Indelible Ink

Sunil Iyengar | Arts Journal | 16th January 2024

The number of books in a child’s home is positively correlated with reading test scores. Would the same hold for digital reading? Recent research claims that the “short length, fast-paced stimuli, and lower linguistic quality” of digital texts may invoke more shallow cognitive processes. For younger students, reading digitally for leisure was associated with lower reading comprehension (1,100 words)

Browser classified:

NetNewsWire is like podcasts — but for reading. Get news from the sites you love — with no tracking, with no social media algorithms dialing up the outrage meter.

Compliance, Violence And Overachievement

Conrad Bastable | Radical Contributions | 7th January 2024

Every place is defined by the process used to select its elites, who eventually acquire the monopoly on state violence. Modern American elites are selected for the desire to pass tests and please authority figures, so when in power they prioritise polite compliance. “To engage in violence,” even as an unwilling recipient, “is perceived as failing a societal-level marshmallow test” (10,500 words)

So You Wanna De-Bog Yourself

Adam Mastroianni | Experimental History | 2nd January 2024

Being intellectually stuck is “the psychological equivalent of standing knee-deep in a fetid bog”. When this happens, it may feel like “a bespoke bog”, but in fact there are recurring patterns. This writer has names for them all. Perhaps you are “gutterballing”, or “hedgehogging”, “puppeteering” or “declining the dragon”. The silly names help with pulling yourself out, apparently (3,800 words)

Browser classified:

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.

Podcast: How Panel Shows Really Work | The Rest Is Entertainment. A long-time TV insider (Richard Osman) and a TV critic (Marina Hyde) answer common questions about how the entertainment we consume is made and how much of apparently “unscripted” content is really scripted in advance (35m 29s)

Paying People To Have Children

Kevin Kelly | Technium | 11th January 2024

Proposal to arrest the global decline in fertility rates: pay people a lot of money to have children. A government would calculate a citizen’s “Total Lifetime Economic Value” and pay people slightly less to have a child. Previous incentives, like free childcare or housing, have not worked. Perhaps the cash payment needs to be huge. “Would you be willing to have a(nother) child for $8 million?” (1,100 words)

Browser classified:

Strut combines the tools you need to run your entire writing process in one place. Capture projects, notes, drafts, and more in simple workspaces powered by AI. It's the only AI that works alongside writers like you — so you can create your best work, more often. The best part? Strut is 100% free! Start Using Strut for Free

Between The Algorithm And A Hard Place

Diana Enríquez | Tech Policy Press | 11th December 2023

In a job that is largely managed by an automated system, software glitches will periodically create a lose-lose situation. The route the app presents to an Uber driver or an Amazon worker makes no sense in the real world, but they face harsh automatic penalties for deviating from it. What to do? A system that is supposed remove worker autonomy forces more individual decision making (1,500 words)

Getting Under The Skin

McKenzie Prillaman | Grow By Ginkgo | 10th January 2024 | U

On the past and future of insulin. Just over a hundred years ago, it was extracted for the first time from cattle to be sold as a diabetes treatment. In the 1970s, it became possible to manufacture it synthetically by injecting bacteria with DNA. Today, the price can fluctuate wildly. But one day soon, we will likely be able to modify our skin cells to be “own miniature insulin factories” (2,300 words)

The Un-Brie-Lievable History Of Tyromancy

Jennifer Billock | Saveur | 16th November 2023 | U

Tyromancy is the art of telling fortunes with cheese. It dates back to the 2C, via the writings of a diviner named Artemidorus of Daldis. It was popular in the Middle Ages for finding love: suitors’ names were carved into cheese, and whichever one grew mould first should meet you at the altar. This tyromancer can read any kind of cheese, including vegan, but a Kraft single must be torn up first (800 words)

Confessions Of A Country Parson

Alexander Poots | UnHerd | 11th January 2024

In praise of the Revd James Woodforde’s diaries. A kind of rural Pepys, he began keeping a daily record of what he called “trifles” when a student in 1759. He concluded at the age of 63, sixty volumes later. Weather, religion, food and wine preoccupied him; he notes when the chamber pots froze and when he bottled his moonshine. “A whole world is born from years of tight observation” (1,200 words)

A Knife Forged In Fire

Laurence Gonzales | Chicago | 9th January 2024

Making a Japanese-style kitchen knife is difficult and time consuming, but worth it. The blade produced by the process described here is a work of art. “The knife slid through the onion’s flesh with no resistance. It felt like cutting air. I rinsed it and wiped it dry and during dinner we propped it up in its black velvet case and we stared at it like early humans in a cave somewhere, watching fire” (7,000 words)

