This Life Gives You Nothing

Jonah Weiner | Blackbird Spyplane | 16th December 2025

Elegantly-written realisation that outsourcing thought to one's phone is not a good idea. "I enjoyed two unexpected, interconnected revelations. The first was that the opening pages of Swann’s Way are beautiful and captivatingly trippy. The second was that I did not want to die having made an Instagram reel with a throwaway punchline about Proust, but not having actually read any Proust" (3,200 words)

Nomido is the Browser's daily word game. Play today's before it's gone!

Anti-Sports Personality Of The Year 2025

Simon Burnton | Guardian | 17th December 2025

There were two stone-based cheating scandals in sport this year. Some competitors at the world stone skimming championship were accused of throwing "suspiciously circular" stones. Also, a Chinese curling player allegedly "burned a stone", that is, illegally touched it with a broom to change its path. Sportspeople also bit each other, waxed pool balls, and tampered with ski suits. Delightfully ignominious (1,900 words)

Great Scientists Follow Intuition And Beauty

Erik Hoel | Seeds Of Science | 3rd December 2025

“The abstract machine of science is an open system. We can be rational about choosing between different hypotheses, different ideas, or different experiments. But rationality does not actually tell you, by itself, what makes for a good hypothesis, a good idea, or an elegant experiment. Those choices include some strange blend of aesthetics, intuition, passion and other irreducible qualities” (1,400 words)

Nomido is the Browser's daily word game. Play today's before it's gone!

Debt Shaped The Way We Speak

Colin Gorrie | Dead Language Society | 10th December 2025

The words “owe”, “should” and “debt” reveal how “English built its way of expressing duty, necessity and obligation — not to mention guilt and sin — out of the raw materials of accounting”. Old and Middle English words that denoted some form of actual debt have become modal verbs of obligation, instances of concrete words being worn down into abstract bits of grammar through use (3,600 words)

Purpose From First Principles

Marco Giancotti | Plankton Valhalla | 4th December 2025

“Humans seem to really, really want to find the purpose of things. This has the nice effect of making us “storytelling animals”, because every story is the chronicle of intents fulfilled or thwarted. The same tendency is the cause of many of our self-inflicted torments. Seeing goals everywhere is the natural way of being human, and it takes years of practice to keep this propensity temporarily at bay” (10,800 words)

Nomido is the Browser's daily word game. Play today's before it's gone!

Venetian Report On The Ottomans

Roman Helmet Guy | 11th December 2025

Venetian intelligence on the Ottomans in 1534. A good four paragraphs are dedicated to naming all lands under Ottoman rule, followed by assessments of the two empires’ respective military prowess as well as allegiances and enmities, near and far. “The Sultan makes no important decision without Ibrahim (Pasha), and Ibrahim alone does everything.” An intriguing snapshot of geopolitics from the time (9,400 words)

Podcast: To Hell And Back | Fear No Man. First episode in a new series about the life of Afrobeat pioneer and social revolutionary Fela Kuti (38m 5s)

Video: Frank | Vimeo | New Yorker | 15m 06s

Film following 99-year-old New Jersey lawyer Frank Lucianna through his final criminal case. When he died not long after this was filmed, there was a two-hour line to get into his wake, such was the crowd of people who wanted to pay their respects.

Nomido is the Browser's daily word game. Play today's before it's gone!

The Legacy Of Nicaea

Ed Simon | Hedgehog Review | 10th December 2025

2025 was the 1700th anniversary of the First Council of Nicaea, "a milestone observed by churches, seminaries, and religious institutions but largely ignored by the secular press". It is worth knowing about, since this gathering in "an Anatolian backwater" resulted in the core doctrine of orthodox Christianity. "Not consistency but paradox, not reason but mystery, not an answer, but a question" (2,100 words)

Nomido is the Browser's daily word game. Play today's before it's gone!

In Memoriam: Justice David H. Souter

Chief Justice Roberts et al | Harvard Law Review | 11th December 2025

Legal luminaries pay tribute to Supreme Court Justice David Souter, who died earlier this year at the age of 85. He was brilliant: "Not just in a yeah-yeah-of-course-he-was-smart kind of way. He possessed a sixth intellectual gear that very few do... I’m talking about raw intellectual firepower. His mind just worked at a speed, and with a capacity, that I hadn’t seen before — and, frankly, haven’t seen since" (6,600 words)

Things I Want To Say To My Boss

Anonymous | I Thought About That A Lot | 10th December 2025

Part of a project that publishes an anonymous reflection every day, 1st-24th December. This one will be recognisable to everyone who has been a neglected employee. "Good leadership isn’t complicated, but it is demanding. It asks more of you than your job title does. It asks for self-awareness, not slogans. It asks you to trade the armour of performance for the discomfort of being accountable" (800 words)

Nomido is the Browser's daily word game. Play today's before it's gone!

Rebellion

Catherine Lacey | Untitled Thought Project| 9th December 2025

Perfectly formed, tiny essay about overcoming family trauma and breaking the generational cycle of bad behaviour. "To be treated badly by someone you love, to be treated badly and to be told that this mistreatment is a demonstration of their love... Such a relationship can be so overwhelming and so warping that even when you escape it (as you must escape it) you might miss all that old drama" (144 words)

Revised Definitions Of The Verb “To Google”

Jessica Camargo | McSweeney’s | 9th December 2025

The state of the search engine today, less satire and more lament. “You used to defend the search engine, blaming users when they said it couldn’t find what they were looking for. Your friends called you the “Google wizard”. Now you can’t even find a simple news article you read last week, and you can’t help but feel deeply sad, realising the internet that shaped you has been destroyed piece by piece” (400 words)

Nomido is the Browser's daily word game. Play today's before it's gone!

Reading Lolita In The Barracks

Sheon Han | Asterisk | 8th December 2025

A conscript describes his efforts at literary erudition during mandatory military service in South Korea. Privates were allowed two hours of voluntary study every day. Every base had a 연등실 (延燈室) or “Room Where the Lights Stay On”, where seats were highly coveted. To steal more reading hours, the author covered other people’s night shifts, reading Solzhenitsyn, Nabokov, Baldwin and Didion in this time (6,400 words)

52 Things I Learned In 2025

Tom Whitwell | Medium | 1st December 2025

This list is an annual institution and always provides a smorgasbord of interesting facts from the year. Some highlights: Spotify still hasn't found a level of randomness for their "shuffle" that listeners like, almost 0.7% of US exports are of human blood or blood products, MIT researchers have created a stretchable and washable computer, and Americans have been shrinking since the 1980s (1,600 words)

Nomido is the Browser's daily word game. Play today's before it's gone!

Last Night On Youtube

Finlay McLaren | Lion & Unicorn | 4th December 2025

Examination of nostalgia as represented by the clips that the BBC Archive packages for modern digital consumption. Videos of train commuters in the 1970s, pub pianists in the 1980s, and a man who cycles across the Cairngorms just to find that his friend isn't in evoke a bygone, analogue age. That's not a bad thing, though. "If you’ve never missed a moment you can never return to, you simply haven’t lived" (2,000 words)

Podcast: When Productivity Becomes Pathological | A Slight Change Of Plans. Interview with a psychiatrist about her research in the field of "high functioning depression" (36m 48s)

Video: The Thrill Is Gone | YouTube | Raye | 6m 47s

British singer-songwriter Raye performs live with The Heritage Orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall.

Nomido is the Browser's daily word game. Play today's before it's gone!