Who’s Afraid Of A Spatchcocked Chicken?

C. Pam Zhang | Eater | 3rd October 2023

English words for meat are peculiarly squeamish: when alive, a cow is a cow, but on the plate it becomes "beef", as if this linguistic separation can disguise that the food is an animal's flesh. Mandarin is different — pig is always pig. "I still thrill at an old, laminated menu that offers 'cow stomach' or 'pig bung'; I trust more a place that doesn’t attempt to dissimulate with 'offal' or 'tripe'" (1,300 words)

Marked by Stars

Anthony Grafton | Public Domain Review | 12th October 2023

The work of 16C polymath Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa blends the occult and the scientific. His De occulta philosophia is a manual of "learned magic", full of daemons, talismans and angels. This was stuff that had unfrocked generations of clerics, yet it also made it possible to navigate the stars. His is "a grand, schematic plan of the cosmos, rather like that of the London Underground" (2,660 words)

The Day the War Really Began

Klaus Wiegrefe | Spiegel | 25th September 2023

Retrospective about the April 2008 Nato summit in Bucharest. Members discussed admitting Ukraine to the group as a show of strength against Russia. The US were in favour; a group of European powers, led by Angela Merkel, blocked the move. Zelenskyy and others have blamed this decision for recent atrocities in Ukraine, believing that Putin would never have invaded a Nato member state (8,450 words)

The Torture Of Tinnitus

Michel Faber | Guardian | 14th October 2023

Excellent writing about an unpleasant topic: tinnitus. It is a personal metallic squeal inside the writer's head: "Like the brakes of a train that’s forever cutting its speed and never coming to a stop". The worst thing about it is not the sound, but the fact that he never consented to its presence. It is a constant reminder of his organic nature, that we are made of meat and bones and gristle (1,420 words)

Bless This Mess

Tyler Watamanuk | Dirt | 6th October 2023

On the clever posture of curated clutter, as demonstrated by a 23-year-old photo of Sofia Coppola’s home office. True mess is undesirable, unhygienic, dirty: redolent of sadness and depression. Desirable mess is aspirational and somehow still clean despite the mishmash of items. It features books, papers and art strewn everywhere. It is a style choice, a way of signalling taste and flair (620 words)

from The Browser ten years ago:

Wall Street Loves A Cheater

Lynnley Browning | Newsweek | 11th October 2013

Profile of Ashley Madison, hook-up agency for married people. Slogan: "Life is short — have an affair". "In the US the top cheating city is Washington, D.C., where 6.18 per cent of all residents have paid memberships... 70 per cent are males over 40, and of that group, 84 per cent are married. There are four times as many 39-year-old men on the site as there are 38-year-olds" (2,060 words)

Impostors And Role-Players

John Wentworth | Less Wrong | 25th September 2023

Coders working with artificial intelligence freely admit to having little or no idea what goes on inside their black boxes, and even top AI scientists proceed largely by inference. Which is, if you think about it, a strange situation. Is this some kind of reverse-impostor syndrome? Or does it suggest strategies for people in other fields who are, one way or another, basically role-playing their jobs? (1,500 words)

On Having Children

Martin Gurri | Discourse | 11th October 2023

For the first time since the fourteenth century the world’s population is about to start shrinking. You can try explaining this reversal by reference to economic and social trends, but mere correlation seems an inadequate account of what amounts to an existential shift in human preference. Have we lost confidence in our species? Do we "love humanity as an abstraction but despise it in the flesh"? (2,060 words)

Mao To Now

Perry Link | China Books Review | 5th October 2023

Western critics compare Xi Jinping's autocracy with Mao Zedong's dictatorship; and seemingly Xi would like to be another Mao; but China has changed too much since Mao's day. People have more information, more understanding of the world. "Under Mao, people usually believed what they were shouting; under Xi, they are often protecting their interests through outward performance" (3,100 words)

Browser classified:

 Join 3-hour ChatGPT & AI Workshop for FREE (worth $49) by Growthschool to master AI tools and ChatGPT hacks: Click to Register (FREE for the First 100 people)

Zuzalu

Vitalik Buterin | Palladium | 6th October 2023

Lessons learned from inviting 200 rationalists, Ethereals and other digital nomads to converge on a coastal village in Montenegro for two months, just to see what happens. Main finding: It's the future. Everybody gets on, has fun, learns stuff, makes friends, makes things. Next step: Something permanent, a place that looks like a monastery and works like a university; or even lots of them (2,200 words)

Look To The Shadows

Rebecca Boyle | Atlas Obscura | 11th October 2023

Lyrical guide to appreciating the forthcoming annular solar eclipse, visible in parts of the Americas this coming Saturday. "One lovely place to be during a partial solar eclipse is underneath a tree, if you can find an evergreen or a deciduous tree that has not dropped its leaves yet. Look at the ground. In the dappled light, you will see crescents everywhere: the crescent Sun" (1,100 words)

Browser classified:

Yakread merges all your content—newsletters, bookmarks, tweets, and more—into a single intelligently curated feed. It's great for keeping up with all your subscriptions without feeling overwhelmed. Give it a try.

How To Exclaim!

