New York Browser readers are invited to join publisher Uri Bram for a party on Thursday evening in honour of his new book, Book. RSVP here.

My Lumbago Isn’t Acting Up

Molly Young | Paris Review | 12th July 2023

DisneyWorld first timer reviews her experience, having read a lot of academic papers before arrival. She has four observations. There are no mirrors over sinks to discourage vain lingering. The park is "utterly sexless", despite the large number of drunk adults in costumes. Everyone is nice to each other. And the attractions are impossibly, brilliantly engineered to be as hokey and silly as they are (1,874 words)

From The Browser Six Years Ago

Growing Up As An Untouchable

Sujatha Gidla | Literary Hub | 18th July 2017

Memoir. Interesting throughout. "In your own town or village, everyone already knows your caste; there is no escaping it. But how do people know your caste when you go elsewhere, to a place where no one knows you? There they will ask you, “What caste are you?” You cannot avoid this question. And you cannot refuse to answer. By tradition, everyone has the right to know" (4,040 words)

Editor's note: Browser readers in and around New York are invited to join publisher Uri Bram for a party next Thursday evening, 20th July, to mark the launch of his new book, Book. If you would like to attend, please RSVP here. (The link will take you to a Partiful page.)

The Drug Dealers' Hometown

Megan Cassidy & Gabrielle Lurie | SF Chronicle | 10th July 2023

A visit to the Siria Valley in Honduras, home to families who control much of drug trade in far-away San Francisco, and who seem only too happy to explain their business. "Leydis Cruz, convicted of helping lead a family-run fentanyl operation in the Bay Area, said the people from her village love San Francisco. The Golden Gate Bridge, she noted, has emerged as a popular neck tattoo" (6,800 words)

China And The Global South

Jacob Dreyer | Noema | 13th July 2023

How China is replacing America as the role-model of the developing world. "For better or worse, it’s San Francisco or Shenzhen. For many countries in the Global South, the model exemplified by Shenzhen seems more plausible and attainable. Nobody thinks they can replicate Silicon Valley, but many seem to think they can replicate Chinese infrastructure-driven middle-class consumerism" (2,900 words)

Second Thoughts On Germ Theory

Jean-Laurent Casanova | PNAS | 12th June 2023

The germ theory of disease has dominated medicine since the mid-19th century. But to see germs as the cause of disease, while true, misses the point. There are germs everywhere, all of the time. Disease happens, not so much because there are germs around, but because the body's defences fail against a particular germ. What medicine needs is not a "germ theory" of disease, but a "host theory" (8,100 words)

Mystified by cryptic crosswords? We at The Browser are here to help. Pick up the ultimate guide, by Dan Feyer and Uri Bram, and let us guide you through the meaning of those clues - so you can get on with puzzling.

Gadgets And Gizmos In Adam Smith

Virginia Postrel | Reason | 10th July 2023

Pocket-sized gadgets were as popular in the 18th century as they are now. People loved showing off their watches and nutmeg graters, snuff boxes and flea-glasses. Adam Smith discerned in these "trinkets" the beginnings of a distinctly modern, even modernist, aesthetic: "What pleases these lovers of toys is not so much the utility, as the aptness of the machines which are fitted to promote it" (1,600 words)

Applying AI To Ancient Languages

Kevin Dickinson | Big Think | 4th July 2023

A good use for AI: Translating surviving fragments of esoteric ancient languages. Israeli linguists have been training an AI to read Akkadian, the 5,000-year-old cuneiform script of the Assyrians and Babylonians. The AI can now make instant raw translations which humans must polish, but it is getting better at the nuances all the time. Can a reading of the Voynich Manuscript be far behind? (1,400 words)

The Far Invisible

Alan Jacobs | Hedgehog Review | 10th July 2023

A unified theory of Thomas Pynchon, written with close reference to Pynchon's sprawling novels. Pynchon is "America's theologian", exploring the spiritual effects of society's surrender to technology. His novels sum to an "elaborate, raucous, anarchic, and terrifyingly accurate portrait of all the forces, prosaic and demonic, that militate against the restoration of our full humanity" (13,000 words)

The Raw, The Cooked And The Hydrolysed

Fred Warren | Dark Mountain Project | 12th July 2023

On the cultural impact of ultra-processed foods, foodstuffs formed in factories by "the fractioning of whole foods into substances". The spoil-defying properties of these foods speak to our obsession with evading death. "There is no sense of time in UPFs. They appear uncannily pre-formed, while their smooth, hyperpalatable textures melt away, leaving little trace of their existence" (1,948 words)

Mending At The Margins

Diamond Abdulrahim | Vestoj | 12th July 2023

Interviews with repairers. Dry cleaning, alteration and cobbling are dying arts. "'You’ve got to have a good eye and you’ve got to have a steady hand. Trimming rubbers and leathers. Don’t cut your fingers off or your chest you know, because you’re working like this towards your body,' he demonstrates by holding a shoe and a small cobbler’s knife horizontally towards his chest" (2,538 words)

To mend a shoe
Is nice to do
To help you feel
Your own sole heel
Just feast your eye-
let's really try -
On good reads. Mend
With what we send...

The Depths Of Rock-Paper-Scissors

Greg Costikyan | MIT Press Reader | 11th July 2023

The outcome in Rock Paper Scissors is neither random nor arbitrary. The savvy player knows that they are playing their opponent rather than the game and human psychology is not random. The different moves have known connotations — such as the Rock with strength and immovability — and to most people it "feels wrong" to choose the same symbol more than twice in a row (948 words)

Mystified by cryptic crosswords? We at The Browser are here to help. Pick up the ultimate guide, by Dan Feyer and Uri Bram, and let us guide you through the meaning of those clues - so you can get on with puzzling.

