On English Melancholy

Iris Moon | MIT Press Reader | 9th May 2024

Brief, discursive history of melancholy. In antiquity, it was associated with Saturn, that “ancient devourer of children”. Aristotle believed that the thoughtful ones — poets, artists, philosophers — himself included, were more susceptible. This idea continued into the 17th century: “ponderous thinking” was said to induce melancholy and “commerce with others” was offered as a potential cure (1,400 words)

The Ambling Mind

L.M. Sacasas | Convivial Society | 9th May 2024

Meditations on the virtues of walking. Kierkegaard “walked himself into a state of well-being”; Nietzsche felt that “all truly great thoughts are conceived by walking”. Travel writer Nick Hunt, reflecting on his walk from the Netherlands to Istanbul, noted that walking turned the world into a continuum. “One thing merges into the next: cultures are not separate things but points along a spectrum” (1,800 words)

Dear Tim Cook

Matt Zoller Seitz | Roger Ebert | 8th May 2024

Outpouring of pure rage about an Apple marketing campaign that depicts a huge press crushing a pile of traditional "creative" objects, such as musical instruments, paints and cameras. The company has now apologised for it. Is this just a harmless piece of imagery to sell a tablet, or a message to artists that "the tech industry will crush you, destroy you; suddenly, violently, all at once"? (1,800 words)

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What Can A Person Wear?

Patricia Marino | The Kramer Is Now | 10th May 2024

Philosopher ponders whether it is possible to dress both ethically and comfortably. Stretchy manmade fabrics are practical, but their plastic fibres "pollute everything from oceans to breast milk". Natural options like cotton use a lot of water and energy to produce, and don't stretch or wash well. "I could dress more sustainably by buying and wearing used, shapeless items, and not looking good" (750 words)

A Record Of Old Kashgar

Henryk Szadziewski | China Review Of Books | 9th May 2024

Kashgar sits at the far west of China, near Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Home to the Uyghur people, this ancient city has seen many kingdoms and enterprises come and go. It became a trading hub because of the influence of the Silk Road. Now, the CCP is "feverishly attempting to score a mark of their permanence onto the fabric of the city" via systematic demolition of ancient buildings (1,700 words)

Big Fridge

Patrick Sisson | Sherwood | 2nd May 2024

Refrigerated warehouses, some as cold as minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit, have completely revolutionised how we eat. They enable seasonal foods to be available all year round and give fresh staples a longer shelf life at home. There is at least 7.4 billion cubic feet of refrigerated industrial space worldwide, over half of which is in the US. In a climate crisis, cold storage is a very hot market (1,400 words)

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Not Lost In A Book

Dan Kois | Slate | 5th May 2024

Sales of books aimed at children aged eight to twelve are in "free fall". This "decline by nine" means that only 35 per cent of this age group read for fun. Some fear this will harm "the entire concept of pleasure reading as a common pursuit". The causes? The pandemic, screen time, bad teaching, too many illustrated books, but also the fact that these kids don't have phones yet (1,700 words)

Becoming An Amateur Polyglot

ArisAlexis | LessWrong | 8th May 2024

It is best if one's first new language is taught by an experienced teacher. After that, it is possible to make good progress alone with spaced repetition, grammar texts and apps. Don't try to learn more than four tenses. Don't worry about the gender of nouns. Watch TV in your new language, with subtitles at first, and use a Kindle to read books. Best of all, talk to friends without switching (1,900 words)

Philosophy Of The Death Penalty

Peter Salmon | New Humanist | 25th April 2024

The death penalty is an issue of sovereignty, “not so much “does the state have the right to take a life?” as: “what does it mean if we grant the state that right?”. It is a fundamental change in the relationship between the state and each individual. This in turn changes all of our relationships to death. It is no surprise that US states with capital punishment have the highest rates of homicide” (2,500 words)

