The Yodogo Hijacking

Madysan Weatherspoon | Fascinating World | 29th January 2026 | U

In 1970, a Japan Airlines flight from Tokyo to Fukuoka was hijacked by nine university students who wanted to start a Marxist revolution. They ordered the pilots to fly to Cuba, seen then as a utopia by communists. But their Boeing 727 could not fly that far without refuelling. So the hijackers pivoted to North Korea. This gave the Japanese authorities the chance to plan a masterly deception and rescue (1,200 words)

The Coke Factory

Turner Brooks | Paris Review | 4th February 2026 | U

Account of a young architect's obsession with the New Haven, Connecticut, coke plant. It was 1966 and the J.M.W. Turner-esque cloud of steam that the factory produced — "so thick it looked like one could climb into it" — was mesmerising. He started making nocturnal visits to stare at the giant mechanised ovens, each seventy-five feet deep, that transformed coal into coke. Highly evocative writing (1,300 words)

The Singularity Is Always Near

Kevin Kelly | 3rd February 2026 | U

The tech singularity — the point at which technology becomes a black hole of self-perpetuating creations — “will always appear as if it is about to happen”. “The singularity is simply a phantom that will materialise anytime you observe exponential acceleration retrospectively. In a thousand years from now, all the 11-dimensional charts at that time will show that ‘the singularity is near’” (2,400 words)

Is it Really So Much Better Now?

Chris Arnade | Chris Arnade Walks The World | 3rd February 2026 | U

There is an "expanding sterility" to 21C life. Instead of ordering food from humans, we use a frustrating app. Getting a flight rebooked traps us in a maze of chatbots. The doctrine of hyper efficiency has both made us less efficient and sucked the soul out of day-to-day interactions. Machines are good at many tasks, but not at interacting with humans. It's a mistake to outsource that work to them (3,000 words)

Selfish And Stupid

Paul Sagar | Diary Of A Punter | 1st February 2026 | U

Climber ponders the fall that left him tetraplegic with bitter honesty. “I took more risks than most. But there are others who took far, far more than I ever would have dreamed of.” One of those risks was free solo climbing, a controversial topic even amongst climbers. Why did he do it? His best explanation is akrasia — “situations in which a person apparently acts against their own professed best judgement” (3,300 words)

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Podcast: The Fabulous Lives Of Peg Plunkett | Trapped History. Introduction to an 18th century courtesan who became Dublin's answer to Samuel Pepys when her incendiary memoirs were published (48m 46s)

Video: It’s Not That Serious | YouTube | Ricky Ubeda | 3m 58s

Contemporary dancer Ricky Ubeda’s dance film. Come for the groovy music, stay for the great choreography and camerawork.

Is it Really So Much Better Now?

Chris Arnade | Chris Arnade Walks The World | 3rd February 2026

There is an "expanding sterility" to 21C life. Instead of ordering food from humans, we use a frustrating app. Getting a flight rebooked traps us in a maze of chatbots. The doctrine of hyper efficiency has both made us less efficient and sucked the soul out of day-to-day interactions. Machines are good at many tasks, but not at interacting with humans. It's a mistake to outsource that work to them (3,000 words)

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Interstellar Space Travel Will Never Happen

Jason Pargin | 18th November 2025

Science fiction is just that — fiction. The ships in Star Trek and Star Wars run on magic, not engineering. "Expecting science to develop real warp drives, hyperspace or wormhole travel is asking it to utterly break the fundamental laws of the universe, no different than expecting to someday have a time machine, or a portal to a parallel dimension." Yet the belief persists that we will one day colonise the stars (2,900 words)

The Church Of Interruption

Sam Bleckley | 22nd November 2011

There are two conversational dogmas: the Church of Interruption and the Church of Strong Civility. Interrupters speak until interrupted, breaking in on others when they understand the point being made. Their counterparts speak briefly, using physical cues to indicate that they'd like to speak next. Everyone belongs to one or the other. Conversation is easy within each church, but hard across the divide (900 words)

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The Coke Factory

Turner Brooks | Paris Review | 4th February 2026

Account of a young architect's obsession with the New Haven, Connecticut, coke plant. It was 1966 and the J.M.W. Turner-esque cloud of steam that the factory produced — "so thick it looked like one could climb into it" — was mesmerising. He started making nocturnal visits to stare at the giant mechanised ovens, each seventy-five feet deep, that transformed coal into coke. Highly evocative writing (1,300 words)

The Singularity Is Always Near

Kevin Kelly | 3rd February 2026 | U

The tech singularity — the point at which technology becomes a black hole of self-perpetuating creations — “will always appear as if it is about to happen”. “The singularity is simply a phantom that will materialise anytime you observe exponential acceleration retrospectively. In a thousand years from now, all the 11-dimensional charts at that time will show that ‘the singularity is near’” (2,400 words)

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Daydreamers And Sleepwalkers

