Economics Of Time Travel

Stuart Mills | Seeds Of Science | 19th December 2023

If we think that time travel is impossible in the current state of science but will become possible in the future, then we probably need to account for why nobody from the future has shown themselves in our time. Perhaps we are just too dull to be worth visiting, a waste of energy. Even so, might we incentivize a time-traveller to make the journey? Stephen Hawking had a similar idea in 2009 (7,000 words)

A Conversation With Angus Deaton

David Price | Richmond Fed | 19th December 2023

Deaton defends the "deaths of despair" thesis for which he and Anne Case shared the 2015 Nobel Prize in economics, arguing that mortality rates have been rising since 1999 among working-class white Americans, reversing centuries of progress, because falling living standards and falling social status have driven middle-aged men without college degrees towards drugs, alcohol and suicide (4,580 words)

The Closing Of The Bulgarian Frontier

Dimiter Kenarov | Switchyard | 19th December 2023

Bulgaria in the 1990s was a place both peculiar and sublime. “It was a feast in a time of plague, a carnival ride amid carnage. Thirty years later, it’s hard for me to explain coherently what happened after ‘the changes’ of 1989. It seems like something out of a dream, scraps of images and phrases and music and emotions jumbled together, a kind of bottled up energy suddenly released” (5,830 words)

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Any time someone achieves success in a way they don't want to admit publicly, they have to come up with an excuse for their abilities. That’s a carrot problem.

The Resurrection Of The Bawdy

J.C. Scharl | Joie De Vivre | 11th December 2023

The case for still reading Rabelais, whose work was disdained by intellectuals immediately after his death in 1553, and then mimicked by the European literati for the next hundred years. Today, it can show us that “the body is the perpetual problem of literature” — Gargantua and Pantagruel is full of fart jokes — and that “no period of history is as straightforward as we might like to think“ (1,900 words)

Witch Trials Of The Arctic Circle

Chelsea Iversen | LitHub | 19th December 2023 | U

In the far north of Norway, the witch hunts of the 17C were especially intense. Over 130 people were accused of trolldom, or witchcraft — amounting to about five per cent of the area’s population. Of these, 92 were executed. Chains of denunciation were common, in which one accused woman would seek to save herself by condemning others. The court transcripts are “the stuff of fantasy” (1,144 words)

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Everybody’s talking about the impact of AI on business – few people understand it. Be one of them with The Business Of Big Data

The Harvard Morgue Scandal

Brenna Ehrlich | Rolling Stone | 4th December 2023 | U

Grisly scandal at the world-famous college. The “Anatomical Gift Programme”, through which people donated their bodies to science to help train the next generation of doctors, seems to have formed the basis of a lucrative black market in stolen body parts. Many donors were attracted by Harvard’s prestige. Now their families aren’t even sure if the ashes they received are genuine (5,000 words)

A Silken Web

Peter Frankopan, Marie-Louise Nosch & Feng Zhao | Aeon | 18th December 2023

Cloth is, and always had been, political. From the earliest imports of Byzantine and Chinese silks to today’s “fast fashion”, textiles are shaped by far more than just thread. Fabric even haunts our political lanugage (see: “Velvet Revolution” and “Iron Curtain”). “A T-shirt on sale in any shop around the world is the result of a finely meshed web of global collaboration, trade and politics” (5,200 words)

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Selling Citizenship

Marco D’Eramo | Sidecar | 15th December 2023

The world operates on the fiction that all citizenship is equal. In fact, a “birthright lottery” determines your likely lifespan and income based on the strengths and weaknesses of your state of origin. Migrants try to escape this inequality with physical movement, hoping to land in a better life. But for the privileged, better citizenship can simply be purchased like any other commodity (2,050 words)

Evolution Of Pain

Colin McGinn | 13th December 2023

Pain is at root a perceptual faculty in humans, like vision or hearing. Pain alerts the mind to danger and damage. "Pain responses have been well-nigh perfected over evolutionary time. Natural selection has made them as wondrous and efficient as eyes. This has no doubt involved making pain as painful as is compatible with proper functioning, which is obviously pretty damn painful"  (1,040 words)

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The perfect stocking-stuffer for the creative person in your life: Book, the book unlike any other.

How To Lose A Library

Carolyn Dever | Public Books | 14th December 2023

The British Library has become a changed and contradictory place since hackers destroyed its computer systems in October. The place is filled with books, but no specific book can be located or read. Desk-staff come to work with nothing much to do. What were once reading rooms are now just rooms. An eerie silence prevails. "The ghosts of all the Christmases are stuck in storage" (2,000 words)

I Do Some Sermonising

Margaret Atwood | In The Writing Burrow | 14th December 2023

Reflections on the power of names and of giving names to things, delivered by Margaret Atwood as a sermon to the graduating class of the University of St Andrews in Scotland. "The act of naming is the first thing Adam does after being created; and it is the second thing God does, He names the sun, moon, and stars. What things are called was evidently of great importance to God" (1,600 words)

