Should Computers Decide Prices?

Colin Horgan | Walrus | 14th August 2023

In theory, personalised or algorithmically-determined pricing is better. By using consumer profiling data, prices should be more responsive to market forces, more efficiently determined, and tailored to individual buyers' means. In practice, increasingly collusion and an overwhelming motive to maximise seller profit at all times means that prices for goods online tend to go up, not down (1,380 words)

Catching Up On The Weird World Of LLMs

Simon Willison | 3rd August 2023

Text of a talk about large language models. Interesting throughout. These models, such as ChatGPT, are "unintuitively difficult to use". Knowing more about them, such as the date at which their training material ends, helps. So does putting in hours of trial and error. "Getting the best answers requires a lot of intuition — which I’m finding difficult to teach to other people" (9,960 words)

Paris Booksellers' Olympic Preparations

Jacqueline Feldman | Paris Review | 9th August 2023

A masterclass in grumpiness. The booksellers of Paris will not be joining in when their city hosts the 2024 Olympics. "I know that during the Olympic Games we will do strictly nothing other than what we’ve been doing for ninety years," says one bookseller. There are other problems to solve, another declares. "Literature, first of all... And then, well. Thought, imagination, reflection, beauty, love" (1,150 words)

Fleeting Encounters In Mrs Dalloway’s London

Luc Guillemot | Datawrapper | 10th August 2023

Virginia Woolf's 1925 novel, mapped. The exercise shows how precisely Woolf placed her characters on the streets between Westminster and Regent's Park. Seeing who goes where also reveals that Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith occupy entirely separate but adjacent regions of the city, with only one character, Sir William Bradshaw, crossing between them (930 words)

Waking-Up Times, In Order

Daniel Lavery | Chatner | 27th July 2023

Get up at 5am "for the novelty, if nothing else". Arising at 5.30am is inexplicable: "You are a doctor of some kind? You have, perhaps, very small children?" while 6am comes with issues; "My God, what time are you going to have lunch?" Virtue kicks in at 8.30am, as "you’re a man who likes his pleasure, but you know when to buckle down and begin the work." Anything after 9 is simply Too Late (815 words)

A River Runs Through It

Julia E. Ault | Central European History | 24th April 2023

Fascinating academic paper about the environmental and political history of the river Elbe in East Germany. During the GDR years, the water became heavily polluted from industry and failing infrastructure — a fact greatly resented by West German neighbours downstream. But even in the most restricted periods, the river still connected East Germans to the rest of Central Europe (8,730 words)

6,000 Miles Across New York City

William B. Helmreich | LitHub | 11th August 2023

Professor of sociology describes how he visited almost every block in New York's five boroughs on foot in order to better understand the city. He originally planned to visit "twenty representative streets", but soon found there was no such thing. Averaging 32 miles a week over four years, he wore out nine pairs of shoes and taped hundreds of conversations with the people he met (2,110 words)

Confessions Of Cancelled Priests

Suzy Weiss | Free Press | 8th August 2023

Dispatch from a conference held by "the Coalition for Cancelled Priests". These clerics have been banished by the Vatican not because of abuse allegations, but for "railing against homosexuality, abortion, IVF". They despise Pope Francis but cannot abandon his institution: "As much as they detest the state of the Church, the idea of leaving it is unthinkable". They want to get it back" (2,340 words)

A Living History Of The Paper Airplane

Sarah Wells & Jennifer Leman | Popular Mechanics | 9th August 2023

Paper planes have a surprisingly broad scientific application. They helped early engineers perfect designs for aircraft, but they are also used today by fluid dynamicists to understand aerodynamics, the nature of lift, and to improve drone capabilities. Launching paper planes from space no longer seems like an eccentric ambition; an astronaut has already volunteered to make the throw (2,425 words)

The World’s Largest Landowners

Madison Trust Company | 13th June 2023

Who owns the most land? Unsurprisingly, King Charles III and the British royal family tops this visualisation with a collection of property that amounts to one-sixth of the world's surface, including 90 per cent of land in Canada. The Catholic Church, multiple Australian sheep and cattle ranchers, a Chinese megafarm, a Russian forestry company and an Inuit people also appear on the list (1,140 words)

The Bullfighter Draws Her Sword

Geoffrey Gray | Alta | 27th March 2023

On the bullfighting career of a young, disaffected American. There was no history of fighting in her family so she learned the craft on the road in Mexico. Once a ban on women bullfighters was overturned in 1974, she headed to Spain. In one fight in Móstoles in 1977, she was awarded a rare honour: the hoof of the bull she felled. It was so unusual a prize that a bigger knife had to be found in a hurry (4,620 words)

Why Read John Milton?

