Every Strand Of Thread

Ben Harper | Boring Like A Drill | 4th August 2023

Recommended for beauty of language. Music for detuned violin is not my bag, but the descriptions here are pure poetry. Lisa Streich’s Falter is "made out of feathery arpeggios occasionally anchored by a barking low note"; Soosan Lolavar’s Every Strand Of Thread is "a rough and hairy piece even in its most delicate sections, modulated by guttural buzzing, thickened timbre and faint rattles" (630 words)

From The Browser Eleven Years Ago

Chicks Dig The Uniform

Maria Farrell | Crooked Timber | 26 August 2012

What it's like being married to a soldier when the soldier goes off to war and when the soldier comes home again. Both are stressful in their different ways. "The army has actually created a Powerpoint slide to illustrate the highs and lows of the soldier’s return, from, ahem, the first moments of joyful reunion to the inevitable and explosive fight that comes between 36 and 48 hours later" (1,800 words)

Readers in New York are invited to join The Browser for a free Parakeet Safari on Saturday, September 16th. RSVP here. To learn more about Brooklyn's wild parakeets, listen to the episode on The Last Archive here.

Always Lie To Election Pollsters

Igor Tulchinsky & Christopher E. Mason | Big Think | 23rd August 2023

The headline is an exaggeration, but the thesis is interesting. Political polling can create a sense of momentum and narrative that makes an election seem decided long before citizens actually vote. We don't govern nations via opinion poll, but we do let them influence our elections. Refusing to take part in a poll, it is argued here, destabilises its prediction and thus strengthens democracy (1,400 words)

The Early History Of Counting

Keith Houston | Lapham's Quarterly | 23rd August 2023

Humans started counting at least 40,000 years ago, around 35,000 years before we started writing. This is shown by a baboon fibula found in South Africa that bears 29 notches made by different tools over time. We may never know what its maker was counting, but this tally stick shows maths moving from fingers to tools. "No invention is simpler and yet more significant than this" (2,160 words)

The Experimental Light Station

Horatio Morpurgo | London Magazine | 22nd August 2023

On the career of Arthur Moss, brilliant lepidopterist and somewhat less brilliant vicar of the largest Anglican parish in the world — the Amazon basin. "He saw silk-moths with astonishing clarity and painted them superbly. This was a fine achievement. Was it perhaps their beauty that blinded him? He chose not to see anything which might threaten his agreeable way of life" (2,660 words)

Artists Have Forgotten How To Draw

Alexander Poots | UnHerd | 18th August 2023

Art schools have moved away from the kind of education that Michelangelo's students would have recognised: copying others' work until you "charm the cheating eye into submission and learn to really see". Access to human life models must be earned. Van Gogh compared it to giving birth: "First pain, then joy afterwards". It is still worth doing. Drawing like this is compulsive (1,760 words)

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)

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)

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)

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)  

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)