The Canal Papers

Scott Alexander | Astral Codex Ten | 14th June 2023

Notes towards a model of mind. A well-functioning mind is constantly absorbing and incorporating new information about the world around it. If particular beliefs and expectations become so fixed in the mind that they resist revision, then the mind is malfunctioning; it is becoming "canalised", ignoring new information in favour of inner fixations which may lose all contact with reality (4,100 words)

The Taliban's Luxury Hotel

Andreas Babst | Neue Zürcher Zeitung | 26th September 2023

A visit to the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul, where in years gone by the Afghan king was a regular at the nightclub, Ahmad Shah Massoud waged war from the penthouse, Osama Bin Laden stayed in Room 196, and suicide bombers left trails of destruction. Under its new Taliban management the hotel strives for an air of normality. "Peace is good for Afghanistan. But it's boring for us" (6,020 words)

The Lost History Of Sextus Aurelius Victor

Justin Stover & George Woudhuysen | Antigone | 23rd September 2023

Bibliographic mystery, solved. Historians have never understood why 4C sources enthused about Victor's short history of Rome when the surviving text is extremely underwhelming. But what if that was just a "scrappy epitome", or abstract, of the full, masterful work that had been mislabelled down the centuries? Its rediscovery will "transform our knowledge of the Roman past" (3,950 words)

How Rain Works In Video Games

Nicole Carpenter | Polygon | 26th September 2023

Insight into how game developers create realistic meteorological effects without involving so many moving pixels that your "computer melts through the floor". Each character has an individual rain cloud that follows them everywhere; weather doesn't exist anywhere beyond the player's field of vision. A well-designed downpour will appear torrential with very few moving raindrops (700 words)

Describing The Water

John Kennedy | Diagram Monkey | 24th September 2023

Climate scientist discusses the ways we literally describe water so as to improve our understanding of the planet, and also the figurative ways that becoming so immersed in such detail erodes the quality of debate on this subject. Just "laying out the situation in greater and more overwhelming detail" does little to enhance understanding. You may as well splash in a paddling pool (2,740 words)

Podcast: Sandro Botticelli's "The Birth of Venus" (1485-86) | The Lonely Palette. Is this painting worthy of its fame and ubiquity? Should it be on every calendar and tea towel? An art critic investigates (35m 40s)

Looking For Virginia Woolf’s Diaries

Geoff Dyer | Paris Review | 12th September 2023

A brilliantly structured essay about a quest to own all volumes of Virginia Woolf's diaries so as to read one small anecdote, which turns out to be in a different book. "That’s the thing about life, something you think lends it a purpose doesn’t last forever. A thing you’d set your sights on turns out to be a misremembered mirage, but that doesn’t mean you give up and stop" (3,050 words)

Orange Is The New Yolk

Marian Bull | Eater | 17th August 2023

There is a fashion in egg yolks. The "yolk phobia" and cholesterol obsession of the mid 20C gave us the egg white omelette. In the early 2000s, the heart disease link debunked, "the soft egg became a ubiquitous hipster entity". Now, golden yolks are engineered at scale with additives like marigolds and turmeric in chicken feed. The result is a pustule of "radioactive, aggressive reddish orange" (5,090 words)

Lazarus Lake

Tyler Cowen | Conversations | 20th September 2023

On the basis of this conversation, Lazarus Lake seems like the nicest person in the world; and yet he designs endurance races which can look to the non-runner like pure sadism. His most notorious creation is the Barkley Marathons, a 60-hour run in Tennessee which only 17 people have completed in almost 40 years. "If they don’t find their way out in a couple of days, we’ll go look for them" (8,000 words)

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Emoji

One From Nippon | 21st September 2023

The word "emoji" combines the Japanese words for "picture" and "letter". Emoji grew from a ❤ symbol popular on 1990s Japanese pagers. A lone coder drew the first emoji set, based on manga. Japanese telecom firms developed rival protocols, then agreed to standardise. Masayoshi Son persuaded Apple to add emoji to the iPhone. Emoji can have different meanings inside and outside Japan (1,746 words)

The Method Of Theoretical Physics

Albert Einstein | Philosophy Of Science | 2nd April 1934

Philosophy Of Science is marking its 90th anniversary by ungating classic articles from past decades, including this warning from Albert Einstein about the wishful thinking of theoretical physicists: "To the discoverer in that field, the constructions of his imagination appear so necessary and so natural that he is apt to treat them not as the creations of his thoughts but as given realities" (2,300 words)

Fire And Fury And The First Amendment

John Sargent | LitHub | 20th September 2023

The publisher of Fire And Fury, Michael Wolff's tell-all book about the Trump administration, recounts how President Trump's attempts to suppress the book turned it into an immediate best-seller. The initial print-run was 90,000 copies. "By Tuesday, the original publication date for Fire And Fury, we had ordered 1.5 million books in twenty-two printings at five dif­ferent printers" (3,100 words)

