The Moral Economy Of High-Tech Modernism

Henry Farrell & Marion Fourcade | Daedalus | 16th March 2023

By no means an easy read, but well worth one's time and attention. Most things in society require organisation of one sort or another. Organisation requires classification of the things to be organised. The power to classify is thus a great power. The exercise of that power is now passing, scarcely remarked and scarcely understood, from bureaucrats to algorithms. Who benefits? (4,400 words)

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The Browser highlights outstanding writing online.Lapham’s Quarterly does the same for the world’s greatest books, searching for passages that inform today’s most pressing issues. You can save more than 40% off the newsstand price with this special subscription offer for readers of The Browser.

The Impact Of Starvation

Andrew Doig | Delancey Place | 29th March 2023

How people behave when very hungry, according to an American clinical study conducted in 1944. Thirty-six men, all conscientious objectors to wartime service, were underfed and overworked for six months. They became angry, depressed, withdrawn, even psychotic. They hoarded. Food became their sole obsession. Allowed unrestricted food again, they binge-ate for three months (850 words)

Three Children And A Mystery

Giles Tremlett | Guardian | 28th March 2023

Masterpiece of story-telling. Three small children are abandoned at a Barcelona railway station in 1984. Fortune smiles on them. They are adopted and raised in a happy Spanish family. Still, they have faint memories of their earliest years: They lived in Paris; their parents had money, fast cars and guns. Were their parents gangsters? Why the abandonment? They begin looking for answers (6,200 words)

Jonathan Swift On Jonathan Swift

Tyler Cowen | Conversations | 29th March 2023

Tyler Cowen invites an instance of artifical intelligence to assume the persona of satirist Jonathan Swift (1667—1745) and give an interview. Technically, the result is a tour de force. This AI-Swift could be a human actor perfectly conversant with Swift's life and work. I doubt that an actual conversation with the historical Swift would have resembled this at all; even so, it is awe-inspiring (6,200 words)

Bicycle

Bartosz Ciechanowski | 28th March 2023

Beautifully illustrated explanation of how bicycles work. This familiar machine is a miracle of physics, governed by a complex interplay of invisible forces. If you have ever wondered why it is so much easier to balance while in motion than when stopped, this is your best chance of finding out. By the end, it is hard not to agree that there is something "a bit magical" about the bicycle (15,471 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 Age Of Average

Alex Murrell | 20th March 2023

We live in "a sea of sameness". Architecture, art, interiors, product design, book covers, film posters, even faces, thanks to plastic surgery — it is all strikingly homogenous. Why? "Perhaps when times are turbulent, people seek the safety of the familiar. Perhaps it’s our obsession with quantification and optimisation. Or maybe it’s the inevitable result of inspiration becoming globalised" (6,053 words)

Unstandardised, Decentralised Carnival Fire

Oliver Darkshire | LitHub | 14th March 2023

On the art of cataloguing rare books. Each entry must record precisely how "a book has survived the ravages of time" in as little space as possible. There is a secret language for this. "Foxed" means the pages are mottled. "Sophisticated" denotes a probable fake, but an interesting one. Sheepskin binding is "roan" and calfskin "vellum". Every bookseller uses these terms in their own way, too (1,752 words).

Podcast: Long Walk | Historically Thinking. Reassessing the story of Elizabethan explorer David Ingram, who in the 16C claimed to have walked from Mexico to Nova Scotia in just 11 months (64m 28s)

'We’re Going To Follow Captain Cook'

Suzanne Heywood | Guardian | 25th March 2023

Gripping account of an adventurous childhood that was not nearly as exciting as it seemed. The author's family set out on what was meant to be a three-year circumnavigation by sail when she was seven. Nine years later, they were still at sea, despite a near shipwreck in the Indian Ocean and the fact that their daughter had needed seven cranial surgeries on a small island to survive (5,587 words)

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Presidential Counsel

George Washington | Lapham's Quarterly | 13th March 2023

Extract from The Rules of Civility and Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation, compiled by a 13-year-old future president in 1744. Includes such timeless advice as "talk not with meat in your mouth", "be not tedious in discourse", "eat not in the streets", "play not the peacock" and "labour to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire called conscience" (1,447 words)

Helen's Rules Of Writing

Helen Lewis | The Bluestocking | 24th March 2023

How to do journalism. Not everyone does it this way, but the world might be a better place if they did. "If you are talking to an adult and they tell you something that makes you uncomfortable — about their medical history, past addiction, odd sexual fetish — resist the urge to tidy that away. Instead, repeat it back to them and see if they panic horribly, or if in fact they wanted you to know" (1,900 words)

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The Impossible Job

William Ralston | Guardian | 21st March 2023

Being a Premier League referee is an emotionally demanding job. If all goes well, fans will forget the ref is even there. "People mistake refereeing for an objective science, practised badly. But football is a physical sport, and judging whether each contact is within its laws will always involve subjectivity.... Until we accept that subjectivity is part of the game, we’re never going to be satisfied" (9,206 words)

A Decade Of Temporary Homes

Rachel Heng | Esquire | 22nd March 2023

An unpromising title, I will give you that. But beneath it is a glorious read about growing up with the ultimate in deadbeat dads. Publicly, dad was a partner in a Singapore law firm with a posh house and a happy family. Privately, dad was a gambling addict who was siphoning off his clients' funds. Then dad vanished. No more dad, no more house, no more happiness. For a while, at least (5,290 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.

