Collection Cost

Kathleen S. Murphy | Lapham's Quarterly | 18th October 2023

Ripple effects of the slave trade are still being uncovered. Natural history in the 17C and 18C relied on slave traders as collectors. "A specimen gathered by a Fante person in the Gold Coast, then acquired by a British slaving mariner, transported on a slaving vessel to an American port of disembarkation and then to London, might find its way to the Royal Society's meeting rooms" (1,740 words)

Fake It ’Til You Fake It

Nick Heer | Pixel Envy | 8th October 2023

Image manipulation is older than we think. Stalin had officials who displeased him cut out of group photographs. In 1851 Edouard Baldus layered multiple exposures to create a single photograph. While there is legitimate cause for concern about what the latest AI-assisted computational photography tools might produce, it has always been a good idea to be sceptical about the images we see (2,390 words)

Murder, Muggers, And Rottweilers

Thurston Moore | Esquire | 10th October 2023

Sonic Youth's co-founder remembers life on the Lower East Side circa 1978, a peak year for no-wavers and punk rockers but also for muggers, murderers, rottweilers, junkies, drug-dealers, rent-boys and drunks. "The crime and violence were real, but they were more or less arbitrary. Also, I probably shouldn’t have been walking alone around Alphabet City at three in the morning" (4,500 words)

The Exam That Broke Society

Yasheng Huang | Aeon | 19th October 2023

The Imperial Civil Service Examination was the sole avenue of social mobility in China from the seventh to the twentieth centuries. It was a catastrophic success. The most brilliant minds in China wanted only to pass the examination, win high office, and entrench their emperor's monopoly on power. So far from fostering private enterprise and civil society, their job was to suppress it (4,000 words)

Hollywood Horror

Daniel Parris | Stat Significant | 18th October 2023

Until the break-out success of The Exorcist (1974), which earned $441 million on a budget of $12 million, horror was strictly a B-movie genre. It has since become Hollywood's most reliable money-maker. Horror films are rarely blockbusters, but they are cheap to make, and their average return on investment is twice that of an action movie. Blair Witch was the most profitable film of all time (2,000 words)

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The Happy Dysfunction Of Dover

Chris Arnade | Unherd | 16th October 2023

Chris Arnade wanders through Dover, walks on to Portsmouth, and decides that the vibe in broken-down parts of England is gentler than the vibe in broken-down parts of America. "England still has a real community built around a shared history and culture. Even if it sometimes gets turned into tourism-board silliness, it very much matters. The English know who they are, and are OK with it" (1,700 words)

Skinny House

Kim Samek | Electric Lit | 18th October 2023

Satirical fiction about a housing shortage. In a busy city, demand exceeds supply so landlords start putting up partitions everywhere, until the average square footage of an apartment has shrunk to almost nothing. "Most of his neighbours have bigger houses. They moved in decades ago, before the subdivisions. He is stuck in an upright coffin, but he is proud of his home" (1,580 words)

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On The Tyranny Of Slush Piles

Samsun Knight | Millions | 18th October 2023

Nepotism has historically played an important part in the publishing of literary fiction — both Proust and Joyce were widely rejected before being rescued by friends. This isn't a good system, but is it any worse than what we have now? Digital "slush piles" proliferate everywhere and the same tropes keep rising to the top. This privileges the "simple at the expense of the complex" (1,400 words)

Who’s Afraid Of A Spatchcocked Chicken?

C. Pam Zhang | Eater | 3rd October 2023

English words for meat are peculiarly squeamish: when alive, a cow is a cow, but on the plate it becomes "beef", as if this linguistic separation can disguise that the food is an animal's flesh. Mandarin is different — pig is always pig. "I still thrill at an old, laminated menu that offers 'cow stomach' or 'pig bung'; I trust more a place that doesn’t attempt to dissimulate with 'offal' or 'tripe'" (1,300 words)

Marked by Stars

Anthony Grafton | Public Domain Review | 12th October 2023

The work of 16C polymath Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa blends the occult and the scientific. His De occulta philosophia is a manual of "learned magic", full of daemons, talismans and angels. This was stuff that had unfrocked generations of clerics, yet it also made it possible to navigate the stars. His is "a grand, schematic plan of the cosmos, rather like that of the London Underground" (2,660 words)

The Day the War Really Began

Klaus Wiegrefe | Spiegel | 25th September 2023

Retrospective about the April 2008 Nato summit in Bucharest. Members discussed admitting Ukraine to the group as a show of strength against Russia. The US were in favour; a group of European powers, led by Angela Merkel, blocked the move. Zelenskyy and others have blamed this decision for recent atrocities in Ukraine, believing that Putin would never have invaded a Nato member state (8,450 words)

