The Invention Of The Polygraph

Amit Katwala | CrimeReads | 8th March 2023

Extract from a new book about the lie detector. Gus Vollmer, 1920s police chief in Berkeley, California, sought to prove Daniel Defoe's idea that "there is a tremor in the blood of a thief". Vollmer had a subordinate create "a Frankenstein device" that measured a subject's blood pressure and breathing rate. Then he tested it on the officer that built it — who had been slacking off on duty (3,284 words)

What Plants Are Saying About Us

Amanda Gefter | Nautilus | 7th March 2023

Are plants intelligent? They can distinguish between the self and others, communicate with those around them, and interact with their environment in a way that can seem "cognitive". And yet they have nothing we could identify as a brain. The researcher interviewed here argues that accepting plant intelligence requires a new conception of human intelligence, too (5,069 words)

Interview: Kevin Kelly

Noah Smith | Noahpinion | 7th March 2023

Conversation with the "prophet of the tech world". Interesting throughout. It covers: the benefits of optimism, why it's always best to delete the first page of anything you write, the pitfalls of evaluating a technology based on its use in just one culture, why futurism fails all the time, and the concept of "the technium" — all of human-made technology as one interconnected system (7,618 words)

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In For A Pound

Hugh Morris | VAN | 2nd March 2023

Review of the Royal Opera House's £1 ticket, which allows young people to stand at the back of the top tier for selected performances. The cheap entry means that "everything else gets a price tag, with fluorescent exclamation marks, flashing constantly". Nothing in the bar is as affordable as the ticket. The music is clearly not optimised for those standing so far back. Should it be? (2,336 words)

On Novocain

Michael Clune | Paris Review | 6th March 2023

Recovering addict, having been clean for 17 years, is prescribed opiates for a dental procedure. The presence of drugs in his life puts him into the grip of what he terms the "Pain Medication Paradox". Should addicts be denied pain relief, because it increases the chance of relapse and, ultimately, death, even though to make people suffer when an easy solution exists seems horribly inhumane? (2,634 words)

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Sainsbury's Packaged A Nation’s Dreams

Ruby Tandoh | Vittles | 6th March 2023

When the British grocery chain Sainsbury's switched in 1950 from old-fashioned counter service to the "less theatrically deferential way of selling food" that persists today, design suddenly became a crucial part of shopping. It was no longer enough for food to be packed safely, it needed to be packaged cleverly to feed the consumer's aspirations of fresh food and a fresh start after WW2 (2,580 words)

Interview With Colonel Oleh Shevchuk

Olha Kyrylenko & Dmytro Larin | War Translated | 1st March 2023

Jaw-dropping throughout. How Ukraine's army leveraged social media against Russia's invasion. "We called civilians and asked: 'Do you see this section of road? If a shell hits in a minute and a half, can you tell us roughly where it exploded?' The person would describe the place of the explosion, we would open a Google map and see: Yes, there is such a place behind the vegetable garden" (5,700 words)

When Ian Fleming Finally Started Writing

John Higgs | CrimeReads | 8th February 2023

It took Fleming five years to start work on the first James Bond novel. It was his misery at impending marriage to his long-time paramour Ann that finally did it. A BDSM-based affair was all to the good, but commitment demanded "a level of emotional maturity which he did not possess". He escaped into 007, a man whose girlfriends rarely survived the novel in which he seduced them (2,673 words)

A Claxonomy Of Mexico City

Lachlan Summers | Allegra Lab | 2nd March 2023

Just when I was starting to think there was nothing new that was true, and nothing true that was new, here out of blue sky comes a wonderful piece of writing on a subject that had only a genius would have recognised as a possible subject in the first place, namely, a taxonomy of car-honking in Mexico City. The mere existence of this piece is a marvel, the reading of it sheer pleasure (2,600 words)

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The End Of Gravity’s Rainbow

Ted Gioia | Honest Broker | 1st March 2023

The fifty years between Ulysses and Gravity's Rainbow were The Age Of Difficulty in fiction. Critics and readers demanded "a certain degree of hardship" from great works. Gravity's Rainbow was the ultimate test: "Once you entered, there were no guarantees you would ever emerge". You never quite knew what the book was even about. The explanation was always "just around the corner" (1,400 words)

Loneliness Reshapes the Brain

Marta Zaraska | Quanta | 28th February 2023

The feeling of loneliness may well be "an evolved adaptation, similar to hunger". Brain scans support this similarity, and suggest that if loneliness persists too long parts of the brain may actually shrink from lack of use. Research suggests that loneliness is "unpleasant but not necessarily negative" — unless it becomes a constant state. Magic mushrooms are one possible treatment (2,378 words)

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Can We Make Bicycles Sustainable Again?

