"We Always Leave Things Unfinished"

Alexander Sorondo | Big Reader Bad Grades | 30th June 2026

Account of a morning with the writer William T. Vollmann. He doesn't have a cellphone or use the internet, and in the 1990s the FBI thought he might be the Unabomber. He has cancer and won't live much longer. His seven-novel sequence telling history of the North American continent will end at six books. But he's still writing, writing, writing: a 3,000-page novel, and a "short" 32,000-word report from Cuba (5,700 words)

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The Anxiety Of The Perfect Loaf

Josh Izaac | 22nd June 2026

Cooks today are "paralysed by precision" because recipes include exact quantities of ingredients to use. They didn't always; until the 19C, culinary instructions were much looser and relied on the cook's past experience. This control is an illusion. "The kitchen is a biological environment. Cooking is a deeply personal experience, and culinary precision is no replacement for intuition" (2,100 words)

My Journey Inside The World Of LARPing

Jason Koebler | 404 Media | 30th June 2026

Blogger goes undercover as a “hustlebro”, influencers who claim to have become wildly rich by some hustle which they teach in an online course. The linchpin of the hustlebro fantasy is the “dashboard”, showing subscriber and revenue metrics. Like a nesting doll of fake schemes, this has led to the LARP influencer, who shows you how to create your course and will even make you a “dashboard” for a fee (3,100 words)

Today's full edition also featured: how to fight big AI, Jackass, Robinson Crusoe, Gilded Age photography, and the making of a mural. Try it for less than $1 a week.

The “Encrapification” Of The American Pint

David Pearlman | 26th March 2026

Check the ingredient list on your ice cream to see how much dairy it actually has. Many store-bought ice creams now are just a cornucopia of stabilisers and overrun (the volume of air added during churning). “If you’ve ever noticed that your ice cream now feels slightly ‘rubbery’ or doesn’t actually melt into a liquid, but rather stays in a foamy, gelatinous blob, you are experiencing the effects of over-stabilisation” (3,300 words)

“Dude, This Is A Gas Station”

Andrew Sullivan | The Weekly | 26th June 2026

The FIFA World Cup in America has provided an “unexpected, fresh burst of globalised joy”. “We forget too easily the multicultural miracle we have already achieved in this quarter of a millennium, and the loving, generous, bountiful culture that is still America at its core. If it takes a soccer tournament rather than a choreographed 250th Anniversary celebration to remind us of that, so be it” (1,500 words)

Puzzle: Play Nomido, the Browser’s daily word game.

When The Waiting Is Over

Heather Abel | Oldster | 29th June 2026

On longing before smartphones. “The place I’ve lived that I remember most wistfully is a place where I was always waiting. In the cabin I rented, I ate chickpeas from a can. There were no lights outside, no houses, just the mesa and a mountain. When I think about that time, I wonder how I bore such silence. No signals came toward me from the world, no news, no chatter. That person is a stranger to me now” (2,400 words)

What I Learned About Wealthy People

Elizabeth George | Use Your Wealth | 18th June 2026

Former private banker's observations on the ultra rich. The wealthy aren't necessarily better at managing money, they just have more of it. Most are investing in the same funds as the rest of us. More people have trust funds that you would expect. A lack of transparency about finances can ruin marriages and parent-child relationships at all levels, but millions of dollars really turbocharges the damage (2,200 words)

The Typography Of Whitehouse.Gov

Ari Zetkin | Fonts In Use | 26th June 2026

What we can learn about politics, taste and design from the evolution of the White House website. For instance: George W. Bush's second term version contained a dizzying array of typefaces (Arial, Georgia, Baskerville Old Face, Minion, Polonaise and Trebuchet). Trump post 2024, meanwhile, leans heavily on Instrument Serif and Instrument Sans, a blend of nostalgia and "quirky tech grotesk"(7,000 words)

The Message Of The Medium

Roger’s Bacon | Secretorum | 25th June 2026

Compilation of thoughts about the connection between visual experiments — or doodling — and the pre-modern tendency for animist polytheism. "One man’s mutant is another man’s god" and augmenting recognisable beings via painting, sculpture or storytelling was a key part of religious evolution. Then human society became literate and thus more literal. A distant, monotheistic, faceless God took over (4,700 words)

Museums And Megastructures

Joe Day | Places Journal | 24th June 2026

Architecture review of three new museums in Los Angeles. Did the city need them? Probably not, but they have been done well, nevertheless. "The Academy delivers as promised (and didn’t over-promise). The Lucas takes the biggest risks, some of debatable urgency but laudable daring. And LACMA is a project for the ages, unless, somehow, its environs evolve to defy its masterful sight lines" (6,600 words)

