The Molt

Eric Wagner | Last Word On Nothing | 19th May 2023

Letter from a penguin colony in Argentina, where April is molting month. These Magellanic penguins undergo "catastrophic molt", meaning that they shed and replace all of their feathers in two or three weeks during which they fast and stay on dry land. "Sometimes I wonder if their appearance embarrasses them a little. They have no privacy, nowhere else to go, nothing to do but wait"  (1,330 words)

Thriving On Mars

Simon Morden | Aeon | 6th December 2022

Can humans survive on Mars? If we can live in Antarctica, which is almost as cold, and if we can visit the Moon, which is almost as hostile, then isn't it just a question of logistics? Maybe. But that if is doing an awful lot of work. The Moon is a three-day flight away. Mars is months away. A Mars mission "will necessarily be months-long, and that increases the complexity of the logistics enormously" (3,000 words)

Cultural Synesthesia

Meera Khare & Apoorva Bhandari | Open Mind | 11th May 2023

Intuitively this seems right. Synesthesia was part of the conscious experience of all early humans, but has generally receded into the unconscious mind, presumably because sharply-differentiated senses proved an evolutionary advantage when navigating the world. Synesthesia survives in all of us as "subliminal associations", and a fortunate few people still inherit it as conscious experience (2,300 words)

The Machine That Never Was

Sheon Han | Quanta | 3rd May 2023

Before there were real computers, Alan Turing invented conceptual computers. While still a graduate student in 1936 he proposed a schematic model: Let there be a sensor which reads symbols from an advancing tape and responds mechanically according to a fixed list of instructions — if this, then that. From which, with some architectural input from John von Neumann, all computing followed (1,350 words)

Parfit, By David Edmonds

Henry Oliver | Common Reader | 11th May 2023

Perceptive discussion of Derek Parfit — arguably the Kant of our time, though his reputation is still bedding down — as depicted in a new biography. "Parfit is very much like [J.S.] Mill. Prodigious, high-minded, aesthetic, musical, socially odd, astonishingly productive, romantically unconventional, and strongly motivated by death". He was "a romantic poet working as a moral philosopher" (1,400 words)

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Written Word And Unwritten World

Italo Calvino | Paris Review | 5th January 2023

An all-time great essay, Calvino at his best, about his realisation, late into his writing life, that he had come to feel more at home in the world of books than in the world of real life. How and why did the two diverge? "The challenge for a writer is to speak of the intricate tangle of our situation using a language so seemingly transparent that it creates a sense of hallucination, as Kafka did" (3,300 words)

The Quest To Quantify Our Senses

Chris Salter | MIT Press Reader | 17th May 2023

Introduction to "psychophysics", a discipline invented by a 19C doctor with a mysterious illness and now expertise required for roles at Facebook. Gustav Fechner created this field to measure the relationship between the mind and the body — and he inspired the design of machines that could do just this. If you wear a fitness tracker or use a VR headset, you have seen his legacy (3,029 words)

Roger's Little Rule Book

Roger Ebert | 28th October 2008

Veteran film critic's guidelines for those who seek to follow in his footsteps. Remember you are there to advise, not dictate. Respect your readers' time and money. Give a bad review when it is warranted so that a good one has meaning. Don't accept freebies unless you are truly hungry. Above all, never ask a film star for a picture or an autograph: it's embarrassing for everyone present (2,463 words)

The Work Of The Audiobook

Alexander Manshel, Laura B. McGrath & J. D. Porter | Los Angeles Review Of Books | 16th May 2023

Audiobooks are the main growth area in publishing today. They are changing how authors write; in one recent high profile release, the writer "describes the pitch, timbre, and vocal tics of the book’s secondary cast, as if she were writing notes directly to the narrator in the booth". Yet the majority of readers are gig workers, rarely acknowledged and just paid per recorded hour (2,932 words)

All The Arguments Against EVs Are Wrong

Noah Smith | Noahpinion | 14 May 2023

Optimistic take on the future of electric vehicles. They will come to dominate the world's transport infrastructure and this will help us save the environment. We won't run out of lithium. Better labour laws will ensure the EV industry doesn't entrench inequalities. Vehicle range is improving all the time, as is the distribution of charging stations, reducing the chances of a driver being stranded (3,257 words)

