Chris Arnade | Chris Arnade Walks the World | 17th September 2024
Excellent bus and ferry links make it possible to take a relaxed approach to hiking these 18 mountainous islands in the North Atlantic Ocean. The infrastructure is as impressive as the landscape. As well as public transport that makes car ownership non-essential, there is a "three-mile sub-sea tunnel with a roundabout in it" that connects three islands. Income inequality is extremely low (2,700 words)
Astrophysicist explains how string theory, the Planck scale and the "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics intersect to suggest the possibility of a multiverse. If the inflationary universe is truly infinite, there will be copies of our own within it. This is a philosophically intriguing idea, but "there is no evidence at all that this has any tie to the reality that we inhabit" (3,600 words)
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Martin Butler | 3 Quarks Daily | 16th September 2024
A long-standing question, given fresh life here: what is the role of the spiritual in the rational age? “The spiritual is not weird because it is completely familiar. We become acutely aware of this dimension of reality when entranced by a piece of music, moved by a great work of art, overcome with love for someone, engrossed in a work of literature, or witnessing profoundly heroic or altruistic action” (3,500 words)
Mustafa Akyol | Law & Liberty | 16th September 2024
2024 marks 100 years since the Ottoman Caliphate was abolished. Was it a good decision? Atatürk’s admirers agree. Counter-arguments note that the Caliphate represented a tolerant and modernising Islam. Its vacuum has been filled by “secular autocrats and reactionary Islamists”, trapping the Middle East in a “vicious cycle of conflict”. Case in point: the Caliphate’s “forgotten friendship with Jews” (2,400 words)
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Financial thriller. A private detective takes a case, investigating an attack on a geologist who died when his car was set alight and became a raging fireball. The trail leads into the murky financial affairs of a mining multinational and an alleged case of bribery and fraud over a mine acquisition in Congo. The oligarchs involved took on the UK's Serious Fraud Office — and they have triumphed (9,000 words)
Don't be fooled by the asinine title. The very format of this article is a clever piece of satire about the parlous state of the ad-supported internet. Once the text flips sideways, the banners close in, and you have clicked "no" on a push notifications pop up for the fifth time, you have entered the doom-spiral of internet commerce and there is no escape. Just keep scrolling, if you dare (3,100 words)
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Profile of "a haphazard collection of international acquaintances" who expose misinformation in science. Some are scientists, like Elisabeth Bik, who is known for her identification of manipulated images. Others are "general-interest vigilantes" who have learned advanced pattern recognition skills. All are motivated by their horror at the amount of fraud in scientific research (6,600 words)
American Patriots Three Percent is one of the largest militias in the US. Despite expanding hugely since the January 6th riot, AP3 has remained largely under the radar. Its leaders have forged alliances with law enforcement, and attracted a new wave of recruits. Members practise storming buildings together with semi automatic rifles, and debate whether to “engage in mass-scale political violence” (7,600 words)
Lawrence Person et al | Bulwer Lytton | 19th August 2024 | U
The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest highlights the worst possible opening lines for imaginary novels. It is named for the novelist Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who actually did actually begin a book in 1830 with "it was a dark and stormy night". The Grand Prize this year goes to: "She had a body that reached out and slapped my face like a five-pound ham-hock tossed from a speeding truck" (3,700 words)
Chess is “a game where a gnat may swim and an elephant may drown”. Its storied history might comprise princes and aristocrats, but the chess this author encounters is something else: competitive kids, old-time New York hustlers, broke Russian émigrés, two-minute street games with bets. “There are a lot of people out there who are very intelligent and just don’t succeed. That’s who I started coming across” (2,800 words)
Brian Evenson | Electric Lit | 9th September 2024 | U
Superbly creepy ghost story. A new father remembers the terrifying bedtime stories his mother used to tell him and wonders why she wanted to scare a child. She denies doing so. Regardless, he recalls those tales and worries that, given the opportunity, she will repeat the experience for her grandson. But what if both mother and son are telling the truth? Who is telling the stories? (3,500 words)
Podcast: The Transdimensional Haboob | Midnight Burger. Opening chapter of a surreal, clever science fiction series. The protagonist, Gloria, has been made unemployed by the pandemic and so takes a humdrum job at a lonely diner outside Phoenix, Arizona. Except it turns out that the diner is only visiting Earth temporarily, and at the end of each shift it moves to a new place in space and time. Fans of Douglas Adams will enjoy this (37m 47s)
Superbly creepy ghost story. A new father remembers the terrifying bedtime stories his mother used to tell him and wonders why she wanted to scare a child. She denies doing so. Regardless, he recalls those tales and worries that, given the opportunity, she will repeat the experience for her grandson. But what if both mother and son are telling the truth? Who is telling the stories? (3,500 words)
