The Third Magic

Noah Smith | Noahpinion | 1st January 2023

Brad DeLong calls this piece "better than anything I read in all 2022". The three "magics" discussed here are (i) writing, broadly defined to mean all ways to record information; (ii) science, broadly defined to include the scientific method, mathematics, logic and reason; (iii) the capacity to control and predict events, now emerging from the confluence of computation, big data and AI (3,580 words)

Mussolini In Public And Private Life

Andrea Bajani | Literary Hub | 5th January 2023

Let's say you were a young girl in Italy in the 1920s when Mussolini seemed strong, exciting, full of possibilities. You went to his rallies. You cheered his speeches. You made him Mussolini. But you never hurt a fly. Time passes. Now you are older, much older, in the Italy of the 1990s. Any regrets? Any feelings of guilt? What were you hoping for all those years ago? What is your share of fascism? (2,900 words)

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Living With Wolves

Nikki Kolb | Catapult | 3rd January 2023

Account of months spent at a remote wolf sanctuary. "On only my second day caring for him alone, he nipped me in the stomach, breaking skin. The mark was miniscule. I was nonetheless mortified. What business did I have here, a city girl who was scared of the dark, worn out by the basic terrain, unable to build a fire, and not even savvy enough to avoid the bite of an ancient wolf dog?" (3,410 words)

Strontian To Laga Bay

Jon Combe | Round The Island | 3rd January 2023

Notes from a walk along a Scottish sea loch, part of an attempt to walk the entire coast of mainland Britain. This section is on the Ardnamurchan peninsula in the western Highlands. The walker visits the village where the chemical element strontium was discovered in 1790, navigates the boundaries between public and private property, and shows great care for some uncaring ducks (2,921 words)

James Patterson's Daily Routine

Clay Skipper | GQ | 3rd January 2023

Interview with the prolific author, who claims to have 31 book projects active at one time. He works with a "stable of co-writers", does about 11 hours of reading and writing a day, and works seven days a week, with interludes for golf. He writes longhand and then an assistant types his manuscripts. His explanation for why he exists like this, at the age of 75? "I've always been a hungry dog" (2,075 words)

The Truffle Industry Is A Scam

Matt Babich | Taste Atlas | 24th December 2022

Few foods that taste of truffle contain the gourmet fungi itself. The organsulfur compound 2,4-dithiapentane naturally occurs in truffles but is almost impossible to extract, although it can be cheaply derived from petroleum. You may not know what truffle tastes like; the familiar flavour is probably the synthetic version. Some restaurants even grate tasteless tubers over dishes to aid the illusion (2,049 words)

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What It's Like To Dissect A Cadaver

Alok Singh | Every Man A Debtor | 9th November 2022

Observations recorded after taking an open access dissection class. Exposing veins, arteries and nerves takes a surprising amount of physical effort and is best done with the hands. Cancer can turn guts a bright mouldy green. Human fat is extremely greasy. The intestines look like damp cardboard but are dry to the touch. Lifting a face off a skull is, as one might assume, "extra uncanny" (1,447 words)

How To Speak Honeybee

Karen Bakker | Noema | 2nd November 2022

Bees communicate mainly by dance, but they also have a vocabulary of sounds and vibrations. They have excellent eyesight and can recognise faces. They can rob and cheat. They get happy and sad. When a swarm needs to split or move on, the bees will argue and vote about where to go next. To better observe them, humans are now building a bee-sized robot which will pass as a bee among bees (4,700 words)

How To Be Influenced

Ian Leslie | The Ruffian | 23rd July 2022

In a world of online influencers we are all going to be influenced. "For almost every decision we have to take, bidders line up to take the contract". The trick lies in turning this to your advantage. "Be impervious to social influence and you get closed off from the best that your fellow humans have to offer. Be defenceless against it and you become manipulable, boring, and unhappy" (2,800 words)

Art, Mourning, Remembrance

Hayley Campbell | Literary Hub | 24th August 2022

Conversation with Nick Reynolds, Britain's only sculptor of death masks, whose subjects have included Peter O'Toole, Malcolm McLaren, Ronnie Biggs, William Rees-Mogg — and his own father, Bruce Reynolds, who masterminded the Great Train Robbery. "When you die, you look amazing. All tension is released from your face. Ideally, I would get to them while they were still warm” (3,500 words)

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Own-Goal Football

Generalist Academy | 7th June 2022

How a glitch in tournament rules left Barbados and Grenada competing to score own-goals in a Caribbean Football Cup tie. No match could end in a draw; goals scored in extra time counted double; Barbados had to win by at least two goals to go through to the next round, otherwise Grenada would go through. As full-time approached, Barbados was one goal ahead. Now do the game theory (660 words)

