How To Make A Monster

Charity Urbanski | Medievalists | 23rd October 2023

For most of history, a "monster" was not necessarily an imaginary creature like a vampire or a werewolf. Any deviation in appearance or behaviour (via a birth defect or disability, say) was folded into the concept of monstrosity. By the 12C, a complex visual language had developed that conflated otherness with demons, and this was used to persecute those perceived to be outsiders (2,810 words)

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What Does A Happily Ever After Look Like?

Alice Lang & Jan Diehm | Pudding | 16th October 2023

Analysis of how romance novel covers have changed over time. Comprising almost a quarter of the US adult fiction market, the way these books are marketed reflects the changing status and perceived desires of their women readers. In the 1950s, as more women entered the workforce, "corporate romances" were popular. Later, the classic 1980s Fabio "clinch" reflected "more feminist openness" (2,800 words)

The Future Of Ghosts

Jeanette Winterson | Paris Review | 23rd October 2023

Ghost stories may well have proliferated in the 19C because of the excess carbon monoxide from gas lamps — low level poisoning can cause hallucinations and dread. In the 21C, our hauntings will be predicated on the intangible reality we already inhabit. "A ghost is the spirit of a dead person. An avatar is a digital twin of a living person. Neither is 'real'. A haunted metaverse. Why not?" (910 words)

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Everyone Needs The Odd Free Lunch

James Harris | Stiff Upper Quip | 19th October 2023

On the "spiritual ungenerosity" of the UK. Unlike elsewhere, tap water is not always free and a hot drink rarely comes with an unsolicited biscuit. This writer finds that his homeland has become "a place of martialling scarcity". The little things that make life nicer are in short supply. "This is what happens to people when they live pinched, cramped lives, worrying about every penny" (1,460 words)

A Spark Extinguished

Ian Johnson | China Books Review | 19th October 2023

Extract from Ian Johnson's much-admired new book, Sparks, about China's "underground historians", an informal movement of disparate individuals working at great personal risk to provide a factual account of China's modern history, often contradicting the "official" history written and rewritten by the Communist Party to erase the Party's monstrosities and bolster the Party's legitimacy (4,800 words)

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The Lure Of Madness

Lorna Collins | The Polyphony | 20th September 2023

A reviewer "who has experienced madness" reviews Lure Of Madness, Alastair Morgan's study of Adorno, Foucault, and anti-psychiatry. "As I am reading, I find myself (my hallucinations) reacting violently. I do not usually include my visionary perspectives in an academic review. but these experiences seem to show something valid about the field defined in this book, if not the book itself" (2,080 words)

Collection Cost

Kathleen S. Murphy | Lapham's Quarterly | 18th October 2023

Ripple effects of the slave trade are still being uncovered. Natural history in the 17C and 18C relied on slave traders as collectors. "A specimen gathered by a Fante person in the Gold Coast, then acquired by a British slaving mariner, transported on a slaving vessel to an American port of disembarkation and then to London, might find its way to the Royal Society's meeting rooms" (1,740 words)

Fake It ’Til You Fake It

Nick Heer | Pixel Envy | 8th October 2023

Image manipulation is older than we think. Stalin had officials who displeased him cut out of group photographs. In 1851 Edouard Baldus layered multiple exposures to create a single photograph. While there is legitimate cause for concern about what the latest AI-assisted computational photography tools might produce, it has always been a good idea to be sceptical about the images we see (2,390 words)

Murder, Muggers, And Rottweilers

Thurston Moore | Esquire | 10th October 2023

Sonic Youth's co-founder remembers life on the Lower East Side circa 1978, a peak year for no-wavers and punk rockers but also for muggers, murderers, rottweilers, junkies, drug-dealers, rent-boys and drunks. "The crime and violence were real, but they were more or less arbitrary. Also, I probably shouldn’t have been walking alone around Alphabet City at three in the morning" (4,500 words)

The Exam That Broke Society

Yasheng Huang | Aeon | 19th October 2023

The Imperial Civil Service Examination was the sole avenue of social mobility in China from the seventh to the twentieth centuries. It was a catastrophic success. The most brilliant minds in China wanted only to pass the examination, win high office, and entrench their emperor's monopoly on power. So far from fostering private enterprise and civil society, their job was to suppress it (4,000 words)

Hollywood Horror

Daniel Parris | Stat Significant | 18th October 2023

Until the break-out success of The Exorcist (1974), which earned $441 million on a budget of $12 million, horror was strictly a B-movie genre. It has since become Hollywood's most reliable money-maker. Horror films are rarely blockbusters, but they are cheap to make, and their average return on investment is twice that of an action movie. Blair Witch was the most profitable film of all time (2,000 words)

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The Happy Dysfunction Of Dover

Chris Arnade | Unherd | 16th October 2023

Chris Arnade wanders through Dover, walks on to Portsmouth, and decides that the vibe in broken-down parts of England is gentler than the vibe in broken-down parts of America. "England still has a real community built around a shared history and culture. Even if it sometimes gets turned into tourism-board silliness, it very much matters. The English know who they are, and are OK with it" (1,700 words)

