Inventing New Particles Is Pointless

Sabine Hossenfelder | Guardian | 26th September 2022

Theoretical physicist says the unsayable about her field: it is wasting a lot of time and money on wild goose chases in the "particle zoo". "It has become common among physicists to invent new particles for which there is no evidence, publish papers about them, write more papers about these particles’ properties, and demand the hypothesis be experimentally tested" (944 words)

Policing The Necropolis

Maria Golia | Lapham's Quarterly | 24th October 2022

Tomb raiding was big business in Ancient Egypt. Surviving court transcripts reveal how these heists were put together by teams of experts skilled at tunnelling, carpentry and fencing stolen goods. The thieves were so successful at it that they halved the value of previous metals. Impalement, the punishment meted out for only the most serious of crimes, was the penalty if caught (1,858 words)

Freeman Dyson And Me

Jeremy Bernstein | MIT Press Reader | 20th October 2022

Memoir of a 50-year friendship spanning the golden age of Big Science in post-war America. Bernstein and Dyson were both protégés of Robert Oppenheimer at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton. Bernstein left in 1961 to join the New Yorker. Dyson stayed on, dividing his genius between quantum mechanics, pure maths, nuclear engineering, space exploration, and game theory (5,800 words)

'The Waste Land' Reviewed

Charles Powell | Guardian | 21st October 2022

The Waste Land is "so much waste paper", declared the The Guardian when it reviewed T.S. Eliot's masterpiece in 1922. The poem was a "mad medley". Lines in other languages, quotations from Shakespeare, even fragments of birdsong, were "thrown in at will or whim". Meaning, if any, was lost behind a "smokescreen of erudition". An ordinary reader should expect to "make nothing of it" (460 words)

On Sundays, Browser readers receive a special edition with puzzles, poems, books, charts, music and more - plus selections from our decade-plus archive of the finest writing on the internet. Here's a taste of this week's edition - our archive picks.

Book Of The Week

The Golden Mole
Katherine Rundell | Faber | 2022

Recommended by Maria Golia at the Times Literary Supplement
"These lovingly crafted portraits of mostly endangered animals, scattered with historical anecdotes, personal observations and literary references, are surprising and delightful. In describing how “we have collided with living things, in both joy and destruction”, Rundell has written both a cultural history of humans’ rapport with their fellow animals and a reminder of how little we know of them"

Chart Of The Week

Blast From The Past

How the Universe appears to us, as determined by the speed of light. Each data point represents a galaxy. The larger and darker the data point, the greater mass of the galaxy. Source: Simons Foundation

Living Descendants Of Mark Anthony

Theodore Kopaliani | Antigone | 19th October 2022

Extreme genealogy. The claim made here is that Bagrationi family, which ruled Georgia for a thousand years until the Bolshevik revolution, is directly descended from Mark Anthony, who died in 30BC. The author is himself a Bagration; perhaps he paints the lily here and there; even so, the family tree is quite a sight, with its massed ranks of kings and queens plus the odd saint and priestess (1,690 words)

Inside The Proton

Charlie Wood & Merrill Sherman | Quanta | 19th October 2022

Popular science done right. Status update on the proton. The proton was first imagined a century ago as a featureless lump in the middle of a stylised atom. Then it was re-imagined as a bundle of quarks. Now, thanks to quantum mechanics, it must be re-imagined yet again as a mere abstraction, a "haze of probabilities", which collapses, when observed, into a sort of tiny seething soup  (1,900 words)

Space Filled Me With Sadness

William Shatner | Variety | 6th October 2022

Extract from the actor's co-written memoir describing his trip to space in Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space shuttle. "I discovered that the beauty isn’t out there, it’s down here, with all of us... It was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered. The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness" (1,266 words)

Revisiting The Playground

Jon Winder | History Workshop | 17th October 2022

Prompt to consider the history of a familiar structure: the children's playground. The idea that children require a dedicated place for play is a recent one — they first appeared in Britain in the mid 19C. Especially in densely populated urban areas, their value seems clear. Yet studies show that children can play anywhere with anything. Do playgrounds diminish this faculty? (1,025 words)

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What Happened To Rod McKuen?