Kris De Decker | Low-Tech Magazine | 28th February 2023

Cycling is environmentally friendly, but the modern manufacture of bicycles is far from sustainable. The US only makes 60,000 bikes a year; the vast majority are manufactured in Asia and shipped around the world. Bikes are also not necessarily made to last or to be easily repairable. A locally-made bicycle that lasts a lifetime with repairs should be the norm, but isn't (4,895 words)

Oberammergau’s Broken Vow

Joy Clarkson | Plough | 23rd February 2023

Theologian reviews the famous Passionsspiele Oberammergau, which has been performed roughly once a decade since 1634. The script was finally rewritten in 1990, in part to expunge some "anti-Semitic overtones". It remains "astonishing", but its emotional impact has been blunted. "What seemed strange to me was an unwillingness to call the story what it is: deeply depressing" (2,849 words)

Black Swans

Harmony Holiday | Black Music And Black Muses | 27th February 2023

Lyrical tribute to Nina Simone, "who wanted to be a concert pianist and ended up a diva". "She was obstinate and delicate at the same time and seemed to always and never get her way. She mastered devastations’s hymn and devastation’s exuberance. Her singing ranged from limber flutter to the blunted acridity of moaning to gain momentum for a scream that never comes" (1,286 words)

Jeff Koons Goes To The Moon

Daniel Riley | GQ | 23rd February 2023

Well-rounded profile of Jeff Koons incorporating all of the reservations any reasonable person might have about his art-works and his business model, while still finding time for the qualities — candour, consistency, optimism, resilience, perfectionism — which have made him America's most successful living artist. Which you don't get to be without having some kind of genius (6,700 words)

From The Perspectives Of Objects

Ceridwen Dovey | Sydney Review Of Books | 20th February 2023

Children's fiction is full of inanimate narrators, yet adult fiction rarely experiments with this trope. Why not? Partly because "the spectre of ridiculousness" haunts any such attempt. But research reveals this to be an idea of good pedigree (John Berger, Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges all approved). Perhaps your next novel will be narrated by the toaster, rather than the toaster's owner (4,900 words)

Dreaming In More Than One Language

Sophie Hardach | BBC Future | 17th February 2023

Inconclusive but intriguing. Anecdotal evidence suggests that people who speak more than one language tend to mingle languages in their dreams, to encounter fragments of other languages while dreaming, and even to create new fantasy-languages within dreams. Could it be that the brain uses dreams to explore how languages work, and how known languages might be connected? (2,700 words)

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Flesh And Page

Bruce Holsinger | Lapham's Quarterly | 22nd February 2023

How to make parchment. First, skin your goats. Next, set aside a couple of weeks to soak, lime, dehair and scrape the hides. Expect to work mainly by trial and error. Surviving recipes from antiquity are hopelessly inexact. Medieval ones are little better, more like schematic accounts than concrete instructions. The trickiest bit is the final scraping which gives the parchment its texture (2,800 words)

Introduction to The Communist Manifesto

Tariq Ali | Verso | 21st February 2023

To mark the 175th anniversary of Marx and Engels' work, Ali looks again at it. History vindicates "very few" of its predictions about the future of capitalism, and it contains no blueprint for the communist society that might follow a successful revolution. Its "strength lay in its broad sweep, a call to transform the world," and after the Russian Revolution, everybody wanted to read it (2,976 words)

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The Merchant, the Marriage, and the Treaty Port

Jessa Dahl | Not Even Past | 17th February 2023

Reassessing Ōura Kei, a prominent 19C Japanese businesswoman, one of Nagasaki’s most famous residents, and an early exporter of green tea. But recently discovered documents show she also helped to arrange marriages between very young Japanese girls and much older Chinese men, showing that she was "not only a victim, but also an enabler of unequal power relations" (3,066 words)

Wide Awake During My Brain Surgery

Harry Forestell | CBC | 20th February 2023

Gripping account of a six-hour session of "deep brain stimulation", written by the patient. "There was no feeling to it as the brain has no pain sensors. But as the probes slid into place, there were tell-tale signs that gave away what was happening — most commonly a tingling feeling in an arm or leg — as the surgeons carefully threaded the electrodes through my brain" (1,880 words)

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For The Love Of Losing

Marina Benjamin | Granta | 9th February 2023

Memoir of a former professional gambler. When you're playing for eight, ten hours a day, losing starts to feel better than winning. "In losing there can be tremendous relief, even rebirth, in that only once you have lost everything can you walk away... Winning is far more problematic, because there is responsibility in the win – what to do with all that money! It’s the opposite of release" (4,683 words)