before finally coming to rest in the 20C mostly in Canada. For a while, the median number of children born to a Hutterite woman was 10.4 (2,100 words)

Building Brasília

Sophia La Banca | JStor Daily | 11th March 2026

Why does Brasília exist? It was created in the middle of a sparsely-populated and hostile landscape in the mid 20C. The historic and populous city of Rio de Janeiro would seem to be a much better capital. But Brasília represents a very old idea: that moving the focus of Brazil inland would promote independence from colonisers. Built at great human cost, it is a fascinating piece of urban design (2,400 words)

Puzzle: Play Nomido, the Browser’s daily word game.

What Is A Tort?

Ketan Ramakrishnan | Harvard Law Review | 10th March 2026

Long, scholarly and surprisingly readable exploration of a knotty legal question. Existing tort definitions usually emphasise either the economic efficiency of tort law or its role in remedying "relational wrongs" between private actors. In fact, a tort is more of a "remedial pigeonhole", a "coarse doctrinal device" that identifies a wrongdoer's moral liability to pay for a loss caused, regardless of intent (28,000 words)

An Unappetising Shrub

Alex Wakeman | Works In Progress | 9th March 2026

Wild cabbage is an “unassuming” weed that has been bred to yield a surprisingly diverse set of vegetables. Modern cabbage and kale were created by selecting for denser layers of leaves; cauliflower and broccoli by selecting for the inflorescence. By favouring large edible buds, 13C farmers in modern-day Belgium created Brussels sprouts. “This level of morphological diversity is unusual” (1,600 words)

Puzzle: Play Nomido, the Browser’s daily word game.

The Right Way To Be A Scientific Contrarian

Ethan Siegel | Big Think | 10th March 2026

“Are you accurately representing the consensus position? Are you reckoning with the full suite of evidence, or only with a selection of it? Is your alternative able to explain everything that the current consensus successfully explains? Is there a fair head-to-head test that can compare the mainstream idea with the alternative directly? Are you being honest about the successes and failures of your alternative?” (3,700 words)

No War Is Illegal

Lorenzo Warby | Lorenzo From Oz | 5th March 2026

Is the attack on Iran, or any war, illegal? Laws come with remedies — consequences for breaking the law. (Public) international law only makes declarative statements, which are not enough to make it law. A war may be unconstitutional, immoral or a strategic failure, but it cannot be illegal. “A much more useful question is: does the war disrupt an existing order or does it seek to enforce it?” (2,100 words)

Puzzle: Play Nomido, the Browser’s daily word game.

Ten Thoughts On Government Data

Santi Ruiz | Statecraft | 5th March 2026

…And its idiosyncrasies. Government data systems were built for administration, not analysis. Datasets often have a small number of civil servants using them; inaccuracies can go unnoticed for a long time. Lots of data are based on representative samples, which entails assumptions that can easily invalidate findings if one forgets to include them. “There’s rarely a single person who can explain the whole thing” (2,000 words)

The Chronicler Of Decline

Ed Simon | Hedgehog Review | 4th March 2026

Lessons from Edward Gibbon and his history of Rome's collapse. "The narrative that unfolds across the six volumes of Gibbon’s history endures as a warning against the way a disease of the soul can metastasise throughout the body politic, showing how a pervasive nihilism can incapacitate a people from within." A nation's values erode slowly, until its collapse comes quickly and horribly (2,000 words)

Puzzle: Play Nomido, the Browser’s daily word game.

Yearning For The Apocalypse

Talia Lavin | The Sword And The Sandwich | 4th March 2026

Christian eschatology is an underrated factor in US government policy. "If you are a self-determined member of the elect, schooled to await the Apocalypse from your earliest days, the end of the world coincides with the destruction of your perceived enemies and your elevation to the ranks of the angels." Fragments of ancient texts are being interpreted in new ways to be causes for modern warfare (4,100 words)

Podcast: How Metrics Make Us Miserable | Plain English. Conversation with the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen about how the quantified life has become a modern religion (1h 3m)

Video: The Doodlin' Song | YouTube | Dick Van Dyke | 2m 15s

From 1963, Dick Van Dyke, Mary Tyler Moore and Sylvia Lewis perform a gently hilarious musical number, with much of the comedy residing in their dance moves

Puzzle: Play Nomido, the Browser’s daily word game.