Podcast: 'If It Makes You Happy' — Sheryl Crow | 60 Songs That Explain The 90s. Meandering and eccentric look at the nineties, song by song. The interview (from 53m) about Sheryl Crow's treatment in the media is a particular highlight of this episode (87m 02s)

Video: Why Do Movies Feel So Different Now? | YouTube | Thomas Flight | 37m 34s

The films of the 2020s feel different to those of previous eras and this video essay seeks to explain why. There is less "straightforward storytelling" and more introspection on the art of cinema itself.

Three Kings

Jonathan Bousfield | Deep Baltic | 14th June 2023

The story of the Vilnius Jazz Trio and jazz in the Soviet Union. Unlike the more archetypal "rebellious" rock music, jazz was a permitted, even respectable, art form — as long as musicians stayed away from more modern or free jazz styles. The Trio evaded the KGB by pushing the boundaries of what was possible: "Their music was so abstract that few officials really knew how to respond to it" (2,283 words)

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The World’s Most Polarising Watch Brand

Sarah Miller | Hodinkee | 13th June 2023

Tour of the premises of Swiss watchmaker Hublot, which prides itself on making timepieces that a lot of people don't like. Their entire design philosophy seems to be making fun of their wealthy customers. "Every time I turn around, I am looking at a watch that really should not exist, that is way too much. Does this watch need nine colours? Does this watch need to look like a very angry alien?" (5,211 words)

Olfactory Overload

Kim Crowder | Polyphony | 13th June 2023

How it feels to have hyperosmia, a heightened sensitivity to smells, which can accompany autism. "Where the neurotypical nose and brain sniffs, moves on, and forgets, the neurodivergent nose can’t let go. An unpleasant smell intensifies, invading nasal cavities, permeating the mind, the brain, triggering an olfactory echo-chamber effect lasting long after the smell’s disappearance" (1,500 words)

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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.

Snowden Ten Years Later

Bruce Schneier | On Security | 6th June 2023

In this essay written ten years ago for the New Yorker, but withheld until now for legal reasons, cyber-security expert Bruce Schneier tells how he helped Glenn Greenwald evaluate Edward Snowden's NSA documents for publication, and why he agreed to do so: "The odds are close to zero that Snowden is the first person to do this; he’s just the first person to make public that he did" (3,020 words)

The Mao-Kissinger Meeting Of 1973

David Cowhig | Translation Blog | 8th June 2023

Verbatim account of talks in Beijing between Henry Kissinger and Mao Zhedong following Richard Nixon's visit to China the previous year. Chilling and fascinating throughout. Mao leads and provokes, Kissinger holds up well. Mao seems almost hopeful of a Sino-Soviet war, and invites Kissinger to see the attractions of a Soviet invasion of China: "They would attack China and be defeated" (6,400 words)

How Folklore Goes Digital

Literal Banana | Return | 3rd June 2023

On the differences between myths, legends, fairy-stories, and stuff we just make up. In folklore studies, a story told for true is a story meant to be believed by its audience. What we now call urban legends are stories told for true until proved false. A memorat is a story that the teller claims to have experienced at first hand. Memorats "constitute the bulk of interesting folklore in our time" (3,600 words)

Podcast: The Enigmas Of Foreign Accent Syndrome | The Disappearing Spoon. Exploration of a rare neurological disorder, often a result of a stroke or injury, that radically changes speech patters to the degree that the speaker appears to have developed a "foreign" accent overnight (18m 14s)

Video: Mother Of The Dawn | Vimeo | Tommy Savas | 11m 23s

Short documentary about a Brazilian truck driver, Tia Neiva, and the spiritual group she founded in the 1950s after she began to have extraterrestrial visions. Neiva was gifted with great organisational skills as well as spiritual ones; after training thousands of other mediums, her group grew into a religion called Vale do Amanhecer that still has thousands of followers.