Doubting Shakespeare

Elizabeth Winkler | LitHub | 15th May 2023

The argument over whether all of the works attributed to Shakespeare were written by Shakespeare is "the greatest drama the bard never wrote". Academics role their eyes and experts dismiss the possibility, but there is some compelling evidence for the theory. It's also great fun. "There is something delightfully Shakespearean about the Shakespeare authorship question" (2,350 words)

How To Survive A Car Crash In 10 Easy Steps

Anne Lagamayo | Longreads | 11th May 2023

Practical guide to recovering from a traumatic brain injury. "You are so incandescently happy to be alive one moment, and miserable and aimless the next. You no longer coast along the outskirts of life but deep within it, plunged headfirst without a life jacket. Sometimes you miss being excused from the business of living. Other times, you can’t imagine life any other way" (4,437 words)

How Tokyo Says No To Cars

Daniel Knowles | Heatmap | 11th April 2023

A car in Tokyo is a liability, not an asset. You can't park anywhere. Most streets are too narrow for your car. You pay a fortune in taxes. The result is that Tokyo has the lowest car-use of any major city in the rich world. People walk, or bicycle, or hop on a train. "There is no traffic noise. No hooting, no engine noise. Most of the time you can walk in the middle of the street, so rare is the traffic" (4,300 words)

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Video: Patrick Collison In Conversation With Sam Altman

A conversation about crypto and AI between the builder of the world's best payments system and the builder of the world's most advanced AI.

Encountering The High Arctic

James Conaway | Hedgehog Review | 10th May 2023

Beautiful piece of writing — embellished memoir, might one say? — about going to the Arctic for National Geographic. "I am bound for Ellesmere Island, a vast orogeny still birthing after 300 million years, with an intermediary stop in the town of Resolute on Cornwallis Island under glaciated hills. Distant cliffs levitate and then are gone, then back again, shimmering in the thermals" (2,970 words)

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The One And Only

Alan Lightman | NYRB | 17th December 1992

Classic appreciation of Richard Feynman, ungated for two weeks, carpe diem. "Feynman's Lectures on Physics, to be found on the bookshelves of almost every professional physicist in the world, are a triumph of human thought. They deserve a place in the history of Western culture along with Aristotle’s collected works, Descartes’s Principles of Philosophy, and Newton’s Principia" (4,500 words)

On The Trail Of The Dark Avenger

Scott J. Shapiro | Guardian | 9th May 2023

The Dark Avenger, the pseudonym of "the most dangerous virus writer in the world", has never been identified. He, or they, were based in the 1980s Bulgarian virus factory, "a loose collective of young Bulgarian men who were highly intelligent and bored." The country was the source of hundreds of malicious programmes that ran rampant through computers in the 1990s (4,118 words)

Your IQ Isn't 160. No One's Is

Erik Hoel | Intrinsic Perspective | 9th May 2023

There is no evidence that Einstein had a high IQ. Plenty of Nobel Prize winners don't score highly on such tests. Why? Because the higher IQ gets, the less definite its measurement is. Anyway, IQ is a psychological construct of questionable validity. The last word goes to Stephen Hawking, who when asked what his IQ was, replied: "I have no idea. People who boast about their IQ are losers" (4,347 words)

Ancient Greek Terms Worth Reviving

Anya Leonard | Classical Wisdom | 2nd May 2023

From aidos to xenia by way of nostos and oikos, a glossary of ancient Greek words which are worth reviving because they capture useful concepts in concise ways.  "Arete means an excellence that is ultimately bound up with the fulfillment of purpose or function, the act of living up to one’s full potential. Arete is frequently associated with bravery, but more often with effectiveness" (1,480 words)

Audio: Are Coincidences Real? | Guardian Longreads

Do coincidences happen randomly? Or do they reveal secret harmonies in the universe? Cognitive science suggests that the answer may be a bit of both. Our minds are constantly looking out for patterns which give order and predictability to the world. This predisposes us to notice coincidences, to invent them, and to give them undue weight. Written by Paul Broks, read by Dermont Daly. (32m 28s)