Feathers Are Evolution’s Cleverest Invention

Michael B. Habib | Scientific American | 16th April 2024 | U

Marvel at feathers. They are "skin appendages", modified by genes and molecules to take the specialised form that each part of a bird requires: narrow and asymmetrical for flight, dazzlingly coloured for display, bristled for protection. Owls have silent hunting feathers. Hummingbirds have extra stiff feathers because they flap so much. Penguins use tiny dense feathers for buoyancy (3,300 words)

The Woman Behind The Windows

Aliide Naylor | Meduza | 19th April 2024 | U

The career of Estonian stained glass artist Dolores Hoffmann tracks the evolving reputation of her medium. Self-taught via smuggled books — religious art not being popular under Soviet rule — she created robust secular works that even Soviet troops couldn't smash. Then stained glass was rehabilitated as an art form; now she receives commissions from Russian oil giants (2,600 words)

The Formalisation Of Social Precarities

Ambika Tandon, Aayush Rathi et al | Data & Society | 17th April 2024 | PDF

Eye-opening report on app gig work, focusing on how the norms of US outfits like Uber have mapped onto other class and labour systems. In India, gated communities surveil gig workers to an astonishing degree. In Brazil, "motoboy" couriers are stereotyped as criminals. And in Bangladesh, domestic workers are abused because they are managed through a digital intermediary (23,000 words)

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The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name

Alexandra Wilson | Critic | 27th March 2024

Concerts once drew bigger crowds than football matches. Now the idea that classical music is an elite, rather than a popular, art form has "spread like Japanese knotweed". What to do? "We must suppress our nervousness about being labelled 'snobs'... We must vouch for it without limply falling back on the utilitarian argument that it makes a contribution to GDP" (2,000 words)

Measuring The Mobile Body

Laura Jung | Eurozine | 17th April 2024

History of surveillance technology, long before AI facial recognition. The 19C brought an obsession with turning the human body into data and code. Bertillonage, and the archiving of its results, was a major way this was achieved. An exacting system of measurements devised in the 1870s by a French police clerk, this process was the forerunner of every biometric ID now in use (3,400 words)

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The Cloud Under The Sea

Josh Dzieza | Verge | 16th April 2024

The world runs on a network of submarine cables that carry all of our data. A secretive fleet of maintenance vessels hover, ready to carry out repairs when needed. They still use the same techniques as in the Victorian era: hook the cable up with a grapnel anchor, bring it on board, fix it and then put it back. Humans cause the most breakages, mostly with fishing equipment (10,000 words)

The Dictionary Of Obscure Sorrows

Maria Popova | Marginalian | 12th April 2024

John Koenig’s “imaginative etymologies” supply words where we lack them, to match the complexity of our experiences. Examples: Craxis — the unease of knowing how quickly your circumstances could change. Zielschmerz — the dread of finally pursuing a lifelong dream. Anoscetia — the anxiety of not knowing “the real you”. “Despite what dictionaries would have us believe, this world is still mostly undefined” (1,200 words)

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Revolutionary “Maps” Of Time

Alyson Foster | Humanities | 11th April 2024

Joseph Priestley’s 1765 Chart of Biography “offered a never-before-seen picture of time itself” — a scroll of famous figures dating back three millennia. “Anyone could run his eye across the chart and immediately gain a sense of the temporal lay of the land. Who came first: Copernicus or Newton? How many centuries separate Genghis Khan from Joan of Arc? The chart was a masterful blend of form and function” (3,700 words)

Why Don’t Rich People Eat Anymore?

Serena Smith | Dazed | 11th April 2024

Ozempic, intermittent fasting, biohacking — where once the rich signalled their status with opulent dining, now they work very hard to eat as little as possible. Today, food is readily available to more people, so the class signifiers are reversed. "It’s a way for the moneyed classes to signal their wealth and status and posture as above us mere mortals who debase ourselves by eating" (1,400 words)

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The Difference Between Morals And Ethics

Eli Burnstein | LitHub | 11th April 2024

Extract from an intriguing volume: the Dictionary of Fine Distinctions. It uses illustrations to elucidate the difference in definition between easily confused word pairings, such as parable vs fable, maze vs labyrinth, and ethics vs morality. For the latter, ethics is "rational, explicit, and defined by one’s community; the other is emotional, deep-seated, and dictated by one’s conscience or god" (700 words)

The City And The Limiting Virtues

Sara Hendren | Undefended/Undefeated | 6th April 2024 | U

How to notice limiting virtues in built spaces: the things you can and cannot do, by design. Libraries have a “gradation of limiting virtues”: meeting spaces, really quiet rooms, floor-to-ceiling windows and activity rooms for children, high-backed chairs and booths for teens to do “semi-sedentary socialising”. Cafés outlaw laptops to avoid becoming offices and chapels provide “that rarest limiting thing: silence” (1,600 words)

Who Gets To Live In Techno-Utopia?

