A Claxonomy Of Mexico City

Lachlan Summers | Allegra Lab | 2nd March 2023

Just when I was starting to think there was nothing new that was true, and nothing true that was new, here out of blue sky comes a wonderful piece of writing on a subject that had only a genius would have recognised as a possible subject in the first place, namely, a taxonomy of car-honking in Mexico City. The mere existence of this piece is a marvel, the reading of it sheer pleasure (2,600 words)

Three Children And A Mystery

Giles Tremlett | Guardian | 28th March 2023

Masterpiece of story-telling. Three small children are abandoned at a Barcelona railway station in 1984. Fortune smiles on them. They are adopted and raised in a happy Spanish family. Still, they have faint memories of their earliest years: They lived in Paris; their parents had money, fast cars and guns. Were their parents gangsters? Why the abandonment? They begin looking for answers (6,200 words)

Yamagami Tetsuya’s Revenge

Dylan Levi King | Palladium | 2nd February 2023

A journey into the dark hinterland of post-war Japanese politics, when three generations of the Kishi/Abe family led the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, and the LDP entwined itself with criminal gangs, intelligence agencies, and religious cults. This history was an open secret, but a secret of sorts, until prime minister Shinzo Abe was shot and explanations became unavoidable (3,500 words)

In The Stacks

Robin Sloan | Brand New Box | 6th January 2023

A new short story by Robin Sloan! All the classic ingredients are here: an improbable hero or two, a library (of course), old technology, new technology, sadness, joy, youth, age, grace, nostalgia, incongruity, music — and a generous sprinkling of that same happy-magic dust which made Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore and Sourdough such charmers (3,500 words)

Anselm's Ontological Argument

John Danaher | Philosophical Disquisitions | 21st December 2023

Close examination of the argument advanced in the late 11th century by St Anselm of Canterbury to "prove" the existence of God. Anselm's logic may seem vacuous at best to secular modern eyes, but it has defied philosophers' attempts at refutation for almost a thousand years. "Most philosophers think it must be wrong in some way, but [cannot] pinpoint exactly what is wrong with it" (7,000 words)

Zola And Shopping

Agnes Callard | Unherd | 19th December 2023

To understand the behavioural economics of shopping, ignore the behavioural economists, and read Au Bonheur Des Dames, by Emile Zola. This fictionalised portrait of a Parisian department store captures the birth of "a new type of desire, a new set of human relationships". Zola saw that the joy of shopping lay not in the thing that was bought, but in the freedom to choose and to spend (2,150 words)

Economics Of Time Travel

Stuart Mills | Seeds Of Science | 19th December 2023

If we think that time travel is impossible in the current state of science but will become possible in the future, then we probably need to account for why nobody from the future has shown themselves in our time. Perhaps we are just too dull to be worth visiting, a waste of energy. Even so, might we incentivize a time-traveller to make the journey? Stephen Hawking had a similar idea in 2009 (7,000 words)

A Conversation With Angus Deaton

David Price | Richmond Fed | 19th December 2023

Deaton defends the "deaths of despair" thesis for which he and Anne Case shared the 2015 Nobel Prize in economics, arguing that mortality rates have been rising since 1999 among working-class white Americans, reversing centuries of progress, because falling living standards and falling social status have driven middle-aged men without college degrees towards drugs, alcohol and suicide (4,580 words)

The Closing Of The Bulgarian Frontier

Dimiter Kenarov | Switchyard | 19th December 2023

Bulgaria in the 1990s was a place both peculiar and sublime. “It was a feast in a time of plague, a carnival ride amid carnage. Thirty years later, it’s hard for me to explain coherently what happened after ‘the changes’ of 1989. It seems like something out of a dream, scraps of images and phrases and music and emotions jumbled together, a kind of bottled up energy suddenly released” (5,830 words)

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Any time someone achieves success in a way they don't want to admit publicly, they have to come up with an excuse for their abilities. That’s a carrot problem.