Dan Kois | Slate | 10th October 2022

Notes on collective cultural amnesia, prompted by the rediscovery of a man once mocked as "the most understood poet in America". Rod McKuen sold millions of books and records in the 1960s and 1970s, but was then almost entirely forgotten. He walked the line between "being beloved, productive and yet also totally disparaged". His most popular poem is titled "A Cat Named Sloopy" (6,570 words)

Beyond The Raw/Pasteurised Divide

Trevor Warmedahl | Milk Trekker | 18th September 2022

Dairy-based wisdom from a nomadic cheesemaker on a hot topic in his field. Pasteurisation is generally thought to be a binary state — milk either is or isn't pasteurised. However, it is argued here, that heating this "is just one form of steering the microbial communities of raw milk" and certainly doesn't result in dairy products that are necessarily "sterile" or free of pathogens (1,617 words)

Publisher's Note: readers in New York are invited to meet Browser Publisher Uri Bram & fellow Browser readers at the Our Dark Academia event today, Saturday 15th, 8pm-11pm. There will be drinks, nibbles, crafts and readings. Email uri@thebrowser.com if you'd like to find us – this is a free public event unaffiliated with the Browser. –Uri

1,600 Years Of Medical Hubris

Robert Graboyes | Bastiat's Window | 12th October 2022

How on earth did doctors get away with the hocus-pocus which passed, until relatively recently, for medicine? "Why, just fifty years ago, we would have thought your daughter's illness was brought on by demonic possession or witchcraft … But nowadays we know that Isabelle is suffering from an imbalance of bodily humors, perhaps caused by a toad or a small dwarf living in her stomach" (1,900 words)

Will The Wise Man Get Drunk?

John Dillon | Antigone | 10th October 2022

Is it wise policy to get drunk in good company every now and then — with a view to seeing the world a different way, speaking with fewer inhibitions, and hearing what others say when they, too, have unbuttoned? Plato seemed to think so, but only if the drinker was already virtuous: "Relaxation will bring out the worst in foolish people, but in the wise it will bring out the best" (4,100 words)

A History Of Nauru

Peter Dauvergne | MIT Press Reader | 22nd July 2019

Nauru was a paradise in the Pacific until the first Europeans arrived with guns and whisky in the early 1800s. Degradation turned to disaster in 1899 when the island was found to consist largely of phosphate, a valuable fertiliser. Opencast mining stripped Nauru bare — and then the phosphate ran out. Nauru survives now by running detention centres for refugees deported from Australia (3,400 words)

Little Rules About Big Things

Morgan Housel | Collaborative Fund | 11th October 2022

Admirable anthology of aphorisms and axioms. "History is driven by surprising events but forecasting is driven by obvious ones". "A lot of people don’t realize what bet they’re making". "Small risks are overblown because they’re easy to talk about". "People who cause harm get the most attention". "Slow progress amid a drumbeat of bad news is the normal state of affairs".  (2,260 words)

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What Counts As A Bestseller?

Jordan Pruett | Public Books | 11th October 2022

The word "bestseller" is deceptive. We might assume that a list of bestselling books ranks those titles that have sold the most copies, but no. As this historical analysis shows, these rankings are actually carefully curated by editors. One author sued the NYT after his exclusion, only to lose the case because, since it was subjectively compiled, the list was protected by the right to free speech (2,577 words)

The Transformations Of Science

Geoff Anders | Palladium | 10th October 2022

What is science for, and who should control it? Excellent questions and many non-answers are to be found in this essay. Since the 17C, science has evolved: from private activity to public, from never-ending inquiry to settled authority, from individual endeavour to state-sponsored justification for policy. Can we ever trust the science? Sometimes, and with caveats aplenty, it seems (3,178 words)

Psychiatry Wars

Rachel Aviv | Guardian | 11th October 2022

Extract from a book about mental illness, concerning the story of Ray Osheroff whose struggles with depression put him at the centre of a battle for the future of psychiatry. After a stay at a psychiatric hospital that prioritised psychoanalysis, he sued the institution for failing to prescribe him antidepressants. In the case, "the 20C's two dominant explanations for mental distress collided" (5,221 words)

What Happened To Rod McKuen?

Dan Kois | Slate | 10th October 2022

Notes on collective cultural amnesia, prompted by the rediscovery of a man once mocked as "the most understood poet in America". Rod McKuen sold millions of books and records in the 1960s and 1970s, but was then almost entirely forgotten. He walked the line between "being beloved, productive and yet also totally disparaged". His most popular poem is titled "A Cat Named Sloopy" (6,570 words)

Diplomatic Dining

Bompas & Parr | WePresent | 22nd September 2022

Pivotal geopolitical moments have often occurred over dinner. From the boeuf à la mode that the Founding Fathers consumed as they wrangled over the new capital of the United States to the schweinwürst that Hitler fed to Kurt von Schuschnigg as he threatened to annexe Austria, food has long been a form of soft power. Menu design still ranks among an ambassador's most important jobs (4,242 words)

There Are Three Types Of Meetings

Cam Daigle | 4th October 2022

Guide to having better meetings. Perhaps the key point here is that meetings cannot be fixed by holding more of them, nor can their problems be solved by abolishing them altogether. Being thoughtful about who attends, what the purpose of the gathering is, and where the power imbalances are is the only way to ensure productive discussions that don't devolve into pointless rambles (2,854 words)