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Digitally Liberating Colonial Plunder

Alizeh Kohari | Noēma | 28th March 2024

Digital repatriation for museum artefacts, as opposed to more politically fraught physical relocation, is surging in popularity. A 3D scan of an object enables those who cannot physically access it to view, study and understand it. One such scan, of the famous Nefertiti Bust displayed at the Neues Museum in Berlin, was made covertly using "a modified Xbox Kinect hidden under a blue scarf" (3,600 words)

$100,000 Lab Leak Debate

Scott Alexander | Astral Codex Ten | 28th March 2024

Novel method for settling an intellectual dispute. On one side, millionaire investor and poker player Saar Wilf, who espouses the lab leak theory of Covid-19's origins. On the other, Peter Miller, a physics student who thinks the lab leak theory is false. Via Wilf's analysis platform Rootclaim, the pair made a $100,000 bet, appointed judges, and took part in a 15-hour video debate. Miller won (16,000 words)

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Five Books features in-depth author interviews recommending five books on a theme. You can read more interviews on the site, or sign up for the newsletter.

The Best Books On Wellness

Today the idea of wellness has been wrapped into 'self care' and the luxury lifestyle. But the movement grew out of radical ideas in the 1960s and 1970s, explains the Cambridge academic James Riley, whose new book presents a cultural history of alternative health. Here he recommends five of the best books on wellness—taking in both satirical novels and how-to guidebooks. Read more

New History Books

A magisterial account of the Eastern Front in World War I and a lively graphic history of the Late Bronze Age are among the new books that'll be out in coming weeks. Our running list of new history books, picked out by Five Books editor Sophie Roell. Read more

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Giving Up

Christiana Spens | London Magazine | 28th March 2024

Lenten memoir. "I booked us into an intriguing B&B in a Victorian house, and we were greeted by a Russian Orthodox Priest. The walls were decorated with icons and antiques, a large gong by the foot of the stairs and shrines and candles at every turn. The Priest wore long black robes and a bright smile and showed us to our room. ‘Does this place even have plug sockets?’ my son asked" (1,700 words)

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Genius And Blood

Tony Morley | Big Think | 28th March 2024

Prior to industrialisation, artificial light was ruinously expensive. In 14C Britain, the cost equivalent of running ten modern bulbs for seven hours would be over £40,000. A candlelit house was a sign of extreme wealth because of the labour involved in making candles. Lamps filled with whale oil were the first reliable and safely portable light source, but the fuel was still costly to procure (1,700 words)

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The Dust Of God

Sam Kriss | Numb At The Lodge | 24th March 2024

On meteor cults, which offer an explanation for human religion. "There’s a chance that the entity billions of us now refer to as God began, 3,000 years ago, as a small lump of rock. Before he was the sole creator of the universe, lord of everything, beyond space, beyond time, not a being among beings but the ground of all being — before that, he spent billions of years erratically orbiting the Sun" (5,900 words)

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Toni Morrison’s Rejection Letters

Melina Moe | Los Angeles Review Of Books | 26th March 2024

This survey of the hundreds of rejection letters Morrison wrote during her 16 years at Random House suggests that she was a very good editor. Too good, perhaps, for the era of aggressive corporate consolidation she witnessed. She was not afraid to be blunt — "it simply wasn’t interesting enough", one slip reads — but she was always honest, and did her best to help unjustly rejected writers (2,500 words)

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Big Gods

Brian Klaas | The Garden Of Forking Paths | 21st March 2024

Humans had largely lived in small bands of fewer than a hundred people, until 12000 years ago, when large, complex civilisations emerged. What enabled the transition? The “Big Gods” theory holds that it is the belief in omniscient beings who watched and punished moral transgressions — “supernatural monitoring” which acted as social glue, preventing individuals from acting against the group’s interests (3,700 words)

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The Hostile Mother-In-Law

Jack Maden | Philosophy Break | 25th March 2024

Reflections on Iris Murdoch’s philosophy. The essence of a moral life is not in moments of action or decision, but in paying the right kind of attention. This entails “unselfing”: “observing the world without the crutch of our usual prejudices”. Example: a mother-in-law finds her daughter-in-law “unpolished and undignified” but over time, realises that this reflects more on herself as someone “old-fashioned and prejudiced” (1,400 words)

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Beware Of Falling Fruit

Sony Devabhaktuni & Joanna Mansbridge | CCA | 18th March 2024

Performances of safety pervade Hong Kong, where “unruly” plants and animals inconvenience day-to-day business. Warning signs include “wild pigs in area” and, incredibly, “beware of falling fruit”. How would this curious assembly of boars, mangoes, and road-side trees interact with each other? — “would they form alliances? Are they anxious about their own safety, indifferent, amused, or blasé?” (3,200 words)