The Future Of Security

Ben Ansell | BBC | 6th December 2023

Second Reith Lecture, on the delicate balance between freedom and order in a liberal society. "No liberal democracy can survive when it doesn't hold a monopoly on the use of force. We cannot defund the police. But when we aim for security we may end up oversteering like a drunkard on a narrowboat, and find ourselves again prone to bad actors, the very ones who we employ to protect us" (9,400 words)

Hylomorphism

Jeremy Skrzypek | 1000-Word Philosophy | 4th December 2023

Introduction to a school of philosophical argument holding that the nature of a thing depends more on the form of the thing than on its substance. A flat-pack table from Ikea, when still in its box, it is not a "table". It becomes a "table" only when it has been properly assembled. This may sound obvious once it has been pointed out, but such is often the case with useful ideas (1,900 words)

The Long Shadow Of Checks

Patrick McKenzie | Bits About Money | 13th December 2023

Checking-accounts dominate American retail banking even though checks are all but obsolete. A checking-account creates a credit relationship between bank and customer whether the customer likes it or not. "Most disagreements between you and a grocery store are beneath the notice of the law. If you and your grocery store have a disagreement about a check specifically, you can go to jail" (3,100 words)

The Invisible Price Of Water

Oana Filip | Eurozine | 13th December 2023

Communism’s collapse is still keenly felt in the “Romanian Sahara”. A system of pipelines that brought water from the Danube to irrigate these 70,000 hectares of farmland gradually crumbled, and now this sandy area known for growing watermelons and tomatoes struggles with desertification. A formerly horizontal water supply has become vertical, as farmers drill risky deep wells (2,900 words)

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The Virus Inside Your TV

Isaac Butler | Slate | 10th December 2023

For three years, an art collective hid provocative works, many of them about reproduction, in the 1990s soap opera Melrose Place. Their props included: “A pool float in the shape of a sperm about to fertilise an egg. A golf trophy that appears to have testicles. Furniture designed to look like an endangered spotted owl.” They called it “culture jamming”. Few viewers noticed (4,800 words)

My Career As A North Korean Novelist

Kim Ju-sŏng | Guardian | 12th December 2023

Extracts from the memoir of an aspiring North Korean writer, who spent years trying to rise through the ranks of an extremely complex literary bureaucracy before escaping south. Success meant freedom and better housing; failure could result in punishment. The most highly regarded genre is “No 1 literature”, which is about the Kim dynasty, while anything “foreign” is frowned upon (4,000 words)

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The common way to talk about happiness is as a single scale: unhappy at one end, neutral in the middle, happy at the other end. This model is wrong.

The Best Book Covers You’ll Never See

Zachary Petit | Fast Company | 11th December 2023

The book covers that you see in bookshops are just “the tip of the iceberg”. Beneath them, unseen, lies a mass of designs that rarely see the light of day — different ways of selling a book that were ultimately discarded on the journey to the final product. Here, a series of designers show an early draft cover for a book alongside the published final, and explain what changed and why (1,700 words)

Moved Along

Grace Benninghoff | Portland Press Herald | 5th December 2023

Day in the life of an unhoused person. She wakes at dawn to pack her belongings and thus avoid losing them in a coming “encampment sweep” that will destroy the tent she has been sheltering in. A still-valid gym membership allows her a warm shower and the chance not to “look homeless” for a few minutes. Drugs, shivering, fear, uncertainty and walking for miles fill the rest of her time (2,600 words)

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Save links beautifully with Aboard—the ultimate organization tool for thoughtful people. Collect links, organize them, and share with friends and the world. Save articles, books, movies—and much more. Made by Browser fans for Browser fans! Get the app at Aboard.com.

What Makes A Good Cat?

Emily Stewart | Vox | 11th December 2023

It is a mistake to assess cats by human or even canine standards. “Cats aren’t here to serve us; the relationship is more of a push and pull. They require boundaries. When a cat is dissatisfied, owners know it, and its surroundings are often at fault. If you’ve got a ‘bad’ cat, the bad is on you. Cats are not as eager to make people happy in the way dogs are, nor are they as motivated by food” (3,000 words)

The Universe With Grimes

Samo Burja | Palladium | 8th December 2023

Interesting throughout. Canadian-born musician Grimes talks about AI, society, and the future of humanity: "Singular genius and agency can move mountains. It’s good to foster the idea that you can aspire to that. But I do agree with the criticism that historical focus on this can downplay the contributions of others. Every time I go to a hospital I’m like, damn, there’s heroes all around me" (4,200 words)

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The perfect stocking-stuffer for the creative person in your life: Book, the book unlike any other.

Macro And Micro Necessity

Colin McGinn | 8th December 2023

The most fundamental question in philosophy is why there is anything rather than nothing. The next most fundamental question is whether things are necessarily the way they are, and what that even means. "Is it an essential property of a particular human arm that it is an arm? Could an arm have been a tooth or a bladder? If you reduce an arm to a pile of dust, it no longer exists. It isn’t a dusty arm" (916 words)