A History Of The Poverty Line

Ranil Dissanayake | Asterisk | 4th October 2023

Can poverty be reduced to a number? We imply as much when we talk of people living "below the poverty line". But "poverty line" is at best a useful shorthand; at worst it creates perverse incentives. If your aim is to raise people above your poverty line, you will keep the line as low as you possibly can, defining out of poverty people who are still very poor by any decent measure (4,400 words)

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770 Is Here

George Prochnik | Cabinet | 3rd November 2022

If I have the metaphysics of this correctly, the Messianic role of the late Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson in Chabad-Lubavitch theology has been inherited by the Rebbe's former house in Brooklyn. The redbrick villa is "the active proxy temple housing both the spirit of the Messiah and the actual Divine presence", and Lubavitchers are building replicas of it around the world (4,500 words)

Podcast: Eleanor Rigby | McCartney: A Life In Lyrics. Very special series. Hosted by the poet Paul Muldoon, it draws on the hours of conversation with Paul McCartney taped while they worked on a book of his lyrics together. Each episode is about a song, with its music woven through the spoken word content (19m 30s)

Video: The Michelangelo Of Microsoft Excel | YouTube | Great Big Story | 2m 28s

Heartwarming story of a Japanese man who took up art on retirement, but didn't want to spend money on software or tools. He started drawing in Microsoft Excel using the graphing features and now creates beautiful, elaborate works this way.

Homesick

Zarina Zabrisky | Orion | 12th September 2023

War correspondent reports from Chernobyl, investigating whether the Russians dug trenches in the soil there during their recent occupation. Residents who have lived in the shadow of pogroms and nuclear fallout are resigned to this latest incursion. "As they were finally retreating, they didn’t have a map and couldn't figure out which way to flee. They asked us, 'Which way do we go?'" (4,600 words)

Being A News Avoider

Chris Dillow | Stumbling And Mumbling | 29th September 2023

Thoughts on why people might be avoiding consuming news. Frustration at the scarcity of useful or educational information shared offers one explanation. What if people want to be well-informed but find their outlets lacking? "For years, much of the public has been horribly wrong about basic facts about society. Which alerts us to the likelihood that the media does not properly inform us" (1,180 words)

Staring Into The Sun

Adam Mastroianni | Experimental History | 3rd October 2023

Even in antiquity an observer could have found that blood circulated in the body of a mammal, and that objects fell to Earth at the same speed. Why did progress in natural science lag thousands of years behind progress in mathematics? Perhaps because popular and pre-scientific beliefs about the world, while wrong, met the needs of the time. "There simply weren't enough ignorance signals" (4,300 words)

From The Browser Seven Years Ago

Every Body Goes Haywire

Anna Altman | n+1 | 6th October 2016

Migraine is an illness consisting entirely of symptoms — and what symptoms they are. “Migraine is associated with severe, throbbing, unilateral pain, an aversion to light and sound, nausea and vomiting, all aggravated by movement. An attack may be announced by what is called an aura, a neurological phenomenon that disrupts a sufferer’s vision with silvery squiggles and zigzags” (5,500 words)

What $500 Means To Zinida Moore

Elly Fishman | Chicago | 26th September 2023

Assessment of an aid experiment in Chicago, in which participants received $500 a month with no strings attached (akin to a universal basic income). This single mother of three with two jobs found that the money did not change her life for good, but it allowed her to clear debts and improve her credit score to the point where steps like a mortgage became feasible for the first time (4,510 words)

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India’s Pickle People

Ruth Dsouza Prabhu | Al-Jazeera | 29th September 2023

On the practice of preserving food as heirlooms. Thirty-year-old preserved lemons are not unusual in some Indian households, blackened and salted. They can be eaten alone "or with a little sugar to cut the saltiness, mixed into breads like parathas or diluted with buttermilk". Some believe they have probiotic benefits, but in order to last unspoiled all microbes must be eradicated (1,170 words)

The Insider

Samanth Subramanian | Guardian | 3rd October 2023

Assessment of Michael Lewis and his book on Sam Bankman-Fried. Such is Lewis' reputation that Apple paid $5m for the TV rights without reading it, yet the collapse of FTX took him completely by surprise. Has he become too well-known now to report accurately? He "doesn’t write about people he can’t befriend"; a book on George Soros was abandoned because of a personal conflict (6,400 words)

The Morality of Gossip: A Kantian Account

Cécile Fabre | Ethics | 1st October 2023 | PDF

Readable academic paper about the ethics of gossip. Although gossiping can be a helpful social lubricant, it also reveals a negligent attitude to our fellow humans. "Our failure to treat others with the respect and concern they are owed as persons is especially wrongful when it manifests itself in a conversational practice which we would not engage in but for the fact that they are persons" (12,500 words)

'I Began With Sound'

