First Rites

Anna Della Subin | Granta | 6th January 2022

On the history of men and women acclaimed in their lifetimes as gods, from Adam in the Garden of Eden, and Demetrius Poliorcetes in the Athens of 307BC, to Jesus and his apostles; by way of Lysander the Spartan general, Epicurus the materialist philosopher, Antinous the lover of Hadrian, and Tullia the daughter of Cicero. Julius Caesar accepted deification, Augustus declined the honour (2,400 words)

On ‘Plant-Based’

Alicia Kennedy | From The Desk Of Alicia Kennedy | 31st January 2022

The term "plant-based", when used to describe a diet free of animal products, can raise the hackles of vegans who prefer the "cultural baggage" that comes with their own label. But if it brings more people around to their way of thinking on meat, is it a bad thing? Yes, if its definition continues to be vague and blurry. Like the word "natural" before it, it can be stretched to the point of absurdity (1,171 words)

Picturing The Periodic Table

Philip Ball | Pioneer Works | 13th December 2022 | U

Our understanding of matter has changed almost beyond recognition since the mid-19th century. But the Periodic Table of the Elements, which purports to show in a logical schema the elements that make up all ordinary matter, has changed scarcely at all. It is out of date. It knows nothing of particle physics. It is full of contestable choices. Can we not agree on something better? (1,350 words)

The Political Economy Of Skiing

Adam Tooze | Chartbook | 17th December 2022

Roughly 1.5 percent of the world's population skis regularly. After a boom in skiing 30-50 years ago, the annual number of skier-days worldwide has plateaued at around 400 million, 43% of which are spent at Alpine resorts. Big corporations have been buying up the top US and European ski resorts and focusing on high-value customers. The price of downhill skiing has tripled since 2000 (2,050 words)

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Nietzsche's Tips For A Great Marriage

Skye Nettleton | Indo-Pacific Journal Of Phenomenology | 1st October 2009

Somewhat tongue in cheek marital advice assembled from Nietzsche's works. He believed that "love is a feeling; feelings are involuntary; and a promise cannot be made based on something that one has no control over. Instead of expecting such ephemeral feelings to form the basis of a long-term partnership, we should commit to actions that "are usually the consequences of love" (5,600 words)

The Perpetual Broths

Blair Mastbaum | Atlas Obscura | 15th December 2022

Both Chinese and French cuisines have the centuries-old tradition of keeping a pot of stock constantly simmering, adding ingredients as they come into season and using it as the base for all manner of dishes. Some "mother broths" in use today have been on the boil for decades, but legend tells of one in Perpignan that had been going since the 1400s; it was destroyed in a WW2 bombing raid (1,316 words)

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Lonely Surfaces

L. M. Sacasas | The Convivial Society | 10th December 2022

The most important thing about a technological development is not what it can do, but how it trains us to behave. Better AI images encourage us to look shallowly, as if skim reading, because these works do not reward close attention. This is not an existential problem for art unless "we find ourselves conditioned to never expect depth at all or unable to perceive it when we do encounter it" (3,699 word)

'There's No Such Thing As A Free Watch'

Jenny Odell | Bureau Of Suspended Objects | 18th August 2017 | PDF

Deep dive into the surprisingly twisted history of a single mass-produced object and what it can tell us about capitalism. Sold via a complex network of drop-shipping sites, the watch in question is a "physical witness" at the heart of a storm of deception. It is certainly the product of a scam, but is perhaps merely a more overt one than most of the objects we unthinkingly purchase (2,963 words)

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Sound

Bartosz Ciechanowski | 22nd October 2022

What sound is, and how sound works, from first principles, beautifully illustrated by inline animations. Each one of Bartosz Ciechanowski's explainers is a museum-quality gem. We have thrilled in the past to his essays on watches and cameras. By the end of this one you will have a schematic idea of how synthesisers and speakers work, and Fourier transforms will hold no terrors for you (7,900 words)

The Right Amount Of Hegel

Tom Whyman | Art Review | 13th December 2022

Archivists have found thousands of pages of notes recording lectures on art given by Hegel at Heidelberg in 1816-1818. Should we be excited? Up to a point. Hegel is one of the all-time great philosophers. But the scale and density of his published writings are already enough to daunt scholars and defy lesser readers. His work might be more widely appreciated if we had less of it, not more (1,700 words)

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John Adams

Tyler Cowen | Conversations | 14th December 2022

The American composer and conductor John Adams proves wise and charming throughout this lively conversation about his own work and about music more generally. Topics include Adams's latest opera, Anthony and Cleopatra, classical music versus contemporary music, Charles Ives, Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, Robert Ashley, Morton Feldman, San Francisco, clarinets and cinema (7,200 words)