The Resurrection Of The Bawdy

J.C. Scharl | Joie De Vivre | 11th December 2023

The case for still reading Rabelais, whose work was disdained by intellectuals immediately after his death in 1553, and then mimicked by the European literati for the next hundred years. Today, it can show us that “the body is the perpetual problem of literature” — Gargantua and Pantagruel is full of fart jokes — and that “no period of history is as straightforward as we might like to think“ (1,900 words)

Witch Trials Of The Arctic Circle

Chelsea Iversen | LitHub | 19th December 2023 | U

In the far north of Norway, the witch hunts of the 17C were especially intense. Over 130 people were accused of trolldom, or witchcraft — amounting to about five per cent of the area’s population. Of these, 92 were executed. Chains of denunciation were common, in which one accused woman would seek to save herself by condemning others. The court transcripts are “the stuff of fantasy” (1,144 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

The Harvard Morgue Scandal

Brenna Ehrlich | Rolling Stone | 4th December 2023 | U

Grisly scandal at the world-famous college. The “Anatomical Gift Programme”, through which people donated their bodies to science to help train the next generation of doctors, seems to have formed the basis of a lucrative black market in stolen body parts. Many donors were attracted by Harvard’s prestige. Now their families aren’t even sure if the ashes they received are genuine (5,000 words)

A Silken Web

Peter Frankopan, Marie-Louise Nosch & Feng Zhao | Aeon | 18th December 2023

Cloth is, and always had been, political. From the earliest imports of Byzantine and Chinese silks to today’s “fast fashion”, textiles are shaped by far more than just thread. Fabric even haunts our political lanugage (see: “Velvet Revolution” and “Iron Curtain”). “A T-shirt on sale in any shop around the world is the result of a finely meshed web of global collaboration, trade and politics” (5,200 words)

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Save links beautifully with Aboard—the ultimate organization tool for thoughtful people. Collect links, organize them, and share with friends and the world. Save articles, books, movies—and much more. Made by Browser fans for Browser fans! Get the app at Aboard.com.

Selling Citizenship

Marco D’Eramo | Sidecar | 15th December 2023

The world operates on the fiction that all citizenship is equal. In fact, a “birthright lottery” determines your likely lifespan and income based on the strengths and weaknesses of your state of origin. Migrants try to escape this inequality with physical movement, hoping to land in a better life. But for the privileged, better citizenship can simply be purchased like any other commodity (2,050 words)

Evolution Of Pain

Colin McGinn | 13th December 2023

Pain is at root a perceptual faculty in humans, like vision or hearing. Pain alerts the mind to danger and damage. "Pain responses have been well-nigh perfected over evolutionary time. Natural selection has made them as wondrous and efficient as eyes. This has no doubt involved making pain as painful as is compatible with proper functioning, which is obviously pretty damn painful"  (1,040 words)

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The perfect stocking-stuffer for the creative person in your life: Book, the book unlike any other.

How To Lose A Library

Carolyn Dever | Public Books | 14th December 2023

The British Library has become a changed and contradictory place since hackers destroyed its computer systems in October. The place is filled with books, but no specific book can be located or read. Desk-staff come to work with nothing much to do. What were once reading rooms are now just rooms. An eerie silence prevails. "The ghosts of all the Christmases are stuck in storage" (2,000 words)

I Do Some Sermonising

Margaret Atwood | In The Writing Burrow | 14th December 2023

Reflections on the power of names and of giving names to things, delivered by Margaret Atwood as a sermon to the graduating class of the University of St Andrews in Scotland. "The act of naming is the first thing Adam does after being created; and it is the second thing God does, He names the sun, moon, and stars. What things are called was evidently of great importance to God" (1,600 words)

The Future Of Security

Ben Ansell | BBC | 6th December 2023

Second Reith Lecture, on the delicate balance between freedom and order in a liberal society. "No liberal democracy can survive when it doesn't hold a monopoly on the use of force. We cannot defund the police. But when we aim for security we may end up oversteering like a drunkard on a narrowboat, and find ourselves again prone to bad actors, the very ones who we employ to protect us" (9,400 words)

Hylomorphism

Jeremy Skrzypek | 1000-Word Philosophy | 4th December 2023

Introduction to a school of philosophical argument holding that the nature of a thing depends more on the form of the thing than on its substance. A flat-pack table from Ikea, when still in its box, it is not a "table". It becomes a "table" only when it has been properly assembled. This may sound obvious once it has been pointed out, but such is often the case with useful ideas (1,900 words)

The Long Shadow Of Checks

Patrick McKenzie | Bits About Money | 13th December 2023

Checking-accounts dominate American retail banking even though checks are all but obsolete. A checking-account creates a credit relationship between bank and customer whether the customer likes it or not. "Most disagreements between you and a grocery store are beneath the notice of the law. If you and your grocery store have a disagreement about a check specifically, you can go to jail" (3,100 words)