What $500 Means To Zinida Moore

Elly Fishman | Chicago | 26th September 2023

Assessment of an aid experiment in Chicago, in which participants received $500 a month with no strings attached (akin to a universal basic income). This single mother of three with two jobs found that the money did not change her life for good, but it allowed her to clear debts and improve her credit score to the point where steps like a mortgage became feasible for the first time (4,510 words)

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India’s Pickle People

Ruth Dsouza Prabhu | Al-Jazeera | 29th September 2023

On the practice of preserving food as heirlooms. Thirty-year-old preserved lemons are not unusual in some Indian households, blackened and salted. They can be eaten alone "or with a little sugar to cut the saltiness, mixed into breads like parathas or diluted with buttermilk". Some believe they have probiotic benefits, but in order to last unspoiled all microbes must be eradicated (1,170 words)

The Insider

Samanth Subramanian | Guardian | 3rd October 2023

Assessment of Michael Lewis and his book on Sam Bankman-Fried. Such is Lewis' reputation that Apple paid $5m for the TV rights without reading it, yet the collapse of FTX took him completely by surprise. Has he become too well-known now to report accurately? He "doesn’t write about people he can’t befriend"; a book on George Soros was abandoned because of a personal conflict (6,400 words)

The Morality of Gossip: A Kantian Account

Cécile Fabre | Ethics | 1st October 2023 | PDF

Readable academic paper about the ethics of gossip. Although gossiping can be a helpful social lubricant, it also reveals a negligent attitude to our fellow humans. "Our failure to treat others with the respect and concern they are owed as persons is especially wrongful when it manifests itself in a conversational practice which we would not engage in but for the fact that they are persons" (12,500 words)

'I Began With Sound'

Emily Wilson | Public Books | 2nd October 2023

Wilson's translations of Homer have earned rave reviews and attracted new readers. Here, she provides a note to her new version of the Iliad, which took six years to produce. "Literary translators should not grind the beef, pork, and lamb of their originals into an unidentifiable hot dog. Instead, the distinctive stylistic features of each original should remain distinct in translation" (2,450 words)

Ruthless Cosmopolitans

Adam Kirsch | Jewish Review Of Books | 1st October 2023

Reflections on Susan Sontag and George Steiner. They had much in common, but detested each other. Both modelled a peculiarly detached and European mode of intellectualism in post-WW2 America. "The intellectual took pride in being what Hannah Arendt called a 'pariah': because he belonged nowhere, he could see the world truly, free from parochialism and self-interest" (2,080 words)

New Words For The Dictionary

Merriam Webster | 28th September 2023

A useful update. Some of these words and phrases are familiar to me — stagiaire, last mile, kayfabe. Some I vaguely recognise — TFW, rotoscope, jorts. Some I see here for the first time, among them zhuzh (a small improvement); cromulent (satisfactory); nurdle (a small plastic pellet); nerf (to reduce the effectiveness of something); nyctinasty (movement by a plant in response to light) (1,900 words)

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An Invitation To A Secret Society

Adam Mastroianni | Experimental History | 20th July 2023

Do science. You don't need anybody's permission. Most great scientists have been dabblers and part-timers. Institutions and corporations monopolised science in the 20th century because they alone could build bombs and run clinical trials. But now the tools of science are cheap again and knowledge is almost free. "I hereby invite every curious human to do science and post it on the internet" (3,100 words)

There’s No Such Thing As An Ethical Museum

Cara Marsh Sheffler | Conversationalist | 14th September 2023

The act of curation by an institution, it is argued here, distorts the subject. Even when there is no questionable funding behind a museum, it cannot be considered a definitive catalogue. "No matter how intricate or well researched a palimpsest — at any cultural institution — it will never solve the problem of perspective. We can never escape ourselves or the times in which we live" (1,760 words)

Bagel Or Beigel?

Josh Glancy | Jewish Chronicle | 21st September 2023

There is an intriguing linguistic divide in the British Jewish community between those who say bagel ("baygel") and those who prefer beigel ("bye-gal"). The bagel belt runs from St John’s Wood to Hendon, while the land of beigel takes in all of Essex, Ilford and Redbridge, Southgate and parts of outer north London. Using the latter is "an indicator of proximity to the old Jewish East End" (850 words)

Think Again, Al Jolson

Peter Tasker | 23rd September 2023

Japanese audiences rarely watched silent films in silence. A narrator, or benshi, provided spoken accompaniment, explaining the action and improvising the dialogue. The best benshi were stars in their own right; 1920s cinema-goers would select for the benshi as much as for the film. Even now there is an audience for silent films in Japan and for the benshi who still accompany them (1,550 words)

The Wagnerization Of Political Order

Alexander Gelland | Palladium | 22nd September 2023

The rise of the Wagner group in Russia was a consequence of state failure. Military preparedness is a core duty of the state, and when the Russian state failed in this duty, it created a vacancy for a private actor, who necessarily became a rival of the state. A state cannot transfer any of its core duties to another party without also transferring a corresponding share of its power and legitimacy (3,000 words)

