We Have Our Ghosts

Elodie Olson-Coons | Guernica | 14th November 2022

Essay that braids together several disparate topics and themes, including the troubled history of the Alsace-Lorraine region — which was French and then German and then French again — as well as the destruction of Notre-Dame de Paris, the process of making a home, the death of a parent, and what happens afterwards. Sometimes, only a good bonfire can provide closure (3,364 words)

London’s Fatberg-Busters

Jessica Leigh Hester | Atlas Obscura | 3rd November 2022

Account of a night spent with a team that maintains London's 150-year-old sewer system. Fatbergs are the enemy: they smell worse than sewage and are harder to clear. "Some of it has a 'mashed-potato consistency'. Other fat is buttery, and so yielding that someone walking across it might find themselves sinking. Over time, it hardens until it is almost geological, solid as rock" (4,294 words)

BrowserBites explores a new idea each day, in under a minute. Join Uri Bram (Publisher of The Browser), Sebastian Park (@SebPark), and guests as they blitz through an idea in less time than it takes to brush your teeth.

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Browser Bites explore a new idea in under a minute. Join Uri Bram (Publisher of The Browser), Sebastian Park (@SebPark), and guests as they blitz through an idea in less time than it takes to brush your teeth.

True Colours Of Antiquity

Suzanna Murawski | New Criterion | 9th November 2022

Were ancient Greek and Roman statues generally displayed as bare white marble, or painted in stylised colours? James Fenton has argued for white. Chroma, at the Met, argues for colours, showing copies of the Met's classical statuary tricked out in antique pigments. These novelty versions confuse the modern eye. They appear "brand-new" and therefore "unreal". They are art, but not art history (1,300 words)

China’s Forbidden Treasures

Sun Jiahui | World Of Chinese | 10th November 2022

A brief history of the Forbidden City in Beijing, built in 1406 as an imperial palace. After the last Chinese emperor was deposed in 1911, the palace was turned into a museum, if not without cost. "Many eunuchs panicked, having long smuggled treasures from the palace and sold them to antique dealers. To cover their tracks they set the palace alight, destroying countless relics in the process" (1,300 words)

Biking's Greatest Uphill Achievement

Braydon Bringhurt | Bicycling | 3rd November 2022

Read the first sentences, and decide if you are minded to continue: "The trail begins at 10,000 feet in the La Sal Mountains, among the aspens of Burro Pass. After an uphill prelude it plunges 8,000 feet into the red-rock canyons near the Colorado River. It’s a feast with every Moab flavor: sculpted slickrock, cliff-edge single track, and descents that rattle the fillings out of your teeth" (7,400 words)

Author's Note

Robin Sloan | Trespassers | 10th November 2022

The unwalling of GPT-3, DALL-E and similar engines has unleashed a deluge of texts and images generated by humans exploiting AIs. Sloan, something of a veteran in both writing and computing, describes here his experience of working at Google's invitation to produce an AI-generated short story meeting the critical norms generally applied by humans to fiction. Not easy, apparently (1,125 words)

The Scent Of Flavour

Linda Bartoshuk | Inference Review | 8th November 2022

On the differences between taste, smell and flavour. Taste occurs when receptors on the tongue are stimulated, smell in the nose. Flavour combines the two. When we swallow, volatiles from the food are released up a conduit between the back of the mouth and the nose and processed there. Owing to traffic on the olfactory nerve, we cannot perceive smell and flavour at the same time (4,181 words)

Cafes And The Parisian Working Class

Robert W. Brown | Berfrois | 7th November 2022

Paris had 3,000 cafes in 1789 and around 42,000 a century later, at the peak of 19C cafe culture. Cafes acted as a "living room" for working class people. In the first half of the 20C, they were also a transitional space as workers moved from the "essentially public" style of living near the street created in the early modern period to the privacy and isolation of a high rise apartment building (1,884 words)

BrowserBites explores a new idea each day, in under a minute. Join Uri Bram (Publisher of The Browser), Sebastian Park (@SebPark), and guests as they blitz through an idea in less time than it takes to brush your teeth.

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At The Digital Doorstep

Aiha Nguyen & Eve Zelickson | Data & Society | 12th October 2022 | PDF

Thoughtful analysis of how home surveillance tech has changed our behaviour and the labour market. "In an ingenious way, Amazon has managed to transform what was once a labour cost (ie supervising work and asset protection) into a revenue stream through the sale of doorbell cameras and subscription services to residents who then perform the labour of securing their own doorstep" (13,517 words)

The Very Bacterial Caterpillar

Jennifer Frazer | Small Things Considered | 7th November 2022

Attention-grabbing from the opening line — "Glued to the inside of your mouth this very moment (there's a 50 per cent chance) may be plump bacter­ial caterpillars" — and further detail does not disappoint. These multicellular bacteria divide in an "unorthodox longitudinal configuration". Of course, unlike real caterpillars, they feed not on foliage but on the inside of our cheeks (1,490 words)

