Review: The Iliad

Phil Hazelden | A Reasonable Approximation | 18th June 2024

First time reader reviews his experience, which was not favourable. "It feels blasphemous, but by modern standards I don't think the Iliad is very good. Sorry Homer." There are a lot of long lists and dull battle commentary. Why is it a classic? Not for the quality of entertainment it offers, but because it provides a "window into the past". Read it with "copious historical notes" (3,600 words)

Apostrophe’s Dream

Yiyun Li | Dial | 4th June 2024

Short fiction, in the form of a dialogue between "a small cluster of movable type, all of them punctuation marks" that lives together in a typesetter's drawer. The type is trying to determine what their collective noun is. "A hope of punctuation marks. A love of punctuation marks. A solidarity of punctuation marks. An empowerment of punctuation marks," the comma suggests (2,500 words)

The Enduring Mystery Of How Water Freezes

Elise Cutts | Quanta | 17th June 2024

Ice requires more than subzero temperatures. It needs a nucleus around which water molecules can arrange themselves into a crystal structure. This unpredictable process often involves microbial activity — the reason distilled water almost never crystallises. Bacteria and fungi are great ice nucleators. The bacterium Pseudomonas syringae is so effective that it is used for artificial snowmaking (1,700 words)

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The Shape Of Information

Adam Kucharski | Understanding The Unseen | 17th June 2024

Concise, elegant explanation of how to extract insights from data with limited resources. “Imagine you have been gifted 100 wine bottles. You discover that one of the bottles has been poisoned, and have no idea which one. You have a test that can detect poison, with only 7 tests available. What should you do?” The solution proffered is akin to how epidemiology tests for infectious diseases in large groups (800 words)

The Most Dangerous Law In America

Joseph Nunn | Democracy Journal | 13th June 2024

“The Insurrection Act is a nuclear bomb hidden in the United States Code”, giving the President unrestrained authority to use the military to quell “domestic revolts”. Deeply mistrustful of the use of the military against their own citizens, the Founders struck a balance by giving Congress the power to regulate the military. This, and other guardrails against a rogue President have been gradually eroded (5,700 words)

Research As Leisure Activity

Celine Nguyen | Personal Canon | 27th May 2024

“It's fundamentally personal, a style of research well-suited for people okay with being dilettantes, who are comfortable with an idiosyncratic, non-comprehensive education in a particular domain. It’s fine, and even better, if the topic isn’t explicitly intellectual or academic in nature. Research as leisure activity is exuberantly undisciplined, and isn’t constrained by disciplinary fiefdoms and schisms” (4,000 words)

The Most Dangerous Law In America

Joseph Nunn | Democracy Journal | 13th June 2024

“The Insurrection Act is a nuclear bomb hidden in the United States Code”, giving the President unrestrained authority to use the military to quell “domestic revolts”. Deeply mistrustful of the use of the military against their own citizens, the Founders struck a balance by giving Congress the power to regulate the military. This, and other guardrails against a rogue President have been gradually eroded (5,700 words)

Research As Leisure Activity

Celine Nguyen | Personal Canon | 27th May 2024

“It's fundamentally personal, a style of research well-suited for people okay with being dilettantes, who are comfortable with an idiosyncratic, non-comprehensive education in a particular domain. It’s fine, and even better, if the topic isn’t explicitly intellectual or academic in nature. Research as leisure activity is exuberantly undisciplined, and isn’t constrained by disciplinary fiefdoms and schisms” (4,000 words)

She Was Pronounced Dead

Ashley Stimpson | Popular Mechanics | 13th June 2024

The stuff of nightmares: although still rare, it is becoming more common for funeral home workers to discover that the dead bodies delivered to them are not, in fact, dead. Last year, a 76-year-old woman was found alive in a closed coffin. So what is death and how do we tell for sure if it has occurred? With great difficulty, it seems. This has only become an issue in the age of organ donation (1,200 words)

Spreadsheet Superstars

David Pierce | Verge | 12th June 2024

Confusion at the Excel World Championship in Las Vegas. "The most problematic thing about competitive Excel becomes blindingly obvious to me: it is damn near impossible to figure out what’s going on. All eight players are moving so fast and doing so many things with keyboard shortcuts and formulas that there’s practically no way to see what they’re doing until it’s already done" (7,300 words)

An Open Elite?

