How To Actually Feed America

Caroline Sutton | Slow Boring | 28th November 2025

On the evolution of the US's largest charitable food network. Food banks used to wait in line and have to accept whatever surplus food was donated, even if it was geographically or nutritionally wrong for their needs. Then some Chicago business school professors instituted a market system with bids, shares and data. It works very well. Now, twenty years on, they can't decide whether to keep it (1,600 words)

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The Midnight Shift

Lucas Vaqueiro | Urban Omnibus | 3rd December 2025

Introduction to New York's Leak Detection team: eleven sound engineers employed by the city to listen for ruptures in the 6,800-mile-long network of water pipes. Every night, they use microphones to check six miles of pipes, listening through headphones for the tell-tale gush of a broken water main spilling its contents into the chaotic layer of "spaghetti" beneath the surface that is made up of cables and tubes (600 words)

Six Decades Behind The Counter

Lisa Jucca | Reuters | 20th November 2025

Interview with Anna Possi, Italy's longest-serving barista. She has recently turned 101 and still works behind the counter at the café she opened with her husband in the Piedmont hills in 1958. He died in 1974; she's been pulling the shots by herself ever since. Her secret for long life? Refusing to be idle and remaining independent. "Work is what distracts you and at the same time gives you something" (1,000 words)

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'Nothing to See Here'

Rusana Novikova | Anthropology News | 3rd December 2025

At Russia's "feral frontier" — such as on Sakhalin Island in the far north-west — the effort to recolonise rural territory must combat thirty years of post-Soviet neglect. "Abandoned fields overgrown with birch trees are by no means a reversal to some 'original nature'. Instead, they are a poignant reminder of what happens when the biggest social experiment of the twentieth century is no more" (1,800 words)

Our Picture Of Evolution

Prosanta Chakrabarty | MIT Press Reader | 1st December 2025

Brief examination of evolutionary diagrams. The most popular one, featuring a linear progression from monkey to man, was drawn from Rudolph Zallinger's 1965 mural “March of Progress”. But it is incorrect. Humans did not evolve from these other forms but with them from shared ancestors. A more accurate alternative, depicting evolution as a phylogenetic tree, is becoming popular in textbooks (1,500 words)

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Let’s Not Bring Back The Gatekeepers

Dan Williams | Conspicuous Cognition | 30th November 2025

Social media benefits populism because it provides a platform for ideas stigmatised by establishment elites. In response, establishment institutions are reluctant to engage with fringe views and conspiracy theorists, for fear that this would legitimise them and imply an equal footing. This is doomed to fail. “If policies against misinformation only work if people aren’t misinformed, they don’t work” (6,200 words)

Underrated Reasons To Be Thankful

Dynomight | 27th November 2025

Charmingly specific list. Cardamom tastes expensive and is cheap. When disposed of correctly, disposable plastic is carbon sequestration. About 1% of all humans that have ever lived enjoyed free elections, the rule of law, and civil liberties; that number is now closer to 10%. When things don’t go our way, we can always turn to the comfort of sleep, “a pause that’s somehow neither experienced nor skipped” (1,400 words)

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The Case For Ending Statistical Significance

Davidson Heath | Reason | 1st December 2025

The obsession with statistical significance has misled many sciences into false-positive findings and bias. An alternative might be “estimation culture”, courtesy of William Gosset, who devised a formula using small-sample estimates for quality control in Guinness beer. “Any series of experiments is only of value in so far as it enables us to form a judgement as to the statistical constants of the population” (3,000 words)

The Price Of Remission

David Armstrong | ProPublica | 8th May 2025

Heath reporter investigates the cost of his treatment. After being diagnosed with multiple myeloma, he is prescribed Revlimid, a thalidomide derivative that greatly improves the prognosis for blood cancer patients. Each daily pill costs 25 cents to make yet costs $1,000 to buy. Why? In his journey through the US healthcare system, he uncovers the extraordinary greed that underpins it all (7,200 words)

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Very Important People

Mike Nagel | Dirt | 28th November 2025

Wry musings on meetings between the famous and the non-famous. Most of the time, there is no second beat to a celebrity encounter. There is no deeper connection or "then what". The seeing is the point. Thus, when our narrator gets the chance to spend a whole weekend around famous musicians, his brain short circuits. Should he throw a baked potato at a rock star's head? Just to see what happens? (2,600 words)

Podcast: Kevin | Heavyweight. Astonishing piece of storytelling, about a troubled childhood, the friends that made it bearable, and the unspoken reason why they one day vanished from the neighbourhood (60m 58s)

Video: Maybe This Time | YouTube | Broadway.com | 4m 19s

Extraordinary performance of a pivotal number from the musical Cabaret. Even in this recital setting, without costume or set, the actress disappears into the character completely.

