The Moral Economy Of The Shire

Nathan Goldwag | Goldwag’s Journal On Civilisation | 31st May 2024

What sort of society would have made Tolkien's idyllic Shire life possible? It was “built out of an idealised version of rural English society”. Bilbo, Frodo, Merry and Pippin were probably members of the landed gentry, a “squirearchy” that wielded high levels of informal control over their community. The other Hobbits were likely tenant farmers or yeomen, small landholders who still depended on the gentry (4,100 words)

How Much Can You Really Learn About A Country By Visiting It?

Noah Smith | Noahpinion | 3rd June 2024

Not much, as it turns out. Tourists are misled about a country’s economy by the public infrastructure of its major cities. The people one can meet in a foreign land will be limited by language, class or cultural orientation. Stereotypes often distort perceptions, for example, the notion that Westerners obey their internal consciences — guilt — while the Japanese are motivated by social censure — shame (3,100 words)

Mating By Moonlight

Gwynne Hogan | The City | 29th May 2024

The horseshoe crab is not a crab but a living fossil. It has existed unchanged since before dinosaurs walked the Earth and has more in common with spiders than other sea creatures. Their blood is used to test vaccines. Every spring they migrate to the beaches of the eastern US to lay their eggs in the sand. And every spring, a team of NYC volunteers leave their desks to count the crabs (1,200 words)

I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream

Emma Kostopolus | Unwinnable | 31st May 2024 | U

The Tamagotchi: harmless 1990s toy, or the cause of deep psychological scarring? Unlike most games, the object is not the player's survival but for the player to keep another being alive. Rather than being at the mercy of the game's mechanism, its survival "hinges entirely upon the length of our attention spans". A Tamagotchi teaches uncomfortable lessons about personal responsibility (800 words)

Podcast: Weather Forecasts | The Economics Of Everyday Things. Scientific and computing improvements mean that the five-day weather forecast is now as accurate as the three-day one was twenty years ago. This improvement comes with pressure; ever more industries rely on forecasters' predictions (13m 46s)

Video: Rediscovering A Lost Typeface | YouTube | BBC | 5m 06s

Short film from 2015 about one man's dedication to recreating the infamous drowned Doves Type — the original letters were thrown into the river Thames in the 1910s after an ownership dispute. To recover it a century later, this designer spent days painstakingly sifting the pieces from the mud.

The Forgotten History Of Chinese Keyboards

Thomas S. Mullaney | IEEE Spectrum | 29th May 2024

Before QWERTY was adapted for Chinese input, many other possible keyboard interfaces were tried. In one design, the keyboard itself became a computer. It had 160 keys arranged in a 16-by-10 grid, with 15 characters per key and the 2,400 Chinese characters on a paper overlay to assist the operator. Cylindrical keyboards and a drawing stylus on a touch sensitive pad were also attempted (3,000 words)

World In A Box

Shannon Mattern | Places | 15th May 2024

The cardboard box is "an abject object that touches all parts of the city, from the granite kitchen island to the sewer grate". It is the closest many of us come to true contact with the realities of globalised trade and connected systems. The shipping container changed the world forever, but the humble boxes within are in our houses, played in by our children and slept in by our cats (8,400 words)

“You Are My Friend”

Jessica Riskin | Public Domain Review | 29th May 2024

The talking head in Don Quixote is just one example of humanity's obsession with machines that can speak. Unlike AI developers, many on this quest in the late 18C — including Charles Darwin's grandfather Erasmus — sought to recreate the actual speech organs with machinery. Leather lips, rubber tongues and bellow-operated lungs managed to say a few words including "Mama" (4,400 words)

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At The Webster Apartments

Tess Little | Paris Review | 28th May 2024

Remembering one of Manhattan's last women-only boarding houses. From 1923, this building offered cheap, safe accommodation in the heart of the city. Occupants were "guests" not residents, and could stay for no less than a month and no more than five years. In the 1920s, it was for shopgirls toiling at department store counters. Decades later, the fashion interns moved in (2,600 words)

Reading Solzhenitsyn For The First Time

Haim Marantz | Montréal Review | 24th May 2024

“It is only after reading Solzhenitsyn and Mandelstam that I realised how lucky the early Romantic poets had been to live in a society where they could yearn to be alone with their daffodils or die with their nightingales. They did not need to learn how the revolutionary ideas of individual freedom could send men and women to die alone, on the taiga’s wastes, in the absence of both daffodils and nightingales” (6,100 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.

