The British Pilgrimage Problem

James Jeffrey | Critic | 9th April 2023

The UK has "so much pilgrimage potential", yet has no popular routes equivalent to the Camino de Santiago. Blame Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell: they banned pilgrimage in England in 1538 as part of the break with Rome, and the practice has been "taboo" ever since, with the British scorning such displays of religiosity. As a result, Britain is missing out on a lucrative slice of the tourist market (1,324 words)

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Barack Obama’s Reading Lists

Sophie Vershbow | Esquire | 10th April 2023

The former president has been publishing his annual list of favourite books since 2009, but it has long been theorised that the Obama selection is really made by consultants, or somehow stitched up between his staffers and publishing executives with book distributors alerted ahead of time so they can secure stock. Not so, apparently: Barack Obama just loves to read widely (1,948 words)

Sketches From Ukraine

Dave Eggers | Believer | 6th April 2023

For me, the best essay of the year to date. "I want to tell you about the wretched suffering that you have seen and read about, but if you will permit me, I’d also like to tell you that Ukraine is an almost fully functioning nation that defies one’s expectations for the conditions of life during wartime. If Ukraine is not the most resilient and defiant nation on Earth, please show me what is" (11,300 words)

Reckless Advice

Daniel Lavery | Literary Hub | 4th April 2023

How to give good advice. Lessons learned from a five-year stint as agony columnist for Slate. You decide what the person with the problem really wants to do, what they want to hear, what you think they should do, and from these you triangulate a compromise. "It’s difficult to remain impressed with one’s own opinion when that opinion must be reproduced to order throughout the week" (1,010 words)

Highway Star

Meg Bernhard | n+1 | 2nd March 2023

Tips from a trucker's life. Jess is the trucker, she lives in her cab, she loves her work, and she ships mostly food. “These apples are last year’s apples. The onions you buy in a grocery store have been in a warehouse for a year. Bananas are stored at 56 degrees if they’re green, 57 if yellow. Don't ask about the chicken in fast food. Drivers who ship syrup for Coca-Cola need a HAZMAT license" (3,400 words)

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Rhythms And Shapes

Nina Kraus | MIT Press | 3rd April 2023

The human brain apprehends rhythm at the same deep level as it understands space, time, and language. Rhythm is a common denominator of these domains. We sense regularities in spatial things, repetition in temporal things, metre in spoken things. Our bodies live by circadian rhythms. Our minds seek patterns and form expectations. Rhythm is central to our comfort and happiness (3,900 words)

Paris Kicked Out The Cars

Henry Grabar | Slate | 30th March 2023 | Code

Paris has radically reduced car usage in the last two decades: car trips within the city are down by almost 60 per cent. But opponents claim that a car-less lifestyle just highlights the city's inequalities. Property prices keep the less well off out in the suburbs, where car use is much higher. Poorly paid bicycle delivery jobs are mostly done by recent immigrants. Given this, "who is the city for?" (6,921 words)

Video: I’m Usually Pretty Good At Naming Things | Vimeo | Mac Promo | 4m 50s

Collage artist describes and demonstrates the process of forcing himself to make art from the vast quantities of paper he has accumulated. The temptation, he says, is to be always trying to say something with his work, but here he experiments with just putting images and patterns together that fit, and waiting for the meaning to catch up with him later.

The Glory Of Trams

Christopher Atamian & Aram Pachyan | LARB | 3rd April 2023

Two essays on the joy of trams. One looks at a childhood spent zooming around Geneva, the other at the demise of the tram system in Yerevan, Armenia. The Yerevan trams recall the heyday of Soviet optimism: "It’s as if the introduction of the tram was some kind of messiah, a maddening religious ecstasy, bringing order to the routine of a person’s work and meaning to their existence" (6,470 words)

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Marilyn Monroe's Psychoanalysis Notes

Jillian Hess | Noted | 13th March 2023

Marilyn Monroe was very keen on psychoanalysis. She read Freud at a young age and spent years documenting her analysis sessions in a series of notebooks. It was not a wholly successful pastime for her. In 1962, the year she died, she wrote: "I hope at some future time to be able to make a glowing report about the wonders that psychoanalysis can achieve. The time is not ripe" (1,682 words)

On Mary Wollstonecraft

Joanna Biggs | Paris Review | 3rd April 2023

Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, although flawed, "is philosophically substantial, even two centuries later". The questions that still preoccupy feminists today — a woman's role at home and how that impacts what she is able to do in the rest of the world — stem from the Vindication's argument "that women should above all be thought human, not other" (4,253 words)

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'That Car's Been In An Accident'

J. Allan Hobson | MIT Press Reader | 27th March 2023

Psychiatrist describes his experience of sudden amnesia after a car accident. His stationary car was struck hard from behind, causing an S-shaped deformation in his brain stem. He was otherwise unharmed, so that he was able to get out of the car and think "that car looks like it’s been in an accident" with no awareness that it was his car or that he had been inside it during the crash (2,385 words)

