Battling All The Way Home

Stephen Pimentel | Palladium | 27th August 2026

Reader's guide to the Odyssey. Homer's Greeks are neither "primitive versions of ourselves" nor "utterly foreign and entirely inaccessible". Elements of their world is recognisable to us, but much of it is not. The points of contact are the big concepts, like loyalty, love, memory and identity. Much of what came after is built on Homer's foundation. "He is not the West, but he stands at its beginning" (3,300 words)

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App Life In China

Jeremy Goldkorn | ChinaFile | 26th August 2026

Postcard from China, from a former resident returning for a visit. Interesting throughout. The degree to which algorithms control life there shocks him. "In Yangzhou’s Geyuan 个园, a lovely traditional courtyard garden of rock and bamboo, you need to watch a video advertisement and scan your face to get toilet paper. Once only: the dispenser remembers who you are and won’t give you seconds" (3,500 words)

Dolly Parton’s Hair

Sarah Mesle | Avidly | 25th August 2026

"Dolly Parton’s hair was real — touchable, textural, ever-present — but not natural. It was abundant, luxurious, and surely expensive, yet placed no social premium of looking rich. Parton retained her hair as a sign of a morally accountable self, but also used it to signal how little she cared for the normalised, dangerously narrow feminine scripts of prosperity and sentimentalism" (1,000 words)

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How To Build A Fine-Grained City

Alicia Pederson | Courtyard Urbanist | 24th August 2026

A "fine-grained" neighbourhood is one in which distinct yet contiguous buildings are built in close proximity, rather than being consolidated into one megastructure development. This enables crucial diversity: residents and business owners have autonomy without compromising on density. Doing this well requires good laws, clever planning and a deep understanding of the "party wall" (3,900 words)

The Examined Life In The Age Of Optimisation

Rodney King | New York Journal Of Philosophy | 6th August 2026

On the perils of an optimised life. “The move beneath all this, and one we seem to have made almost without noticing, is to regard the self as a project. We talk now about working on ourselves, upgrading our habits, levelling up, building a personal brand, becoming the best version of who we are, as though a person were a small business that might reach profitability if only the founder would stop sleeping” (3,000 words)

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How Universities Should Prepare Founders

Paul Graham | 25th August 2026

Founders need to be good at building things that customers will like. Courses on “entrepreneurship” will not help. Expose students to powerful ideas instead. Give them less coursework and more time. Random side projects are one of the best sources for startup ideas. Both Microsoft and Meta were started during reading period at Harvard, a gap between the end of classes and the start of final exams (2,900 words)

A Billion Dollars

Kevin Kelly | Technium | 24th August 2026

What would you do with a billion dollars? Maybe buy a house. Travel. Support a friend. But after all that, you still have a billion dollars and you still need to do something with your time. Some would start their own business, or open a bakery. Work with the poor. Go pro with their band. Become a YouTube creator. None of these things requires a billion dollars. “Most people’s dreams are not gated by money” (1,700 words)

Vintage Artificial Intelligence

Jason Scott | Internet Archive Blogs | 16th August 2026

An archive of miscellaneous projects that explored the question of thinking machines and synthetic life before generative AI, dating from the 1970s through the 1990s. From our current vantage point, “it’s easy to dismiss these older programs as toys or forgettable jaunts, but they carried with them the weight of a machine imbued with at least a fuzzy sense of character and thought” (2,100 words)

You Are A Type Of Guy

Octopusyarn | 30th July 2026

Musings on group membership and individuation. Compelled by our innate feelings of inadequacy or ordinariness, we jockey for status within subcultures and yet perversely resent being slotted into a category. “Ironically, the fear of being mediocre is what’s in the way of growing beyond the norm. Decoupling an activity from status games is what gives it the breathing room to become meaningful” (2,200 words)

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Volcanoes That Made History

Alexandra Witze | Knowable | 20th August 2026

In the months after the 1883 explosion in Krakatau, Indonesia, the world saw violently coloured sunsets that artists captured in paintings, likely including Munch’s The Scream. The Mongol Empire may have collapsed due to climate changes caused by a volcanic eruption. Historical records from the Black Death suggest that skies were darker than usual at the time, perhaps due to volcanic haze (2,400 words)

How Orchids Inspired Darwin

Rowan Hooper | Literary Hub | 20th August 2026

Charles Darwin was fascinated by orchids, an obsession he inherited from his grandfather Erasmus, who felt a “borderline sexual love” for them. When sent an orchid with a flower tube about 30 cm long, he predicted the existence of a moth with a tongue that long. Twenty years after his death, such a moth was discovered in Madagascar and given the species name praedicta in his honour (3,100 words)

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Department Stores Into Dreamworlds

Nozomi Naoi | MIT Press Reader | 20th August 2026

Potted history of the Japanese department store. The store chain Mitsukoshi started off as a kimono fabric store for wealthy patrons in 1673 in Edo. Other well-known chains have equally hoary pasts. Takashimaya originally served imperial family members; Matsuzakaya sold religious robes for Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines, while Daimaru catered to the less privileged masses (1,500 words)

