Evolution Of Pain

Colin McGinn | 13th December 2023

Pain is at root a perceptual faculty in humans, like vision or hearing. Pain alerts the mind to danger and damage. "Pain responses have been well-nigh perfected over evolutionary time. Natural selection has made them as wondrous and efficient as eyes. This has no doubt involved making pain as painful as is compatible with proper functioning, which is obviously pretty damn painful"  (1,040 words)

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The perfect stocking-stuffer for the creative person in your life: Book, the book unlike any other.

How To Lose A Library

Carolyn Dever | Public Books | 14th December 2023

The British Library has become a changed and contradictory place since hackers destroyed its computer systems in October. The place is filled with books, but no specific book can be located or read. Desk-staff come to work with nothing much to do. What were once reading rooms are now just rooms. An eerie silence prevails. "The ghosts of all the Christmases are stuck in storage" (2,000 words)

I Do Some Sermonising

Margaret Atwood | In The Writing Burrow | 14th December 2023

Reflections on the power of names and of giving names to things, delivered by Margaret Atwood as a sermon to the graduating class of the University of St Andrews in Scotland. "The act of naming is the first thing Adam does after being created; and it is the second thing God does, He names the sun, moon, and stars. What things are called was evidently of great importance to God" (1,600 words)

The Future Of Security

Ben Ansell | BBC | 6th December 2023

Second Reith Lecture, on the delicate balance between freedom and order in a liberal society. "No liberal democracy can survive when it doesn't hold a monopoly on the use of force. We cannot defund the police. But when we aim for security we may end up oversteering like a drunkard on a narrowboat, and find ourselves again prone to bad actors, the very ones who we employ to protect us" (9,400 words)

Hylomorphism

Jeremy Skrzypek | 1000-Word Philosophy | 4th December 2023

Introduction to a school of philosophical argument holding that the nature of a thing depends more on the form of the thing than on its substance. A flat-pack table from Ikea, when still in its box, it is not a "table". It becomes a "table" only when it has been properly assembled. This may sound obvious once it has been pointed out, but such is often the case with useful ideas (1,900 words)

The Long Shadow Of Checks

Patrick McKenzie | Bits About Money | 13th December 2023

Checking-accounts dominate American retail banking even though checks are all but obsolete. A checking-account creates a credit relationship between bank and customer whether the customer likes it or not. "Most disagreements between you and a grocery store are beneath the notice of the law. If you and your grocery store have a disagreement about a check specifically, you can go to jail" (3,100 words)

The Invisible Price Of Water

Oana Filip | Eurozine | 13th December 2023

Communism’s collapse is still keenly felt in the “Romanian Sahara”. A system of pipelines that brought water from the Danube to irrigate these 70,000 hectares of farmland gradually crumbled, and now this sandy area known for growing watermelons and tomatoes struggles with desertification. A formerly horizontal water supply has become vertical, as farmers drill risky deep wells (2,900 words)

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The Virus Inside Your TV

Isaac Butler | Slate | 10th December 2023

For three years, an art collective hid provocative works, many of them about reproduction, in the 1990s soap opera Melrose Place. Their props included: “A pool float in the shape of a sperm about to fertilise an egg. A golf trophy that appears to have testicles. Furniture designed to look like an endangered spotted owl.” They called it “culture jamming”. Few viewers noticed (4,800 words)

My Career As A North Korean Novelist

Kim Ju-sŏng | Guardian | 12th December 2023

Extracts from the memoir of an aspiring North Korean writer, who spent years trying to rise through the ranks of an extremely complex literary bureaucracy before escaping south. Success meant freedom and better housing; failure could result in punishment. The most highly regarded genre is “No 1 literature”, which is about the Kim dynasty, while anything “foreign” is frowned upon (4,000 words)

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The common way to talk about happiness is as a single scale: unhappy at one end, neutral in the middle, happy at the other end. This model is wrong.

