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Should We Colonise Other Planets?

Philip Ball | Guardian | 21st August 2023

Probably not. There is a "dismaying irrationality" in popular answers to this question. Aiming to dwell on a planet that lacks what we need to survive seems futile. The timescales for escaping climate change by heading into space don't work: Mars won't be ready for us for at least a century, if ever. The only honest justification for planetary settlement is "because it would be cool" (1,080 words)

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Semesters For Adults

Allie Volpe | Vox | 21st August 2023

On the benefits of organising life by the academic calendar, long after you have left full-time education. Prioritising a new skill for about 16 weeks — the length of a semester at a US college — makes the goal specific and provides an automatic "assessment" point to check if the desired progress is being made. Plus, it's always good to build in the expectation of a long summer vacation (1,650 words)

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All The Kitchen’s A Stage

Jaya Saxena | Eater | 5th June 2023

Chefs, like actors, now have to put on a show for their public. The open-kitchen concept pioneered by Wolfgang Puck has infiltrated all levels of the restaurant industry. No longer is it only short-order cooks at fast food outlets and street stalls who fry in front of the customers. A view of the chef at work amid his burners has become an expected part of fine dining across America (1,720 words)

Buy Me A Chair

Paul Musgrave | Systematic Hatreds | 15th August 2023

The perfect gift for a bookish friend: Their name on a university professorship. You can find the prices online, and, as a form of immortality, these naming rights seem quite cheap. UCLA wants $5m for "an endowed chair that creates a new position", $2m for a chair that "supplements an existing position". Duke asks $3.5m for a full chair, $2m for a head coach "other than football or basketball” (1,200 words)

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AI And Aesthetic Judgement

Jessica Hulman et al | Northwestern | 17th August 2023

Three respected scholars argue that AI resembles art more than technology in its capacity to disturb our sensibilities. Current calls to curb AI recall Plato's ancient call for a ban on poetry, lest poets' fictitious accounts of the world might "morally corrupt those who took them to heart, as if art could influence lives like alcohol or industrial technology or political propaganda or weapons of war" (13,000 words)

Bride Of Bay Area House Party

Scott Alexander | Astral Codex Ten | 17th August 2023

Fads and fashions in the Bay Area aggregated and satirised, including some that Scott just made up (I think). In this latest mix: Land-acknowledgement Alexas, reverse-engineered reality shows, eating like Nero, anti-subscriptions, Golden-Bough gurus, inclusivity monitors, repugnant houses, Lindyness testing. "Taleb was too antifragile to die. Killing him just makes him stronger" (2,900 words)  

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The Woman Behind Borges

Alejandro Chacoff | The Dial | 1st August 2023

Jorge Luis Borges had just two months to live when he married his secretary and collaborator Maria Kodama in 1986. He died that year aged 86; she died this year, also aged 86, after almost four decades as sole heir and executor of Borges's estate. Obsessive and litigious, Kodama believed that she alone understood Borges's work, and she assumed "medium-like airs" when she spoke of him (3,400 words)

Joys And Pains Of Insects

Lars Chittka | Scientific American | 1st July 2023

Bees can count, grasp concepts of sameness and difference, and learn complex tasks by observing others; they appear to experience pleasure and pain. Wasps can recognise other wasps' faces. Ants will help other ants in trouble. Flies can be fooled by virtual reality. It may be time to recalibrate our ideas of insecthood: "It seems that some species of insects, maybe all of them, are sentient" (3,400 words)

If a bee can count and grasp concepts of sameness and difference, then maybe a bee can understand this message:

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The Jester Of Tonga

Maximilian Hess | Fence | 5th August 2023

Giving new meaning to the term "funny money", the late King of Tonga appointed a court jester who doubled as head of the Pacific island's sovereign wealth fund. An unusual skill-set was indicated: The fund-managing fool was "a proponent of orthopaedic magnetism, star financier, solar installation salesman, spiritual explorer, alleged fraudster, Buddhist devotee and saxophonist" (1,300 words)

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From Middle East To West Asia

Chas Freeman | Responsible Statecraft | 15th August 2023

How the countries and peoples of the Middle East see and describe themselves. The term "Middle East" is falling out of favour in the region owing to its Western-colonial origins. "West Asia" is gaining ground. Peoples who once identified with pan-Arabism, Baathism, Judaism, Sunni and Shiite Islam and other transnational movements now identify primarily as citizens of nation-states (5,500 words)

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Curse Of Cane

David Edgerton | Literary Review | 9th August 2023

Glowing review of a new history of sugar. The author captures the contradictions of a commodity that both helps and harms. "He shows that we could always have done without sugar and today could have all the sweetness we want without it. Yet many of the poorest people in the world depend on it to make a meagre living and to make more bearable the sour realities of everyday life" (1,210 words)

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Lost Water

Ursula Lindsey | Places Journal | 15th August 2023

Amman, the capital of Jordan, is running out of water. The supply is intermittent, with many residents receiving a week's provision in 24 hours to be stored in roof cisterns until needed. The country is largely desert and its neighbours — Syria and Israel — have used dams to siphon off most of the contents of its two rivers. The underground aquifers are depleted. The rainy season is short (9,000 words)

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Should Computers Decide Prices?