Analogies For Large Language Models

Dynomight | 8th December 2022

Ignore the unwieldy title. This is a virtuoso display of synthetic thinking about how all scenarios imagining the impact of Artificial Intelligence on the future of society are captured by the historical analogies on which they rely. Will AI do for office work what railroads did for horses? Or what tractors did for farming? Or what guns did for swords? Or what photography did for painting? (1,620 words)

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Identical Twins Aren't That Identical

Stuart Ritchie | Science Fictions | 4th December 2022

The University of South Carolina accused identical twins of colluding in an exam, and now the twins have won a $6.5 million lawsuit by arguing that their papers were similar because their minds were "connected". Is there any good science in this claim? Probably not. But if there were, it would have interesting implications for debates about how far genetic endowment determines behaviour (2,800 words)

Dismantling Sellafield

Samanth Subramanian | Guardian | 15th December 2022

Superb reporting from Sellafield in northern England, where Britain's first big nuclear plant is winding down. Sellafield produced plutonium for nuclear weapons in the 1950s, and electricity until 2003. Until this year it reprocessed spent fuel. Now it is the world's most toxic storage depot, holding tonnes of plutonium and lakes of liquid waste that will need guarding for thousands of years (6,070 words)

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The Rise And Fall Of Peer Review

Adam Mastroianni | Experimental History | 13th December 2022

Peer review is "the grand experiment we’ve been running for six decades" and it has failed. It is expensive and detrimental to research productivity. Plus, studies in which errors are deliberately added to papers have demonstrated that reviewers don't catch the mistakes before publication the majority of the time. So what now? What science does best: move on to a new experiment and try again (3,618 words)

Books Of The Year

The White Review | 8th December 2022

Many lists of "best" books are published at this time of year. Few are this wide-ranging or surprising. Suggestions of the best Sri Lankan fiction sit alongside memoirs by Paul Theroux, Laurie Lee and Simone de Beauvoir. Works in translation, whether from 18C Irish or classical Chinese, are well represented. Hard to peruse without adding new volumes to one's to be read list (15,260 words)

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Becoming A Chatbot

Laura Preston | Guardian | 13th December 2022

Account of a year working as the "human backup" for a conversational AI named Brenda, which answers basic questions about real estate listings. The company deliberately hired poets and writers with MFAs or PhDs. The work was mostly a "game of reflexes", editing and improving the AI's responses against the clock. Brenda was never allowed to say "I don't know" or "I'm not a bot" (5,509 words)

Scientists Can't Give Up On Alien Life

Ethan Siegel | Big Think | 13th December 2022

Efforts to discover life elsewhere in the universe have so far yielded no results, but continuing the hunt is still a valuable endeavour. Facing the "end of our scientific certainty" and designing methods of inquiry that attempt to go beyond the limits of our capabilities into the philosophical realm is worthwhile in and of itself. "The odds are unknown, but the payoff could be unfathomable" (2,938 words)

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All Souls Politics Exam

All Souls College, Oxford | 2016-2022 | PDF

Past paper for the last six years of the All Souls prize fellowship exam. Candidates sit four three-hour papers, only two of which can be in their own subject. In each, they must answer three questions with as much originality as possible. Questions on this politics paper include: "Has the Cold War ended?", "Why not anarchism?", "What explains civil wars?", and "Is populism an ideology?" (2,354 words)

Searching For Zarahemla

Emily Fox Kaplan | Pipe Wrench | 6th December 2022

Some Mormons believe that the events described in their holy book took place in northern Guatemala and southern Mexico. This journalist joined a package tour revealing the region to the faithful. "I think I find Mormons so compelling because Jews don’t have any certainty about anything... 16 million-plus Mormons, one set of very specific answers to pretty much every question imaginable" (8,012 words)

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History In The Making

Stephen Davies | Work In Progress | 8th December

The study of history is meant to help us understand our present and our future. But a conception of history dominated by wars and revolutions will not get us very far. It is new ideas and new technologies that do most to shape the world over time. Better to understand how Newton's Principia changed science, and how the Model-T changed America, than how 1066 changed Britain (3,100 words)

The Brilliant Hackwork Of P.G. Wodehouse

Dan Brooks | Gawker | 7th December 2022

P.G. Wodehouse found a recipe for writing comic novels, and very wisely stuck to it. In innumerable novels and short stories Bertie Wooster gets into some scrape after shunning Jeeves's advice, and Jeeves, after a huff, engineers a happy ending. The formulaic quality of the stories is part of their charm. It allows for a seemingly effortless style of writing, and the levity transmits itself to the reader (1,500 words)