Who Gets A Nation?

Kal Raustiala | Noēma | 4th January 2024

Not everyone. “Our world of 200 or so independent nations could easily be broken up into 300, 400, 500 sovereign states.” These are places like Tibet inside China, Puerto Rico and Hawaii in the US, and Scotland in the UK. Distinct “peoples” are assumed to have the right to self-determination. But what is a people? We look to the UN to rule on such questions, but it tends always towards stasis (3,500 words)

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Everybody’s talking about the impact of AI on business – few people understand it. Be one of them with The Business Of Big Data

A Lighthouse Keeper Hangs Up Her Bonnet

Diana Cervantes | Hakai | 19th December 2023

Marking the retirement of the US’s last official lighthouse keeper. For 20 years, Sally Snowman served the Boston Light on Little Brewster Island. Now in her seventies, she was its first female custodian. She often dressed as a lighthouse keeper’s wife from 1783, both for historical authenticity and “so that her colleagues in the coast guard can easily recognise her from a distance” (1,180 words)

Unpredictable But Entirely Possible Events

Ian Bremmer, Matthew Burrows et al | Politico | 5th January 2023

Futurists imagine the “Black Swan” events that could radically alter the course of the next year. Many focus tightly on the US presidential election, with possible incidents like “death at a Trump rally” and “a violent attack on a candidate”, but more interesting are the larger themes that emerge. As a group, these analysts anticipate that coups and global warming will now shape our lives (5,400 words)

Cycling Doping Fallacies

Nicholas A. Ferrell | New Leaf Journal | 4th January 2024

Doping was so prevalent in cycling from 1999 to 2005 that there is no point trying to untangle the records of the cheaters and the clean. Who can say who “should” have been winning during Lance Armstrong’s dominance of the Tour de France? Rather, fans should focus on the achievements of those athletes who “tried to do it the right way” but never got to find out if they were good enough (6,200 words)

Antarctica’s Looming Threat

Tara Lohan | Revelator | 4th January 2023

As more humans visit Antarctica, so do more invasive species. Ten mites and an earthworm have already arrived. To save the valuable but non-photogenic species, first we must protect the animals we have heard of. “I think when people are thinking of Antarctica, they’re not necessarily thinking of ugly little worms on the seafloor...They’re thinking of penguins and seals and whales” (1,200 words)

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The Return Of History

Adam Tooze | Chartbook | 1st January 2023

There was never a guarantee that “history would develop in a direction congenial to the West”. Europe’s precarious post-WW2 success story “congealed into a cliché for export” that allowed a belief in “economic convergence leading to geopolitical and political alignment” to persist much longer than was reasonable. The only question that remains is how the West will respond to this “defeat” (3,200 words)

Inside Pyongyang

Caroline Campbell | Atlas Obscura | 3rd January 2023

On the urban planning of the Kim dynasty. After their decades in power, the only old building left in this 3,000-year-old city is the Potong Gate from the 6C. It has been left deliberately to create a vista contrasting this “small, encircled and unimpressive” edifice from Korea's history with the unfinished Ryugyong Hotel, “a sci-fi rocket-like concrete structure which seems to pierce the sky” (3,000 words)

Are We Stuck With The Zoo Hypothesis?

Matt Williams | Universe Today | 2nd January 2024

Why is there still no definitive evidence that the Earth is known to extraterrestrial civilisations? Three possibilities: there is no other advanced life in the universe, it just has yet to make contact, or the “Zoo Hypothesis” is true. This argues that aliens are “deliberately avoiding interaction and have set aside the area in which we live as a zoo”. The latter theory is surprisingly popular (1,900 words)

Better Text Generators

David Chapman | Better Without AI | 27th December 2023

Text generators like ChatGPT are “genre imitation engines, not knowledge bases;” they are more omniscient than intelligent. Their performance has improved with scale so far, but largely as a side-effect of (indirectly, unreliably) storing facts. Could a better approach be to “separate language ability from knowledge” by building fluent but ignorant systems that retrieve human-crafted text from a database? (4,600 words)

The Ghost Did What?!

Ada Palmer | Strange Horizon | 27th November 2023

Stories from other cultures offer extra suspense because even their “narrative formulae and assumptions” surprise us. Western tales are Providential, so “good and bad people generally get what they deserve.” By contrast, in Japanese horrors, “personal purity does not protect you” and survival depends more on taking the threat seriously. Hence Western viewers’ genuine shock during movies like Ring (3,800 words)

What Does The Cerebellum Do?

