The Invisible Price Of Water

Oana Filip | Eurozine | 13th December 2023

Communism’s collapse is still keenly felt in the “Romanian Sahara”. A system of pipelines that brought water from the Danube to irrigate these 70,000 hectares of farmland gradually crumbled, and now this sandy area known for growing watermelons and tomatoes struggles with desertification. A formerly horizontal water supply has become vertical, as farmers drill risky deep wells (2,900 words)

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The Virus Inside Your TV

Isaac Butler | Slate | 10th December 2023

For three years, an art collective hid provocative works, many of them about reproduction, in the 1990s soap opera Melrose Place. Their props included: “A pool float in the shape of a sperm about to fertilise an egg. A golf trophy that appears to have testicles. Furniture designed to look like an endangered spotted owl.” They called it “culture jamming”. Few viewers noticed (4,800 words)

My Career As A North Korean Novelist

Kim Ju-sŏng | Guardian | 12th December 2023

Extracts from the memoir of an aspiring North Korean writer, who spent years trying to rise through the ranks of an extremely complex literary bureaucracy before escaping south. Success meant freedom and better housing; failure could result in punishment. The most highly regarded genre is “No 1 literature”, which is about the Kim dynasty, while anything “foreign” is frowned upon (4,000 words)

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The common way to talk about happiness is as a single scale: unhappy at one end, neutral in the middle, happy at the other end. This model is wrong.

The Best Book Covers You’ll Never See

Zachary Petit | Fast Company | 11th December 2023

The book covers that you see in bookshops are just “the tip of the iceberg”. Beneath them, unseen, lies a mass of designs that rarely see the light of day — different ways of selling a book that were ultimately discarded on the journey to the final product. Here, a series of designers show an early draft cover for a book alongside the published final, and explain what changed and why (1,700 words)

Moved Along

Grace Benninghoff | Portland Press Herald | 5th December 2023

Day in the life of an unhoused person. She wakes at dawn to pack her belongings and thus avoid losing them in a coming “encampment sweep” that will destroy the tent she has been sheltering in. A still-valid gym membership allows her a warm shower and the chance not to “look homeless” for a few minutes. Drugs, shivering, fear, uncertainty and walking for miles fill the rest of her time (2,600 words)

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What Makes A Good Cat?

Emily Stewart | Vox | 11th December 2023

It is a mistake to assess cats by human or even canine standards. “Cats aren’t here to serve us; the relationship is more of a push and pull. They require boundaries. When a cat is dissatisfied, owners know it, and its surroundings are often at fault. If you’ve got a ‘bad’ cat, the bad is on you. Cats are not as eager to make people happy in the way dogs are, nor are they as motivated by food” (3,000 words)

The Universe With Grimes

Samo Burja | Palladium | 8th December 2023

Interesting throughout. Canadian-born musician Grimes talks about AI, society, and the future of humanity: "Singular genius and agency can move mountains. It’s good to foster the idea that you can aspire to that. But I do agree with the criticism that historical focus on this can downplay the contributions of others. Every time I go to a hospital I’m like, damn, there’s heroes all around me" (4,200 words)

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

Macro And Micro Necessity

Colin McGinn | 8th December 2023

The most fundamental question in philosophy is why there is anything rather than nothing. The next most fundamental question is whether things are necessarily the way they are, and what that even means. "Is it an essential property of a particular human arm that it is an arm? Could an arm have been a tooth or a bladder? If you reduce an arm to a pile of dust, it no longer exists. It isn’t a dusty arm" (916 words)

The Train Wrecked In Slow Motion

Grace Glassman | Slate | 26th November 2023

Account of childbirth in the US as an older woman, where maternal mortality rates are rising alarmingly. This writer, an emergency medicine doctor, has a scheduled C-section before ending up in a medical thriller that is engrossing yet horrifying to read. She lost about six litres of blood: “My body’s entire store, plus a third more. As quickly as they were giving me blood, it ran out of me” (5,100 words)