Colin Horgan | Walrus | 14th August 2023

In theory, personalised or algorithmically-determined pricing is better. By using consumer profiling data, prices should be more responsive to market forces, more efficiently determined, and tailored to individual buyers' means. In practice, increasingly collusion and an overwhelming motive to maximise seller profit at all times means that prices for goods online tend to go up, not down (1,380 words)

Catching Up On The Weird World Of LLMs

Simon Willison | 3rd August 2023

Text of a talk about large language models. Interesting throughout. These models, such as ChatGPT, are "unintuitively difficult to use". Knowing more about them, such as the date at which their training material ends, helps. So does putting in hours of trial and error. "Getting the best answers requires a lot of intuition — which I’m finding difficult to teach to other people" (9,960 words)

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Paris Booksellers' Olympic Preparations

Jacqueline Feldman | Paris Review | 9th August 2023

A masterclass in grumpiness. The booksellers of Paris will not be joining in when their city hosts the 2024 Olympics. "I know that during the Olympic Games we will do strictly nothing other than what we’ve been doing for ninety years," says one bookseller. There are other problems to solve, another declares. "Literature, first of all... And then, well. Thought, imagination, reflection, beauty, love" (1,150 words)

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Fleeting Encounters In Mrs Dalloway’s London

Luc Guillemot | Datawrapper | 10th August 2023

Virginia Woolf's 1925 novel, mapped. The exercise shows how precisely Woolf placed her characters on the streets between Westminster and Regent's Park. Seeing who goes where also reveals that Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith occupy entirely separate but adjacent regions of the city, with only one character, Sir William Bradshaw, crossing between them (930 words)

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Waking-Up Times, In Order

Daniel Lavery | Chatner | 27th July 2023

Get up at 5am "for the novelty, if nothing else". Arising at 5.30am is inexplicable: "You are a doctor of some kind? You have, perhaps, very small children?" while 6am comes with issues; "My God, what time are you going to have lunch?" Virtue kicks in at 8.30am, as "you’re a man who likes his pleasure, but you know when to buckle down and begin the work." Anything after 9 is simply Too Late (815 words)

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A River Runs Through It

Julia E. Ault | Central European History | 24th April 2023

Fascinating academic paper about the environmental and political history of the river Elbe in East Germany. During the GDR years, the water became heavily polluted from industry and failing infrastructure — a fact greatly resented by West German neighbours downstream. But even in the most restricted periods, the river still connected East Germans to the rest of Central Europe (8,730 words)

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6,000 Miles Across New York City

William B. Helmreich | LitHub | 11th August 2023

Professor of sociology describes how he visited almost every block in New York's five boroughs on foot in order to better understand the city. He originally planned to visit "twenty representative streets", but soon found there was no such thing. Averaging 32 miles a week over four years, he wore out nine pairs of shoes and taped hundreds of conversations with the people he met (2,110 words)

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Confessions Of Cancelled Priests

Suzy Weiss | Free Press | 8th August 2023

Dispatch from a conference held by "the Coalition for Cancelled Priests". These clerics have been banished by the Vatican not because of abuse allegations, but for "railing against homosexuality, abortion, IVF". They despise Pope Francis but cannot abandon his institution: "As much as they detest the state of the Church, the idea of leaving it is unthinkable". They want to get it back" (2,340 words)

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A Living History Of The Paper Airplane

Sarah Wells & Jennifer Leman | Popular Mechanics | 9th August 2023

Paper planes have a surprisingly broad scientific application. They helped early engineers perfect designs for aircraft, but they are also used today by fluid dynamicists to understand aerodynamics, the nature of lift, and to improve drone capabilities. Launching paper planes from space no longer seems like an eccentric ambition; an astronaut has already volunteered to make the throw (2,425 words)

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The World’s Largest Landowners

Madison Trust Company | 13th June 2023

Who owns the most land? Unsurprisingly, King Charles III and the British royal family tops this visualisation with a collection of property that amounts to one-sixth of the world's surface, including 90 per cent of land in Canada. The Catholic Church, multiple Australian sheep and cattle ranchers, a Chinese megafarm, a Russian forestry company and an Inuit people also appear on the list (1,140 words)

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The Bullfighter Draws Her Sword

Geoffrey Gray | Alta | 27th March 2023

On the bullfighting career of a young, disaffected American. There was no history of fighting in her family so she learned the craft on the road in Mexico. Once a ban on women bullfighters was overturned in 1974, she headed to Spain. In one fight in Móstoles in 1977, she was awarded a rare honour: the hoof of the bull she felled. It was so unusual a prize that a bigger knife had to be found in a hurry (4,620 words)

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Why Read John Milton?

Ed Simon | Millions | 3rd August 2023

For his language, "those gorgeous, labyrinthine, serpentine sentences which unspool across dozens of enjambed lines". Milton's plotting is impeccable; Paradise Lost "begins in media res with the angels who rebelled against God cast into the pits of Hell". And his politics is an attraction: "He was arguably far more radical, revolutionary, and rebellious than might be supposed" (1,380 words)

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