How ChatGPT Works

Stephen Wolfram | Writings | 14th February 2023

I had become so averse to excitable articles about GPTs that I foolishly missed this medium-sized masterpiece when it appeared a month ago. Luckily, I was alerted to its virtues today by Rodney Brooks, who links to it in his own worthwhile note on AI. Wolfram explains here, clearly and schematically, how large language models and neural networks work. No magic, no mystery, but some math (18,800 words)

Beast In The Blood

Peter Sahlins | Public Domain Review | 22nd March 2023

On the "Transfusion Affair", a 17C Parisian scandal over the transfusion of animal blood into humans. A young physician, Jean Denis, believed that blood from calves, lambs, and kid goats could cure all ailments and prolong life. Two patients died, but three were reportedly "cured and rejuvenated". A factional war of ideas followed between followers of William Harvey and René Descartes (4,584 words)

What Films Should We Teach?

Joe Karaganis | Public Books | 22nd March 2023

Three professors discuss the most assigned titles at US film schools. First is the 1929 film Man with a Movie Camera, followed by Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing and then Citizen Kane. "I’d argue that an educated person needs basic film history, which begins with acquiring a vocabulary to describe lighting, camerawork, sound and image relationships, editing, and narrative structure" (4,113 words)

Waiting For Brando

Edward J. Epstein | Lapham's Quarterly | 7th March 2023

It is 1959. The author, aged 24, sets out to impress his girlfriend by telegraphing a Greek film company proposing a co-production of the Iliad with Marlon Brando as Achilles. The Greeks are thrilled. The then-unknown Mario Puzo writes a shooting script. Sydney Lumet may be interested in directing. The Greek government lends a battalion of soldiers. But one thing is still missing: Marlon Brando (5,300 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.

From The Browser Six Years Ago

Insect Detective

Eric Boodman | Stat | 22nd March 2017

Government entomologist tells how her working day is increasingly taking up by delusional visitors who walk in claiming that their bodies are infested with insects and parasites, and who have exhausted the patience of their physicians. “Patients believe that the proper medication is not an antipsychotic but an antiparasitic, and that the correct expert is not a psychiatrist but an insect specialist” (4,800 words)

Leonard Cohen’s Hydra

Richard Trapunski | Hazlitt | 15th March 2023

Arriving on Hydra, the Greek island to which Leonard Cohen moved in 1960, is "like stepping into an archival photograph". This is where he met Marianne, where he got into I Ching, where he wrote "Bird On The Wire", which was inspired by the installation of phone lines on the island. But for a place that was so important to him, there are few physical traces. Even his house is hard to find (3,029 words)

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Day In The Life Of An Oak Tree

John Lewis-Stempel | Country Life | 10th March 2023

In one 24-hour period, this tree is visited by a whole host of creatures, including: a mistle thrush, a great tit, grey squirrels, a fox, pipistrelle bats, a wren, a great spotted woodpecker, a nuthatch, a treecreeper, a chiffchaff, a pied flycatcher, bracket fungus, a fallow-deer buck, a bullfinch, a woodcock, a stag beetle, and a flat-backed millipede. A crash course in British woodland ecology (1,449 words)

Banking On The Seaweed Rush

Nicola Jones | Hakai | 14th March 2023

Will we all be eating seaweed soon? Global production has increased sixfold in the last three decades. The attractions are obvious: it's a nutrient-dense crop that can also soak up excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere while protecting oceanic habitats. But if we rush into intensive, large-scale seaweed farming, we risk repeating at sea our past agricultural mistakes on land (2,798 words)

Meet The Archive Moles

Lucy Scholes | Prospect | 25th January 2023

Bringing out of print books back into circulation requires a lot of unseen literary detective work. The hunters scan through old book reviews and obituaries, check out library books nobody has borrowed for decades, follow leads left by long-forgotten taste makers, scour every secondhand bookshop, and chase down vanished titles that appeared on long ago prize shortlists (2,381 words)

Organised Fun: Who’s It All For?

Clive Martin | The Face | 14th March 2023

Former London dweller returns to the city and discovers that something has changed. Gone is the habit of popping into a just-discovered club or exhibition. Thanks to the "experience economy", everything is now "strangely occupational". Every event is marketed and monetised, and usually sells out in advance. All of this organised fun is "the antidote to, and the accelerator of, alienation" (3,318 words)

Podcast: How To Think Like A Mathematician | The Infinite Monkey Cage. Randall Munroe of xkcd fame guests on this BBC radio gameshow about how to use maths to solve everyday problems (42m 35s)