Skinny House

Kim Samek | Electric Lit | 18th October 2023

Satirical fiction about a housing shortage. In a busy city, demand exceeds supply so landlords start putting up partitions everywhere, until the average square footage of an apartment has shrunk to almost nothing. "Most of his neighbours have bigger houses. They moved in decades ago, before the subdivisions. He is stuck in an upright coffin, but he is proud of his home" (1,580 words)

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On The Tyranny Of Slush Piles

Samsun Knight | Millions | 18th October 2023

Nepotism has historically played an important part in the publishing of literary fiction — both Proust and Joyce were widely rejected before being rescued by friends. This isn't a good system, but is it any worse than what we have now? Digital "slush piles" proliferate everywhere and the same tropes keep rising to the top. This privileges the "simple at the expense of the complex" (1,400 words)

Who’s Afraid Of A Spatchcocked Chicken?

C. Pam Zhang | Eater | 3rd October 2023

English words for meat are peculiarly squeamish: when alive, a cow is a cow, but on the plate it becomes "beef", as if this linguistic separation can disguise that the food is an animal's flesh. Mandarin is different — pig is always pig. "I still thrill at an old, laminated menu that offers 'cow stomach' or 'pig bung'; I trust more a place that doesn’t attempt to dissimulate with 'offal' or 'tripe'" (1,300 words)

Marked by Stars

Anthony Grafton | Public Domain Review | 12th October 2023

The work of 16C polymath Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa blends the occult and the scientific. His De occulta philosophia is a manual of "learned magic", full of daemons, talismans and angels. This was stuff that had unfrocked generations of clerics, yet it also made it possible to navigate the stars. His is "a grand, schematic plan of the cosmos, rather like that of the London Underground" (2,660 words)

The Day the War Really Began

Klaus Wiegrefe | Spiegel | 25th September 2023

Retrospective about the April 2008 Nato summit in Bucharest. Members discussed admitting Ukraine to the group as a show of strength against Russia. The US were in favour; a group of European powers, led by Angela Merkel, blocked the move. Zelenskyy and others have blamed this decision for recent atrocities in Ukraine, believing that Putin would never have invaded a Nato member state (8,450 words)

The Torture Of Tinnitus

Michel Faber | Guardian | 14th October 2023

Excellent writing about an unpleasant topic: tinnitus. It is a personal metallic squeal inside the writer's head: "Like the brakes of a train that’s forever cutting its speed and never coming to a stop". The worst thing about it is not the sound, but the fact that he never consented to its presence. It is a constant reminder of his organic nature, that we are made of meat and bones and gristle (1,420 words)

Bless This Mess

Tyler Watamanuk | Dirt | 6th October 2023

On the clever posture of curated clutter, as demonstrated by a 23-year-old photo of Sofia Coppola’s home office. True mess is undesirable, unhygienic, dirty: redolent of sadness and depression. Desirable mess is aspirational and somehow still clean despite the mishmash of items. It features books, papers and art strewn everywhere. It is a style choice, a way of signalling taste and flair (620 words)

from The Browser ten years ago:

Wall Street Loves A Cheater

Lynnley Browning | Newsweek | 11th October 2013

Profile of Ashley Madison, hook-up agency for married people. Slogan: "Life is short — have an affair". "In the US the top cheating city is Washington, D.C., where 6.18 per cent of all residents have paid memberships... 70 per cent are males over 40, and of that group, 84 per cent are married. There are four times as many 39-year-old men on the site as there are 38-year-olds" (2,060 words)

Impostors And Role-Players

John Wentworth | Less Wrong | 25th September 2023

Coders working with artificial intelligence freely admit to having little or no idea what goes on inside their black boxes, and even top AI scientists proceed largely by inference. Which is, if you think about it, a strange situation. Is this some kind of reverse-impostor syndrome? Or does it suggest strategies for people in other fields who are, one way or another, basically role-playing their jobs? (1,500 words)

On Having Children

Martin Gurri | Discourse | 11th October 2023

For the first time since the fourteenth century the world’s population is about to start shrinking. You can try explaining this reversal by reference to economic and social trends, but mere correlation seems an inadequate account of what amounts to an existential shift in human preference. Have we lost confidence in our species? Do we "love humanity as an abstraction but despise it in the flesh"? (2,060 words)

Mao To Now

Perry Link | China Books Review | 5th October 2023

Western critics compare Xi Jinping's autocracy with Mao Zedong's dictatorship; and seemingly Xi would like to be another Mao; but China has changed too much since Mao's day. People have more information, more understanding of the world. "Under Mao, people usually believed what they were shouting; under Xi, they are often protecting their interests through outward performance" (3,100 words)

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Zuzalu

Vitalik Buterin | Palladium | 6th October 2023

Lessons learned from inviting 200 rationalists, Ethereals and other digital nomads to converge on a coastal village in Montenegro for two months, just to see what happens. Main finding: It's the future. Everybody gets on, has fun, learns stuff, makes friends, makes things. Next step: Something permanent, a place that looks like a monastery and works like a university; or even lots of them (2,200 words)