What Were We Thinking?

George Scialabba | Commonweal | 11th January 2023

How will today's political morality look to our descendants in the 23C? Here it is theorised that not only will they deplore the inequality in apparently free and fair democracies like the US, but they will also question whether our ideals of fairness and freedom are sufficient. They may well ask "why did you assume that contracts between parties with radically unequal resources could be free?" (4,024 words)

What Happens When A Huge Ship Sinks?

Emma Bryce & Harvey Symons | Guardian | 11th January 2023

Shipwrecks are rarely abandoned to the waves these days. The first step is to contain the cargo and off load it before it can cause pollution or fire. Any fuel and oil on board must be drained. If below the surface, the ship is raised. Then the hull is either sliced into sections with diamond-encrusted wire or blown into fragments by explosives. Each portion is lifted onto a barge and carried away (1,732 words)

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The Most Powerful Uber Driver In India

Varsha Bansal | Rest Of World | 4th January 2023

Profile of Shaik Salauddin, a former taxi driver who has emerged as a new kind of labour organiser in India. He still drives occasionally for Uber, but now lends out his car to others while he campaigns for better employment rights. He has founded a new gig economy union and seems to understand how to bend the internet news cycle to his purpose far better than traditional labour organisers (1,572 words)

Enduring The Winters Of A Life Sentence

Jeffrey Shockley | Atmos | 9th January 2023

Incarcerated writer reflects on winters in prison. On the positive side: tap water in the cells is properly cold, inmates get to work outside clearing paths, and the snow makes the grounds look better. The negatives include: more lockdowns as staff struggle to get to work, moods plummeting from all the time cooped up, and violence rising as people face the holiday season without loved ones (854 words)

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An Ocean Of Earth

Justin E.H. Smith | Hinternet | 13th November 2022

Lyrical, surprising and "mostly true" history of the Russian Empire. "Turkey, Russia, and for a while Germany too, had no ocean to cross in their own territorial expansions, and curiously this circumstance has made it easy for at least one of these latter empires to 'hide' itself with surprising success. The reason Russia is so big is because most of it is not Russia" (7,514 words)

Strangely Beautiful Google Reviews

Will McCarthy | Longreads | 3rd January 2023

An old-fashioned internet article, which invites the reader to marvel at the infinite variety of humanity. Several of those highlighted here contain entire novels: “She butchered my Pomeranian I would not recommend” (Laurie’s Gentle Pet Grooming); “Unknowingly purchased sick Nigerian dwarf goats” (Hilltop Goat & Sheep Auction); and “Didn’t enjoy, too much water” (the Bering Sea) (3,313 words)

The Decline Of Disruption

Michael Park et al | Nature | 4th January 2023

Scientific paper, so no prizes for prose style, but an important-if-true main point and some interesting methodology. Key argument: "If a paper or patent is disruptive, subsequent work that cites it is less likely to also cite its predecessors". Key finding: Measured by citations culled from millions of papers and patents, disruptive discoveries have been in relative decline since 1945 (12,800 words)

In The Stacks

Robin Sloan | Brand New Box | 6th January 2023

A new short story by Robin Sloan! The year is indeed shaping up well. All the classic ingredients are here: An improbable hero or two, a library (of course), old technology, new technology, sadness, joy, youth, age, grace, nostalgia, incongruity, music — and a generous sprinkling of that same happy-magic dust which made Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore and Sourdough such charmers (3,500 words)

The Third Magic

Noah Smith | Noahpinion | 1st January 2023

Brad DeLong calls this piece "better than anything I read in all 2022". The three "magics" discussed here are (i) writing, broadly defined to mean all ways to record information; (ii) science, broadly defined to include the scientific method, mathematics, logic and reason; (iii) the capacity to control and predict events, now emerging from the confluence of computation, big data and AI (3,580 words)

Mussolini In Public And Private Life

Andrea Bajani | Literary Hub | 5th January 2023

Let's say you were a young girl in Italy in the 1920s when Mussolini seemed strong, exciting, full of possibilities. You went to his rallies. You cheered his speeches. You made him Mussolini. But you never hurt a fly. Time passes. Now you are older, much older, in the Italy of the 1990s. Any regrets? Any feelings of guilt? What were you hoping for all those years ago? What is your share of fascism? (2,900 words)

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Living With Wolves

Nikki Kolb | Catapult | 3rd January 2023

Account of months spent at a remote wolf sanctuary. "On only my second day caring for him alone, he nipped me in the stomach, breaking skin. The mark was miniscule. I was nonetheless mortified. What business did I have here, a city girl who was scared of the dark, worn out by the basic terrain, unable to build a fire, and not even savvy enough to avoid the bite of an ancient wolf dog?" (3,410 words)

