“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)

Golden Girls

Eman Naseer | Vestoj | 17th May 2024

On the eve of Partition, Nusrat, the author’s great-grandmother, hid all her gold in a makeshift utility belt sewn around her pregnant belly, and took her six children on a perilous journey to Lahore amid looting, pillaging mobs. Eventually, this jewellery was passed down to her daughters and granddaughters — an enduring practice among South Asian women, who own over 11% of the world's gold today (2,200 words)

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Little Seed: A Field Guide To Grieving

Wei Tchou | Virginia Quarterly Review | 14th May 2024

“At the time of my brother’s first psychotic break, I knew nothing about ferns but that I had one and it was dying. The Victorians believed that ferns were a blessing of courage. Modern interpretations are more foreboding. To dream of tracing the fronds of a fern, winding through their fractal divisions, their obsessive symmetry, can indicate a deadening of pleasure: anxiety, a premonition of illness” (8,400 words)

Podcast: City Gone Crazy | Let The Kids Dance!. Beginning of a series about Seattle’s "Teen Dance Ordinance", a controversial law that between 1985 and 2002 made it very difficult and expensive to legally host a concert or dance for those aged under 21. The effect on teen culture and counterculture in the city was profound (41m 32s)

Video: Come Again By John Dowland | YouTube | Daniel Keene | 2m 45s

A tenor and a luthier perform John Dowland's secretly rather saucy song from 1597. The control and musicianship on display in this recital is wonderful to see — it feels like the nearest thing to time travel that music can offer.

Rushdie, Khomeini And Me

Amir Ahmadi Arian | London Review Of Books | 15th May 2024

“To ordinary people in Iran, the fatwa came out of nowhere. The country had just emerged from the Iran-Iraq War. The 86-year-old Khomeini was close to death. No one had the time to worry about a novel. On 13 February 1989, two British Muslim activists, Kalim and Ghayasuddin Siddiqui, ran into Khatami, Iran’s Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance. The fatwa was issued the next day” (3,200 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.

The Natural Selection Of Bad Vibes

Kevin Dorst | Stranger Apologies | 11th May 2024

There is a reason for the perennial gap between pessimistic public discourse and the “chart-wielding optimists” who claim things are better than ever. People — rationally — tend to focus conversations on solving problems, with the unintended side effect of excess pessimism, even when times are largely good. As the information age multiplies the number of conversation topics, excess pessimism would increase (2,400 words)

‘Plague’ Comes Before The Fall

Colin Elliott | Bulletin Of The Atomic Scientists | 15th May 2024

Estimates for the death toll of the 166AD Antonine plague range between 2 per cent and 35 per cent. We haven't identified the pathogen or the symptoms. We do, however, know that increased storm activity the previous decade altered the Nile, which reduced the grain harvest, so that malnourished Roman bodies were more susceptible to sickness. Historical science is a capricious discipline (1,900 words)

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Science Stories With a Human Touch. Nautilus explores the biggest ideas in science through the lens of humanity. Discover the stories behind the science and how it ripples through our lives and culture in the Nautilus newsletter.

The Raw Milk Black Market

Nicholas Florko | Stat News | 15th May 2024

It is illegal in the US to ship unpasteurised milk between states. Yet the FDA does not seem to enforce the ban, even though tests have found genetic traces of bird flu viruses in 20 per cent of samples. Raw milk fans believe in health benefits the government is trying to keep from them. This reporter is easily able to buy a half-gallon via what feels like "the world’s weirdest drug deal" (1,700 words)