Sarah Constantin | Rough Diamonds | 28th December 2023

The “little brain” lives just beneath the “big” brain. It helps us balance, move, prepare and anticipate, ““getting ready” for the next step before the last one is complete.” People who lack it “are still capable of most of the same tasks, just with worse performance.” They speak grammatically but struggle with conjunctions like “but” or “because.” Across movement, language and thought, the cerebellum adds fluency (3,934 words)

SEO Spam

Dan Luu | 30th December 2023

Dense post investigating the accusation that modern search engines have been borked by SEO. The incentives are stacked towards whoever can profit most from a term, so searching for gambling addiction ultimately leads to ads for gambling. Incorporating user responses only improves rankings “when users are sophisticated enough to know what the best results are, which they generally aren’t” (4,857 words)

Can We Imagine A World Without Work?

Rachel Fraser | Boston Review | 21st November 2023

Self-cleaning houses were voted “the most eagerly anticipated of speculative technologies” in 2019, but the discourse of automation focuses on work outside the home. Oscar Wilde envisaged “the machine” taking over the tedium of mining coal, but gave no thought to who would fold the laundry. “Even in the age of the machine,” therefore, “women are mopping up after others” (4,761 words)

Los Inocentes

Clellan Coe | The American Scholar | 27th December 2023

Some English idioms are reversed in Spanish: black and white becomes “blanco y negro.” Others are lost in translation: cat got your tongue conjures “an absurd image of a cat dangling by its claws.” Both cultures dedicate a day to pranks; the Spanish one falls on The Feast of the Holy Innocents, remembering parents who tricked soldiers to save their toddlers from King Herod’s massacre (614 words)

What If Money Expired?

Jacob Baynham | Noema | 14th November 2023

On the work of late 19C German economist Silvio Gesell, who proposed that money should decay over time. The nature of money should better reflect the goods for which it is exchanged, he argued. If crops decay, so should the currency that buys them. Alongside this, private ownership of land would be abolished. He believed that this would bring "natural selection" into the economy (5,060 words)

The Most Cryptic Clues Ever Written

Jack Shepherd | On Words And Up Words | 3rd December 2023

If you are a fan of Browser cryptic crosswords, then all your Christmases have come at once with this anthology of classic cryptic clues. Two of them are from the late and legendary Araucaria, including what must surely remain the most concise and cryptic clue of all time, consisting of a solitary punctuation mark: "? (1,6,3,1,4)". The answer: I haven't got a clue (1,000 words)

Apocalypse-Proof

Zach Mortice | Places Journal | 12th September 2023

History of the windowless tower-block at 33 Thomas Street in Manhattan, built for AT&T in 1974 as a “skyscraper inhabited by machines”, and now a hub of the NSA. It may well be the "densest inhabitable object in New York City”. Long a lodestar for conspiracy theorists, the tower is blast-proof, riot-proof, fallout-proof, and stocked with enough food and fuel to see off an apocalypse (7,600 words)

How To Exclaim!

Florence Hazrat | Millions | 11th October 2023

Ernest Hemingway liked exclamation marks to signal anticlimax. Salman Rushdie couldn't have too many: Midnight's Children averages six per page. Jane Austen's frequent use of the exclamation point, especially in moments of female emotional intensity, was apparently toned down by her editors. This punctuation mark, the "inky semaphore of the sentence", deserves to be used! (1,600 words)

Anaïs Nin’s Bicoastal Bigamy

Joy Lanzendorfer | Alta | 26th June 2023

Nin spent two and a half decades on what she called her "trapeze", swinging back and forth every six weeks between two husbands on opposite coasts. In New York, she had wealthy banker Hugh Parker Guiler, who financed her writing life, and had no idea that her regular trips to California were so that she could spend her time there as the wife of a forest ranger 16 years her junior (3,687 words)

Ornamental Hermits

Shoshi Parks | Smithsonian | 7th July 2023

Notes on the fashion among 18th century English aristocrats for keeping hermits on their country estates. Terms for a hermit might include a cave or hut, food and water, and a lump sum at the end of a seven-year term. The hermit's main job was to be silently picturesque, and thus to delight visitors. “By 1750, if you only put in one structure in your garden, it would have been a hermitage” (1,900 words)