The Best Book Covers You’ll Never See

Zachary Petit | Fast Company | 11th December 2023

The book covers that you see in bookshops are just “the tip of the iceberg”. Beneath them, unseen, lies a mass of designs that rarely see the light of day — different ways of selling a book that were ultimately discarded on the journey to the final product. Here, a series of designers show an early draft cover for a book alongside the published final, and explain what changed and why (1,700 words)

Moved Along

Grace Benninghoff | Portland Press Herald | 5th December 2023

Day in the life of an unhoused person. She wakes at dawn to pack her belongings and thus avoid losing them in a coming “encampment sweep” that will destroy the tent she has been sheltering in. A still-valid gym membership allows her a warm shower and the chance not to “look homeless” for a few minutes. Drugs, shivering, fear, uncertainty and walking for miles fill the rest of her time (2,600 words)

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What Makes A Good Cat?

Emily Stewart | Vox | 11th December 2023

It is a mistake to assess cats by human or even canine standards. “Cats aren’t here to serve us; the relationship is more of a push and pull. They require boundaries. When a cat is dissatisfied, owners know it, and its surroundings are often at fault. If you’ve got a ‘bad’ cat, the bad is on you. Cats are not as eager to make people happy in the way dogs are, nor are they as motivated by food” (3,000 words)

The Universe With Grimes

Samo Burja | Palladium | 8th December 2023

Interesting throughout. Canadian-born musician Grimes talks about AI, society, and the future of humanity: "Singular genius and agency can move mountains. It’s good to foster the idea that you can aspire to that. But I do agree with the criticism that historical focus on this can downplay the contributions of others. Every time I go to a hospital I’m like, damn, there’s heroes all around me" (4,200 words)

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The perfect stocking-stuffer for the creative person in your life: Book, the book unlike any other.

Macro And Micro Necessity

Colin McGinn | 8th December 2023

The most fundamental question in philosophy is why there is anything rather than nothing. The next most fundamental question is whether things are necessarily the way they are, and what that even means. "Is it an essential property of a particular human arm that it is an arm? Could an arm have been a tooth or a bladder? If you reduce an arm to a pile of dust, it no longer exists. It isn’t a dusty arm" (916 words)

The Train Wrecked In Slow Motion

Grace Glassman | Slate | 26th November 2023

Account of childbirth in the US as an older woman, where maternal mortality rates are rising alarmingly. This writer, an emergency medicine doctor, has a scheduled C-section before ending up in a medical thriller that is engrossing yet horrifying to read. She lost about six litres of blood: “My body’s entire store, plus a third more. As quickly as they were giving me blood, it ran out of me” (5,100 words)

The Right To Choose How To Be Irish

Padraig Reidy | What Fresh Hell? | 2nd December 2023

Thoughts on the Irish diaspora after the death of Shane MacGowan of The Pogues. His “priceless self-awareness” showed that not everything has to be passed on to the next generation. “We want them to experience Irishness, without experiencing the burden — a burden that we, in our 40s, may have been the last generation to know. We want them to have songs and sport and pride” (1,300 words)

Just Your Handyman

Kurt Armstrong | Plough | 5th December 2023

A hero for our time. "I’m a handyman. People hire me to fix things. My jobs start when someone tells me about something they’d like me to build, or some problem they want me to solve: we need to put a window in the north wall; we want a tile tub surround; this sink is leaky. In my kind of work you take things apart carefully because you’re going to have to put them back together again" (2,700 words)

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The Valve At The End of The World

Evan Grillon | Dirt | 24th November 2023

Splenetic, disjointed, disarmingly honest and strangely compelling account of open-heart surgery and its aftermath, reminiscent at times of Dostoevsky's Notes From The Underground. "I’ve read of people who are driven half-mad by their mechanical heart valve, who can’t sleep, or whose wives can’t sleep, whose marriages are ruined by their insomnia or their anxiety" (5,200 words)