Sidelined, Or No Pain, No Gain

Mac Crane | Offing | 9th October 2025

Former college athlete and self-described jock explains the confusing desire to keep training when badly injured. "Even now, I still lift every day, and I often lift to excess. I want big, strong muscles, but I also want that old sore feeling back, that pathological embodiment, that can-think-of-nothing-else-but-the-pain, it hurts so good. My pain and pleasure wires have not necessarily crossed, but maybe fused" (4,000 words)

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The Myth Of The Sommelier

Cremieux Recueil | 9th October 2025

Can oenophiles really claim to be better judges of wine than the average imbiber? Is there even such a thing as an objectively "good" wine, as opposed to one that you personally happen to like? This investigation would suggest not. For decades, so-called inferior wines have been winning expert blind tasting contests. In competitions with many entries, the judges almost never agree (4,600 words)

The Cult Of Can't

Aurelien | Trying To Understand The World | 8th October 2025

To change society for the better, people have to believe that said change is possible. This is no longer the case, it is argued here. Left-wingers and right-wingers alike have ceased to subscribe to the "myth of progress". The result is ever greater individualism and a version of life as a zero-sum game. "When everything is too difficult, let’s concentrate on dividing up the spoils: at least we know how to do that" (5,500 words)

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Just A Little Longer

Joshua Barnes | Sydney Review Of Books | 7th August 2025

Why are books divided into chapters? This history of "literary segmentation" runs from the New Testament to the 21C. The great characters in this story are Laurence Sterne, author of Tristram Shandy, James Joyce and B.S. Johnson, all of whom created works with intriguing taxonomies. The chapter is a unit of time and, with this tool, a writer can shape "the reader’s experience of temporality" (7,500 words)

Yoshie Shiratori’s Remarkable Prison Escapes

Kaushik Patowary | Amusing Planet | 7th October 2025

Story of Yoshie Shiratori, a legend among escape artists for his four prison breaks in Japan, each more incredible-sounding than the last. After his third recapture and imprisonment, he would spit a little miso soup onto his handcuffs and food slot every day. The salt in the soup slowly corroded the iron until one day, he dislocated his shoulders to squeeze out through the food slot (1,500 words)

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An Existential Guide To Making Friends

The Shadowed Archive | 27th September 2025

“The first thing you need to know is that friendship is not natural. Every friend you’ve ever had has wronged you. They drift. They acquire a dog with a complicated gut. They move to a suburb called Something-Heath where the last bus leaves at 9.12. Even the ones who stay close eventually betray you by dying. And if they don’t, you’ll betray them first. This is the contract hidden in the handshake” (3,200 words)

Experiments That Failed To Replicate

Marco Giancotti | Aether Mug | 21st August 2025

Compact list of the most infamous experiments debunked during psychology’s replication crisis in the 2010s. For now, these theories should be considered false: being bilingual has cognitive advantages; cleanliness makes people more morally lax; listening to Mozart temporarily makes you smarter; simply thinking about money makes you more selfish; people solve problems better under stress (1,300 words)

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Different From All Other Humans In History

Brian Klaas | Garden Of Forking Paths | 6th October 2025

Human lives today are utterly without precedent. Jet-lag, first identified in 1931, was made possible by a mode of travel far enough and fast enough to disrupt our circadian rhythms. 9,497 of the 9,500 prior generations of humans never experienced Earth as a Pale Blue Dot. Past humans would have been bewildered at the notion that children teach their parents how to use technology, and not the reverse (3,300 words)

Podcast: I Know What You Know | KERA’s Think. Steven Pinker on the importance of common knowledge in maintaining the social contract (46m 18s)

Video: The Scythe | Vimeo | Fiona Jane Burgess | 4m 59s

Music video for a song about grief and love by British indie rock band The Last Dinner Party. The black and white film shows an older couple on a journey through the English countryside, quietly revelling in the closeness of their connection.

