Casting Light On Relief Map Shading

Felix Frey | Swiss National Museum | 9th January 2024

In 1927, Albert Heim denounced Switzerland’s official maps for a “lie that flew in the face of nature”: mountains were shaded as if lit from the northwest, where factually in Switzerland the sun shines from the south. The convention arose from the convenience of right-handed illustrators, as revealed by older maps where east is on the left and south is at the top but the shading stays the same (1,100 words)

The Dress Form

Kathryn Hughes & Lauren Kane | New York Review | 13th January 2024

Clothes tell a life through “the wearer’s engagement with their own arrangement of sinew and muscle, and the accommodations they’re obliged to make with the wider world”. George Eliot claimed her right hand was larger due to “all the milking she had done on her father’s farm”. Jane Austen’s coat-dress shows she “wasn’t simply tall; she was gigantic”, which is why she would only wear flat shoes (2,500 words)

Step Inside The ‘Pain Cave’

Olivier Guiberteau | BBC Sport | 18th January 2024

Courtney Dauwalter is the only ultrarunner to win the sport’s “triple crown” of three 100-mile races in a season, setting a new record for each course. A teacher, she only began running full time in 2017. She regularly wins races ahead of male competitors — once beating the nearest man by ten hours. Scientists think 195 miles is “the magic number where women become faster than men” (2,800 words)

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The Story Of A Mosque

Ruslan Yusupov | Made In China | 18th January 2024

Architectural changes to Laohuasi Mosque in Gansu Province show how serious the Chinese government is about its campaign to “Sinicise Islam”. Domes have been removed and minarets shortened, and a hip-and-gable roof, typical of Chinese design, added. This mosque holds over 6,000 people and altering it so publicly is a rejection of “so-called Arabisation and Saudi-isation” (1,600 words)

What The Germans Left Behind

Anna Parker | Granta | 17th January 2024

On the afterlife of the Sudetenland. Now in the Czech Republic, this area began to be settled by Germans in the 16C and was annexed by Hitler in 1938. Germans were expelled in 1945, and the photographs and memorabilia of their tenure is now valued as kitsch decoration. “The men balance cigars between their index and middle fingers. I wonder which of them were Nazi collaborators” (4,700 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.

Accents And Dialects In The United States

Megan Ulu-Lani Boyanton | Smithsonian | 17th January 2024

Every twist and turn of American history is audible in the vast array of accents and dialects spoken across the country. Colonists and immigrants brought their speech with them, and then spread them as they migrated across the continent. Travel was historically easier in the west than in the east, which is why the vocal differences there are “slightly more homogenised” and “subtle” (2,000 words)

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Indelible Ink

Sunil Iyengar | Arts Journal | 16th January 2024

The number of books in a child’s home is positively correlated with reading test scores. Would the same hold for digital reading? Recent research claims that the “short length, fast-paced stimuli, and lower linguistic quality” of digital texts may invoke more shallow cognitive processes. For younger students, reading digitally for leisure was associated with lower reading comprehension (1,100 words)

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Compliance, Violence And Overachievement

Conrad Bastable | Radical Contributions | 7th January 2024

Every place is defined by the process used to select its elites, who eventually acquire the monopoly on state violence. Modern American elites are selected for the desire to pass tests and please authority figures, so when in power they prioritise polite compliance. “To engage in violence,” even as an unwilling recipient, “is perceived as failing a societal-level marshmallow test” (10,500 words)

So You Wanna De-Bog Yourself

Adam Mastroianni | Experimental History | 2nd January 2024

Being intellectually stuck is “the psychological equivalent of standing knee-deep in a fetid bog”. When this happens, it may feel like “a bespoke bog”, but in fact there are recurring patterns. This writer has names for them all. Perhaps you are “gutterballing”, or “hedgehogging”, “puppeteering” or “declining the dragon”. The silly names help with pulling yourself out, apparently (3,800 words)

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Podcast: How Panel Shows Really Work | The Rest Is Entertainment. A long-time TV insider (Richard Osman) and a TV critic (Marina Hyde) answer common questions about how the entertainment we consume is made and how much of apparently “unscripted” content is really scripted in advance (35m 29s)