The Moral Economy Of High-Tech Modernism

Henry Farrell & Marion Fourcade | Daedalus | 16th March 2023

By no means an easy read, but well worth one's time and attention. Most things in society require organisation of one sort or another. Organisation requires classification of the things to be organised. The power to classify is thus a great power. The exercise of that power is now passing, scarcely remarked and scarcely understood, from bureaucrats to algorithms. Who benefits? (4,400 words)

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The Impact Of Starvation

Andrew Doig | Delancey Place | 29th March 2023

How people behave when very hungry, according to an American clinical study conducted in 1944. Thirty-six men, all conscientious objectors to wartime service, were underfed and overworked for six months. They became angry, depressed, withdrawn, even psychotic. They hoarded. Food became their sole obsession. Allowed unrestricted food again, they binge-ate for three months (850 words)

Three Children And A Mystery

Giles Tremlett | Guardian | 28th March 2023

Masterpiece of story-telling. Three small children are abandoned at a Barcelona railway station in 1984. Fortune smiles on them. They are adopted and raised in a happy Spanish family. Still, they have faint memories of their earliest years: They lived in Paris; their parents had money, fast cars and guns. Were their parents gangsters? Why the abandonment? They begin looking for answers (6,200 words)

Jonathan Swift On Jonathan Swift

Tyler Cowen | Conversations | 29th March 2023

Tyler Cowen invites an instance of artifical intelligence to assume the persona of satirist Jonathan Swift (1667—1745) and give an interview. Technically, the result is a tour de force. This AI-Swift could be a human actor perfectly conversant with Swift's life and work. I doubt that an actual conversation with the historical Swift would have resembled this at all; even so, it is awe-inspiring (6,200 words)

Bicycle

Bartosz Ciechanowski | 28th March 2023

Beautifully illustrated explanation of how bicycles work. This familiar machine is a miracle of physics, governed by a complex interplay of invisible forces. If you have ever wondered why it is so much easier to balance while in motion than when stopped, this is your best chance of finding out. By the end, it is hard not to agree that there is something "a bit magical" about the bicycle (15,471 words)

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The Age Of Average

Alex Murrell | 20th March 2023

We live in "a sea of sameness". Architecture, art, interiors, product design, book covers, film posters, even faces, thanks to plastic surgery — it is all strikingly homogenous. Why? "Perhaps when times are turbulent, people seek the safety of the familiar. Perhaps it’s our obsession with quantification and optimisation. Or maybe it’s the inevitable result of inspiration becoming globalised" (6,053 words)

Unstandardised, Decentralised Carnival Fire

Oliver Darkshire | LitHub | 14th March 2023

On the art of cataloguing rare books. Each entry must record precisely how "a book has survived the ravages of time" in as little space as possible. There is a secret language for this. "Foxed" means the pages are mottled. "Sophisticated" denotes a probable fake, but an interesting one. Sheepskin binding is "roan" and calfskin "vellum". Every bookseller uses these terms in their own way, too (1,752 words).

Podcast: Long Walk | Historically Thinking. Reassessing the story of Elizabethan explorer David Ingram, who in the 16C claimed to have walked from Mexico to Nova Scotia in just 11 months (64m 28s)

'We’re Going To Follow Captain Cook'

Suzanne Heywood | Guardian | 25th March 2023

Gripping account of an adventurous childhood that was not nearly as exciting as it seemed. The author's family set out on what was meant to be a three-year circumnavigation by sail when she was seven. Nine years later, they were still at sea, despite a near shipwreck in the Indian Ocean and the fact that their daughter had needed seven cranial surgeries on a small island to survive (5,587 words)

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Presidential Counsel

George Washington | Lapham's Quarterly | 13th March 2023

Extract from The Rules of Civility and Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation, compiled by a 13-year-old future president in 1744. Includes such timeless advice as "talk not with meat in your mouth", "be not tedious in discourse", "eat not in the streets", "play not the peacock" and "labour to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire called conscience" (1,447 words)

Helen's Rules Of Writing

Helen Lewis | The Bluestocking | 24th March 2023

How to do journalism. Not everyone does it this way, but the world might be a better place if they did. "If you are talking to an adult and they tell you something that makes you uncomfortable — about their medical history, past addiction, odd sexual fetish — resist the urge to tidy that away. Instead, repeat it back to them and see if they panic horribly, or if in fact they wanted you to know" (1,900 words)

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The Impossible Job

William Ralston | Guardian | 21st March 2023

Being a Premier League referee is an emotionally demanding job. If all goes well, fans will forget the ref is even there. "People mistake refereeing for an objective science, practised badly. But football is a physical sport, and judging whether each contact is within its laws will always involve subjectivity.... Until we accept that subjectivity is part of the game, we’re never going to be satisfied" (9,206 words)