Emily Wilson | Public Books | 2nd October 2023

Wilson's translations of Homer have earned rave reviews and attracted new readers. Here, she provides a note to her new version of the Iliad, which took six years to produce. "Literary translators should not grind the beef, pork, and lamb of their originals into an unidentifiable hot dog. Instead, the distinctive stylistic features of each original should remain distinct in translation" (2,450 words)

Ruthless Cosmopolitans

Adam Kirsch | Jewish Review Of Books | 1st October 2023

Reflections on Susan Sontag and George Steiner. They had much in common, but detested each other. Both modelled a peculiarly detached and European mode of intellectualism in post-WW2 America. "The intellectual took pride in being what Hannah Arendt called a 'pariah': because he belonged nowhere, he could see the world truly, free from parochialism and self-interest" (2,080 words)

New Words For The Dictionary

Merriam Webster | 28th September 2023

A useful update. Some of these words and phrases are familiar to me — stagiaire, last mile, kayfabe. Some I vaguely recognise — TFW, rotoscope, jorts. Some I see here for the first time, among them zhuzh (a small improvement); cromulent (satisfactory); nurdle (a small plastic pellet); nerf (to reduce the effectiveness of something); nyctinasty (movement by a plant in response to light) (1,900 words)

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An Invitation To A Secret Society

Adam Mastroianni | Experimental History | 20th July 2023

Do science. You don't need anybody's permission. Most great scientists have been dabblers and part-timers. Institutions and corporations monopolised science in the 20th century because they alone could build bombs and run clinical trials. But now the tools of science are cheap again and knowledge is almost free. "I hereby invite every curious human to do science and post it on the internet" (3,100 words)

There’s No Such Thing As An Ethical Museum

Cara Marsh Sheffler | Conversationalist | 14th September 2023

The act of curation by an institution, it is argued here, distorts the subject. Even when there is no questionable funding behind a museum, it cannot be considered a definitive catalogue. "No matter how intricate or well researched a palimpsest — at any cultural institution — it will never solve the problem of perspective. We can never escape ourselves or the times in which we live" (1,760 words)

Bagel Or Beigel?

Josh Glancy | Jewish Chronicle | 21st September 2023

There is an intriguing linguistic divide in the British Jewish community between those who say bagel ("baygel") and those who prefer beigel ("bye-gal"). The bagel belt runs from St John’s Wood to Hendon, while the land of beigel takes in all of Essex, Ilford and Redbridge, Southgate and parts of outer north London. Using the latter is "an indicator of proximity to the old Jewish East End" (850 words)

Think Again, Al Jolson

Peter Tasker | 23rd September 2023

Japanese audiences rarely watched silent films in silence. A narrator, or benshi, provided spoken accompaniment, explaining the action and improvising the dialogue. The best benshi were stars in their own right; 1920s cinema-goers would select for the benshi as much as for the film. Even now there is an audience for silent films in Japan and for the benshi who still accompany them (1,550 words)

The Wagnerization Of Political Order

Alexander Gelland | Palladium | 22nd September 2023

The rise of the Wagner group in Russia was a consequence of state failure. Military preparedness is a core duty of the state, and when the Russian state failed in this duty, it created a vacancy for a private actor, who necessarily became a rival of the state. A state cannot transfer any of its core duties to another party without also transferring a corresponding share of its power and legitimacy (3,000 words)

The Canal Papers

Scott Alexander | Astral Codex Ten | 14th June 2023

Notes towards a model of mind. A well-functioning mind is constantly absorbing and incorporating new information about the world around it. If particular beliefs and expectations become so fixed in the mind that they resist revision, then the mind is malfunctioning; it is becoming "canalised", ignoring new information in favour of inner fixations which may lose all contact with reality (4,100 words)

The Taliban's Luxury Hotel

Andreas Babst | Neue Zürcher Zeitung | 26th September 2023

A visit to the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul, where in years gone by the Afghan king was a regular at the nightclub, Ahmad Shah Massoud waged war from the penthouse, Osama Bin Laden stayed in Room 196, and suicide bombers left trails of destruction. Under its new Taliban management the hotel strives for an air of normality. "Peace is good for Afghanistan. But it's boring for us" (6,020 words)

The Lost History Of Sextus Aurelius Victor

Justin Stover & George Woudhuysen | Antigone | 23rd September 2023

Bibliographic mystery, solved. Historians have never understood why 4C sources enthused about Victor's short history of Rome when the surviving text is extremely underwhelming. But what if that was just a "scrappy epitome", or abstract, of the full, masterful work that had been mislabelled down the centuries? Its rediscovery will "transform our knowledge of the Roman past" (3,950 words)

How Rain Works In Video Games

Nicole Carpenter | Polygon | 26th September 2023

Insight into how game developers create realistic meteorological effects without involving so many moving pixels that your "computer melts through the floor". Each character has an individual rain cloud that follows them everywhere; weather doesn't exist anywhere beyond the player's field of vision. A well-designed downpour will appear torrential with very few moving raindrops (700 words)