Dandelions And Elephants

Flux Collective | Lens Of The Week | 6th October 2022

Short and suggestive note on r/K selection theory, which locates all evolutionary strategy on a continuum between two poles: r-selection and K-selection. An r-selection strategy focuses on rapid replication: make copies of yourself as quickly as possible and have them mutate freely across generations. K-selection focuses on quality over quantity, fitting a population already at carrying capacity (375 words)

SoupGate

James Ozden | Understanding Social Change | 22nd October 2022

If one sees climate change as a clear and present danger to human flourishing, should one support climate activists who throw soup at (glass-protected) Van Gogh paintings? Probably yes. Average sympathy for a radical protest will be much lower than average sympathy for a moderate protest; but a radical protest will attract many times more eyeballs, and thus a greater aggregate of sympathy (1,400 words)

Five Ideas That Might Boost Growth

Tim Harford | 3rd November 2022

If you believe, as Tim Harford does, that "raising the rate of growth is an admirable goal for any politician", then the ideas and observations here, provoked by the counter-examples of the British government in recent weeks, merit attention. In brief: Don't cut taxes without cutting spending; don't cut spending if you care about the long term; focus spending on education and infrastructure (900 words)

It’s The Way That You Do It

Samuel Jay Keyser | Berfrois | 2nd November 2022

Can one distinguish between form and meaning in a poem? Does poetic form exist only to embellish thoughts that might otherwise be expressed in prose with no great loss of meaning, if perhaps with some great loss of elegance? That, I think, is Keyser's argument here. In any case, his experimental mixing of Wordsworth's Tables Turned with Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky is a joy to behold (2,100 words)

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The Vulnerable Internet

Matt Burgess | Wired | 2nd November 2022

Egypt is the epicentre of the world's internet. It is estimated that 17 per cent of online traffic travels via underwater cables that surface there. Other routes are either too expensive or go through war zones. This Egyptian "chokepoint" is highly vulnerable, as was shown earlier this year when two of these cables were severed and entire countries (Ethiopia and Somalia) lost connectivity (1,816 words)

A Locus Of Care

Justin E. H. Smith | Hinternet | 15th October 2022

Remembering the French philosopher Bruno Latour, best known for his work on the narrative consequences of scientific discovery. "Bruno Latour was honest and generous, and I don’t think there’s any question he took up that was not, for him, a true matter of concern. He was one of our era’s best guides between the eternal Scylla and Charybdis of dogmatism and scepticism" (2,919 words)

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A Feminist-Materialist Quest For Everlasting Life

Anne M. Thell | JHI Blog | 31st October 2022 | U

Margaret Cavendish, 17C writer and philosopher, spent much of her time (when she wasn't publishing the first science fiction in English or sparring with the Royal Society) pondering immortality. A favourite thought experiment was what she called "Restoring-Beds, or Wombs" — spongey sacks hidden in "the Centre of the World" that could restore any being placed inside to perfect health (2,065 words)

The Ghostly Radio Station No One Runs

Zaria Gorvett | BBC Future | 15th July 2020 | U

The radio station MDZhB has been broadcasting a 4625 kHz drone every day since 1976, occasionally interrupted by a voice reading words in Russian "such as 'dinghy' or 'farming specialist'". Fans call it "the Buzzer". Its purpose is unknown. The Russian military has never claimed it. Conspiracy theories abound, but it is probably just a placeholder, waiting to be used in a moment of crisis (2,244 words)

Amid War, Bat Rescue Continues

Wojciech Mikołuszko | Undark | 31st October 2022

The Ukrainian Bat Rehabilitation Centre lost all of its funding and some of its staff this year. They now rescue bats that are trapped in bombed out buildings. The Russian Ministry of Defence accused them of using the bats as bioweapons, but Ukrainians have stepped up to help, hosting hibernating bats in their homes when conservation facilities become inaccessible thanks to military activity (1,861 words)

On Spookiness

Eliza Brooke | Dirt | 19th October 2022

Why is "spooky" a fun and cosy aesthetic, whereas a "scary" atmosphere can give one nightmares? "Technically, spooky means ghostly or spectral, two words that relate to liminality. To me, spookiness is a suggestion... I suspect that spookiness is a lot like love, in that everyone experiences it in a way that seems so private, so specific, that they believe nobody else feels it quite as they do" (2,896 words)

from the Browser eight years ago: My Grandma The Poisoner

John Reed | Vice | 27th October 2014

Grandma is 94 now, and barely knows who or where she is. Clearing out her old house, and finding the chemicals in her shed, I start to understand why, when she was younger, people were always dying around her — her children, her husbands, her boyfriend. "I don’t wonder whether Grandma got what she deserved as a mother; I wonder whether she got what she deserved as a murderer" (4,025 words)

The Diaries Of Ned Rorem

Ted Gioia | Honest Broker | 23rd October 2022

The American composer Ned Rorem, who turned 99 this week, has been keeping one of the world's great diaries throughout his amazing life, and publishing it in tantalising fragments. His Paris Diaries came out in 1951: "Picasso shows up on page 2. On page 4 Rorem meets Jean Cocteau, and is painted by the Vicomtesse de Noailles, with whom he starts a love affair before we get to page 5" (2,980 words)