Rust Never Sleeps

Stewart Brand | Works In Progress | 21st September 2023

All metals corrode eventually, save for gold and platinum. Rust is nature asserting itself — metallurgy in reverse. Refined metals shed electrons until they have turned themselves back into more chemically stable metal oxides. Keeping rust at bay is an "endless drudgery of oiling, greasing, brushing, scraping, cleansing, swabbing, painting, repainting, re-repainting, and finally discarding" (3,800 words)

The Case For Prophetic Office

James Bernard Murphy | 1584 | 12th September 2023

Why prophets deserve a place among the checks and balances of a well-ordered political system: They are ombudsmen of a sort. "Prophets cannot rule us or create good institutions; they can only denounce abuses of power by politicians and priests. Prophetic politics is the politics of the veto. Prophets do not tell religious and political leaders what to do but only what cannot be done" (1,425 words)

Ancient Goat Teeth And Animal Care

Melina Seabrook | Sapiens | 12th September 2023

Analysis of animal bones from between 3,000 and 7,500 years ago provides interesting lessons about human-animal relations. A pattern of older goats with "devastatingly poor teeth" suggests animals tethered cruelly yet cherished for their milk. "The goats I studied might have garnered affection from their owners. And ironically, the goats likely suffered from that special treatment" (1,350 words)

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Against The Death Penalty

Ralph Leonard | Areo | 19th September 2023

Well-articulated summary of the arguments around capital punishment, with the writer concluding that there is no practical reason for a state to conduct judicial killings. "The coercive elements of state power can and must still be reined in, in the interests of civil society. We need to be protected from the state just as much — perhaps even more — than we need to be protected by the state" (2,040 words)

Aldous Huxley's Deep Reflection

J. Allan Hobson | MIT Press Reader | 19th September 2023

Huxley was fascinated by altered states of consciousness. He was "a painstaking self-observer" and keen on experimentation. He worked with a medical hypnosis expert in 1950 to do some trials around his trance-like "deep reflection" state. At will, Huxley could make himself utterly insensible to his surroundings, vanishing into the "timeless, spaceless void" in which he wrote his fiction (1,750 words)

Creating A Fake Indian Cricket League

Sean Williams | Sports Illustrated | 15th September 2023

A man in a small Indian village — at the behest of "shadowy but well-financed men" in Moscow — set up a fake cricket league. He rented a field, bought cameras and fake IPL uniforms, and hired cricketers to play in matches that were completely fixed for the purposes of online gambling. This scam was just the ground floor of a multi-level swindle that operated on a global scale (4,810 words)

I’m Completely Blind

Jeffry Ricker | Psyche | 18th September 2023

College professor, who recently lost his sight completely, explains how he acclimatised to life as a blind person. The hardest thing to adjust to was the disruption to his social world. The negativity from the sighted people in his life, even close friends, was difficult to accept. "Strangers often seemed anxious around me. Even people I had known for years sometimes avoided me" (2,000 words)

A Literary History Of Apple's Fake Texts

Max Read | Read Max | 16th September 2023

Since 2011, Apple's demonstrations of their latest devices have included uncanny fictional text messages and emails, concocted to show off the interface. The tone conveys a stilted, improbable cheeriness. These fake people in "Dimension Apple" are always demanding that others "send photos!", planning surprise parties and taking trips together. There is no irony, anywhere (1,700 words)

Making Architecture Easy

Samuel Hughes | Works In Progress | 7th September 2023

A useful way to think about architectural styles. A building can be "easy" or "challenging". An easy building is one that everybody can enjoy. A challenging building is one that only connoisseurs may appreciate. In literature, music, and the fine arts, new works are expected to be challenging. But architecture is different. If a building imposes itself on the public view, it has a duty to be easy (5,076 words)

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Eating Fossils

Jan Zalasiewicz | Palaeontological Association | 1st November 2017

Behold the winner of this year's Ig Nobel prize for Chemistry and Geology (the prize for Nutrition having gone to a paper about electrified chopsticks, Augmented Gustation Using Electricity). In the days before modern chemistry, geologists would taste rocks for hints of their composition, and lick them to reveal textures and colours. "One could literally develop a taste for stratigraphy" (2,660 words)

For The Love Of A Good Doll

Shanti Escalante-De Mattei | Document Journal | 28th August 2023

Beyond Barbie lies a world of doll makers who imbue their human replicas with a darker, more complex meaning. Tastes vary by country: "Russians like super skinny girls — whimsical, but skinny... Americans like chubby children, with big eyes. In France, they like the monster-esque, mermaids or little dragons with little horns. In Japan, Korea, it’s very anime, with those ruched dresses" (2,930 words)

Blame Air Conditioning

Nick Niedzwiadek | Politico | 12th September 2023

It is possible that the origin of US government shutdowns lies in the introduction of air conditioning to Capitol in 1929. Legislators could now sit through DC's humid summers, so sessions got longer and longer. After protests, an August recess was enforced. Then the federal budget deadline was moved to autumn. Now, there are only a few days to pass spending bills before the cutoff (1,900 words)