Peter Singer

Tyler Cowen | Conversations | 7th June 2023

Interesting throughout, of course. Topics include animal rights, Darwin, aliens, altruism, war, children, AI, human nature, Parfit, Vienna, Freud, retirement. Some signs of mellowing: "There’s the issue of how we compare the value of human lives  with the lives of nonhuman animals. I don’t think animals are equal in the sense that their lives contain equal value with that of humans" (10,070 words)

First Impressions Of Vision

John Gruber | Daring Fireball | 7th June 2023

So many wild claims have been made in the past about the imminent triumph of fancy headsets (Magic Leap, Google Glass, Meta) that one may reasonably hesitate to be taken for a fool yet again. But this is Apple; Apple gets stuff right in the end; Gruber knows from Apple; and Gruber says it's good. So if this is the iPad moment in VR after a decade of Newtons, remember, you read it here first (4,200 words)

Beamer, Dressman, Bodybag

Alexander Wells | European Review Of Books | 19th April 2023

Editor for an English-language monthly in Berlin considers "Denglisch, Berlinglish & global Englisch". The city's Anglophone inhabitants speak an ultra-local dialect formed from loanwords, puns and misunderstandings. This hybrid tongue is changing German, too. He takes pleasure in "my own language made camp", as he uses the language of Goethe to order «ein Flat White bitte» (3,534 words)

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A Gallop Through A Horse’s Pedigree

Mark Harvey | 3 Quarks Daily | 5th June 2023

Entertaining canter through one horse's family history. Bought at auction for his impressive turn of speed, Tatonka turns out to be a descendant of Native Dancer, a champion racehorse from the 1950s. Like all thoroughbreds, he is descended from one of just three early 18C stallions, at least one of whom came from Yemen. Although fast like his ancestors, Tatonka also has a lazy streak (1,773 words)

Ingenious Librarians

Monica Westin | Aeon | 5th June 2023

Librarians invented the modern search engine. In the 1970s, they created the first databases and queries. They even made it possible to piggyback on searches made by other users, a strategy Google is still using today. But the most radical aspect of this work was that it predicted their own obsolescence. "They saw that we would lose expert intermediaries and they designed for this cost" (2,785 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.

The Secret History And Strange Future Of Charisma

Joe Zadeh | Noema | 24th May 2023

We all know when we are in the presence of charisma, but few can explain what it is. Science certainly struggles. It seems to be a kind of raw power, enhanced by our beliefs about it as an engine of historical change, which can be bent to the owner's will regardless of allegiance or ideology. Trump has it, many believe, while Gordon Brown decidedly does not. Now AI is being trained to imitate it (5,956 words)

The Art Of Compression

Richard Hughes Gibson | Hedgehog Review | 31st May 2023

Quantity has a quality all its own. A work of fiction shorter than 10,000 words is a short story. A work of fiction longer than 30,000 words is a novel. But is there a stylistic frontier between the two? Is "vigorous compression" a useful marker for the short story, and "expansiveness" a useful marker for the novel? Or is a short story something to be read in one sitting, and a novel episodically? (1,770 words)

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We Are Not Human Beings

Derek Parfit | Philosophy | 5th January 2012

Was Derek Parfit the greatest philosopher in living memory, or a windy eccentric who wrote one fine book and one dud book? Opinion is divided, as recent reviews of a new biography demonstrate. Judge for yourself. This essay shows Parfit at his best. He considers what might make a person the same person over time, replete with thought experiments about teleportation and head transplants (9,600 words)

Podcast: The Only People Who Made Money From Tumblr | ICYMI. In the early 2010s, there was a brief period when book publishers were hunting for their next big hits on the esoteric blogging platform Tumblr. A small handful of people benefited from that — and they explain here how it worked (34m 20s)

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.

Video: The Lone Valley | Vimeo | Robin Pogorzelski | 5m 22s

Atmospheric short film about the life and work of a shepherd in the French Alps.

An Illustrated Guide To Mouth Gestures

François Caradec | MIT Press Reader | 29th May 2023

Excerpt from Caradec's Dictionary of Gestures, focusing on the mouth. For instance, "to thrust one’s thumb into the mouth, inflate the cheeks, and blow" in the Netherlands signifies indifference, and "to blow the smoke from a cigarette in the direction of a person whom one desires" is, in the Middle East, an act of flirtation. The illustrations by Philippe Cousin are worth seeing (2,112 words)

Astrophysics And Stale Beer

John Messick | Salon | 29th May 2023

Life at the South Pole is weird. A platoon of seasonal support workers makes the research station there run smoothly. People with romantic ideas about ice and isolation come to shovel snow in exchange for a bunk at the bottom of the world. "I met architects who had quit high-paying jobs to load cargo, Scuba instructors hired to clean toilets, and a poet who drove a forklift" (3,802 words)