The Later Years Of Douglas Adams

Jimmy Maher | The Digital Antiquarian | 19th July 2024

The man behind The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was part of a motley club of successful writers who hated writing. As someone reared on Wodehouse and Monty Python, he “felt pigeonholed as the purveyor of goofy two-headed aliens”. Any effort to change direction — the fourth Hitchhiker’s novel was a magic-realist romantic comedy set on Earth — was met with disapproval from his fans (8,200 words)

Love Letter Generator

Patricia Fancher | Big Think | 20th July 2024

“Can computers think?”, Turing asked in a 1951 radio broadcast. “To behave like a brain seems to involve free will.” The computer can only do what the programmer stipulates; it could appear to create something new through a touch of randomness. Turing and Strachey programmed a love letter generator based on this idea, “hinting at a future in which a computer could write original prose” (2,500 words)

Recreating Bell Labs

Brian Potter | Construction Physics | 18th July 2024

Bell Telephone Laboratories, AT&T’s research arm, was the best industrial research lab in the world. It produced the transistor, the first videophone, the first fibre optic telephone cable and the UNIX operating system. Why don't we just recreate it? Because the world in which it thrived no longer exists. It was fuelled by WW2 discoveries and a vertically integrated monopoly (6,300 words)

Video: 29,000 Feet Up Mount Everest | YouTube | DJI | 4m 11s

Drone ascends the world's highest peak so you don't have to. Crystal clear footage, albeit soundtracked by overdramatic music. The best parts are the glimpses of the humans below who are using their legs rather than their screens to make the climb.

Major Sociological Theories

Nicole Hardy | Socjournal | 16th July 2024

Useful list of definitions, ideal for those who are tired of hearing terms like "game theory" and "chaos theory" thrown around without having a precise sense of these concepts. For instance: social exchange theory "views society as a network of interactions driven by the evaluation of rewards and punishments, where all human relationships derive from a subjective cost-benefit analysis" (1,100 words)

How Do You Price Your Wine List?

Eliza Dumais | Punch | 10th July 2024

Restaurant sommeliers explain how they decide what to charge for wine. Prices are undoubtedly going up, in part because winemakers are facing rising costs, which are being passed on down the supply chain until they hit the customer's wallet. Selling a bottle for twice the wholesale price is considered generous; a markup of at least three times what the establishment paid is normal (1,000 words)

Imagination Vs. Creativity

Venkatesh Rao | Ribbonfarm | 14th July 2024

Analysed using Lego. Following complex instructions to build models from a kit is one thing; creating designs from a pile of bricks with no plan is another. Imagination reasons forwards from a current state — example, fixing bugs in a program — whereas creativity reasons backwards from desired outcomes, often through leaps that are non-analytical, open-ended and serendipitous (2,400 words)

The Stratocaster Turns 70

Loz Blain | New Atlas | 10th July 2024

Love letter to the most well-known electric guitar. No one, least of all its creator Leo Fender, had any idea of its sonic possibilities. In the 1950s, “rock ‘n’ roll was still wearing suits and bow ties, amps were played clean most of the time. The Strat was built to be a Spanish guitar, to sound clean, not for fuzz tones and distortion. Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock was the furthest thing from Fender’s mind in ‘54” (3,800 words)

Why Doesn't Advice Work?

Dynomight | 11th July 2024

Because we don't follow it. History is full of ignored advice that lead to predictably dire consequences. Perhaps the advice is poorly explained, so that the advisee does not understand it. Or they are not in the right frame of mind to receive it, or don't believe it will work. Maybe nothing would have worked: "The reason your advice is needed is the same reason people can’t follow it" (2,000 words)

Video: A Ship From Guantánamo | Vimeo | Veena Rao | 6m 16s

Moath al-Alwi, who has been detained in Guantánamo Bay without charge since 2002, fills his days by making sculptures of historic ships using whatever unwanted materials are available to him — cardboard, plastic lids, dental floss, and so on. One of his pieces is examined in this film.

Podcast: Nick Cave | The Louis Theroux Podcast. Rock memoir in interview form, conducted by one of the most skilful conversationalists there is (82m 41s)

Podcast: Sudden Russian Death Syndrome | Whale Hunting. Succinct exploration of the unusually high number of deaths among Russia's oligarchs and business leaders in the past two years. Putin may not be to blame for all of them (18m 45s)

Video: 12,000km | Vimeo | Erik Nylander | 28m 03s

A group of Swedish snowboarders want to try out the slopes in Japan, but have decided that they are no longer travelling by air because of the climate crisis. Instead, they take a series of boats and trains across eastern Europe and Russia to get there, documenting their journey through thousands of miles of wintry landscape.