Julianne Werlin | Life And Letters | 8th June 2024

What can literary history tell us about social mobility? — researched and presented. Interesting methodological conundrums discussed: Where does one place pirates or con artists in the class hierarchy? The Elizabethan period saw new writers born of merchants and tradesmen, followed by the more restrictive Stuart and Restoration eras, when it was mostly gentry writing literature (1,800 words)

Why No One Will Save Sudan

Cameron Hudson | Persuasion | 5th June 2024

“The crisis in Sudan is neither forgotten nor ignored. It is de-prioritised.” Why? In 2001, Bush famously scribbled “not on my watch” in the margins of a paper on the Rwandan genocide. Since then, America’s global war on terror and its 2011 action in Libya have soured people on intervention. The “responsibility to protect” doctrine has been set aside, now seen as leading to regime change rather than stability (1,400 words)

I Jumped From A Plane

Leah Harper | Guardian | 11th June 2024

Interview with a skydiver who fell from 4,000ft after a parachute malfunctioned and survived. "I felt oddly calm. I do remember seeing the ground coming towards me really quickly and I thought to myself: ‘This is going to hurt.’" She managed to steer away from a tarmac landing strip to fall on grass, and was lucky not to be paralysed. A year later she was able to hike to Everest Base Camp (2,500 words)

The Little-Known Legacy Of The EP

Steven Heller | Print | 4th June 2024

The EP exists because of a "good old-fashioned form factor war" between record companies in the 1940s. Around 25 minutes of music, this format of "more than a single, less than an album" was highly successful in the 1960s when the lower price and tight tracklist attracted huge sales. Never-before-heard songs could sit alongside chartoppers in an economical yet collectable package (1,200 words)

The Fastest Path To African Prosperity

Magatte Wade | Palladium | 7th June 2024

…is not through education; Africans joke that the first job for a Ph.D. is taxi driver. To prosper, nations must go from being “closed access” to “open access”. In “closed access” societies, elites prevent market competition through rent-seeking restrictions on economic activity. How can they be persuaded to give up their exclusive privileges? Botswana, Rwanda, and Mauritius offer lessons in reform (4,200 words)

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Against Stories

Sam Kahn | Castalia | 7th June 2024

Stories embed themselves in our psyches through narrowly-defined rules — a beginning, a middle, and an end; moments of crisis followed by resolution. Much of life does not align with the world as it is presented in stories. Writers like E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf have expressed an aversion to the optimised story structure. “Get into the story sensibility and you expect everything to artfully resolve itself” (1,900 words)

Britain’s Forgotten Pandemic

Scott Preston | LitHub | 10th June 2024

The foot and mouth outbreak among livestock in 2001 was arguably the UK's biggest crisis since 1945, but you won't find many films or television series about it. An estimated ten million animals were killed and "charnel smokestacks" became a common feature of the rural landscape. People, especially those not involved in farming, forgot quickly, distracted by the "war on terror out east" (1,400 words)

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Why Is Hungary So Small?

Tomas Pueyo | Uncharted Territories | 5th June 2024

Short answer: because of the First World War. For a slightly longer answer, look at the unique geography of Hungary. Being nestled in the highly defensible Pannonian Basin was historically good for repelling invaders, but the lack of sea coast produced the famine conditions that contributed to Austria-Hungary's surrender in 1918, and the reallocation of its territory by the Allies (3,300 words)

I Cannot

Lucy Schiller | Paris Review | 5th June 2024

A certain formality is creeping into the way people write on the internet, traditionally considered to be a sloppy, casual place of bad grammar and spelling. Phrases like “I am deceased” and “I simply cannot” pepper the sentences of personal essays and social media posts. Why? It hints at "an increasingly digital sandedness to life’s corners", and an attempt to reclaim authenticity (1,800 words)

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How to discover and consume 6,500+ podcast episodes without subscribing to any podcasts? Wenbin Fang shares his episode-centric listening approach with Listen Notes.

A New Baseball Fan's Five-Point Plan

Joe Posnanski | JoeBlogs | 7th June 2024

Advice for baseball newcomers who might feel overwhelmed upon approaching the sport for the first time. Don't try to understand it all at your first game. Just enjoy the sights and sounds. Pay the most attention to the hitter and the pitcher. Notice the little customs but don't get bogged down by the rules. "There’s something beautifully Zen about it all. Think of it as a summer picnic" (1,600 words)