Podcast: Garden Of England | Currently. Behind the scenes of the soft fruit harvest in Kent, where each summer thousands of temporary workers arrive to do the picking (28m 26s)

Video: Wild Summon | Vimeo | Karni and Saul | 14m 38s

Trippy, fantastical animated short that imagines a world in which humans exist on the dramatic life cycle of wild salmon, complete with river spawning, leaping and predatory fishing. Narrated by Marianne Faithfull.

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Massively Disruptive, Totally Plausible

Dean W. Ball et al | Politco | 2nd January 2026

Fifteen futurists offer their thoughts on what "unpredictable, unlikely but entirely plausible thing" could happen in 2026. Riots in Syria could reignite the civil war. Deepfake videos could derail the US midterm elections and erode public trust in reality itself. There could be public backlash against AI companies and a stock crash. Some combination of these could usher in the "American Troubles" (4,900 words)

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I Sell Onions On The Internet

Peter Askew | Deep South Ventures | 22nd April 2019

In 2014, a domain name trader bought an onion-related web address for $2,200 and somehow ended up running one of America's most successful farm-to-door onion delivery services. Specifically, he sells mild Vidalia onions grown in Georgia, US. He had no onion experience or distribution infrastructure when he started. It works: people want nice onions, he provides them, with good customer service (1,100 words)

The Post-American Internet

Cory Doctorow | Pluralistic | 1st January 2026

Speech about a predicted shift in internet geopolitics, from the writer who coined the word "enshittification" to describe decaying online platforms. Trump's trade policy has dismantled global norms that favoured the US. Crises precipitate change. With the US no longer a "neutral" tech broker, an "unstoppable coalition of activists, entrepreneurs and natsec hawks" is poised to refashion the internet (8,000 words)

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2025 Letter

Dan Wang | 1st January 2026

Dan Wang's China letter is an annual classic. He moved from Yale to Stanford this year and, back in San Francisco, found that Silicon Valley and the Chinese Communist Party share a fondness for paranoia and a general lack of humour. The US is suffering from Trump's mishandling of China, but Europe is doing worse. Still: "American problems seem more fixable to me than Chinese problems" (14,000 words)

Can We Trust Social Science Yet?

Ryan Briggs | Asterisk | 20th May 2025

Using evidence to arrive at policy decisions seems obviously right. But would the world improve if decision makers based their choices solely on the "evidence" produced by economists and political scientists? Most likely not. The reason being that even the top social science journals still regularly publish research that is wildly inaccurate, a product of a system that seems to be rigged for failure (4,100 words)

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The Era Of The Business Idiot

Edward Zitron | Where's Your Ed At? | 21st May 2025

Critique of today's business leaders, who are so detached from reality that they don't participate in the very economy from which they seek to profit. "Everything is dominance, acquisition, growth and possession over any lived experience, because their world is one where the journey doesn’t matter, because their journeys are riddled with privilege and the persecution of others in the pursuit of success" (13,400 words)

Pablo Picasso’s Stunning Repetitions

Jillian Hess | Noted | 7th April 2025

Picasso was a master realist until the advent of photography. His response was “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon”, a painting that “set the art world on fire”. He carried out 809 preliminary studies and filled 16 different sketchbooks, moving from realistic representations to geometric forms, collapsing perspectives, using shapes that didn’t belong together — birthing what would become known as cubism (1,600 words)

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The Lost Art Of Research As Leisure

Mariam Mahmoud | Kasurian | 9th March 2025

The 21C world of audio-visual distractions was predicted by major 20C figures like E.B. White, Virginia Woolf and Susan Sontag. Leisure, not as pure idleness but as an inheritor of the Greek concept of scholē or "school", is under threat. As the German philosopher Josef Pieper argued, this takes the form of "a style of unconstrained research". Don't just read — read playfully, purposefully and curiously (3,500 words)

