Brutal Birth

Hamish McDonald | Inside Story | 20th June 2024

Review of Revolusi, new account of the Indonesian struggle for independence. It has caused a shock in the Netherlands, where 50% of the Dutch public were still proud of their colonial empire, per a 2019 survey. “Indonesia was crucial to the birth of the modern world. It inspired anticolonial movements in Africa, and the 1955 Bandung conference was a seminal moment for what is now the Global South” (3,400 words)

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Therapy Isn’t The Only Answer

Naomi Kanakia | Woman Of Letters | 20th June 2024

Discursive story-essay that calls for a return to straightforward storytelling. “In modern prose fiction, we are very embodied within the subject. We construct images, describe feelings, physical sensations. But this is quite recent! It isn’t until early 20th-century modernism that fiction gains the intensely interior, embodied quality. And I’m a bit tired of it. Sometimes I just want to sit down and tell a story” (3,800 words)

Why Do People Persecute City Pigeons?

Zaria Gorvett | BBC Future | 21st June 2024

Charles Darwin adored pigeons. A Mughal emperor had 20,000 of them. During WW2, we gave them medals. Humans domesticated them into their current form, yet the average city dweller today considers feral pigeons to be "dirty, disease-addled and akin to flying rats". Our dislike is recent, and based on faulty information. These birds are clever, caring and disease-resistant (2,600 words)

An Anatomy Of Algorithm Aversion

Cass R. Sunstein & Jared H. Gaffe | Social Science Research Network | 15th June 2024

Algorithm aversion is the impulse to distrust forecasting or decision-making done by machine learning or language models. This effect persists even when the algorithms can be proven to outperform humans on the same task. It has to do with "a desire for sovereignty over one’s own life", it is theorised. It feels better to do a bad job ourselves rather than have a machine do a better one (9,000 words)

Review: The Iliad

Phil Hazelden | A Reasonable Approximation | 18th June 2024

First time reader reviews his experience, which was not favourable. "It feels blasphemous, but by modern standards I don't think the Iliad is very good. Sorry Homer." There are a lot of long lists and dull battle commentary. Why is it a classic? Not for the quality of entertainment it offers, but because it provides a "window into the past". Read it with "copious historical notes" (3,600 words)

Apostrophe’s Dream

Yiyun Li | Dial | 4th June 2024

Short fiction, in the form of a dialogue between "a small cluster of movable type, all of them punctuation marks" that lives together in a typesetter's drawer. The type is trying to determine what their collective noun is. "A hope of punctuation marks. A love of punctuation marks. A solidarity of punctuation marks. An empowerment of punctuation marks," the comma suggests (2,500 words)

The Enduring Mystery Of How Water Freezes

Elise Cutts | Quanta | 17th June 2024

Ice requires more than subzero temperatures. It needs a nucleus around which water molecules can arrange themselves into a crystal structure. This unpredictable process often involves microbial activity — the reason distilled water almost never crystallises. Bacteria and fungi are great ice nucleators. The bacterium Pseudomonas syringae is so effective that it is used for artificial snowmaking (1,700 words)

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The Shape Of Information

Adam Kucharski | Understanding The Unseen | 17th June 2024

Concise, elegant explanation of how to extract insights from data with limited resources. “Imagine you have been gifted 100 wine bottles. You discover that one of the bottles has been poisoned, and have no idea which one. You have a test that can detect poison, with only 7 tests available. What should you do?” The solution proffered is akin to how epidemiology tests for infectious diseases in large groups (800 words)

The Most Dangerous Law In America

Joseph Nunn | Democracy Journal | 13th June 2024

“The Insurrection Act is a nuclear bomb hidden in the United States Code”, giving the President unrestrained authority to use the military to quell “domestic revolts”. Deeply mistrustful of the use of the military against their own citizens, the Founders struck a balance by giving Congress the power to regulate the military. This, and other guardrails against a rogue President have been gradually eroded (5,700 words)

Research As Leisure Activity

Celine Nguyen | Personal Canon | 27th May 2024

“It's fundamentally personal, a style of research well-suited for people okay with being dilettantes, who are comfortable with an idiosyncratic, non-comprehensive education in a particular domain. It’s fine, and even better, if the topic isn’t explicitly intellectual or academic in nature. Research as leisure activity is exuberantly undisciplined, and isn’t constrained by disciplinary fiefdoms and schisms” (4,000 words)