Rethinking “Weekend Plans”

Haley Nahman | Maybe Baby | 2nd July 2023

On the decline of "doing errands". Tasks that used to take an entire afternoon like banking and shopping can now be done from the sofa. Has a mode of being been lost? "Today my to-do list is infinitely longer than it’s ever been, and yet real, out-of-the-house errands — afternoon cleared, sneakers and sunglasses on: the kind of errands my mom seemed to be running — are harder to come by" (1,747 words)

A Weekend Pretending To Be In Space

Sarah Scoles | Scientific American | 10th July 2023

Space exploration sceptic visits Biosphere 2, a 3.14-acre glass house in Arizona used for "analogue astronaut" experiments. "It looks like a large RV that belongs to a small cult. In the living quarters, mattresses lie head to toe on the floor against metal walls.  Farther back — after we crawl through a tunnel — is a room glowing purplish from grow lights that shine on a little stable of plants" (2,299 words)

Overload, Dizziness, Vertigo, Trance

Stephen Piccarella | n+1 | 10th July 2023

Account of what it is like to suffer from an obscure set of balance and visual processing disorders. Convalescing from such conditions requires a very conscious rejection of the world as it is today: "I have to resist the urge to scroll endlessly, to play music every time I take a walk or tackle a chore, to watch TV with every meal, end every workday with a drink, read every time I take the subway" (3,129 words)

Don't Make Me Think

Blas Moros | Rabbit Hole | 5th July 2023

Maxims for making websites more navigable, many of them excellent and most of them useful in other walks of life. "If you can’t make something self-evident, make it self-explanatory". "Six words is long enough to convey a full thought, and short enough to absorb easily". "Clarity trumps consistency". "The main thing you need to know about instructions is that no one is going to read them" (3,030 words)

Video: Umberto Eco's Library | Davide Ferrario | YouTube | 2m 10s

"Eco’s family members are our tour guides. They read the section titles, shelf by shelf: semiology, demonology, alchemy, Rosicrucians, universal languages, the soul of animals. Let us be honest: you have to be the kind of person who enjoys watching people open books, over and over, to appreciate this film. But if that describes you, it is a treat" — TLS

You're only getting two of our article recommendations each day. We'd love to send you five article recommendations, a podcast and a video tonight:

Van Halen's Brown M&Ms

Doug Mack | Snack Stack | 3rd July 2023

A rider in Van Halen's touring contracts, demanding dishes of M&Ms with all brown M&Ms removed, was soon being studied at business schools: The rider was seen as a "canary" that signalled whether a venue had read and respected the 53-page contract. Smart, but not true. The rider was a display of power. It showed that Van Halen could demand anything, and that venues must acquiesce (2,700 words)

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Three Philosophies Of Carmaking

Stewart Brand | Books In Progress | 30th June 2023

An American car-buyer in 1908 might have noticed three new models: The Detroit Electric, with an 80-mile range; the Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost, which cost a fortune but would last for ever; and the Ford Model T, which was cheap but would need occasional fixing. Millions chose the Ford, then found they enjoyed fixing it. "They discovered that the power to maintain is the power to improve" (2,700 words)

Amusement Parks And Central Banks

Tim Harford | 6th July 2023

Even bankers and economists find it hard to explain quite what money is and how money works; we all tend to fall back on stories and analogies. The late Nobel prizewinning economist Robert Lucas used to compare central banks with ticket-booths in amusement parks which issued tickets for rides. At Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen, Tim Harford measures Lucas's fable against real life (1,000 words)

Russia, Finland, And The Åland Islands

Anna-Sophie Schneider | Spiegel | 6th July 2023

File under: Nooks and crannies of the new Europe. The Åland Islands are an archipelago in the Baltic Sea, belonging to Finland but largely autonomous, which have been demilitarised for a century under a peace treaty between Finland and Russia. But what now, as Finland joins Nato? The Ålanders fear invasion by Russia, but they also fear full incorporation into Finland (1,400 words)  

Mass And Consciousness

Colin McGinn | 5th July 2023

We do not have a theory of mind; we draw inferences from observing how people behave. But are we any the wiser when it comes to matter? Here, too, we merely draw inferences from observing how "things" behave. We may say that matter has (or is) mass — but what, then, is mass? If we define mass in terms of inertia, what then is inertia? Why is it a property of some things and not of others? (750 words)

Mystified by cryptic crosswords? We at The Browser are here to help. Pick up the ultimate guide, by Dan Feyer and Uri Bram, and let us guide you through the meaning of those clues - so you can get on with puzzling.

Mystery At The Oslo Plaza

Lars Wegner | VG | 28th June 2022

On June 3rd 1995 a woman is found dead in a room at the Plaza Hotel in Oslo, shot through the head with a pistol that is still in her right hand. It looks like suicide. But why did she check in under a false name, why are the labels stripped from her clothes, and why is carrying a bag of bullets? Was she a spy? An assassin? Almost 30 years later, meticulous re-investigation sheds some new light (19,000 words)

Rapture Of The Deep

Gary Smith | SI Vault | 16th June 2003

Gripping throughout. The triumphs and tragedies of free-diving. Pipín Ferreras is the world free-diving champion. Audrey Mestre loves him and wants to emulate him — even outdo him. Sustained only by the breath in her lungs, she will dive to 571 feet, a new world record. On the day, a storm is brewing. Pipín frets. But Audrey must dive. "She took a final breath of air, and vanished" (8,100 words)

Automation Of Work

Benedict Evans | 2nd July 2023

As coal-powered steam engines became more efficient in the 19th century, the result was not a decrease in coal consumption, but a vast increase in the usage of steam-power, and thus of coal. Likewise, as automation has made office work more efficient in the past century, so the scope and scale of office jobs has multiplied. It will be the same with AI. Work expands to fill technology available (3,100 words)