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The Claims Of Close Reading

Johanna Winant | Boston Review | 26th November 2025

As the humanities are sidelined in academia and AI erodes our ability to comprehend text, it is worth returning to the rewarding practice of close reading. Looking at the tiniest details of a poem, scene or prose excerpt, taking it seriously, noticing every minute decision the writer made to arrive at the final product, is a revolutionary skill. It is learning to read as the basis of forming an argument (2,800 words)

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Interview With A YouTube Writer

Anonymous | Human Invariant | 22nd November 2025

The writer interviewed here works for several YouTube channels that have collectively amassed over half a billion views for science and gaming-adjacent videos. His responses provide a glimpse inside the complex workings of a platform that shapes contemporary culture far more than we realise. Almost nobody who posts on YouTube is making much money, but a small group are making a lot (5,100 words)

Revisiting The Thucydides Trap

Noah Millman | Gideon's Substack | 5th February 2025

The "Thucydides trap" describes the geopolitical situation in which an ascending power threatens to displace an established one, often resulting in war. Each action taken in the lead-up to this outcome seems individually logical but results in escalation anyway. Many characterise Sino-American relations this way. What if the answer for the US is not chasing supremacy, but "alliances of convenience"? (2,800 words)

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Don’t Close Your Teeth

Cynthia Zarin | Los Angeles Review Of Books | 17th November 2025

Virginia Woolf's diaries, begun in 1897 and ending just before her death in 1941, are a record of her life but also of fascism's rise in Europe. In 1934, she reads the news of extrajudicial killings in Germany like "an act in a play". The following year, the Woolfs visit Germany and she sees swastikas everywhere; back home, a man shouts abuse in German under her Jewish husband's bedroom window (3,300 words)

The Penicillin Myth

Kevin Blake | Asimov Press | 24th November 2025

Alexander Fleming claimed his discovery of penicillin was by chance. Was it? The story is similar to his earlier discovery of another antibacterial substance, which also involved lucky contamination from an open window. His notebook has an entry dated two months after when he claimed to have discovered the culture plate. For years, scientists have tried to replicate his original discovery. All have failed (7,000 words)

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The Dangerous Rise Of Buddhist Extremism

Sonia Faleiro | Guardian | 25th November 2025

Across Asia, Buddhism is being weaponised by charismatic monks to promote sectarian hatred. One such monk is Gnanasara, whose inflammatory speeches vilify Muslims in Sri Lanka, rousing mobs to loot and torch homes, shops and mosques. Now the hostility is shifting to Christians. Gnanasara once told the press that it was his duty to act against any threat to Buddhism. “Attaining nirvana can wait” (5,700 words)

An Attempt At Exhausting A Place In Paris

Christopher Hawthorne | Punch List | 21st November 2025

Experiments in paying attention. The writer Georges Perec would sit in a plaza and “exhaust” it by naming everything in it, writing entries that read like an experimental poem. “I did feel, as I stood up to leave the square, a significantly sharpened sense of perception, not to mention a pleasing sort of mental calm. This might be a step toward building back up our atrophied powers of attention and observation” (2,000 words)

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In Praise Of Bibliomania

Ed Simon | Literary Hub | 24th November 2025

The desire to read can be sustained by a library card; coveting the book is its own beast. “When I have a little money, I buy books”, wrote Erasmus, “and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes”. Anke Gowda, an Indian sugar plant worker, acquired nearly two-million books. “Photos of his cramped house, where trenches have been made out of piles of books, make me simultaneously anxious and envious” (2,500 words)

The Realities Of Being A Pop Star

Charli XCX | Charli's Substack | 20th November 2025

The architect of "brat summer" has a newsletter. There are great things about being a pop star, she says — you get to wear earrings so valuable they have their own security guards and you can call in sick whenever you want. The less good aspects include the mockery of old friends and all the time spent in "strange and soulless liminal spaces". And the more successful you are, the more paranoid you become (1,800 words)

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Lol I’m Trying To Tell You How It Feels For Me

Harriet Armstrong | Granta | 21st November 2025

Towards a semiotics of the ubiquitous abbreviation "lol". It's short for "laughing out loud" but can mean something quite dark. "Like an exclamation mark, which adds something jovial and upbeat, ‘lol’ indicates that a sentence should be taken less seriously — but this often feels like a sort of mutually understood but unacknowledged mask. Often ‘lol’ conveys a near-explicit desperation to connect" (1,000 words)