Two Americas, A Bank Branch, $50,000 Cash

Patrick McKenzie | Bits About Money | 5th March 2025

Last year, a magazine published a viral feature about a financial advice columnist who fell for a scam and ended up handing a shoebox containing $50,000 cash to a stranger. This finance writer didn't feel that the account of this large cash withdrawal rang true. So he devoted months of his life to fact-checking it. It's a long and winding road, but the destination is surprisingly satisfying (6,700 words)

Luxury Beliefs

Scott Sumner | The Pursuit Of Happiness | 26th February 2025

America contains a "hidden aristocracy". These people are so insulated by their wealth that they may not even realise the extent to which they exist in a different legal reality to the rest of the country. Drug offences are the classic — rich buyers don't go to jail but poor sellers do. Other matters that are consequence-free for the wealthy include divorce scandals and illegal immigration (1,900 words)

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Podcast: What If You Survived The Burundian Genocide? | This Is Actually Happening. First person account from a survivor of the 1993 mass killing of Tutsis in Burundi. Very informative about an under-reported moment in history (49m 30s)

Video: The Disturbing Current | YouTube | Joel Blackledge | 5m 39s

Illuminating visual analysis of how director Leo McCarey used shot composition to enhance the themes of dissolution and reconciliation in his 1937 screwball comedy The Awful Truth.

The World Was Flat. Now It's Flattened

Ted Gioia | Honest Broker | 5th March 2025

Critic's annual "state of the culture" speech. Homogeneity is the name of the game. "Every big web platform feels the same. That rich tapestry of my friends and family and colleagues has been replaced by the most shallow and flattened digital fluff. And this feeling of flattening is intensified by the lack of context or community. The only ruling principle is the total absence of purpose or seriousness" (1,800 words)

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One Of Florida’s Most Lethal Python Hunters

Lindsey Liles | Garden & Gun | 15th October 2024

Profile of Donna Kalil, a 62-year-old professional python hunter in the Florida Everglades. Burmese pythons began arriving in the 1970s, as imported pets that escaped or were released. They are extremely efficient predators: in the Everglades National Park, 90 per cent of fur-bearing animals have disappeared since the early 2000s. But as a snake bounty hunter, Donna is more dangerous still (3,300 words)

Numinous Response

Lamorna Ash | Amulet | 3rd March 2025

The 12C story of doomed lovers Héloïse and Abelard is a sacred text. Their correspondence, after they had been separated and had entered holy orders, apart, is as stirring as it was centuries ago. A medieval academic feared its resonance would fade with passing years, but the "intense passion and suffering" are still fresh. "Sacred texts are this: a glimpse of love’s eternality" (2,100 words)

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The World Of Professional Slap Fighting

Ander Monson | Esquire | 23rd May 2024

Dispatch from a fast-growing new combat sport. "Phillips’s eyes are closed, all 255 pounds of him anticipating the blow, hoping to endure it so he can return fire. He can’t move to evade the slap. That’s not allowed. Flinching is a foul — spiritually, the greatest foul in slap fighting — and the penalty is that your opponent gets an extra chance to smash you in the face. So you just have to take the blow" (6,500 words)

Self-Domesticated Ape

Kevin Kelly | Technium | 2nd March 2025

The first animals domesticated by humans weren’t dogs, but ourselves. Humanity selected for rounder faces, wider eyes, and broadly the retention of juvenile traits into adulthood. Human evolution is a story of Survival of the Friendliest. "We self-selected our character, and crafted this being called human. We invented ourselves. I contend this is our greatest invention" (1,500 words)

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The Walnut Tree

David Blake Knox | Dublin Review Of Books | 4th March 2025

Survivors of a massacre in Croatia identify the man who directed it: the town’s mayor. He has eight sworn alibi witnesses and a video with a burnt-in time-code showing him elsewhere. Except that a Czech detective, an English silviculturist, and the angles on the branches of a walnut tree collectively prove that the video had been doctored: at the crucial moment he was driving in to town, not out (2,000 words)

Always Look Up Everybody’s Mom

Ada Palmer | Ex Urbe | 12th February 2025

Two Renaissance cardinals claimed rags-to-riches stories, but Franscesco della Rovere was more like "a son of the 1% climbing to join the 0.01%" as Pope Sixtus IV. (One historical tip for identifying hidden nepotism: consider people’s mothers, not just their fathers). By contrast, Jorge da Costa’s farming family was truly dirt poor; as such, his slow grind to success required living to age 102 (4,000 words)

