52 Things I Learned In 2022

Tom Whitwell | Magnetic Notes | 1st December 2022

Tom Whitwell's annual assemblage of unexpected facts and claims maintains its usual high standard. "A bolt of lightning contains about ¼ of a kilowatt-hour of power. Even with recent energy price rises, it’s only worth about 9 pence". "In the UK people tend to turn left when entering a building, in the US they turn right — important to remember if you are booking a trade show booth" (1,500 words)

J. Edgar Hoover: Head Of The State

Charles Trueheart | American Scholar | 1st December 2022

“There probably will never be anybody like Mr. Hoover again — nor should there be”, says Beverley Gage in her "subtle and discerning" new biography. Hoover turned the FBI into his private deep state, pandering to presidents while collecting "scandalous dossiers" on them. He died "just in time to avoid witnessing the public repudiation of his life’s work and the destruction of his reputation” (1,320 words)

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When You Can Taste Everything You See

Julia Skinner | Atlanta | 2nd November 2022

A food critic with synesthesia explains what it is like to navigate a world in which everything she sees has a flavour. A particular stretch of road "tastes" like blueberry pop rocks, while a nearby building's facade is "caramelly". Sometimes her sense associations produce surprisingly delicious invented recipes, but often not: chocolate cake with raw tomatoes was not a hit (967 words)

Two Conspiracy Theories About Cola

Dynomight | 20th October 2021

Debunking of two ideas about cola beverages. The first states that the classic cola recipe contains enough sugar to make the drinker vomit, but this effect is offset by an anti-nausea drug. The second claims that because Mexican coke is made from "pure sugar" rather than corn syrup, it is healthier. The evidence does not support either theory, and we shouldn't be drinking sugary drinks anyway (2,596 words)

Deconstructing Brian Eno's Music for Airports

Dan Carr | Reverb Machine | 11th July 2019

Analysis of Eno's landmark 1978 ambient album, which was a continuation of years of experimentation with the tape machine as an engine for composition. He focused on generative systems rather than melodies, creating loops of different lengths that keep interlocking in new ways as they repeat. There is a clever tool here that the reader can use to make their own piece in browser (1,722 words)

The Art World’s Catholic Problem

Daniel Larkin | Hyperallegenic | 27th November 2022

Relationships between major museums and the Catholic Church are too little critiqued. Mounting exhibitions of Old Masters is difficult without the full co-operation of the Vatican and other church collectors. "Why are we as art critics getting it wrong? Why does the Vatican get to play the ventriloquist, subtly but effectively influencing what we write and do not write?" (2,437 words)

Social Credit In China

Zeyi Yang | MIT Technology Review | 22nd November 2022

How China's "social credit" system works, as set down in a new national law. Officially it consists of two separate mechanisms — one for scoring people's financial creditworthiness and another for scoring their pro-social behaviour. Some local governments have been linking the two, threatening financial reprisals for anti-social behaviour. But this is not national policy ... Yet (2,700 words)

Building Fast And Slow

Brian Potter | Construction Physics | 23rd November 2022

Part one of a deep dive into why the Empire State Building was completed on time and within budget whereas the World Trade Center took for ever to build and cost the earth. The Empire State Building was designed with speed of construction paramount. Every possible component and process was an industry standard. Beauty was never on the spec sheet, somehow it just happened (3,900 words)

The Death Of Key Change

Chris Dalla Riva | Tedium | 9th November 2022

For 30 years or so until 1990 there was a pretty good chance that a Billboard hit single would be written in the key of C, and would feature a key-change in the final verse. But after 1990 something happened. Hit songs were being written in all keys equally; late key-changes had disappeared. Why so? By this analysis, it was hip-hop and computer software that changed the fundamentals (2,200 words)

How Many Yottabytes In A Quettabyte?

Elizabeth Gibney | Nature | 18th November 2022

World governments have agreed on new names for very big numbers. Ten to the power 27 is henceforth a ronna. Ten to the power 30 is a quetta. The last such update took place in 1991, when 10 to the power 24 was christened the yotta. But with the world's computers now expected to produce a yottabyte of data annually in the next decade, the yotta was starting to seem notta lotta (870 words)

When Lethal Weapons Grew On Trees

Kris De Decker | Low-Tech Magazine | 23rd November 2022

Comprehensive study of the bow and arrow, a technology that was once used on every continent other than Antarctica and Australia (where spear throwing dominated). The oldest bow ever found has been dated to between 6,500 and 7,000 BCE. A bow can be made out of any wood, but yew is best. If you ever need to manufacture one quickly, everything you need to know is here (5,785 words)

