Audio: Ronan Farrow On Elon Musk | New Yorker. Ronan Farrow enlarges on his story in this week's New Yorker about Elon Musk's emergence as an essential yet unaccountable part of American governance. Musk stands athwart the green transition, the space race, the war in Ukraine. Yes, he is some sort of wayward genius. But should any private person possess such power? (32m 43s)

Video: Happiness | Steve Cutts | Vimeo | 4m 15s

Funny, touching, sad animation about the rat race as lived by rats. Previously recommended on The Browser in 2017, but such a classic that I will risk recommending it again. The soundtrack is L’Amour Est Un Oiseau Rebelle from Bizet's Carmen. Cutts on Cutts: “I grew up looking at artists like Robert Crumb and Gary Larson, so I’m sure there’s some of their influence in there somewhere. I tend to view the world in a kind in slightly abstract terms and often see humor in dark situations"

Eugene Debs Really Loved Bicycles

Eugene Debs | Jacobin | 17th August 2023

In 1895, the US trade unionist had high hopes for the socialist potential of cycling. "The bicycle, not the medical profession, will triumph over disease. The wheel is on the trail of Consumption and will overtake and vanquish the remorseless destroyer. Men and women and children will all ride the bicycle and the enrapturing panorama of nature will no longer be forbidden glories" (335 words)

Next Slide, Please

Claire L. Evans | MIT Technology Review | 11th August 2023

History of the corporate presentation. The first audio-visual slideshow at a sales meeting occurred in 1948. It created an entire industry of slide projector specialists. Then came the 1984 revolution: Microsoft Powerpoint. Its instigator didn't stick around to see it become the "shorthand for the stupefying indignities of office life". He retired and became expert in antique concertinas (2,800 words)

My Kendom For A Horse

Lawrence Freedman | Comment Is Freed | 6th August 2023

Barbie, a strategic analysis. Why does the revolution of the Kens collapse, allowing the Barbies to restore their matriarchy so easily? Not because of hard power. Neither coup is violent. Ideology is the decisive factor. "Ken does not understand the patriarchy. He believes it has something to do with horses. The Barbies understand the matriarchy because they have lived it before" (1,500 words)

That 1980s Bowling Alley Smell

Jason Diamond | The Melt | 25th August 2023

Why don't ice rinks, and bowling alleys, and everything else, smell the way they used to when "we" (read "people turning 50") were kids? Is it just the lack of struck matches and cigarette smoke? Are different chemicals used for cleaning the ice and waxing the lanes? Or do our memories mislead us, insisting that the world of youth smelt (and felt) richer and stranger than the world of middle age? (1,580 words)

Every Strand Of Thread

Ben Harper | Boring Like A Drill | 4th August 2023

Recommended for beauty of language. Music for detuned violin is not my bag, but the descriptions here are pure poetry. Lisa Streich’s Falter is "made out of feathery arpeggios occasionally anchored by a barking low note"; Soosan Lolavar’s Every Strand Of Thread is "a rough and hairy piece even in its most delicate sections, modulated by guttural buzzing, thickened timbre and faint rattles" (630 words)

From The Browser Eleven Years Ago

Chicks Dig The Uniform

Maria Farrell | Crooked Timber | 26 August 2012

What it's like being married to a soldier when the soldier goes off to war and when the soldier comes home again. Both are stressful in their different ways. "The army has actually created a Powerpoint slide to illustrate the highs and lows of the soldier’s return, from, ahem, the first moments of joyful reunion to the inevitable and explosive fight that comes between 36 and 48 hours later" (1,800 words)

Readers in New York are invited to join The Browser for a free Parakeet Safari on Saturday, September 16th. RSVP here. To learn more about Brooklyn's wild parakeets, listen to the episode on The Last Archive here.

Always Lie To Election Pollsters

Igor Tulchinsky & Christopher E. Mason | Big Think | 23rd August 2023

The headline is an exaggeration, but the thesis is interesting. Political polling can create a sense of momentum and narrative that makes an election seem decided long before citizens actually vote. We don't govern nations via opinion poll, but we do let them influence our elections. Refusing to take part in a poll, it is argued here, destabilises its prediction and thus strengthens democracy (1,400 words)

The Early History Of Counting

Keith Houston | Lapham's Quarterly | 23rd August 2023

Humans started counting at least 40,000 years ago, around 35,000 years before we started writing. This is shown by a baboon fibula found in South Africa that bears 29 notches made by different tools over time. We may never know what its maker was counting, but this tally stick shows maths moving from fingers to tools. "No invention is simpler and yet more significant than this" (2,160 words)

The Experimental Light Station

Horatio Morpurgo | London Magazine | 22nd August 2023

On the career of Arthur Moss, brilliant lepidopterist and somewhat less brilliant vicar of the largest Anglican parish in the world — the Amazon basin. "He saw silk-moths with astonishing clarity and painted them superbly. This was a fine achievement. Was it perhaps their beauty that blinded him? He chose not to see anything which might threaten his agreeable way of life" (2,660 words)

Artists Have Forgotten How To Draw

Alexander Poots | UnHerd | 18th August 2023

Art schools have moved away from the kind of education that Michelangelo's students would have recognised: copying others' work until you "charm the cheating eye into submission and learn to really see". Access to human life models must be earned. Van Gogh compared it to giving birth: "First pain, then joy afterwards". It is still worth doing. Drawing like this is compulsive (1,760 words)

Should We Colonise Other Planets?