Video: Hold It | YouTube | UCLA Film & Television Archive | 7m 52s

Cats serenade their neighbourhood at night — animated film from Fleischer Studios, Disney’s chief competitor in the 1930s. Note the surrealist touches — the bass disintegrates into the air, the cats chorusing on the branch conjoin to form one singing maw.

Italy’s Bridge To Nowhere

Tobias Jones | Unherd | 9th July 2024

Italian leaders, from Ferdinand II to Silvio Berlusconi, have long loved the idea of a bridge across the Strait of Messina. The EU is keen on a road link between Sicily and the mainland too. But it would cost an estimated €13.5 billion, be vulnerable to earthquakes, and obstruct taller ships. Is it just infrastructure for Cosa Nostra? "The bridge won’t link just two mafias, but 20 different gangs" (1,500 words)

How To Feed The Olympics

Jaya Saxena | Eater | 3rd July 2024

Feeding all 15,000 people in the athletes' village at the 2024 Olympics will be hard. Competitors must eat sport-specific diets, and they hail from vastly different food cultures. In two weeks, the team will serve 1.2 million meals and three million bananas will be consumed. The Americans were the most "picky and sensitive" about the menu. The Australians are bringing their own barista (2,000 words)

Logical Fallacies

Amanda Ruggeri | BBC Future | 10th July 2024

Field guide to bad arguments. Being able to spot them is the first step to defeating them. There are seven types: the appeal to ignorance, ad hominem attacks, the slippery slope analogy, the straw man, the appeal to authority, the false dichotomy, and whataboutism. Their use does not necessarily mean the point is wrong; merely that its maker is resorting to underhand tactics to try and win (1,400 words)

A Man Apart

Alan Prendergast | Westword | 16th January 2024

Profile of James Sabatino, America's loneliest prisoner. He is held in the highest security wing of the US's most secure prison. He exists utterly alone but is always watched via cameras in the cell. He is only allowed phone calls with his stepmother and his lawyer. Why? He is not violent, but rather an expert con man with a record of running multi-million-dollar scams from behind bars (3,600 words)

The Case For Political Neutrality

Dust To Dust | 4th July 2024

Is silence violence? Intervening in a controversy one knows little about can increase suffering. For example: it seems intuitive to support a ban on the rhino horn trade in South Africa. Yet, such a ban caused horn prices to soar, resulting in increased poaching of rhinos. Political neutrality does not mean withdrawing from politics; it involves cultivating informed opinions before taking action (1,700 words)

A Bug’s Life

Natalie Lawrence | Public Domain Review | 9th July 2024

On Book of Monsters, a 1914 collection of macrophotographs of insects. Its authors, David and Marian Fairchild, created cameras with extension tubes up to twenty feet long to magnify the images, transforming “jumping spiders, weevils, dragonfly nymphs, and other arthropods” into fantastical beasts. The text imagined insects’ perspectives — “a spider from the fly’s point of view is a terrible monster” (1,400 words)

Why Haven’t Biologists Cured Cancer?

Ruxandra Teslo | 6th July 2024

A common explanation is that the field of biology suffers from a dearth of talent. Biologists are blamed for being bad at maths, yet the integration of mathematics and computing into genomics, for instance, has not resulted in comparable advancements in biology or medicine. This could be due to “long feedback loops” — lab experiments and clinical trials take a long time to yield results (5,400 words)

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A Book To Read Out Loud

Henry Oliver | The Common Reader | 7th July 2024

On the joys of reading The Hobbit out loud. “Tolkien breaks many rules of writing. He says “suddenly” all the time. He uses “he” multiple times in a sentence, referring to two different people. He constantly breaks the fourth wall to say “of course such and such”. He repeats words, relatively close together. But Tolkien does all of this deliberately. He is not a mere spinner of tales, but a worker of lost languages” (900 words)

Gilded Age Privacy

Sohini Desai | Smithsonian | 5th July 2024

The debut of the first Kodak camera in 1888 transformed the way that Americans thought about their own image. Suddenly, anyone could be snapped or "Kodaked" anywhere. By 1905, a third of people in the US were amateur photographers. There were no stock photos nor any laws dealing with this, so companies regularly stole the images of private citizens for their advertisements (1,500 words)

The DMZ At 70

Matthew Longo | LARB | 2nd July 2024

The Demilitarised Zone between North and South Korea was meant to be temporary. Nobody imagined that the ceasefire line would still be there 70 years on, nor that it would have become a tourist attraction: militarised, yet Instagrammable. It is more than a border. It has a culture and a spirit. "It doesn’t just enforce division but also creates, performs, and maintains it" (2,500 words)