Thinking Fast, Slow, And Super Slow

David Bessis | 18th December 2025

Appraisal and critique of Daniel Kahneman's theory of cognitive biases, which posits that we have two distinct cognitive systems — one for immediate, instinctive responses and the other for rigorous reasoning. Cognitive biases arise when the first system is “systematically wrong”. His theory overlooks a third system, the bridge between intuition and logic, which is “entirely ignored by our culture” (4,700 words)

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Making Forest Fires Worse

Alex Smith & Elizabeth McCarthy | Breakthrough Journal | 17th December 2025

In the last 14 years, California’s wildfires have raged unchecked, burning 16% of the state’s landmass. The US Forest Service, which contains wildfires by mechanical thinning and prescribed burns, has been hamstrung by a string of lawsuits from one environmentalist. “The problem lies in a system that allows a single person to make decisions that impact millions of people and acres of our ecosystems” (3,100 words)

How To Be Old

Catherine Hiller | Oldster | 22nd December 2025

Tongue-in-cheek guide from a 79 year old on how to "enjoy the entitlements" of age. Be sure to tell everyone about your precise state of health. Enjoy the little noises you now make when standing up or sitting down. When faced with new technology, "cultivate a state of learned helplessness" — if an 8-year-old can truly solve the problem, let them. Also: "Embrace your inner curmudgeon!" (1,300 words)

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Editing Is Only Good If the Editing Is Good

Freddie deBoer | 22nd December 2025

Responding to writing by saying that it "could use an editor" seems smart but is actually akin to repeating a sports cliché. It offers no specific critique and reveals ignorance of how editing works, especially today when so much of editorial work has been hollowed out. Some editing is good, some is bad. Overediting can be as bad as underediting. Concision isn't even necessarily an improvement (3,200 words)

Were Classical Statues Painted Horribly?

Ralph S Weir | Works In Progress | 16th December 2025

When we reconstruct the original colouring of Greek and Roman sculptures, they look grotesque — to our eyes, much worse than the plain stone or bronze. Has our aesthetic sense greatly evolved in 2,000 years, or is something else going on? Much older painted statuary from other cultures, such as Egypt, still looks marvellous. Perhaps the problem is just that the reconstructions are very badly done (2,700 words)

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Let A Thousand Societies Bloom

Vitalik Buterin | 17th December 2025

Assessment of the state of intentional community-building. This movement encompasses everything from libertarian micronations to socialist utopias. Some are actively experimenting with short-term "pop-up" cultures. The writer ran one called Zuzalu in Montenegro in 2023; 200 people co-existed for two months, shared ideas and formed subcultures. Living in tribes is the future, it is argued (8,700 words)

Podcast: The World’s Worst Philosopher | Panpsycast. An attempt to rank the worst philosopher in all of history, revisiting famous missteps by otherwise well-regarded thinkers (39m 52s)

Video: Fairytale Lullaby | YouTube | Jacob Collier | 3m 17s

Jacob Collier sings John Martyn’s Fairytale Lullaby late at night in the mostly deserted streets of Venice.

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‘It's Just A Bomb’

Ravi Somaiya | Bungalow | 16th December 2025

Astonishing reconstruction of a chance meeting outside a hospital in Leeds in 2023. Mohammed Farooq, a student nurse, walked towards the entrance with a homemade bomb in a bag, planning on detonating it inside. Nathan Newby, sitting on a bench nearby, was a patient with a lung infection. He struck up a conversation — "Alright mate, you alright?" — and convinced the bomber to turn himself in (5,800 words)

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Rumours Of Our Death

Ian Hislop et al | The Fence | 18th December 2025

Veteran editors weigh in on the future of print magazines. Here's Ian Hislop on his much-mocked decision to keep Private Eye as print only, which seems astute now: "My strategy has always been to resist all developments and technological ‘improvements’ and just carry on with print, because it’s a better vehicle for conveying ideas – and a really good platform for cartoons. They just don’t work as well online" (3,300 words)