The Right To Choose How To Be Irish

Padraig Reidy | What Fresh Hell? | 2nd December 2023

Thoughts on the Irish diaspora after the death of Shane MacGowan of The Pogues. His “priceless self-awareness” showed that not everything has to be passed on to the next generation. “We want them to experience Irishness, without experiencing the burden — a burden that we, in our 40s, may have been the last generation to know. We want them to have songs and sport and pride” (1,300 words)

Just Your Handyman

Kurt Armstrong | Plough | 5th December 2023

A hero for our time. "I’m a handyman. People hire me to fix things. My jobs start when someone tells me about something they’d like me to build, or some problem they want me to solve: we need to put a window in the north wall; we want a tile tub surround; this sink is leaky. In my kind of work you take things apart carefully because you’re going to have to put them back together again" (2,700 words)

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The Valve At The End of The World

Evan Grillon | Dirt | 24th November 2023

Splenetic, disjointed, disarmingly honest and strangely compelling account of open-heart surgery and its aftermath, reminiscent at times of Dostoevsky's Notes From The Underground. "I’ve read of people who are driven half-mad by their mechanical heart valve, who can’t sleep, or whose wives can’t sleep, whose marriages are ruined by their insomnia or their anxiety" (5,200 words)

The People Who Ruined The Internet

Amanda Chicago Lewis | Verge | 1st November 2023

They are the SEO “experts”, and it is their fault that you can’t find anything on Google. “The more I thought about search engine optimisation and how a bunch of megalomaniacal jerks were degrading our sense of reality because they wanted to buy Lamborghinis and prove they could vanquish the almighty algorithm, the more I looked forward to going to Florida for this alligator party” (8,530 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 Pint For The Alewives

Akanksha Singh | JSTOR | 5th December 2023

Until the 14C when plague radically reduced the population of Europe, the brewing of beer was women’s work. It now has overtly masculine associations, but ale was once the sole liquid any medieval peasant could drink safely. The “alewife” or “brewster” performed this perpetual domestic labour, soaking and fermenting grain to produce ale for household consumption and for sale (1,060 words)

The Geopolitics Of Godzilla

Peter Tasker | 4th December 2023

Godzilla’s Japan evolves, reflecting the differing political concerns of each new age into which the monster rampages. Thus in 1954’s Godzilla, King of the Monsters! we see anti-American sentiment after a US H-bomb test, while Shin Godzilla shows residual trauma from the 2011 tsunami. The latest instalment reveals a nation newly focused on defence after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (1,380 words)

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30 Useful Principles

Gurwinder | 25th November 2023

Compilation of laws and concepts that can aid greater understanding of the world, with links out to more detailed explanations. Favourites include “Benford's Law of Controversy”, which deals with the relationship between information and emotion, and the “Toothbrush Problem” — “Psychologists treat theories like toothbrushes; no self-respecting person wants to use another’s” (1,550 words)

Audio: Kissinger | The Documentary. Recorded in 2022. The BBC's James Naughtie talks to the late Henry Kissinger about the six world leaders — Konrad Adenauer, Charles de Gaulle, Richard Nixon, Anwar Sadat, Lee Kuan Yew and Margaret Thatcher — profiled in Kissinger's final book, Strategy (49m 29s)

Video: The World Is Too Much With Us | William Bartlett | Vimeo | 1m 20s

William Wordsworth's 19th-century sonnet with 21st-century images:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers ...

Interview: Nick Bostrom

Flo Read | Unherd | 12th November 2023

Philosopher of existential risk argues that AI, if it does not kill us, will make us stronger. "I would like AI [to arrive] before some radical biotech revolution. We could go extinct through synthetic biology without even getting to roll the die with AI. Whereas if we get AI first, maybe that will kill us, but if not, if we get through that, then I think [AI] will handle the biotech, the nanotech, risks" (2,600 words)

52 Things I Learned In 2023

Tom Whitwell | Magnetic Notes | 1st December 2023

Is it that time of year already? The claims in Tom Whitwell's annual assemblage of offbeat eyebrow-raisers range, as always, from the counterintuitive to the scarcely credible. “A group of domesticated birds were taught to call one another on tablets and smartphones.” "Scientists in Singapore have developed a tiny flexible battery, powered by the salt in human tears, for smart contact lenses" (1,500 words)