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Joint Review: Class

Jane Psmith & John Psmith | Mr And Mrs Psmith’s Bookshelf | 22nd September 2025

Book reviewers discuss Paul Fussell's 1983 work on the American class system, which divides US society into nine layers: "Top out-of-sight, upper, and upper middle classes all constituting relatively high, then middle class and three degrees of proletarian in the middle, with destitute and bottom out-of-sight at, well, the bottom." Class is a form of culture, determined by taste as much as by net worth (8,000 words)

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Death And The Gardener

Georgi Gospodinov, trans. Angela Rodel | LitHub | 2nd October 2025

Novel extract from the Booker-winning Bulgarian writer. A son reflects on his elderly father's later years and wonders if he should have visited more, stopped him working in his garden sooner, even though the plants were his friends. Told with spare prose and economy of expression. The opening line alone is an argument to read this novel: "My father was a gardener. Now he’s a garden" (1,400 words)

21 Facts About Throwing Good Parties

Uri Bram | Atoms Vs Bits | 22nd September 2025

Facilitating enjoyable and productive socialisation is a public service. People will likely feel less lonely and maybe, long-term relationships and children will result from your efforts. To host well, "prioritise your ease of being over any other consideration", make your start time quarter-to the hour, repeatedly emphasise to attendees that they will know other people there, and be sure to account for the "flake rate" (1,000 words)

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How I Read

Henrik Karlsson | Escaping Flatland | 1st October 2025

Notes on a personal reading system. Karlsson starts about 300 books a year, but only finishes around 50, skimming the rest before rejecting them as inferior candidates. He rarely carries a smartphone and turns off the internet when it isn't needed. The ability to read complex prose can be trained as if it is an endurance sport. LLMs, although imperfect, can help with unfamiliar vocabulary and concepts (2,600 words)

The Opposite Of The Opposite Of Loneliness

Evan Harkness-Murphy | Republic Of Letters | 29th September 2025

Commencement address for people who were sad in college. “For most of their lives they have felt something like homunculi; they look human and sound human, but they don’t have the instinctual wetware the others do, the gyri and special ventricles that somehow guide real people to friends, to grabbing something to eat after class, and to every social activity of increasing complexity outward from there” (2,200 words)

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Speaking Apartment

Jane Stern | Paris Review | 30th September 2025

On the woes of finding a new apartment. Includes, helpfully, a glossary of basic apartment speak — “Cozy: so small you will keep your clothes in a plastic box under the bed. Built-ins: previous tenants added weird cabinets and shelves you can never remove. Turnkey: way overpriced with the charm of a corporate office. Hidden gem: so far from any stores or schools the police can’t find it on their map” (1,700 words)

The Product Of The Railways Is The Timetable

Benedict Springbett | 26th September 2025 | U

The railways’ main offering to the public is the intricate mapping of space, time and networks distilled into a timetable. Both track infrastructure and the rolling stock of trains have to be planned around the timetable. When infrastructure is separated from operations, this link is broken. The two most successful railway systems in the world — Switzerland and Japan — understand this principle (1,900 words)

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Overcoming Our Politics Of War

David D. Corey | Law & Liberty | 24th September 2025 | U

Manifesto to abandon politics as war. People in pluralist societies “live radically different lives because they hold divergent ideas about what is good. Some treasure religious freedom. Others treasure economic freedom. Still others prize expressive freedom. The problem is that freedoms are not always compatible. The result is a perception that people who differ from us pose an existential threat” (2,000 words)

America Against China Against America

Jasmine Sun | Jasmi News | 28th August 2025

Notes on travelling in China, to Shenzhen, Hangzhou, Yuyao and Shanghai. "There’s a saying that 'After one week in China, you feel you could write a book. After one year, you think you could write an article. After ten years, you realize you know nothing.' Expats there are all addicted to the pace of change; everywhere else is slow in comparison.... China is a place where things actually happen" (6,900 words)

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In Defence Of Dan Brown

Brian Klaas | Garden Of Forking Paths | 26th September 2025 | U

The author of The Da Vinci Code is eccentric. He has his computer programmed to freeze for sixty seconds every hour so he can do push-ups and his prose is a paean to the dictum of "tell, don't show". He may not be a good writer but he is an effective one. Millions are entertained and intrigued by his books, which serve as a "gateway drug to untapped joys of the mind for less naturally committed readers" (2,400 words