Victor Zhenyi Wang | Mathbabe | 8th April 2024 | U

“Liberal” eugenics is group-level genetic manipulation without harming existing people. But what traits should parents be allowed to eliminate? Are people with disabilities “worse off”? Seemingly objective wellbeing metrics are based on surveys of typically abled participants’ subjective accounts. “This metric is going to inherit all the biases society already has against disabled people” (1,600 words)

How Deep Does Life Go?

James Powell | MIT Press Reader | 8th April 2024 | U

History of deep-sea explorations, prior to which, scientists believed that photosynthesis was essential to support life — hence, no living creatures in the dark ocean depths. In 1977, 24 dives along the Galápagos Rift revealed many life forms far beyond sunlight’s reach. The answer was chemosynthesis, by which bacteria oxidise inorganic materials, like hydrogen sulphide, to sustain higher life forms (2,900 words)

The Forgotten War On Beepers

Louis Anslow | Pessimists Archive | 10th April 2024 | U

Decades before anyone was worried about smartphone addiction, the same discourse surrounded beepers. The "pager panic" of the late 1980s stemmed from their adoption by both teenagers and drug addicts — and the concern was that one group might use them to maintain contact with the other. New Jersey even passed a law banning them. A reminder that everything is cyclical (1,000 words)

Africa’s Democratic Dividend

Mohamed Kheir Omer & Parselelo Ole Kantai | African Arguments | 10th April 2024 | U

The post-colonial implementation of Western-style democracy across Africa has created fascinating hybrid models. The Gada system in Ethiopia likely predates most other forms of governance and prioritises term limits. In Somalia, the "4.5 formula" enables power sharing between clans. Rwanda, Senegal, Madagascar, Lesotho and Morocco incorporate proportional representation (3,100 words)

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The Birthplace Of County Cricket?

Kit Harris | Wisden | 11th April 2024

The beginning of county cricket in England is murky: various matches played as the game evolved in the late 18C can claim to be the "first". But the lost ground of Laleham Burway has a better case than most — it definitely hosted two counties and the wickets "were not pitched on a whim". Unfortunately, "it is not quite possible to reach the enclosure now, on account of the cows" (1,600 words)

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NetNewsWire is like podcasts — but for reading. Get news from the sites you love — with no tracking, with no social media algorithms dialing up the outrage meter.

The Forgotten War On Beepers

Louis Anslow | Pessimists Archive | 10th April 2024

Decades before anyone was worried about smartphone addiction, the same discourse surrounded beepers. The "pager panic" of the late 1980s stemmed from their adoption by both teenagers and drug addicts — and the concern was that one group might use them to maintain contact with the other. New Jersey even passed a law banning them. A reminder that everything is cyclical (1,000 words)

Africa’s Democratic Dividend

Mohamed Kheir Omer & Parselelo Ole Kantai | African Arguments | 10th April 2024 | U

The post-colonial implementation of Western-style democracy across Africa has created fascinating hybrid models. The Gada system in Ethiopia likely predates most other forms of governance and prioritises term limits. In Somalia, the "4.5 formula" enables power sharing between clans. Rwanda, Senegal, Madagascar, Lesotho and Morocco incorporate proportional representation (3,100 words)

How to Stop Losing 17,500 Kidneys

Santi Ruiz | Statecraft | 10th April 2024 | U

The bad news: if you are an organ donor in the US, there is a one in four chance that your donation ends up in the bin rather than inside a human who needs it. "There are 17,500 kidneys, 7,500 livers, 1,500 hearts, and 1,500 lungs that go untransplanted every year." The US is also uniquely bad at this. The better news: this is a "fixable" problem that even politicians can agree on (5,700 words)