The Joy Of Sulk

Rebecca Roache | Aeon | 12th May 2023

Sulking is a fascinating form of indirect communication. It only works as long as everyone involved refuses to address the situation clearly. "A sulk is like a magic spell, which is broken if referenced directly. Even a sympathetic mention of it by the target risks giving the sulker something new to sulk about. You cannot sulk if you announce in advance that you’re going to do so" (2,600 words)

I Asked ChatGPT To Control My Life

Maxwell Strachan | Vice | 17th May 2023

Not an original idea at this point, but worth your time for the sheer chaos and nihilism it exudes. The writer spends a week existing according to a daily schedule ChatGPT sets. The model's insistence that he prioritise "overall wellbeing" quickly becomes ludicrous; the shallowness of what it calls "self-care" is soon exposed. "I do as I am told. I have become a robot-fuelled monster" (6,428 words)

Body Languages

Anvita Abbi | Scientific American | 23rd May 2023

A linguist immerses herself in a family of almost-extinct Andaman Island languages, and finds in them a seemingly unique grammatical structure modelled on the human body. "The prefix e-, which originally derived from an unknown word for an internal body part, had, over eons, morphed into a grammatical marker signifying any internal attribute, process or activity" (3,800 words)

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The Law Of The Sea Needs A Rewrite

Surabhi Ranganathan | Dial | 9th May 2023

What lawyers call the "law of the sea" consists mostly of international treaties regulating trade routes and territorial waters; it has little or nothing useful to say about today's problems and priorities — melting ice-sheets, rising sea-levels, man-made islands, sinking states, floating cities. The law is obsolescent, even obsolete. "The legal distinction between land and sea no longer holds" (5,200 words)

Take The "I" Out Of AI

Kevin Munger | Crooked Timber | 22nd May 2023

A sensible, small, concrete, and, one imagines, relatively straightforward step towards demystifying artificial intelligence and making its product more recognisable. AIs should be required, if necessary by law, to stop referring to themselves as "I", and to stop referring to humans as "we", in text and speech. To pass as human was once a test for an AI, but is not the job of an AI (1,200 words)

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The Penguin Emperors Of Fluid Dynamics

Sam Harris | Chalkdust | 22nd May 2023

Instinct and evolution have equipped Antarctic penguins to huddle against wind and cold with mathematical precision. Random, static huddling would leave those on the edge of a huddle to freeze and those in the middle to overheat. What penguins actually do (some algebra required) is to regroup dynamically so as to maximise the sheltering effect across the huddle as a whole (2,200 words)

The Scientist And The Bats

Caroline Chen | ProPublica | 22nd May 2023

Profile of Peggy Eby, who works on virus transmission between bats and other mammals. A decade before Covid-19, she was being told that her work was not a "sufficiently important contribution". Her methods are not trendy or AI-based: just plenty of observation and recording. But the data she gathers allows her team to prove that virus spillover is not only predictable, but preventable (3,833 words)

from The Browser eleven years ago:

How Markets Crowd Out Morals

Michael Sandel | Boston Review | 21 May 2012

Sandel considers where economic markets belong. Is there anything that money cannot buy? "Suppose, on your wedding day, your best man delivers a heartwarming toast, a speech so moving it brings tears to your eyes. You later learn that he bought it online. Would you care? Would the toast mean less than it did before you knew it was paid for? For most of us, it probably would" (4,341 words)

The Molt

Eric Wagner | Last Word On Nothing | 19th May 2023

Letter from a penguin colony in Argentina, where April is molting month. These Magellanic penguins undergo "catastrophic molt", meaning that they shed and replace all of their feathers in two or three weeks during which they fast and stay on dry land. "Sometimes I wonder if their appearance embarrasses them a little. They have no privacy, nowhere else to go, nothing to do but wait"  (1,330 words)

Thriving On Mars

Simon Morden | Aeon | 6th December 2022

Can humans survive on Mars? If we can live in Antarctica, which is almost as cold, and if we can visit the Moon, which is almost as hostile, then isn't it just a question of logistics? Maybe. But that if is doing an awful lot of work. The Moon is a three-day flight away. Mars is months away. A Mars mission "will necessarily be months-long, and that increases the complexity of the logistics enormously" (3,000 words)

Cultural Synesthesia

Meera Khare & Apoorva Bhandari | Open Mind | 11th May 2023

Intuitively this seems right. Synesthesia was part of the conscious experience of all early humans, but has generally receded into the unconscious mind, presumably because sharply-differentiated senses proved an evolutionary advantage when navigating the world. Synesthesia survives in all of us as "subliminal associations", and a fortunate few people still inherit it as conscious experience (2,300 words)

The Machine That Never Was

Sheon Han | Quanta | 3rd May 2023

Before there were real computers, Alan Turing invented conceptual computers. While still a graduate student in 1936 he proposed a schematic model: Let there be a sensor which reads symbols from an advancing tape and responds mechanically according to a fixed list of instructions — if this, then that. From which, with some architectural input from John von Neumann, all computing followed (1,350 words)

