A Return To The Dismal 1980s

Michael Schaffer | Politico | 1st March 2024

After 25 years of municipal comeback, urban decay is again “the dominant civic storyline” in Washington DC. The homicide rate in 2023 was at its highest since 1998. Transport systems are crumbling and vacant shops are everywhere. Hybrid work at federal agencies is part of the issue. With 200,000 people no longer commuting full time to the city, tax revenues are down (2,300 words)

The Scientific Integrity Sleuth

Deborah Balthazar | Stat | 28th February 2024

Interview with Elisabeth Bik, a microbiologist and a full-time “science sleuth”. She specialises in finding cases where “image duplication” has been used to falsify results. So far, she has analysed over 100,000 papers and found about 8,000 with problems. “Of the three forms of misconduct — which are plagiarism, falsification, and fabrication — I feel plagiarism is the least bad” (2,200 words)

Kinda Nice

Damola Morenikeji | More! | 19th February 2024 | U

It is better to be kind than it is to be nice. A kind person is supportive while still being honest, whereas the “nice” person will avoid the responsibility of delivering accurate feedback for the future for fear of awkwardness or hurting feelings in the present. “Happiness, for them, is zero-sum and immediate,” whereas the kind person understands that happiness is “collective flourishing” (750 words)

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Julius Caesar's Year of Confusion

Martha Henriques | BBC Future | 28th February 2024 | U

By 200BC, the Roman calendar — which was based on both the lunar year and a superstition about the wrongness of even numbers —  had gone “catastrophically wrong”. Harvest festivals fell in spring and eclipse predictions were four months out. Julius Caesar fixed it in 46BC with a year of 445 days. Leap days now keep us broadly on track. Until the 56C, when we will be out by a day again (1,600 words)

Tools For Thinking About Censorship

Ada Palmer | Reactor | 21st February 2024

“The majority of censorship is self-censorship, but is intentionally cultivated by an outside power. Real censorship regimes see themselves as constantly underfunded and understaffed while attempting to seem all-reaching and all-knowing. Censorship aims to be visible, talked about, feared. This increases its power. We must cut through the Orwellian illusion and remember the realities of how it works” (4,400 words)

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The World’s First Computer

Evaggelos Vallianatos | Classical Wisdom | 23rd February 2024

Ever since it was unearthed from a shipwreck in 1900, the Antikythera Mechanism has perplexed scientists. This dictionary-sized device with bronze-toothed gears had a calendar for Greece’s major annual events; an eclipse calculator; and an Olympiad dial for sports. Likely built 2100 years ago by the astronomer Hipparchos, it is “the most complicated piece of scientific machinery known from antiquity” (1,400 words)

Military Failures Of Fascism

Bret Devereaux | Unmitigated Pedantry | 23rd February 2024

“Being good at war is central to fascism in all its forms. Despite this positioning, fascist governments are generally bad at war. A shocking percentage of these regimes started wars of choice, which resulted in the absolute destruction of their state. We miss this fact because fascism heavily prioritises all the signifiers of military strength, the pageantry rather than the reality — which beguiles people” (3,300 words)

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Common Law And Regulating Social Media

Morgan Ricks & Ganesh Sitaraman | LPE Project | 26th February 2024

Case for designating social media platforms as common carriers. The core idea: businesses which provide essential services to commerce and tend towards monopoly need to be governed by special rules in public interest. Some believe this might prevent deplatforming. While there are fears about unmoderated content, common carriers have always been able to exclude users as long as it was reasonable (1,100 words)

The Great Pretenders

Sarah Treleaven | Toronto Life | 14th February 2024 | U

On a case of “pretendian” fraud in Canada. The Tanzanian mother of a pair of academically gifted twins falsely registered them as adoptees, listing an Inuit woman as their “birth mother”. No proof was required. This made them eligible for many educational and business subsidies intended for indigenous people. They received at least $160,000, until online sleuths cracked the case (6,200 words)

Hex Marks The Spot

Jon-Paul Dyson | Museum Of Play | 13th December 2019 | U

Games in which pieces are moved by being picked up, such as chess, work well on a board divided into squares. But as simulation games became popular after WW2, this no longer worked. Pieces in these games slide from place to place, mimicking army units occupying territory. The mathematician John Nash and the polymath Piet Hein independently arrived at the same solution: hexagons (900 words)

What Is Left?