Florence Hazrat | Millions | 11th October 2023

Ernest Hemingway liked exclamation marks to signal anticlimax. Salman Rushdie couldn't have too many: Midnight's Children averages six per page. Jane Austen's frequent use of the exclamation point, especially in moments of female emotional intensity, was apparently toned down by her editors. This piece of punctuation, the "inky semaphore of the sentence", deserves to be used! (1,600 words)

The Evolution Of Tunnel Boring Machines

Brian Potter | Construction Physics | 6th October 2023

Comprehensive history of how humans have dug tunnels beneath the ground in the past 150 years. In 1825 Marc Brunel, father of Isambard Kingdom, used a 22-foot "shield" with stacked compartments containing individual workers to dig the first tunnel beneath the river Thames. Now we use a combination of enormous tunnel boring machines and intricate pre-cast concrete liners (4,860 words)

Browser classified:

Got an idea for a world-changing digital product or frustrated by cookie-cutter survey platforms? Try GuidedTrack for free! Effortlessly create prototypes, surveys or educational programs - without any programming experience. Kickstart your project today with one of our 11 free templates.

Podcast: The End Of The Murdoch Empire | Intelligence Squared

Michael Wolff, biographer of Rupert Murdoch, unpacks the "real-life Succession" drama playing out at the media conglomerate (27m 40s)

Why Women Won

Claudia Goldin | National Bureau Of Economic Research | 9th October 2023

Paper from the 2023 Nobel economics laureate on 20C changes in women's legal rights and why progress slowed. Nearly half of the major developments occurred between 1963 and 1973. Women "won when they had the political clout to get men to see that women’s rights were as valid as civil rights. Yet, women’s rights had setbacks when, in light of gains, women abandoned the movement" (18,801 words)

In Defence Of The Rat

J.B. MacKinnon | Hakai | 26th September 2023

Rats are not nearly as bad as we are encouraged to believe. They are not aggressive or filthy and pose a low risk of disease, other than in situations when infection is rife anyway. They are resilient; we will never eradicate them. They are emotionally complex. They can laugh. And they can learn to play hide and seek with humans and "will do so for no other reward than tickles and fun" (5,600 words)

A History Of The Poverty Line

Ranil Dissanayake | Asterisk | 4th October 2023

Can poverty be reduced to a number? We imply as much when we talk of people living "below the poverty line". But "poverty line" is at best a useful shorthand; at worst it creates perverse incentives. If your aim is to raise people above your poverty line, you will keep the line as low as you possibly can, defining out of poverty people who are still very poor by any decent measure (4,400 words)

Browser classified:

Got an idea for a world-changing digital product or frustrated by cookie-cutter survey platforms? Try GuidedTrack for free! Effortlessly create prototypes, surveys or educational programs - without any programming experience. Kickstart your project today with one of our 11 free templates.

770 Is Here

George Prochnik | Cabinet | 3rd November 2022

If I have the metaphysics of this correctly, the Messianic role of the late Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson in Chabad-Lubavitch theology has been inherited by the Rebbe's former house in Brooklyn. The redbrick villa is "the active proxy temple housing both the spirit of the Messiah and the actual Divine presence", and Lubavitchers are building replicas of it around the world (4,500 words)

Podcast: Eleanor Rigby | McCartney: A Life In Lyrics. Very special series. Hosted by the poet Paul Muldoon, it draws on the hours of conversation with Paul McCartney taped while they worked on a book of his lyrics together. Each episode is about a song, with its music woven through the spoken word content (19m 30s)

Video: The Michelangelo Of Microsoft Excel | YouTube | Great Big Story | 2m 28s

Heartwarming story of a Japanese man who took up art on retirement, but didn't want to spend money on software or tools. He started drawing in Microsoft Excel using the graphing features and now creates beautiful, elaborate works this way.

Homesick

Zarina Zabrisky | Orion | 12th September 2023

War correspondent reports from Chernobyl, investigating whether the Russians dug trenches in the soil there during their recent occupation. Residents who have lived in the shadow of pogroms and nuclear fallout are resigned to this latest incursion. "As they were finally retreating, they didn’t have a map and couldn't figure out which way to flee. They asked us, 'Which way do we go?'" (4,600 words)

Being A News Avoider

Chris Dillow | Stumbling And Mumbling | 29th September 2023

Thoughts on why people might be avoiding consuming news. Frustration at the scarcity of useful or educational information shared offers one explanation. What if people want to be well-informed but find their outlets lacking? "For years, much of the public has been horribly wrong about basic facts about society. Which alerts us to the likelihood that the media does not properly inform us" (1,180 words)

Staring Into The Sun

Adam Mastroianni | Experimental History | 3rd October 2023

Even in antiquity an observer could have found that blood circulated in the body of a mammal, and that objects fell to Earth at the same speed. Why did progress in natural science lag thousands of years behind progress in mathematics? Perhaps because popular and pre-scientific beliefs about the world, while wrong, met the needs of the time. "There simply weren't enough ignorance signals" (4,300 words)

From The Browser Seven Years Ago

Every Body Goes Haywire

Anna Altman | n+1 | 6th October 2016

Migraine is an illness consisting entirely of symptoms — and what symptoms they are. “Migraine is associated with severe, throbbing, unilateral pain, an aversion to light and sound, nausea and vomiting, all aggravated by movement. An attack may be announced by what is called an aura, a neurological phenomenon that disrupts a sufferer’s vision with silvery squiggles and zigzags” (5,500 words)