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Inside Pyongyang

Caroline Campbell | Atlas Obscura | 3rd January 2023

On the urban planning of the Kim dynasty. After their decades in power, the only old building left in this 3,000-year-old city is the Potong Gate from the 6C. It has been left deliberately to create a vista contrasting this “small, encircled and unimpressive” edifice from Korea's history with the unfinished Ryugyong Hotel, “a sci-fi rocket-like concrete structure which seems to pierce the sky” (3,000 words)

Are We Stuck With The Zoo Hypothesis?

Matt Williams | Universe Today | 2nd January 2024

Why is there still no definitive evidence that the Earth is known to extraterrestrial civilisations? Three possibilities: there is no other advanced life in the universe, it just has yet to make contact, or the “Zoo Hypothesis” is true. This argues that aliens are “deliberately avoiding interaction and have set aside the area in which we live as a zoo”. The latter theory is surprisingly popular (1,900 words)

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Better Text Generators

David Chapman | Better Without AI | 27th December 2023

Text generators like ChatGPT are “genre imitation engines, not knowledge bases;” they are more omniscient than intelligent. Their performance has improved with scale so far, but largely as a side-effect of (indirectly, unreliably) storing facts. Could a better approach be to “separate language ability from knowledge” by building fluent but ignorant systems that retrieve human-crafted text from a database? (4,600 words)

The Ghost Did What?!

Ada Palmer | Strange Horizon | 27th November 2023

Stories from other cultures offer extra suspense because even their “narrative formulae and assumptions” surprise us. Western tales are Providential, so “good and bad people generally get what they deserve.” By contrast, in Japanese horrors, “personal purity does not protect you” and survival depends more on taking the threat seriously. Hence Western viewers’ genuine shock during movies like Ring (3,800 words)

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What Does The Cerebellum Do?

Sarah Constantin | Rough Diamonds | 28th December 2023

The “little brain” lives just beneath the “big” brain. It helps us balance, move, prepare and anticipate, ““getting ready” for the next step before the last one is complete.” People who lack it “are still capable of most of the same tasks, just with worse performance.” They speak grammatically but struggle with conjunctions like “but” or “because.” Across movement, language and thought, the cerebellum adds fluency (3,934 words)

SEO Spam

Dan Luu | 30th December 2023

Dense post investigating the accusation that modern search engines have been borked by SEO. The incentives are stacked towards whoever can profit most from a term, so searching for gambling addiction ultimately leads to ads for gambling. Incorporating user responses only improves rankings “when users are sophisticated enough to know what the best results are, which they generally aren’t” (4,857 words)

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Can We Imagine A World Without Work?

Rachel Fraser | Boston Review | 21st November 2023

Self-cleaning houses were voted “the most eagerly anticipated of speculative technologies” in 2019, but the discourse of automation focuses on work outside the home. Oscar Wilde envisaged “the machine” taking over the tedium of mining coal, but gave no thought to who would fold the laundry. “Even in the age of the machine,” therefore, “women are mopping up after others” (4,761 words)

Los Inocentes

Clellan Coe | The American Scholar | 27th December 2023

Some English idioms are reversed in Spanish: black and white becomes “blanco y negro.” Others are lost in translation: cat got your tongue conjures “an absurd image of a cat dangling by its claws.” Both cultures dedicate a day to pranks; the Spanish one falls on The Feast of the Holy Innocents, remembering parents who tricked soldiers to save their toddlers from King Herod’s massacre (614 words)

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This week, The Browser looks back at some of our favourite selections from the year gone by.

What If Money Expired?

Jacob Baynham | Noema | 14th November 2023

On the work of late 19C German economist Silvio Gesell, who proposed that money should decay over time. The nature of money should better reflect the goods for which it is exchanged, he argued. If crops decay, so should the currency that buys them. Alongside this, private ownership of land would be abolished. He believed that this would bring "natural selection" into the economy (5,060 words)

The Most Cryptic Clues Ever Written

Jack Shepherd | On Words And Up Words | 3rd December 2023

If you are a fan of Browser cryptic crosswords, then all your Christmases have come at once with this anthology of classic cryptic clues. Two of them are from the late and legendary Araucaria, including what must surely remain the most concise and cryptic clue of all time, consisting of a solitary punctuation mark: "? (1,6,3,1,4)". The answer: I haven't got a clue (1,000 words)

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This week, The Browser looks back at some of our favourite selections from the year gone by.

Apocalypse-Proof

Zach Mortice | Places Journal | 12th September 2023

History of the windowless tower-block at 33 Thomas Street in Manhattan, built for AT&T in 1974 as a “skyscraper inhabited by machines”, and now a hub of the NSA. It may well be the "densest inhabitable object in New York City”. Long a lodestar for conspiracy theorists, the tower is blast-proof, riot-proof, fallout-proof, and stocked with enough food and fuel to see off an apocalypse (7,600 words)

How To Exclaim!