Counting Calories

Michelle Stacey | Smithsonian | 20th May 2024

Deep-dive into calorie counting and the doctor who evangelised it in the early 20C. While the calorie had been studied previously, Lulu Hunt Peters’ novel idea was to use it not as a nutritional gauge, but as a means to weight loss. She was a savvy marketer who picked an opportune moment — as the curvy Gibson Girl of the 1890s gave way to the whittled-down figure of the 1920s flapper (5,700 words)

Longitude And Our Neurons Of Navigation

Brian Klaas | Garden Of Forking Paths | 21st May 2024

Navigational woes and how they were overcome. Latitude was easy to calculate on land or at sea, using the sun in the day and the North Star at night. Calculating longitude was more complex as it required the precise measurement of time — a difficult prospect at sea. “Many of the best scientific minds — including Isaac Newton — gave up on tackling the longitude problem, considering it unsolvable” (3,300 words)

How To Build 300,000 Airplanes In Five Years

Brian Potter | Construction Physics | 23rd May 2024

During WWII, the US produced more aircraft than Germany, Japan and Italy combined — helping to secure the Allied victory. Before the war, American aircraft were hand-assembled piece by piece. Scaling production was a challenge — “while a car had around 5,000 parts, a B-25 bomber had 165,000, not including the tens of thousands of parts in the engines, instruments, and other equipment” (5,600 words)

Strong Links Vs Weak Links

Chris Dillow | Stumbling And Mumbling | 24th May 2024

Everything is a trade-off between strong and weak links. "A weak-link problem is where success depends upon the quality of the worst component. A strong-link problem is where it depends upon the quality of the best." The US constitution solves "the weak-link problem of protecting Americans from tyranny", but is "not perhaps so good in delivering effective active government" (1,500 words)

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The Logic Of Animal Patterns

Amber Dance | Knowable | 23rd May 2024

Some animal markings, like the spots on a Dalmatian, are generated randomly. Others, such as the stripes of chipmunks and tigers and the speckles on fishes and chickens are the product of complex self-organising genetic systems. Alongside his code-breaking and other work, Alan Turing produced a mathematical theory to explain such patterns, which is still in use today (2,800 words)

50 Things I Know

Sasha Chapin | 23rd May 2024

List of advice. Braised cabbage is delicious. Silence is under-used in conversation. Cheap lawyers are expensive. Candour is a neglected skill. People cannot read your mind, so tell them what is on it. Peel ginger with a spoon. Don't resist positive emotions. You will never regret money spent on food for friends. Nobody receives enough sincere compliments. Persistence is not always a virtue (2,700 words)

How To Make A Great Government Website

Dave Guarino | Asterisk | 20th May 2024

Interview with a software engineer turned policy wonk. Bad online application forms intensify the already-vast "administrative burden" the state puts on the citizen. Forms should be minimal and decentralised, while still complying with the law. Designs and systems should be built to iterate and improve. And engineers should leave the office and meet the people trying to use their sites (5,500 words)

Just Live

Galen Strawson | Dublin Review Of Books | 1st February 2024 | U

What is the meaning of life? Centuries of answers to this question suggest that life, existence, itself, is the source of that meaning. "All experience of Meaning, meaning in life, lies in the quality of experience in the present moment. Certainly you can enjoy thinking narratively about yourself; that’s one thing you can do in the living moment of experience. But there are many other things" (4,700 words)

Inequality Without Class

Simon Torracinta | Dissent | 22nd May 2024 | U

The world has never been more interested in the causes and effects of inequality, yet the economists in this field today "have had strikingly little to contribute beyond the merely observational". The book reviewed here offers some satisfaction away from the "perpetual seesawing" between blaming market or society for the great divide, but does so at the expense of clarity (3,000 words)

Toxic Gaslighting

Sharon Lerner | ProPublica | 20th May 2024

3M, the company of scotch tape and N95 masks, has produced at least 100 million pounds of the chemical PFOS, and has known for decades that it accumulates in humans. Studies have linked PFOS to liver malfunction, increased infectious diseases, and vaccine ineffectiveness. 3M “have not admitted wrong­doing or faced liability for producing forever chemicals or for concealing their harms” (9,000 words)

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Hummingbirds Are Wondrous

Zito Madu | Plough | 17th May 2024

The things we know, and might not know, about hummingbirds: they are the smallest living birds in the world, of which the bee hummingbird is the smallest at two inches. They can fly forward, backward, up, down, and in zigzags. Hummingbird plumage has more colours than all other bird species combined. “They seem as if they were made in an instant, a spark of genius from an extravagant god” (2,200 words)