The 100 Greatest Songs Of The 1960s

Paste | 19th June 2026 | U

Refreshingly original list, made more so by the requirement to choose only one song per artist (as per the headnote, this prevents it being "40% Beatles"). Broken up into three pages, so be sure to explore numbers 50-11 and 10-1 as well. There are plenty of well-known favourites here by big-time stars, as well as appearances by the likes of Jackie Shane, Doris Troy and Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band (19,500 words)

Puzzle: Play Nomido, the Browser’s daily word game.

The Big Lebowskization Of California

Joe Mathews | Zócalo Public Square | 23rd June 2026 | U

Californians think of themselves as "young and diverse and hip", but they have more in common with the protagonist of the 1998 cult film The Big Lebowski, who is "an aging, bowling, cocktail-drinking, Creedence-loving, underemployed stoner". This condition, known as "Lebowskization", is "spreading faster than Ebola". Unemployment, marijuana usage and alcohol consumption are all up state-wide (1,100 words)

How Not To Forget What Matters

Henrik & Johanna Karlsson | Escaping Flatland | 22nd June 2026

To offset “stultitia” or “the tendency to lose track of what matters in the cacophony of things that attract our attention”, the Romans had a notetaking system called hypomnēmata. The writer would store quotes from books. Each day, they would open their notebook and look for a passage relevant to what they were struggling with, and meditate on it. Over time, insight becomes character (3,100 words)

Today's full Browser also featured the geopolitics of fertiliser, military earplugs, and the colours that screens can't capture. Have more ideas everyday with the full Browser.

Writers And Substance Abuse

Rosa Montero & Lindsey Ford | Literary Hub | 4th June 2026

Voltaire drank fifty coffees a day. Nietzsche was addicted to chloral hydrate. Opium was popular with Shelley, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, De Quincey and Coleridge. Freud and R.L. Stevenson used cocaine. Truman Capote took barbiturates and Philip Dick took amphetamines. But the number of writers who were alcoholics is legion. “Alcohol is the great plague of writers, especially during the 20th century” (2,200 words)

The Forgotten Castles Of The Garamantes

Giulio Aprin | Wild Man Life | 4th May 2026

The Garamantes, an ancient Berber civilisation that flourished for nearly 16 centuries from 900 BC to 700 CE, went unremarked until satellite images showed the ruins of a hidden empire in a remote part of the Libyan Sahara. They were able to sustain entire cities in the unforgiving desert by digging subterranean channels called foggaras to mine fossil water sealed in aquifers from the time of a green Sahara (3,100 words)

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The Butlerian Jihad Has Begun

Charles McBryde | Syndekit | 29th May 2026

The growing anti-AI movement often references the Butlerian Jihad, coined by Frank Herbert in Dune as “a moment in the distant past — our future — when humans rose up and destroyed the ‘thinking machines’”. But popular discourse misreads the term, which is “not a parable about technology, but about domination”. “A properly conceived Butlerian Jihad must target technocracy, not technology” (3,100 words)

The Cult Of The Enhanced Self

Derek Thompson | 18th June 2026

Biometric technology, packaged as fitness watches and rings, means that human health has never been so measurable. This personal awareness has ushered in a new era of completely individual self-improvement. Unlike in the past, there is no community or structural element to the desire to raise your sleep score. In fact, getting stuck in the feedback loop of data can cause withdrawal from relationships (3,800 words)

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How To Earn A Billion Dollars

Paul Graham | 14th June 2026

Text of a talk given by a Y Combinator co-founder at the Oxford Union on how to become a billionaire. It's simple, in a way: create something people don't know they need, and then keep growing the business for a long time. The best startup ideas, counterintuitively, come when you aren't looking for them. The winners "tend to sound so lame, at first". Stick at it and keep making your customers happy (2,300 words)

The full Browser recommends five articles, a video and a podcast. Today, enjoy our audio and video picks.

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Podcast: Why Tomatoes Are The Most Expensive They've Been In Four Decades | Odd Lots. Procurement expert from an American food distributor explains how the US's geopolitical position is causing the price of fresh produce, especially tomatoes, to spike (54m 55s)

Video: Echoes | Vimeo | Robinson Drossos | 7m 20s

An adventure about the world that lies beneath a mundane, urban cityscape, full of strange and wondrous shapes and sounds.

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