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Nature’s Oldest Mandolin

Maria Popova | Marginalian | 5th May 2024

Observations on cicadas, every line a joy. “Homer’s highest praise for orators was to compare them to cicadas. Lord Byron — otherwise blind to the grandeur of smallness — rhapsodised about these tiny “people of the pine” that “make their summer lives one ceaseless song”. Their kettledrums are perhaps the only musical instruments now in use that have remained unchanged through a thousand centuries” (1,200 words)

Leaf Venation Networks And Simulated Damage

Luke Mander & Hywel T. P. Williams | Royal Society Open Science | 1st May 2024

Trees began to grow branching veins in their leaves about 340 million years ago. Then, around 20 million years ago, a new "loopy" vein pattern evolved in some plants. Why? By inflicting hypothetical damage to fossilised leaves, the authors of this paper posit the plausible answer that, in between, insects evolved that eat these leaves, and so the trees developed veins that resist the damage (5,500 words)

Variations On The Theme Of Silence

Jeannette Cooperman | Common Reader | 26th March 2024

Stellar opening to a piece about kinds of silence: not all of them are soothing. "My boyfriend was a moody architect who wore black leather jackets and blared Nine Inch Nails. I worked for a broke little magazine so stressful the production manager threw her phone at the floor and screamed 'fuck' every afternoon at three, clockwork. About to turn thirty, I was beginning to hate my life" (4,600 words)

To Save It, Eat It

Taras Grescoe | Long Now | 24th January 2024

War in Ukraine and Syria could end up devastating humanity long after the last shot is fired. Both conflicts have damaged major seed banks — one in Kharkiv, the other in Aleppo — where the seeds of tens of thousands of plants were preserved as insurance against future famine and mutation. Even Hitler left the Ukrainian seeds alone. Some of the samples destroyed were centuries old (1,600 words)

Vico's Singularity

Henry Farrell | Programmable Mutter | 1st May 2024

"Vinge’s Fork", named for the late science fiction author Vernor Vinge, suggests two paths forward: either an AI-powered super-intelligence will destroy humanity, or with the help of such an AI, humanity will conquer the cosmos. Both metaphors are "wildly misleading', it is argued here, and merely continue a debate humans have been having at least since the Renaissance (2,300 words)

The Beautiful Dissociation Of The Japanese Language

Marco Giancotti | Aether Mug | 20th April 2024 | U

…Lies in the difference between the spoken and written forms. Japanese was purely oral until 5th-century scholars adopted Chinese characters, or “kanji”, sometimes only for their sound and not their meaning. A single Chinese character can represent several spoken Japanese words, so one kanji can have many different meanings and sounds. Example: there are over 15 ways to pronounce “life” in kanji (3,900 words)

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History Of Online Public Messaging

Jeremy Reimer | Ars Technica | 29th April 2024 | U

From Morse’s prophetic first message via telegraph — “what hath God wrought?” — all the way to social networks today. Full of amusing facts: Usenet veterans in the 1990s dreaded Septembers, when undergraduates would discover and pepper newsgroups with naive questions. “What started as a fun hobby for nerds has led to a world where everyone feels anxious and uncertain as they “doomscroll” infinite feeds” (4,400 words)

The Unstallable Plane That Stalled

Sylvia Wrigley | Fear Of Landing | 26th April 2024

The Cessna 185 Skywagon is a small aircraft popular in remote areas without proper airstrips. With modification, it can take off from and land on water. The pilot flying one in Finland on 30th April 2003 believed that it was incapable of stalling, which is the major reason that he crashed it into a lake seconds after take off. That, and he wasn't wearing the safety shoulder harness (4,000 words)

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Tales From An Attic

Sierra Bellows | American Scholar | 4th March 2024

In 1995, the Willard Asylum for the Chronic Insane in New York closed. Over 400 suitcases belonging to patients were found in an attic. The contents are revealing not of high psychological drama, but the mundanities of life. One held a military uniform and WW2 ration books, another a library slip from borrowing a Freud volume in 1929. Patient Benjamin M's luggage held only a toothpick (7,700 words)