Antonio Melechi | MIT Press Reader | 2nd February 2026 | U

Miscellaneous reflections on the intriguing “borderlands between sleep and wakefulness”. When French President Paul Deschanel found himself wandering at night along a railway line several miles south of Paris, bloody-faced and disoriented, nobody could confirm what had precipitated the episode. Could the sleepwalker be considered to have a nocturnal self that can act independently? (2,400 words)

Best Gas Masks

Sarah Jeong | Verge | 29th January 2026 | U

Part product guide, part explainer. The feeling of being tear gassed while reporting on a protest is "excruciating, like your lungs are trying to kill you from the inside out", but after it has happened a few times "you mostly just resent the inconvenience". A good gas mask covers the whole face, is very durable, and is comfortable enough to wear for long periods without chafing at the face or hair (2,200 words)

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Seventh-Grader On Educational Technology

Micah Blachman | 18th January 2026 | U

Twelve-year-old casts a critical eye over the tech involved in his education. Instructors can cast presentations onto students' personal computers, track their grades and assignments, set them videos to watch, and annotate material on interactive whiteboards. The verdict? "I don’t necessarily feel like any of them really help me learn." AI is forbidden for students but teachers can and do use it (1,200 words)

Podcast: Nature, Nurture And Identical Twins | EconTalk. Famous studies about identical twins reared apart seem to indicate that genetics is destiny. This conversation unravels the problems with those studies (1h 4m)

Video: Travel The Roads Of The Roman Empire | YouTube | Itiner-e | 8m 39s

Computer simulation of what it was like to use Roman roads in different parts of the empire, with a particular focus on the variety of surfaces.

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On Political Power

Henrik Karlsson | Escaping Flatland | 28th January 2026 | U

Thoughts after reading the first volume of Robert Caro's Lyndon B. Johnson biography. Political power is not, as the writer had thought, endowed by jobs or institutions. Real political operatives understand that it "is something you frack, something you force out of the stone by pumping fluid into the cracks". Every drop adds up. Johnson saw the world this way, and had done since he was a toddler (2,700 words)

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Iran's Ultimate Banned Book

Amir Ahmadi Arian | Dial | 15th January 2026 | U

No text captures Iran's contradictions as well as the 1936 novella The Blind Owl. Sadegh Hedayat's book holds the distinction of having been banned both before and after the 1979 revolution. Its ambiguous, symbol-laden narrative follows a mediocre painter through his obsession with a beautiful woman, whom he kills, and then his awakening as "the old, Quran-reciting man he most despises" (3,700 words)

A Lot Of Population Numbers Are Fake

David Oks | 21st January 2026 | U

Good population data is hard to come by. As such: "We simply have no idea how many people live in many of the world’s countries." Conducting a good census is expensive, difficult and, often, politically fraught. Corrupt officials can inflate the numbers for gain. Satellites are useful to an extent, but they can't look inside dwellings to see who lives there. We know less about the world than we think (3,700 words)

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Fran Sans

Emily Sneddon | 6th November 2025 | U

Graphic designer describes the process of creating a new font inspired by the displays on a specific San Francisco train route. Owing to the proliferation of transit agencies, the city is "an eclectic patchwork of typography". This sign has "a raw, analogue quality" thanks to its fixed grid and fluorescent backlighting. The eventual font was created by stacking elements "like Lego" to build letters (1,700 words)

Seeing Like A Sedan

Andrew Miller | Asterisk | 26th January 2026 | U

A Waymo and a Tesla Cybercab, both self-driving cars, see the world very differently. The Waymo uses lidar and radar for a detailed 3D model of its environment beyond what humans can see. A Cybercab has no lidar or radar. It has 8 cameras which send video feeds to a neural network to identify objects and gauge dimensions. “Which technology wins out will determine the future of self-driving vehicles” (6,100 words)

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Television Is 100 Years Old

Diamond Geezer | 26th January 2026 | U

In a rented room in Hastings, John Logie Baird built the first TV-signal-transmitting equipment using a hatbox, tea chest, darning needles and bicycle light lenses. It caused a 1000-volt electric shock which burned his hand. Three years later, he gave the first official demonstration of a television from his attic workshop in London. Most present failed to realise the significance of what they had just seen (1,400 words)

Do Today’s Work Today

Matt Webb | Interconnected | 23rd January 2026

What links a 1980s British playground rhyme — "Oompa-Loompa stick it up your jumper" — and the Nazi slogan "Arbeit Macht Frei"? A 1935 comic song about defying authority, which began "Twas Christmas Day at the workhouse and you know how kind they are..." and the headline of this piece, which is emblazoned on a surviving London workhouse, where "city paupers were farmed" as poverty relief (900 words)

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Injury To Buildings And Vegetables

Alyssa Battistoni | n+1 | 4th September 2025

On climate change as a class problem, building on the work of Marx, Engels and left-wing ecologist Barry Commoner. "Like the free lunch, the free gift of nature is an illusion. Its costs always appear elsewhere in the system. The question is not whether they are paid, but what form they take and who — or what — pays them." Pollution should be considered and priced as a product of capitalism (4,000 words)