Parfit, By David Edmonds

Henry Oliver | Common Reader | 11th May 2023

Perceptive discussion of Derek Parfit — arguably the Kant of our time, though his reputation is still bedding down — as depicted in a new biography. "Parfit is very much like [J.S.] Mill. Prodigious, high-minded, aesthetic, musical, socially odd, astonishingly productive, romantically unconventional, and strongly motivated by death". He was "a romantic poet working as a moral philosopher" (1,400 words)

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Written Word And Unwritten World

Italo Calvino | Paris Review | 5th January 2023

An all-time great essay, Calvino at his best, about his realisation, late into his writing life, that he had come to feel more at home in the world of books than in the world of real life. How and why did the two diverge? "The challenge for a writer is to speak of the intricate tangle of our situation using a language so seemingly transparent that it creates a sense of hallucination, as Kafka did" (3,300 words)

The Quest To Quantify Our Senses

Chris Salter | MIT Press Reader | 17th May 2023

Introduction to "psychophysics", a discipline invented by a 19C doctor with a mysterious illness and now expertise required for roles at Facebook. Gustav Fechner created this field to measure the relationship between the mind and the body — and he inspired the design of machines that could do just this. If you wear a fitness tracker or use a VR headset, you have seen his legacy (3,029 words)

Roger's Little Rule Book

Roger Ebert | 28th October 2008

Veteran film critic's guidelines for those who seek to follow in his footsteps. Remember you are there to advise, not dictate. Respect your readers' time and money. Give a bad review when it is warranted so that a good one has meaning. Don't accept freebies unless you are truly hungry. Above all, never ask a film star for a picture or an autograph: it's embarrassing for everyone present (2,463 words)

The Work Of The Audiobook

Alexander Manshel, Laura B. McGrath & J. D. Porter | Los Angeles Review Of Books | 16th May 2023

Audiobooks are the main growth area in publishing today. They are changing how authors write; in one recent high profile release, the writer "describes the pitch, timbre, and vocal tics of the book’s secondary cast, as if she were writing notes directly to the narrator in the booth". Yet the majority of readers are gig workers, rarely acknowledged and just paid per recorded hour (2,932 words)

All The Arguments Against EVs Are Wrong

Noah Smith | Noahpinion | 14 May 2023

Optimistic take on the future of electric vehicles. They will come to dominate the world's transport infrastructure and this will help us save the environment. We won't run out of lithium. Better labour laws will ensure the EV industry doesn't entrench inequalities. Vehicle range is improving all the time, as is the distribution of charging stations, reducing the chances of a driver being stranded (3,257 words)

Doubting Shakespeare

Elizabeth Winkler | LitHub | 15th May 2023

The argument over whether all of the works attributed to Shakespeare were written by Shakespeare is "the greatest drama the bard never wrote". Academics role their eyes and experts dismiss the possibility, but there is some compelling evidence for the theory. It's also great fun. "There is something delightfully Shakespearean about the Shakespeare authorship question" (2,350 words)

How To Survive A Car Crash In 10 Easy Steps

Anne Lagamayo | Longreads | 11th May 2023

Practical guide to recovering from a traumatic brain injury. "You are so incandescently happy to be alive one moment, and miserable and aimless the next. You no longer coast along the outskirts of life but deep within it, plunged headfirst without a life jacket. Sometimes you miss being excused from the business of living. Other times, you can’t imagine life any other way" (4,437 words)

How Tokyo Says No To Cars

Daniel Knowles | Heatmap | 11th April 2023

A car in Tokyo is a liability, not an asset. You can't park anywhere. Most streets are too narrow for your car. You pay a fortune in taxes. The result is that Tokyo has the lowest car-use of any major city in the rich world. People walk, or bicycle, or hop on a train. "There is no traffic noise. No hooting, no engine noise. Most of the time you can walk in the middle of the street, so rare is the traffic" (4,300 words)

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A conversation about crypto and AI between the builder of the world's best payments system and the builder of the world's most advanced AI.

Encountering The High Arctic

James Conaway | Hedgehog Review | 10th May 2023

Beautiful piece of writing — embellished memoir, might one say? — about going to the Arctic for National Geographic. "I am bound for Ellesmere Island, a vast orogeny still birthing after 300 million years, with an intermediary stop in the town of Resolute on Cornwallis Island under glaciated hills. Distant cliffs levitate and then are gone, then back again, shimmering in the thermals" (2,970 words)

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The One And Only

Alan Lightman | NYRB | 17th December 1992

Classic appreciation of Richard Feynman, ungated for two weeks, carpe diem. "Feynman's Lectures on Physics, to be found on the bookshelves of almost every professional physicist in the world, are a triumph of human thought. They deserve a place in the history of Western culture along with Aristotle’s collected works, Descartes’s Principles of Philosophy, and Newton’s Principia" (4,500 words)