The Torture Of Tinnitus

Michel Faber | Guardian | 14th October 2023

Excellent writing about an unpleasant topic: tinnitus. It is a personal metallic squeal inside the writer's head: "Like the brakes of a train that’s forever cutting its speed and never coming to a stop". The worst thing about it is not the sound, but the fact that he never consented to its presence. It is a constant reminder of his organic nature, that we are made of meat and bones and gristle (1,420 words)

Bless This Mess

Tyler Watamanuk | Dirt | 6th October 2023

On the clever posture of curated clutter, as demonstrated by a 23-year-old photo of Sofia Coppola’s home office. True mess is undesirable, unhygienic, dirty: redolent of sadness and depression. Desirable mess is aspirational and somehow still clean despite the mishmash of items. It features books, papers and art strewn everywhere. It is a style choice, a way of signalling taste and flair (620 words)

from The Browser ten years ago:

Wall Street Loves A Cheater

Lynnley Browning | Newsweek | 11th October 2013

Profile of Ashley Madison, hook-up agency for married people. Slogan: "Life is short — have an affair". "In the US the top cheating city is Washington, D.C., where 6.18 per cent of all residents have paid memberships... 70 per cent are males over 40, and of that group, 84 per cent are married. There are four times as many 39-year-old men on the site as there are 38-year-olds" (2,060 words)

Impostors And Role-Players

John Wentworth | Less Wrong | 25th September 2023

Coders working with artificial intelligence freely admit to having little or no idea what goes on inside their black boxes, and even top AI scientists proceed largely by inference. Which is, if you think about it, a strange situation. Is this some kind of reverse-impostor syndrome? Or does it suggest strategies for people in other fields who are, one way or another, basically role-playing their jobs? (1,500 words)

On Having Children

Martin Gurri | Discourse | 11th October 2023

For the first time since the fourteenth century the world’s population is about to start shrinking. You can try explaining this reversal by reference to economic and social trends, but mere correlation seems an inadequate account of what amounts to an existential shift in human preference. Have we lost confidence in our species? Do we "love humanity as an abstraction but despise it in the flesh"? (2,060 words)

Mao To Now

Perry Link | China Books Review | 5th October 2023

Western critics compare Xi Jinping's autocracy with Mao Zedong's dictatorship; and seemingly Xi would like to be another Mao; but China has changed too much since Mao's day. People have more information, more understanding of the world. "Under Mao, people usually believed what they were shouting; under Xi, they are often protecting their interests through outward performance" (3,100 words)

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Zuzalu

Vitalik Buterin | Palladium | 6th October 2023

Lessons learned from inviting 200 rationalists, Ethereals and other digital nomads to converge on a coastal village in Montenegro for two months, just to see what happens. Main finding: It's the future. Everybody gets on, has fun, learns stuff, makes friends, makes things. Next step: Something permanent, a place that looks like a monastery and works like a university; or even lots of them (2,200 words)

Look To The Shadows

Rebecca Boyle | Atlas Obscura | 11th October 2023

Lyrical guide to appreciating the forthcoming annular solar eclipse, visible in parts of the Americas this coming Saturday. "One lovely place to be during a partial solar eclipse is underneath a tree, if you can find an evergreen or a deciduous tree that has not dropped its leaves yet. Look at the ground. In the dappled light, you will see crescents everywhere: the crescent Sun" (1,100 words)

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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 piece of punctuation, the "inky semaphore of the sentence", deserves to be used! (1,600 words)

The Evolution Of Tunnel Boring Machines

Brian Potter | Construction Physics | 6th October 2023

Comprehensive history of how humans have dug tunnels beneath the ground in the past 150 years. In 1825 Marc Brunel, father of Isambard Kingdom, used a 22-foot "shield" with stacked compartments containing individual workers to dig the first tunnel beneath the river Thames. Now we use a combination of enormous tunnel boring machines and intricate pre-cast concrete liners (4,860 words)

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Podcast: The End Of The Murdoch Empire | Intelligence Squared

Michael Wolff, biographer of Rupert Murdoch, unpacks the "real-life Succession" drama playing out at the media conglomerate (27m 40s)

Why Women Won

Claudia Goldin | National Bureau Of Economic Research | 9th October 2023

Paper from the 2023 Nobel economics laureate on 20C changes in women's legal rights and why progress slowed. Nearly half of the major developments occurred between 1963 and 1973. Women "won when they had the political clout to get men to see that women’s rights were as valid as civil rights. Yet, women’s rights had setbacks when, in light of gains, women abandoned the movement" (18,801 words)

In Defence Of The Rat

J.B. MacKinnon | Hakai | 26th September 2023

Rats are not nearly as bad as we are encouraged to believe. They are not aggressive or filthy and pose a low risk of disease, other than in situations when infection is rife anyway. They are resilient; we will never eradicate them. They are emotionally complex. They can laugh. And they can learn to play hide and seek with humans and "will do so for no other reward than tickles and fun" (5,600 words)