Paying People To Have Children

Kevin Kelly | Technium | 11th January 2024

Proposal to arrest the global decline in fertility rates: pay people a lot of money to have children. A government would calculate a citizen’s “Total Lifetime Economic Value” and pay people slightly less to have a child. Previous incentives, like free childcare or housing, have not worked. Perhaps the cash payment needs to be huge. “Would you be willing to have a(nother) child for $8 million?” (1,100 words)

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Between The Algorithm And A Hard Place

Diana Enríquez | Tech Policy Press | 11th December 2023

In a job that is largely managed by an automated system, software glitches will periodically create a lose-lose situation. The route the app presents to an Uber driver or an Amazon worker makes no sense in the real world, but they face harsh automatic penalties for deviating from it. What to do? A system that is supposed remove worker autonomy forces more individual decision making (1,500 words)

Getting Under The Skin

McKenzie Prillaman | Grow By Ginkgo | 10th January 2024 | U

On the past and future of insulin. Just over a hundred years ago, it was extracted for the first time from cattle to be sold as a diabetes treatment. In the 1970s, it became possible to manufacture it synthetically by injecting bacteria with DNA. Today, the price can fluctuate wildly. But one day soon, we will likely be able to modify our skin cells to be “own miniature insulin factories” (2,300 words)

The Un-Brie-Lievable History Of Tyromancy

Jennifer Billock | Saveur | 16th November 2023 | U

Tyromancy is the art of telling fortunes with cheese. It dates back to the 2C, via the writings of a diviner named Artemidorus of Daldis. It was popular in the Middle Ages for finding love: suitors’ names were carved into cheese, and whichever one grew mould first should meet you at the altar. This tyromancer can read any kind of cheese, including vegan, but a Kraft single must be torn up first (800 words)

Confessions Of A Country Parson

Alexander Poots | UnHerd | 11th January 2024

In praise of the Revd James Woodforde’s diaries. A kind of rural Pepys, he began keeping a daily record of what he called “trifles” when a student in 1759. He concluded at the age of 63, sixty volumes later. Weather, religion, food and wine preoccupied him; he notes when the chamber pots froze and when he bottled his moonshine. “A whole world is born from years of tight observation” (1,200 words)

A Knife Forged In Fire

Laurence Gonzales | Chicago | 9th January 2024

Making a Japanese-style kitchen knife is difficult and time consuming, but worth it. The blade produced by the process described here is a work of art. “The knife slid through the onion’s flesh with no resistance. It felt like cutting air. I rinsed it and wiped it dry and during dinner we propped it up in its black velvet case and we stared at it like early humans in a cave somewhere, watching fire” (7,000 words)

The Quest To Build A Better Chicken

Boyce Upholt | Noēma | 19th December 2023

Chicken is the world’s most-consumed meat, a cheap, easily-transportable source of protein. As chickens have been bred to become more efficient at “turning food into body mass”, they are now mere “meat-growing machines”, cooped up inside sheds and unable to stand. On the other hand, smallholder poultry farms are a health risk and could undermine chicken welfare (4,100 words)

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Podcast: Adventures Of A Bone Hunter | Lost Women Of Science. Turn-of-the-century palaeontologist Annie Montague Alexander financed her own fossil-hunting expeditions in Nevada and founded the world’s most prized research collections at UC Berkeley (33m 22s)

A Theory Of The Modern Exclamation Point!

Anne Helen Petersen | Culture Study | 7th January 2024

Current usage norms for "!" are rooted in the assumptions that enthusiasm is feminine and that femininity is unprofessional. Women must switch tone hundreds of times a day, trying to appear professional but not “ambitious, or cold, or threatening”. Technological advances mean more communication across more channels, hence more "Tone Work" and tone guilt than ever (1,300 words)

Mind-Decoding Technologies

Fletcher Reveley | Undark | 3rd January 2024

Neuroscientists can now decode MRI scans and see text renderings of a patient's thoughts. Is that ethical? Five protective “neurorights” are proposed: to mental privacy, to maintain one’s existing identity, to mental augmentation, to protection from bias, and to free will. Chile has already amended its constitution in this direction. “If we lose our mental privacy, what else is there to lose?” (5,700 words)