Deleted from Wikipedia because it contained "nonsense phrases thought up by people who apparently find this sort of thing terribly clever", this list of pangrams is a marvel. The "perfect" ones contain only one each of English's 26 letters and don't make much sense. But "Fox nymphs grab quick-jived waltz" (28) and "Bright vixens jump; dozy fowl quack" (29) sit pleasingly on the tongue (10,700 words)
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Chess is “a game where a gnat may swim and an elephant may drown”. Its storied history might comprise princes and aristocrats, but the chess this author encounters is something else: competitive kids, old-time New York hustlers, broke Russian émigrés, two-minute street games with bets. “There are a lot of people out there who are very intelligent and just don’t succeed. That’s who I started coming across” (2,800 words)
Unfinished projects have the allure of infinite potential. But endless beginnings come at a steep cost, lingering in the back of your mind and quietly draining your energy. How to tame this Project Hydra? Define “done” from the start. Aim for good enough instead of perfect. Build your “finishing muscle” by completing small tasks regularly. Keep separate logs for ideas and implementation. Celebrate finishing (2,200 words)
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Gregory T. Clark | New Criterion | 29th April 2024
The work of 15C Flemish painter Jan van Eyck is worth going into raptures over. As well as a "seemingly effortless ability to present nature rather than represent it", he was wonderful at capturing light and atmosphere, right down to the most minute detail of his busy scenes. As the grime of centuries is cleaned off, these are paintings that must be seen face to face, not as reproductions (1,200 words)
What if the Roman empire never truly ended? The last Emperor's reign came to a close with the fall of Constantinople in 1453, yes, but what we call "the West" is really just Rome under another name. We are not even as anti-religion as we might think, but rather inhabiting a faithless void. "The Void is our new Colosseum: both bounded and empty, a place of entertainment and terror" (3,200 words)
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Five Books features in-depth author interviews recommending five books on a theme. You can read more interviews on the site, or sign up for the newsletter.
Mountaineering is a thrilling, mind-altering pastime that brings the climber into direct contact with some of the world's most beautiful landscapes. But it is also one that carries significant risk, explains Anna Fleming, author of the rock-climbing memoir Time on Rock. Here, she recommends five fascinating mountaineering books that combine history, nature, and sheer adventure. Read more
We're looking forward to the announcement of this year's six-book Booker Prize shortlist in mid-September. But until then, perhaps you'd like to work your way through the backlist of Booker Prize-winning novels from the last twenty years? Read more
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Polemic on the state of masculinity. The idea of a "good man" has devolved into a forced binary of predators on one hand and faux infantilism on the other. What if it's neither? "A decent man does not have to put on an elaborate performance of being sexless and unthreatening towards women, in part because he understands that such a performance is no guarantor of safety at all" (3,700 words)
Europe's peasants have all but vanished. Where did they go? Into cities and suburbs, both at home and abroad, largely. The surprising part is, perhaps, how recently this happened. This writer looks at photographs of his Irish cousins. "The size of their hands is apparent, the sign of those who work the land. They lean on blackthorn sticks, which they will have fashioned with these hands" (3,500 words
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Gruesome history of Elizabeth Báthory, considered one of the most infamous and prolific female serial killers of all time. The 17C Hungarian Countess allegedly bathed in the blood of servant girls she murdered, “intent on using their gore to preserve her youth and beauty”. Since the success of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, her story has been “re-interpreted through the lens of vampiric folklore” (3,100 words)
Ledia Xhoga | Electric Literature | 2nd September 2024
Novel excerpt. An interpreter helps Albanian and Kurdish refugees navigate dental appointments, therapy sessions, and immigration interviews. “There was, at times, an unnatural intimacy that developed between myself and the people I interpreted for. Disclosing personal and confidential information in front of someone played a trick on the brain, making us both believe we were more than acquaintances” (5,200 words)
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There is a striking visual similarity between integrated circuit designs and Navajo weaving. This is historically resonant. In the 1960s, the Fairchild company set up plants to make integrated circuits on Navajo land with Navajo workers. History now comes full circle, as Navajo artists recreate the complex designs of Pentium chips — with over three million tiny transistors — on woven rugs (6,700 words)
Eryk Salvaggio | Tech Policy Press | 29th August 2024
Read between the slick marketing lines about generative AI’s capabilities. The prompt myth creates the illusion that LLMs are “retrieving information rather than constructing word associations”. The intelligence myth conflates “AI systems inspired by models of human thought” with a capacity to think. The scaling myth claims that all problems can be fixed with more data or better training (3,600 words)
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