Strontian To Laga Bay

Jon Combe | Round The Island | 3rd January 2023

Notes from a walk along a Scottish sea loch, part of an attempt to walk the entire coast of mainland Britain. This section is on the Ardnamurchan peninsula in the western Highlands. The walker visits the village where the chemical element strontium was discovered in 1790, navigates the boundaries between public and private property, and shows great care for some uncaring ducks (2,921 words)

James Patterson's Daily Routine

Clay Skipper | GQ | 3rd January 2023

Interview with the prolific author, who claims to have 31 book projects active at one time. He works with a "stable of co-writers", does about 11 hours of reading and writing a day, and works seven days a week, with interludes for golf. He writes longhand and then an assistant types his manuscripts. His explanation for why he exists like this, at the age of 75? "I've always been a hungry dog" (2,075 words)

The Truffle Industry Is A Scam

Matt Babich | Taste Atlas | 24th December 2022

Few foods that taste of truffle contain the gourmet fungi itself. The organsulfur compound 2,4-dithiapentane naturally occurs in truffles but is almost impossible to extract, although it can be cheaply derived from petroleum. You may not know what truffle tastes like; the familiar flavour is probably the synthetic version. Some restaurants even grate tasteless tubers over dishes to aid the illusion (2,049 words)

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What It's Like To Dissect A Cadaver

Alok Singh | Every Man A Debtor | 9th November 2022

Observations recorded after taking an open access dissection class. Exposing veins, arteries and nerves takes a surprising amount of physical effort and is best done with the hands. Cancer can turn guts a bright mouldy green. Human fat is extremely greasy. The intestines look like damp cardboard but are dry to the touch. Lifting a face off a skull is, as one might assume, "extra uncanny" (1,447 words)

How To Speak Honeybee

Karen Bakker | Noema | 2nd November 2022

Bees communicate mainly by dance, but they also have a vocabulary of sounds and vibrations. They have excellent eyesight and can recognise faces. They can rob and cheat. They get happy and sad. When a swarm needs to split or move on, the bees will argue and vote about where to go next. To better observe them, humans are now building a bee-sized robot which will pass as a bee among bees (4,700 words)

How To Be Influenced

Ian Leslie | The Ruffian | 23rd July 2022

In a world of online influencers we are all going to be influenced. "For almost every decision we have to take, bidders line up to take the contract". The trick lies in turning this to your advantage. "Be impervious to social influence and you get closed off from the best that your fellow humans have to offer. Be defenceless against it and you become manipulable, boring, and unhappy" (2,800 words)

Art, Mourning, Remembrance

Hayley Campbell | Literary Hub | 24th August 2022

Conversation with Nick Reynolds, Britain's only sculptor of death masks, whose subjects have included Peter O'Toole, Malcolm McLaren, Ronnie Biggs, William Rees-Mogg — and his own father, Bruce Reynolds, who masterminded the Great Train Robbery. "When you die, you look amazing. All tension is released from your face. Ideally, I would get to them while they were still warm” (3,500 words)

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Own-Goal Football

Generalist Academy | 7th June 2022

How a glitch in tournament rules left Barbados and Grenada competing to score own-goals in a Caribbean Football Cup tie. No match could end in a draw; goals scored in extra time counted double; Barbados had to win by at least two goals to go through to the next round, otherwise Grenada would go through. As full-time approached, Barbados was one goal ahead. Now do the game theory (660 words)

Seven Stowaways And A Hijacked Oil Tanker

Samira Shackle | Guardian | 9th June 2022

Real life thriller at sea. In October 2020, UK ministers praised a naval operation that prevented the hijacking of an oil tanker by seven Nigerian stowaways. This investigation tells another story, of men risking their lives to escape gang violence and a ship's crew that tried to help them despite restrictive maritime laws. Was the "hijacking" in fact staged to get the stowaways safely to land? (5,890 words)

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Every Vending Machine In The World

Tom Lamont | Guardian | 14th April 2022

As Moby-Dick is to whales, so this excursus is to vending machines — immense, immersive, inspired. Prepare to be gripped by a social and economic history of vending machines from their origins in mid-19C England to their ubiquity in 21C Japan, where there is one vending machine for every 46 people. "In Nagasaki, there is a machine that sells the edible chrysalises of silkworms" (6,500 words)

Notes From The Underground

Zack Graham | Astra | 6th April 2022

Ode to raving. The writer started off in the shallow end of the scene, but is quickly drawn into its more radical depths. In Europe's Freetekno scene, he finds people who are so committed to the escapism that they have dropped out of society all together. Post Covid, he joins a reunion party in a remote Austrian forest clearing. The blissed out dancers are guarded from police by dogs (2,740 words)