Ed Simon | Millions | 3rd August 2023

For his language, "those gorgeous, labyrinthine, serpentine sentences which unspool across dozens of enjambed lines". Milton's plotting is impeccable; Paradise Lost "begins in media res with the angels who rebelled against God cast into the pits of Hell". And his politics is an attraction: "He was arguably far more radical, revolutionary, and rebellious than might be supposed" (1,380 words)

Modernity Has Made Us Allergic

Theresa MacPhail | Noema | 8th August 2023

You are not imagining it: allergies are much more common now. Our pets also get them, unlike animal species that do not live with us — a clue that "we are at least partially doing this to ourselves" with our hygiene and diet. Nobody is certain exactly what the problem is, though. Likely theories: our homes are too clean, our food production too industrialised and our lives too sedentary (7,410 words)

One Week In America

Monet P. Thomas | From Monet With Love | 7th August 2023

One of the best genres of personal newsletter to develop on the Tinyletter is the serialised travelogue, told through sporadic updates that feel like receiving postcards from a kindly stranger. This one is well worth your time. It reads best cumulatively, as intended, but this entry about a return to the US after three years living through Covid-19 in Beijing is a good starting point (700 words)

100 Things I Know

Mari Andrew | Out Of The Blue | 5th August 2023

Lengthy list of life-improving advice. Being good at cooking is mostly about adding lemon and salt. Always board the plane last. If you feel hot and sweaty, wash your hands and feet. Write to your old teachers and tell them what you still remember from their lessons. Use an endearment for yourself in your head. No therapist is better than a bad therapist. Many other gems contained therein (5,260 words)

Killer Heat Waves Are Coming

David S. Jones | Boston Review | 1st June 2023

We have known that heat can kill humans for millennia, yet we have done very little about it. Hoping that temperatures rise slowly enough for acclimatisation or trying to air condition every indoor space will not be sufficient. This is a public health matter: we need to invest in heat protection infrastructure in the way that 19C governments poured money into sewers and sanitation systems (4,310 words)

Why Kundera Never Went Home

Petr Drulak | Compact | 1st August 2023

He may have been the greatest Czech novelist since Kafka, but Milan Kundera was never much loved at home. Czechs saw him as the anti-Havel: When Havel was a persecuted dissident, Kundera was an establishment gadfly; while Havel stayed and suffered, Kundera emigrated and prospered. It only made things worse that Kundera, by far Havel's moral inferior, was by far the better writer (3,270 words)

From The Browser Eleven Years Ago

Snap Goes The Crocodile

Marina Akhmedova | OD Russia | 4th August 2012

Harrowing throughout. Notes on life among the drug addicts of Yekaterinburg. Much granular detail about preparing and injecting home-made narcotics. "It is dark and fetid in here, as if you are in the depths of a forest. Pale, dropsical men lie on a couch redolent of urine. They look like mushrooms which have sprouted in some poisonous grove. A swollen girl occupies the only chair" (9,070 words)

Home Is Where The Hatred Is

Damian Le Bas | Literary Review | 1st August 2023

Discussion of Roma history and culture, with reference to recent books by Klaus-Michel Bogdal and Jeremy Harte. "The key places in our history are the places where we congregate today: Horse fairs, races, christenings, weddings, funerals, camps, stopping places, pubs that are happy to serve us and – too often, alas – jail. A history of an outlawed culture is bound to be a history of outlaws" (1,600 words)

We Are All Animals At Night

Lana Hall | Hazlitt | 12th July 2023

Gripping account of life and work in a massage parlour, as told by a writer who made her living from sex work for five years: Three to six twelve-hour shifts a week, 2pm to 2am, mostly spent "waiting around, wondering how much money you will — or won’t — make". The job was "unbearably tangible at times", but the world felt quieter and simpler in the small hours of the night (3,240 words)

A Philosophy Of Holes

Roberto Casati & Achille Varzi | SEP | 14th June 2023

A hole is made of nothing and contains nothing. It is an absence, not a substance. Can a hole even be said to exist, save as a property of the substance in which it forms a hole? We might say that holes exist in their own right as pieces of space; but, if so, how is it that we can move holes around (move a donut and you move the hole) when we cannot move pieces of space around? (2,160 words)

Second Chance Suite

Sam Sweet | Baffler | 15th July 2023

Three true stories from Los Angeles about luck, magic and death. The first centres on “Crazy Mike” Caro, the poker player who wrote a standard work on tells; the second on Professor Dai Vernon, illusionist and co-founder of The Magic Castle; the third on Wardell Gray, a dazzling jazz saxophonist whose career echoed that of Charlie Parker right down to Gray's fatal heroin overdose at age 34 (3,500 words)

The Limits Of Personal Experience

Max Roser | Our World In Data | 27th July 2023

Many people believe that first-hand knowledge, "lived experience", trumps experts and text-books when understanding how the world works. This may be true in the context of one's own life, but it is not true of life in general. "The world is large, and we can experience very little of it personally. To see what the world is like, we need to rely on other means: carefully collected global statistics" (2,700 words)

The Dutiful Wife

Rafia Zakaria | Baffler | 14th July 2023

Before we got hooked on the turbulent private lives of footballers and musicians, we looked mainly to writers and artists to shock and delight us with glimpses of their bohemian marriages and sordid divorces. Nor did they let us down. Kingsley Amis, Alberto Moravia and Roald Dahl were among these "cheaters of old", who believed that their genius entitled them to behave as they liked (1,200 words)