The Amazon Tax

Seth Godin | 18th August 2026

Amazon makes nearly a billion dollars in profit every week from selling search ads to merchants and publishers. The perverse side effect of this system is that it gives them “an incentive to make their organic search results worse — giving producers more incentive to buy more ads”. For decades, Amazon claimed to be a customer-centric company, and they were. They cannot make this claim anymore (600 words)

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The Economics Of Swifties

John Quiggin | Crooked Timber | 18th August 2026

Taylor Swift re-recorded her back catalogue in 2021, outwitting the record companies who owned the originals and setting the stage for her 2023 Eras tour. A lovely voice and good songwriting aside, she is not an innovator. What explains her longevity as a pop star? Perhaps the decline of the centrality of the teenager in popular culture, which has allowed Swift to build a career over decades rather than years (1,300 words)

Is The City Finished?

Sam Kahn | Castalia | 17th August 2026

For thousands of years, culture used to radiate outwards from the city. No longer. The rise of algorithmic recommendations and the pandemic may have led people to realise that “they didn’t have to depend on the city for much at all”. “The cultural claims of the city — its theatre, its music venues, its fashion, its literary centres — really may not matter for the distribution of cultural content as a whole” (1,300 words)

The Undertaker

Feyi Fawehinmi | 1914 Reader | 17th August 2026

Intriguing from the opening line: “Cheung Yan became a dollar billionaire simply by noticing.” In the 1990s, containers were arriving in America packed with Chinese goods and returning empty. Cheung bought waste cardboard and sent it back to China on the ships, to be pulped and turned into new boxes. She built her empire when Premier Zhu’s reforms were turning China into an export juggernaut (5,400 words)

The Animator Who Inspired Cartoon Network

Animation Obsessive | 17th August 2026

Robert Cannon “left a colossal imprint on animation but remains little-known and barely investigated. He perfected a type of limited animation that was copied around the world.” A ballet fan, he pioneered motion that broke realism and the laws of physics in service of timing, creating funny and unique movements for every character. Shy and gentle, he “vanished” when reporters tried for interviews (1,400 words)

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Human Giants Defy The Laws Of Physics

Joel David Hamkins | MIT Press Reader | 13th August 2026

Galileo on why human giants are physically impossible. “If one wishes to maintain in a great giant the same proportion of limb as that found in an ordinary man he must either find a harder and stronger material for making the bones, or he must admit a diminution of strength in comparison with men of medium stature; for if his height be increased inordinately he will fall and be crushed under his own weight” (2,000 words)

Hidden Truths

Robert Zaretsky | American Scholar | 13th August 2026

Review of a new biography of Hannah Arendt, published half a century after her death. Since the 2016 US presidential election, her work on totalitarianism has surged in popularity and she has been "canonised" by a generation of political commentators. And yet many of her manuscripts still remain unpublished and her time as "a young Zionist" complicates the more familiar version of Arendt in later life (1,600 words)

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Why Are Plumbers Paid More In The US?

Philippe Lemoine | Stream Of Randomness | 13th August 2026

Plumbers in rich countries aren't substantially better at plumbing those in low-income places. They might access to better equipment and materials, but this isn't enough to explain the vastly different levels of pay. What they do have is a higher "value productivity", because workers in other sectors produce more than the equivalent people in low-income countries, raising the price of plumbing services (16,000 words)

Whose Spy Was He?

Shaun Walker | Guardian | 13th August 2026

An 27-year-old Russian political activist, living in exile in Poland, has been convicted of espionage and collaboration with the FSB. Allies can't decide if he was a super spy or a fool. "He is convinced that Rogov was genuinely against Putin, but suspects he was so weak-willed that he was co-opted into working for the FSB, thinking he could make some money without doing anyone much harm" (6,600 words)

On Nostalgia

Boris Dralyuk | Poetry Foundation | 1st May 2026

Conveying nostalgia in poetry is tricky. "There is often a sweetness to nostalgia, a sugar coating that, left unchecked, thickens until it obscures the 
painful kernel. The longing for a past purified of its faults — or a past we never knew firsthand — becomes an indulgence. What makes nostalgia difficult to treat honestly in poems is how easily some of us fall under its spell" (1,200 words)

The Atlas Of Learning

Hana Lee Goldin | Card Catalog | 11th August 2026

Introduction to a research framework intended to help users navigate an increasingly confusing information environment. Once upon a time, resources existed in their silos — card index, books, papers — but now every kind of record comes to us on the same screen. It's confusing. We need a map. "Before deciding what to search, then, we need to know what we’re trying to find" (3,900 words)

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Why Are Rivers So Mathematical?

Natalie Wolchover | Quanta | 10th August 2026

Introduction to "Hack's Law", created by a US Geological Survey scientist named John Hack in 1957. "Any stream, from the littlest brook to the mightiest river, has a length that’s proportional to its drainage area raised to the power of 0.6." More data gathered over subsequent decades has shown this to be the case worldwide, for deltas as well as rivers. Why? Fluid dynamics and geometry, most likely (2,200 words)