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Etymology Of South Asia’s Missiles

Qamar Shahzad | South Asian Voices | 29th February 2024

India's and Pakistan’s naming strategies for their missiles are calculated statecraft, to increase legitimacy of military and political elites amongst a low-literacy populace. For example, Pakistan’s missiles: “Hatf” — “death”, the Prophet’s sword; “Ra’ad” — “thunder”, the Islamic concept of divine punishment. India’s missiles: “Agni” — Vedic fire god invoking nuclear power; “Trishul” — the god Shiva’s trident (1,500 words)

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The Best Travel Writing: the 2024 Edward Stanford Awards

Every spring, the judges of the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards draw up a shortlist for the title of the 'travel book of the year.' The 2024 shortlist highlights six fascinating recent travelogues that wrestle with political and environmental issues, and explore the contrast between the outsider and the insider gaze. Read more

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The Best Science Fantasy

We use 'science fantasy' when a book seems to be both science fiction and fantasy. What distinguishes the two, and what does it mean to combine them? These books are an opportunity to explore our ways of knowing, reflect changing cultures, and find humour in the unexpected, says award-winning fantasy and sci fi author Vajra Chandrasekera. Read more

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Things That Don't Work

Dynomight | 21st March 2024

Things, big and small, that don't work for most people, with links to sources. Interesting throughout. Mundane entries include: dieting, explaining board games, telling jokes, multivitamins, acupuncture and elegant mathematical notation. Bigger concepts fall under the same heading, such as "wanting to be liked", communism, picking stocks and "religion without the G word"(1,600 words)

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How to discover and consume 6,500+ podcast episodes without subscribing to any podcasts? Wenbin Fang shares his episode-centric listening approach with Listen Notes.

Interaction Patterns Across Platforms

Walter Quattrociocchi et al | Nature | 20th March 2024

This comparative analysis of online conversations on different platforms over the course of thirty years reveals that the contemporary orthodoxy that the internet has never been a more horrible place is not necessarily correct. Levels of toxicity are consistent across all platforms, subjects and through time. Begs the question: is the problem human beings, rather than the tools they use? (10,000 words)

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The Soul Moved The Pen, And Broke It

Henry Oliver | Common Reader | 18th March 2024

Flaubert wrote about emotions but kept himself apart from them. His most moving writing comes from the "opposite of empathy". "The less you feel a thing... the more capable you are of expressing it. To merely write out your emotions, is, to Flaubert, hardly to write at all. It is not to make Art, not to prioritise style, not to make sacral the aesthetic. Everything is style, he insisted" (1,900 words)

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Spacing The Cans

Rob Horning | Internal Exile | 15th March 2024

Aldi has re-invented the visual style of the no-frills supermarket. Rather than blank packaging, its goods are the wares of imaginary brands that look slightly wrong, such as the "Happy Harvest" tin of tomatoes inspected here. "They seem provisional, desultory, like drafts from a brand-strategist firm, or improvisational parodies, or something that generative AI would spit out" (1,800 words)

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Five Books features in-depth author interviews recommending five books on a theme. You can read more interviews on the site, or sign up for the newsletter.

Best Books for Inspiring a Local Adventure

Wonderful as it would be to climb Mount Everest or row across the Atlantic, not all of us will get the chance to go on an epic adventure. But that doesn't mean we can't go exploring. Alastair Humphreys, the British adventurer, explains the concept of 'local adventure' and recommends books that give a feel for what it's about and why it's worth pursuing. Read more

The Best Historical Fantasy Books

Historical fantasy books intermingle real history with counterfactual and speculative elements. P. Djèlí Clark, historian and Nebula Award-winning novelist, talks us through his top five magical re-imaginings of past eras, taking us from fourteenth-century Russia into the Washington D.C. of the Roaring Twenties. Read more

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All We Have To Fear

Emily Walz | China Book Review | 14th March 2024 | U

US fear of China’s geopolitical role has persisted for over 150 years: “Xi Jinping’s techno-authoritarianism is only the latest model of the China spectre.” Ulysses S. Grant was predicting that China would soon become “dangerous” in 1879. This fear quickly merged with xenophobia, expressed in pop culture via villains like Fu Manchu, and was still extant by the time of the Covid pandemic (1,500 words)

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Why I Hate Pi Day

Oliver Johnson | Logging The World | 14th March 2023 | U

Pi Day, or 3/14 if you write the date in the US style, is a day upon which anyone “science-adjacent” will find themselves being told that the formula expressed in Euler's identity is “beautiful”. This professor disagrees. “It’s like a butterfly pinned to a card by a Victorian collector. You can imagine it taking to the air and flying if you think hard enough, but otherwise it just sits and does nothing” (900 words)

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