The Names Of All Manner Of Hounds

David Scott-Macnab | Viator | Fall 2013 | PDF

This paper about a hitherto unpublished 15C manuscript is free to download but requires email registration; the list of 1,065 names for hunting dogs it contains makes makes it very much worth the extra effort. Names include: Archebawde, Bragger, Eggetene, Halibutte, Joliboye, Knave, Litilman, Mery, Norman, Organ, Plodder, Quester, Sturdy, Thrifti, Veleyne and Wyseman (11,615 words)

The Toxic History Of Colour

Whitney Bauck | Atmos | 21st November 2022

Colour has always been deadly. The Romans sent slaves underground to mine the poisonous arsenic sulphur known as orpiment so they could make gold paint. In the Middle Ages, dyers were using realgar both as an orange pigment and as a rat poison. In the 1800s, synthetic colours were developed and lead to multicoloured environmental waste that, in some cases, still causes harm today (2,298 words)

The Library Of Alexandria And Its Reputation

Peter Gainsford | Kiwi Hellenist | 22nd November 2022

Was the burning of the Library of Alexandria as catastrophic an event as we think? Manuscript evidence suggests local copies of key texts were regularly made in the Hellenic world to avoid long journeys. This book trade long outlived one library. The library's reputation as a "magical irreplaceable repository of unique items" in large part dates back to Carl Sagan's 1980 TV series Cosmos (2,536 words)

Choice Reading

Denise Gigante | Lapham's Quarterly | 21st November 2022

New York in the 19C was so full of books and paper that readers felt "lost in a sea of print". The bibliomania exhibited by a pair of literary critic brothers, Evert and George Duyckinck, is a case in point. By the time of Evert's death in 1878, the family library had swelled to over 15,000 volumes of English and American literature — a number that few other private libraries could match (2,294 words)

Kickoff

Jonathan Wilson | Paris Review | 20th November 2022

World Cup curtain raiser. Everything about this tournament, played in Qatar's "balmy winter", feels absurd. "Spectators will emerge from their hotels and the 'Bedouin-style' tents pitched in the desert, or disembark from cruise ships berthed in the gulf, and enter the booze-free stadiums. The infinite air conditioning will hum... Will the crowd have enough lung capacity to overcome it?" (1,565 words)

Things Could Be Better

Adam Mastroianni | Experimental History | 15th November 2022

In which the author tests a conjecture and makes a discovery. The conjecture: All judgments are comparisons. If I say, X is good, I mean, I can easily think how X might be worse. Now for the discovery, and make of it what you will: When you ask people how X might be different, whether X is a banana or a bus service, 90% of people default to ways in which X might be better, not worse (3,800 words)  

Welcome To Your World Cup

Adam Susman | Howler | 18th November 2022

It may well be that, like me, you have no strong interest in soccer, and even a mild aversion to this particular World Cup. And yet, since you know that half humanity will be talking football for the next month, you would like to have at your disposal one or two lesser-known facts, perhaps a mildly provocative prediction, for tactical use in conversation. If so, then commit this piece to memory (6,100 words)

Grand Narratives

Brad DeLong | Grasping Reality | 17th November 2022

Having just published an economic history of the 20th century, DeLong offers draft notes towards a prequel at scale — an economic history of the world since the invention of agriculture 12,000 years ago. In brief: the Neolithic shift from hunter-gathering to settled farming doomed most humans to poverty and servitude, which remained the worker's lot until modernity came, belatedly, in 1870 (1,500 words)

Non-State Courts

Sarah Constantin | Rough Diamonds | 17th November 2022

Can a legal system function without state power at its back? Up to a point, and there are examples to prove it — in non-state polities such as Somaliland and medieval Iceland, and among non-state communities such as the Romani and the Amish. But non-state courts still require means of compelling obedience to their judgements: Ostracism is one such, ritualised violence is another (2,916 words)

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Sacred Feathers

Elizabeth Hlavinka | Atmos | 16th November 2022

Climate change is affecting the supply of feathers available to Native American tribes for ceremonial use. Different peoples require different feathers: canaries, hawks, woodpeckers, eagles and others are all venerated. Some feathers have been unavailable for decades, but now a specialised conservation group collects feathers from zoos and sanctuaries so that these rites can still be practised (2,345 words)

The Flat Era Of Fashion

Ana Kinsella | Dirt | 8th November 2022

Fashion is flat now. Clothes are both designed and worn to be viewed in two dimensions, as product photographs on a website and outfit pictures on social media. Eccentricity is out. Local context is disappearing, too: "Today it doesn’t matter where an influencer lives, because she dresses like she’s from the internet, and that’s all that counts." Everyone is now a walking advertisement (1,139 words)