Florence Hazrat | Millions | 11th October 2023

Ernest Hemingway liked exclamation marks to signal anticlimax. Salman Rushdie couldn't have too many: Midnight's Children averages six per page. Jane Austen's frequent use of the exclamation point, especially in moments of female emotional intensity, was apparently toned down by her editors. This punctuation mark, the "inky semaphore of the sentence", deserves to be used! (1,600 words)

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This week, The Browser looks back at some of our favourite selections from the year gone by.

Anaïs Nin’s Bicoastal Bigamy

Joy Lanzendorfer | Alta | 26th June 2023

Nin spent two and a half decades on what she called her "trapeze", swinging back and forth every six weeks between two husbands on opposite coasts. In New York, she had wealthy banker Hugh Parker Guiler, who financed her writing life, and had no idea that her regular trips to California were so that she could spend her time there as the wife of a forest ranger 16 years her junior (3,687 words)

Ornamental Hermits

Shoshi Parks | Smithsonian | 7th July 2023

Notes on the fashion among 18th century English aristocrats for keeping hermits on their country estates. Terms for a hermit might include a cave or hut, food and water, and a lump sum at the end of a seven-year term. The hermit's main job was to be silently picturesque, and thus to delight visitors. “By 1750, if you only put in one structure in your garden, it would have been a hermitage” (1,900 words)

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This week, The Browser looks back at some of our favourite selections from the year gone by.

A Claxonomy Of Mexico City

Lachlan Summers | Allegra Lab | 2nd March 2023

Just when I was starting to think there was nothing new that was true, and nothing true that was new, here out of blue sky comes a wonderful piece of writing on a subject that had only a genius would have recognised as a possible subject in the first place, namely, a taxonomy of car-honking in Mexico City. The mere existence of this piece is a marvel, the reading of it sheer pleasure (2,600 words)

Three Children And A Mystery

Giles Tremlett | Guardian | 28th March 2023

Masterpiece of story-telling. Three small children are abandoned at a Barcelona railway station in 1984. Fortune smiles on them. They are adopted and raised in a happy Spanish family. Still, they have faint memories of their earliest years: They lived in Paris; their parents had money, fast cars and guns. Were their parents gangsters? Why the abandonment? They begin looking for answers (6,200 words)

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This week, The Browser looks back at some of our favourite selections from the year gone by.

Yamagami Tetsuya’s Revenge

Dylan Levi King | Palladium | 2nd February 2023

A journey into the dark hinterland of post-war Japanese politics, when three generations of the Kishi/Abe family led the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, and the LDP entwined itself with criminal gangs, intelligence agencies, and religious cults. This history was an open secret, but a secret of sorts, until prime minister Shinzo Abe was shot and explanations became unavoidable (3,500 words)

In The Stacks

Robin Sloan | Brand New Box | 6th January 2023

A new short story by Robin Sloan! All the classic ingredients are here: an improbable hero or two, a library (of course), old technology, new technology, sadness, joy, youth, age, grace, nostalgia, incongruity, music — and a generous sprinkling of that same happy-magic dust which made Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore and Sourdough such charmers (3,500 words)

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Anselm's Ontological Argument

John Danaher | Philosophical Disquisitions | 21st December 2023

Close examination of the argument advanced in the late 11th century by St Anselm of Canterbury to "prove" the existence of God. Anselm's logic may seem vacuous at best to secular modern eyes, but it has defied philosophers' attempts at refutation for almost a thousand years. "Most philosophers think it must be wrong in some way, but [cannot] pinpoint exactly what is wrong with it" (7,000 words)

Zola And Shopping

Agnes Callard | Unherd | 19th December 2023

To understand the behavioural economics of shopping, ignore the behavioural economists, and read Au Bonheur Des Dames, by Emile Zola. This fictionalised portrait of a Parisian department store captures the birth of "a new type of desire, a new set of human relationships". Zola saw that the joy of shopping lay not in the thing that was bought, but in the freedom to choose and to spend (2,150 words)

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Five Books features in-depth author interviews recommending five books on a theme. You can read more interviews on the site, or sign up for the newsletter.

Best Art Books of 2023

From the latest research on what art does to the brain to how women in Renaissance times used cosmetics, this year saw a range of accessible and authoritative books about art. Art historian Francesca Ramsay recommends her best art books of 2023—and argues that for all the doom and gloom, it's an exciting time to be an artist.

The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Books of 2023

The Hugo Awards, first presented in 1953, were originally known as the 'Science Fiction Achievement Awards.' But, in practice, their shortlists encompass speculative fiction as a whole, including fantasy—and is considered one of that genre's most prestigious prizes. Here, Sylvia Bishop offers an overview of this year's nominees in the 'Best Novel' category, which represent the most popular sci-fi and fantasy books of 2023.

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