The Quest To Build A Better Chicken

Boyce Upholt | Noēma | 19th December 2023

Chicken is the world’s most-consumed meat, a cheap, easily-transportable source of protein. As chickens have been bred to become more efficient at “turning food into body mass”, they are now mere “meat-growing machines”, cooped up inside sheds and unable to stand. On the other hand, smallholder poultry farms are a health risk and could undermine chicken welfare (4,100 words)

Browser classified:

Look, it's a book. It's not like other books. There's no real way to describe it without ruining the surprise, you might have to take a chance

Podcast: Adventures Of A Bone Hunter | Lost Women Of Science. Turn-of-the-century palaeontologist Annie Montague Alexander financed her own fossil-hunting expeditions in Nevada and founded the world’s most prized research collections at UC Berkeley (33m 22s)

A Theory Of The Modern Exclamation Point!

Anne Helen Petersen | Culture Study | 7th January 2024

Current usage norms for "!" are rooted in the assumptions that enthusiasm is feminine and that femininity is unprofessional. Women must switch tone hundreds of times a day, trying to appear professional but not “ambitious, or cold, or threatening”. Technological advances mean more communication across more channels, hence more "Tone Work" and tone guilt than ever (1,300 words)

Mind-Decoding Technologies

Fletcher Reveley | Undark | 3rd January 2024

Neuroscientists can now decode MRI scans and see text renderings of a patient's thoughts. Is that ethical? Five protective “neurorights” are proposed: to mental privacy, to maintain one’s existing identity, to mental augmentation, to protection from bias, and to free will. Chile has already amended its constitution in this direction. “If we lose our mental privacy, what else is there to lose?” (5,700 words)

Who Gets A Nation?

Kal Raustiala | Noēma | 4th January 2024

Not everyone. “Our world of 200 or so independent nations could easily be broken up into 300, 400, 500 sovereign states.” These are places like Tibet inside China, Puerto Rico and Hawaii in the US, and Scotland in the UK. Distinct “peoples” are assumed to have the right to self-determination. But what is a people? We look to the UN to rule on such questions, but it tends always towards stasis (3,500 words)

Browser classified:

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 Lighthouse Keeper Hangs Up Her Bonnet

Diana Cervantes | Hakai | 19th December 2023

Marking the retirement of the US’s last official lighthouse keeper. For 20 years, Sally Snowman served the Boston Light on Little Brewster Island. Now in her seventies, she was its first female custodian. She often dressed as a lighthouse keeper’s wife from 1783, both for historical authenticity and “so that her colleagues in the coast guard can easily recognise her from a distance” (1,180 words)

Unpredictable But Entirely Possible Events

Ian Bremmer, Matthew Burrows et al | Politico | 5th January 2023

Futurists imagine the “Black Swan” events that could radically alter the course of the next year. Many focus tightly on the US presidential election, with possible incidents like “death at a Trump rally” and “a violent attack on a candidate”, but more interesting are the larger themes that emerge. As a group, these analysts anticipate that coups and global warming will now shape our lives (5,400 words)

Cycling Doping Fallacies

Nicholas A. Ferrell | New Leaf Journal | 4th January 2024

Doping was so prevalent in cycling from 1999 to 2005 that there is no point trying to untangle the records of the cheaters and the clean. Who can say who “should” have been winning during Lance Armstrong’s dominance of the Tour de France? Rather, fans should focus on the achievements of those athletes who “tried to do it the right way” but never got to find out if they were good enough (6,200 words)

Antarctica’s Looming Threat

Tara Lohan | Revelator | 4th January 2023

As more humans visit Antarctica, so do more invasive species. Ten mites and an earthworm have already arrived. To save the valuable but non-photogenic species, first we must protect the animals we have heard of. “I think when people are thinking of Antarctica, they’re not necessarily thinking of ugly little worms on the seafloor...They’re thinking of penguins and seals and whales” (1,200 words)

Browser classified:

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 Return Of History

Adam Tooze | Chartbook | 1st January 2023

There was never a guarantee that “history would develop in a direction congenial to the West”. Europe’s precarious post-WW2 success story “congealed into a cliché for export” that allowed a belief in “economic convergence leading to geopolitical and political alignment” to persist much longer than was reasonable. The only question that remains is how the West will respond to this “defeat” (3,200 words)