Rebecca Solnit | LitHub | 23rd February 2024

To be on the left “has long meant a grab bag full of contradictions”. Since 1917, the left has both opposed and supported authoritarianism, stood up for universal human rights while ignoring rights-based oppressions, and both supported and scorned organised religion. Perhaps this is just “a problem of nomenclature”? The aim should be “truth in labelling and clarity in categories” (1,900 words)

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Of Chairs And Pomeranians

Michael Glover | Hyperallergic | 22nd February 2024

Flâneur’s progress. On Sundays, London’s Pomeranians and their owners meet by the Albert Memorial. After viewing these “ridiculous fluff-balls of varying sizes”, the writer enjoys a Barbara Kruger retrospective before contemplating the screwed-down chairs that have now appeared at odd angles on pavements all over the city. “To meet a lover’s gaze, you have to crane your neck” (1,000 words)

I’m Addicted To Bad News

Casey Plett | Walrus | 20th February 2024 | U

When did having a habit of keeping up with the news switch from “being well-informed” to a self-destructive behaviour? Probably the early 2010s, when it became “like pressing a button that caused one to get punched in the face over and over again by a cartoon glove marked ‘DREAD’”. It’s a question of control: “The world may be awful, but if I know about it, then at least I know” (750 words)

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In Search Of The Last Saola

Jeremy Leon Hance | Ensia | 15th February 2024 | U

On the hunt for the world’s most elusive large land mammal. Thought to reside in Annamite Mountains on the border between Laos and Vietnam, the saola is also known as “the Asian unicorn”. It looks like a huge antelope, but it is genetically closer to wild cattle. It was only discovered in 1992 and last photographed in 2013. While searching, the hunters have already found a new kind of frog (4,200 words)

The Evolution Of Neanderthal Portraits

Cindy Hsin-Yee Huang | Sapiens | 21st February 2024 | U

Depictions of Neanderthals, our evolutionary cousins, have varied greatly since the 1800s. These portraits “represent a touchstone for what it means to be human” and alter with each age. Artists filled in the gaps of the fossil record, making their versions lighter-skinned or less “ape-like” at the zenith of 19C scientific racism and then more sympathetic and palatably “modern” in the late 20C (1,300 words)

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Urban Countrysides

Matthieu Calame | Books & Ideas | 20th February 2024 | U

The “renaturation” of urban spaces — adding greenery for aesthetic and ecological reasons — has come to be regarded as a wholly good idea. Returning cultivation to these spaces, via city farms and green roofs, also seems like a positive step. But it can “become the Trojan horse of gentrification”, driving up property prices and attracting private investors with nothing but profit in mind (1,400 words)

The Singing Tribe

Benjamin George Coles | London Magazine | 19th February 2024 | U

Lump-in-throat-inducing short story about cultural loss. A grandfather tells his granddaughter about a lost tribe within the Guyanese rainforest that communicated only by singing. “I sometimes imagine the moment when they first encountered other people — people who didn’t sing all the time. The profundity of the pity they must have felt. And what about the first member of their tribe to stop singing?” (1,300 words)

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Death, Lonely Death

Doug Muir | Crooked Timber | 19th February 2024 | U

Voyager 1’s original mission was supposed to last three years. Forty years later, it is still going — falling outwards into interstellar space over 15 billion kilometres away. Its legacy includes the now-famous image of Earth as the “Pale Blue Dot”. Expected to die off due to power loss decades earlier, Voyager 1 ploughs on — sending back “gibberish instead of data”. “We thought we knew how Voyager would end” (2,500 words)