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Magnet Fishing Has Beef

Robbie Armstrong | Glasgow Bell | 1st March 2025

"Lobbing high-powered magnets on ropes into waterways to retrieve discarded metal objects" might seem like wholesome fun, but legally it's considered "unauthorised work on a scheduled monument." A group in Glasgow skirts the law and irks the regulators at Scottish Canals. "I don’t like backstabbing and I’m no keen on authority figures telling me what tae dae, especially wi ma hobby" (2,700 words)

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Sorry Not Sorry

Michelle Cyca | Walrus | 28th February 2025 | U

The apology statement is ubiquitous after any mistake or tragedy. Individuals and institutions fire them out, eager to be seen to be saying the right thing while less keen to do anything concrete. "Forgiveness for mistakes should be possible in a just society, but it should follow from genuine remorse and reparations — not from outsourced platitudes wielded like a tranquiliser dart for outrage" (1,400 words)

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Flashback On The New Yorker's Birthday

Tina Brown | Fresh Hell | 24th February 2025 | U

Editor's victory lap. Tina Brown took over the New Yorker in 1992 with a remit from the publisher "to clean house and blood-change the reader demographic". She found a magazine that was "easier to praise than to read", still paying staff writers who hadn't filed a piece in over 30 years. She fired 71 people, "rewired the management as a matriarchy" and increased circulation by 22 per cent (2,900 words)

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Podcast: Ghana’s Exiled King | It's A Continent. Audio profile of Asantehene Prempeh I, who ruled the Ashanti Empire in the late 19C, defied the British Empire, and spent 28 years exiled in the Seychelles (29m 52s)

Video: Ernest Wright | YouTube | Sheffield Museums | 9m 12s

A craftsman in the historic steel-making city of Sheffield, Yorkshire, demonstrates the process for making the perfect kitchen scissors.

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10 Observations About Tokyo

Quico Toro | Persuasion | 19th February 2025

American resident in Tokyo reflects on the city's norms. Interesting throughout. Unlike elsewhere, a polite and formal manner projects warmth, rather than frosty reserve. The more casual affect commonly used with strangers can seem aggressive to the unfamiliar. Most important is the prosocial consensus, which ensures that every interaction has a clear script and set of expectations (1,500 words)

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Bayes Is Not A Phase

Dynomight | 27th February 2025

In defence of Bayesian reasoning. There is a good explanation here of this method of statistical inference popular with certain segments of the "techie" population. Far from being a "hipster fad", this combination of aleatoric uncertainty and epistemic uncertainty is very useful for optimising decisions. Unfortunately, building a trustworthy formal model takes far too long for real life (2,200 words)

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Is God A Mushroom?

John Last | Long Now | 26th February 2025

Dead Sea Scrolls scholar John Marco Allegro certainly thought so. His 1970 book about the influence of psychoactive mushroom extracts on early Christianity, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, "is remembered as a quintessential example of academic suicide". But in the 21C, psychedelic science has caught up with him. Jesus wasn't a mushroom, but the human sense of the divine could be (4,100 words)

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The Hardest Working Font In Manhattan

Marcin Wichary | Aresluna | 14th February 2025

Gorton, an unassuming and unfashionable monoline typeface, is everywhere. Institutions including the US military and national parks service use it; it also appears on thousands of typewriter keyboards, warning signs and elevator controls. It seems to be have been especially popular in Manhattan. This beautifully-illustrated essay explores the history of the font and celebrates its imperfections (6,500 words)

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The West Lost The War It Thought It Had Won

Natalia Antelava | Coda Story | 24th February 2025

“Putin’s success stems from the collective failure of the Western establishment, convinced of its own invincibility, to recognise his systematic dismantling of the order they claimed to defend. The values the West claimed for itself — defense of individual rights, rule of law, democratic values — were worth fighting for. But having “won” the Cold War, Western establishments grew complacent” (1,800 words)

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Curious Correspondence With Edward Gorey

Cynthia Rose | Comics Journal | 24th February 2025

“My father chanced on his works back when they were small, slight booklets that seemed handmade. With them came an entire world, curious and enticing, fashioned out of the finest pen strokes. I saw his kohl-eyed vamps as shady White Russians and his muscular villains as figures out of Bram Stoker.” Filled with delightful asides on the epistolary life — “ours was a family who liked filling envelopes” (1,400 words)

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