Philip Ball | Guardian | 21st August 2023

Probably not. There is a "dismaying irrationality" in popular answers to this question. Aiming to dwell on a planet that lacks what we need to survive seems futile. The timescales for escaping climate change by heading into space don't work: Mars won't be ready for us for at least a century, if ever. The only honest justification for planetary settlement is "because it would be cool" (1,080 words)

Semesters For Adults

Allie Volpe | Vox | 21st August 2023

On the benefits of organising life by the academic calendar, long after you have left full-time education. Prioritising a new skill for about 16 weeks — the length of a semester at a US college — makes the goal specific and provides an automatic "assessment" point to check if the desired progress is being made. Plus, it's always good to build in the expectation of a long summer vacation (1,650 words)

All The Kitchen’s A Stage

Jaya Saxena | Eater | 5th June 2023

Chefs, like actors, now have to put on a show for their public. The open-kitchen concept pioneered by Wolfgang Puck has infiltrated all levels of the restaurant industry. No longer is it only short-order cooks at fast food outlets and street stalls who fry in front of the customers. A view of the chef at work amid his burners has become an expected part of fine dining across America (1,720 words)

Buy Me A Chair

Paul Musgrave | Systematic Hatreds | 15th August 2023

The perfect gift for a bookish friend: Their name on a university professorship. You can find the prices online, and, as a form of immortality, these naming rights seem quite cheap. UCLA wants $5m for "an endowed chair that creates a new position", $2m for a chair that "supplements an existing position". Duke asks $3.5m for a full chair, $2m for a head coach "other than football or basketball” (1,200 words)

AI And Aesthetic Judgement

Jessica Hulman et al | Northwestern | 17th August 2023

Three respected scholars argue that AI resembles art more than technology in its capacity to disturb our sensibilities. Current calls to curb AI recall Plato's ancient call for a ban on poetry, lest poets' fictitious accounts of the world might "morally corrupt those who took them to heart, as if art could influence lives like alcohol or industrial technology or political propaganda or weapons of war" (13,000 words)

Bride Of Bay Area House Party

Scott Alexander | Astral Codex Ten | 17th August 2023

Fads and fashions in the Bay Area aggregated and satirised, including some that Scott just made up (I think). In this latest mix: Land-acknowledgement Alexas, reverse-engineered reality shows, eating like Nero, anti-subscriptions, Golden-Bough gurus, inclusivity monitors, repugnant houses, Lindyness testing. "Taleb was too antifragile to die. Killing him just makes him stronger" (2,900 words)  

The Woman Behind Borges

Alejandro Chacoff | The Dial | 1st August 2023

Jorge Luis Borges had just two months to live when he married his secretary and collaborator Maria Kodama in 1986. He died that year aged 86; she died this year, also aged 86, after almost four decades as sole heir and executor of Borges's estate. Obsessive and litigious, Kodama believed that she alone understood Borges's work, and she assumed "medium-like airs" when she spoke of him (3,400 words)

Joys And Pains Of Insects

Lars Chittka | Scientific American | 1st July 2023

Bees can count, grasp concepts of sameness and difference, and learn complex tasks by observing others; they appear to experience pleasure and pain. Wasps can recognise other wasps' faces. Ants will help other ants in trouble. Flies can be fooled by virtual reality. It may be time to recalibrate our ideas of insecthood: "It seems that some species of insects, maybe all of them, are sentient" (3,400 words)

The Jester Of Tonga

Maximilian Hess | Fence | 5th August 2023

Giving new meaning to the term "funny money", the late King of Tonga appointed a court jester who doubled as head of the Pacific island's sovereign wealth fund. An unusual skill-set was indicated: The fund-managing fool was "a proponent of orthopaedic magnetism, star financier, solar installation salesman, spiritual explorer, alleged fraudster, Buddhist devotee and saxophonist" (1,300 words)

From Middle East To West Asia

Chas Freeman | Responsible Statecraft | 15th August 2023

How the countries and peoples of the Middle East see and describe themselves. The term "Middle East" is falling out of favour in the region owing to its Western-colonial origins. "West Asia" is gaining ground. Peoples who once identified with pan-Arabism, Baathism, Judaism, Sunni and Shiite Islam and other transnational movements now identify primarily as citizens of nation-states (5,500 words)

Curse Of Cane

David Edgerton | Literary Review | 9th August 2023

Glowing review of a new history of sugar. The author captures the contradictions of a commodity that both helps and harms. "He shows that we could always have done without sugar and today could have all the sweetness we want without it. Yet many of the poorest people in the world depend on it to make a meagre living and to make more bearable the sour realities of everyday life" (1,210 words)

Lost Water

Ursula Lindsey | Places Journal | 15th August 2023

Amman, the capital of Jordan, is running out of water. The supply is intermittent, with many residents receiving a week's provision in 24 hours to be stored in roof cisterns until needed. The country is largely desert and its neighbours — Syria and Israel — have used dams to siphon off most of the contents of its two rivers. The underground aquifers are depleted. The rainy season is short (9,000 words)