The Canal Papers

Scott Alexander | Astral Codex Ten | 14th June 2023

Notes towards a model of mind. A well-functioning mind is constantly absorbing and incorporating new information about the world around it. If particular beliefs and expectations become so fixed in the mind that they resist revision, then the mind is malfunctioning; it is becoming "canalised", ignoring new information in favour of inner fixations which may lose all contact with reality (4,100 words)

The Taliban's Luxury Hotel

Andreas Babst | Neue Zürcher Zeitung | 26th September 2023

A visit to the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul, where in years gone by the Afghan king was a regular at the nightclub, Ahmad Shah Massoud waged war from the penthouse, Osama Bin Laden stayed in Room 196, and suicide bombers left trails of destruction. Under its new Taliban management the hotel strives for an air of normality. "Peace is good for Afghanistan. But it's boring for us" (6,020 words)

The Lost History Of Sextus Aurelius Victor

Justin Stover & George Woudhuysen | Antigone | 23rd September 2023

Bibliographic mystery, solved. Historians have never understood why 4C sources enthused about Victor's short history of Rome when the surviving text is extremely underwhelming. But what if that was just a "scrappy epitome", or abstract, of the full, masterful work that had been mislabelled down the centuries? Its rediscovery will "transform our knowledge of the Roman past" (3,950 words)

How Rain Works In Video Games

Nicole Carpenter | Polygon | 26th September 2023

Insight into how game developers create realistic meteorological effects without involving so many moving pixels that your "computer melts through the floor". Each character has an individual rain cloud that follows them everywhere; weather doesn't exist anywhere beyond the player's field of vision. A well-designed downpour will appear torrential with very few moving raindrops (700 words)

Describing The Water

John Kennedy | Diagram Monkey | 24th September 2023

Climate scientist discusses the ways we literally describe water so as to improve our understanding of the planet, and also the figurative ways that becoming so immersed in such detail erodes the quality of debate on this subject. Just "laying out the situation in greater and more overwhelming detail" does little to enhance understanding. You may as well splash in a paddling pool (2,740 words)

Podcast: Sandro Botticelli's "The Birth of Venus" (1485-86) | The Lonely Palette. Is this painting worthy of its fame and ubiquity? Should it be on every calendar and tea towel? An art critic investigates (35m 40s)

Looking For Virginia Woolf’s Diaries

Geoff Dyer | Paris Review | 12th September 2023

A brilliantly structured essay about a quest to own all volumes of Virginia Woolf's diaries so as to read one small anecdote, which turns out to be in a different book. "That’s the thing about life, something you think lends it a purpose doesn’t last forever. A thing you’d set your sights on turns out to be a misremembered mirage, but that doesn’t mean you give up and stop" (3,050 words)

Orange Is The New Yolk

Marian Bull | Eater | 17th August 2023

There is a fashion in egg yolks. The "yolk phobia" and cholesterol obsession of the mid 20C gave us the egg white omelette. In the early 2000s, the heart disease link debunked, "the soft egg became a ubiquitous hipster entity". Now, golden yolks are engineered at scale with additives like marigolds and turmeric in chicken feed. The result is a pustule of "radioactive, aggressive reddish orange" (5,090 words)

Lazarus Lake

Tyler Cowen | Conversations | 20th September 2023

On the basis of this conversation, Lazarus Lake seems like the nicest person in the world; and yet he designs endurance races which can look to the non-runner like pure sadism. His most notorious creation is the Barkley Marathons, a 60-hour run in Tennessee which only 17 people have completed in almost 40 years. "If they don’t find their way out in a couple of days, we’ll go look for them" (8,000 words)

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Emoji

One From Nippon | 21st September 2023

The word "emoji" combines the Japanese words for "picture" and "letter". Emoji grew from a ❤ symbol popular on 1990s Japanese pagers. A lone coder drew the first emoji set, based on manga. Japanese telecom firms developed rival protocols, then agreed to standardise. Masayoshi Son persuaded Apple to add emoji to the iPhone. Emoji can have different meanings inside and outside Japan (1,746 words)

The Method Of Theoretical Physics

Albert Einstein | Philosophy Of Science | 2nd April 1934

Philosophy Of Science is marking its 90th anniversary by ungating classic articles from past decades, including this warning from Albert Einstein about the wishful thinking of theoretical physicists: "To the discoverer in that field, the constructions of his imagination appear so necessary and so natural that he is apt to treat them not as the creations of his thoughts but as given realities" (2,300 words)

Fire And Fury And The First Amendment

John Sargent | LitHub | 20th September 2023

The publisher of Fire And Fury, Michael Wolff's tell-all book about the Trump administration, recounts how President Trump's attempts to suppress the book turned it into an immediate best-seller. The initial print-run was 90,000 copies. "By Tuesday, the original publication date for Fire And Fury, we had ordered 1.5 million books in twenty-two printings at five dif­ferent printers" (3,100 words)