Seven Stowaways And A Hijacked Oil Tanker

Samira Shackle | Guardian | 9th June 2022

Real life thriller at sea. In October 2020, UK ministers praised a naval operation that prevented the hijacking of an oil tanker by seven Nigerian stowaways. This investigation tells another story, of men risking their lives to escape gang violence and a ship's crew that tried to help them despite restrictive maritime laws. Was the "hijacking" in fact staged to get the stowaways safely to land? (5,890 words)

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Every Vending Machine In The World

Tom Lamont | Guardian | 14th April 2022

As Moby-Dick is to whales, so this excursus is to vending machines — immense, immersive, inspired. Prepare to be gripped by a social and economic history of vending machines from their origins in mid-19C England to their ubiquity in 21C Japan, where there is one vending machine for every 46 people. "In Nagasaki, there is a machine that sells the edible chrysalises of silkworms" (6,500 words)

Notes From The Underground

Zack Graham | Astra | 6th April 2022

Ode to raving. The writer started off in the shallow end of the scene, but is quickly drawn into its more radical depths. In Europe's Freetekno scene, he finds people who are so committed to the escapism that they have dropped out of society all together. Post Covid, he joins a reunion party in a remote Austrian forest clearing. The blissed out dancers are guarded from police by dogs (2,740 words)

First Rites

Anna Della Subin | Granta | 6th January 2022

On the history of men and women acclaimed in their lifetimes as gods, from Adam in the Garden of Eden, and Demetrius Poliorcetes in the Athens of 307BC, to Jesus and his apostles; by way of Lysander the Spartan general, Epicurus the materialist philosopher, Antinous the lover of Hadrian, and Tullia the daughter of Cicero. Julius Caesar accepted deification, Augustus declined the honour (2,400 words)

On ‘Plant-Based’

Alicia Kennedy | From The Desk Of Alicia Kennedy | 31st January 2022

The term "plant-based", when used to describe a diet free of animal products, can raise the hackles of vegans who prefer the "cultural baggage" that comes with their own label. But if it brings more people around to their way of thinking on meat, is it a bad thing? Yes, if its definition continues to be vague and blurry. Like the word "natural" before it, it can be stretched to the point of absurdity (1,171 words)

Picturing The Periodic Table

Philip Ball | Pioneer Works | 13th December 2022 | U

Our understanding of matter has changed almost beyond recognition since the mid-19th century. But the Periodic Table of the Elements, which purports to show in a logical schema the elements that make up all ordinary matter, has changed scarcely at all. It is out of date. It knows nothing of particle physics. It is full of contestable choices. Can we not agree on something better? (1,350 words)

The Political Economy Of Skiing

Adam Tooze | Chartbook | 17th December 2022

Roughly 1.5 percent of the world's population skis regularly. After a boom in skiing 30-50 years ago, the annual number of skier-days worldwide has plateaued at around 400 million, 43% of which are spent at Alpine resorts. Big corporations have been buying up the top US and European ski resorts and focusing on high-value customers. The price of downhill skiing has tripled since 2000 (2,050 words)

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Nietzsche's Tips For A Great Marriage

Skye Nettleton | Indo-Pacific Journal Of Phenomenology | 1st October 2009

Somewhat tongue in cheek marital advice assembled from Nietzsche's works. He believed that "love is a feeling; feelings are involuntary; and a promise cannot be made based on something that one has no control over. Instead of expecting such ephemeral feelings to form the basis of a long-term partnership, we should commit to actions that "are usually the consequences of love" (5,600 words)

The Perpetual Broths

Blair Mastbaum | Atlas Obscura | 15th December 2022

Both Chinese and French cuisines have the centuries-old tradition of keeping a pot of stock constantly simmering, adding ingredients as they come into season and using it as the base for all manner of dishes. Some "mother broths" in use today have been on the boil for decades, but legend tells of one in Perpignan that had been going since the 1400s; it was destroyed in a WW2 bombing raid (1,316 words)

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Lonely Surfaces

L. M. Sacasas | The Convivial Society | 10th December 2022

The most important thing about a technological development is not what it can do, but how it trains us to behave. Better AI images encourage us to look shallowly, as if skim reading, because these works do not reward close attention. This is not an existential problem for art unless "we find ourselves conditioned to never expect depth at all or unable to perceive it when we do encounter it" (3,699 word)

'There's No Such Thing As A Free Watch'

Jenny Odell | Bureau Of Suspended Objects | 18th August 2017 | PDF

Deep dive into the surprisingly twisted history of a single mass-produced object and what it can tell us about capitalism. Sold via a complex network of drop-shipping sites, the watch in question is a "physical witness" at the heart of a storm of deception. It is certainly the product of a scam, but is perhaps merely a more overt one than most of the objects we unthinkingly purchase (2,963 words)

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