The Most Dangerous Law In America

Joseph Nunn | Democracy Journal | 13th June 2024

“The Insurrection Act is a nuclear bomb hidden in the United States Code”, giving the President unrestrained authority to use the military to quell “domestic revolts”. Deeply mistrustful of the use of the military against their own citizens, the Founders struck a balance by giving Congress the power to regulate the military. This, and other guardrails against a rogue President have been gradually eroded (5,700 words)

Research As Leisure Activity

Celine Nguyen | Personal Canon | 27th May 2024

“It's fundamentally personal, a style of research well-suited for people okay with being dilettantes, who are comfortable with an idiosyncratic, non-comprehensive education in a particular domain. It’s fine, and even better, if the topic isn’t explicitly intellectual or academic in nature. Research as leisure activity is exuberantly undisciplined, and isn’t constrained by disciplinary fiefdoms and schisms” (4,000 words)

She Was Pronounced Dead

Ashley Stimpson | Popular Mechanics | 13th June 2024

The stuff of nightmares: although still rare, it is becoming more common for funeral home workers to discover that the dead bodies delivered to them are not, in fact, dead. Last year, a 76-year-old woman was found alive in a closed coffin. So what is death and how do we tell for sure if it has occurred? With great difficulty, it seems. This has only become an issue in the age of organ donation (1,200 words)

Spreadsheet Superstars

David Pierce | Verge | 12th June 2024

Confusion at the Excel World Championship in Las Vegas. "The most problematic thing about competitive Excel becomes blindingly obvious to me: it is damn near impossible to figure out what’s going on. All eight players are moving so fast and doing so many things with keyboard shortcuts and formulas that there’s practically no way to see what they’re doing until it’s already done" (7,300 words)

An Open Elite?

Julianne Werlin | Life And Letters | 8th June 2024

What can literary history tell us about social mobility? — researched and presented. Interesting methodological conundrums discussed: Where does one place pirates or con artists in the class hierarchy? The Elizabethan period saw new writers born of merchants and tradesmen, followed by the more restrictive Stuart and Restoration eras, when it was mostly gentry writing literature (1,800 words)

Why No One Will Save Sudan

Cameron Hudson | Persuasion | 5th June 2024

“The crisis in Sudan is neither forgotten nor ignored. It is de-prioritised.” Why? In 2001, Bush famously scribbled “not on my watch” in the margins of a paper on the Rwandan genocide. Since then, America’s global war on terror and its 2011 action in Libya have soured people on intervention. The “responsibility to protect” doctrine has been set aside, now seen as leading to regime change rather than stability (1,400 words)

I Jumped From A Plane

Leah Harper | Guardian | 11th June 2024

Interview with a skydiver who fell from 4,000ft after a parachute malfunctioned and survived. "I felt oddly calm. I do remember seeing the ground coming towards me really quickly and I thought to myself: ‘This is going to hurt.’" She managed to steer away from a tarmac landing strip to fall on grass, and was lucky not to be paralysed. A year later she was able to hike to Everest Base Camp (2,500 words)

The Little-Known Legacy Of The EP

Steven Heller | Print | 4th June 2024

The EP exists because of a "good old-fashioned form factor war" between record companies in the 1940s. Around 25 minutes of music, this format of "more than a single, less than an album" was highly successful in the 1960s when the lower price and tight tracklist attracted huge sales. Never-before-heard songs could sit alongside chartoppers in an economical yet collectable package (1,200 words)

The Fastest Path To African Prosperity

Magatte Wade | Palladium | 7th June 2024

…is not through education; Africans joke that the first job for a Ph.D. is taxi driver. To prosper, nations must go from being “closed access” to “open access”. In “closed access” societies, elites prevent market competition through rent-seeking restrictions on economic activity. How can they be persuaded to give up their exclusive privileges? Botswana, Rwanda, and Mauritius offer lessons in reform (4,200 words)

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Against Stories

Sam Kahn | Castalia | 7th June 2024

Stories embed themselves in our psyches through narrowly-defined rules — a beginning, a middle, and an end; moments of crisis followed by resolution. Much of life does not align with the world as it is presented in stories. Writers like E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf have expressed an aversion to the optimised story structure. “Get into the story sensibility and you expect everything to artfully resolve itself” (1,900 words)