Svante Pääbo And The Human Story

Editorial Board | Quillette | 6th October 2022

Concise explainer of why Svante Pääbo's Nobel Prize is so well deserved. Pääbo has sequenced the Neanderthal genome, discovered a previously unknown hominin species, the Denisovans, and shown that all three lineages — Neanderthals, Denisovans, and Homo Sapiens — overlapped and interbred 50,000 years ago. "He hasn’t just benefited humankind. He has illuminated it" (800 words)

Collision Course

Lauren Smiley | Intelligencer | 3rd October 2022

True-crime yarn, gloriously told. Family nets $6 million by staging car-crashes: They inflict moderate injuries on one another before each crash, then claim big insurance payouts afterwards. "Mize hurt you one at a time, pulling tools from a briefcase, cold and businesslike. He’d gash your brow with a razor or box cutter, scuff the wound with sandpaper, gripe if you didn’t bleed enough" (8,700 words)

What We Get Wrong About Inflation

Tim Harford | 6th October 2022

In 1963 Milton Friedman defined inflation as “a steady and sustained rise in prices”, which was "always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon”. But Friedman's rule hardly describes current conditions: Prices are rising because Russia has cut off Europe's gas. Is this still "inflation"? Governments are confused. "The recently signed Inflation Reduction Act is no such thing" (865 words)

Diaries

Alan Rickman | Guardian | 25th September 2022

Extracts from the actor's diaries covering the filming of Sense And Sensibility, Michael Collins, and Dogma. (The Harry Potter films are elsewhere.) "The trouble with this job is that you can watch yourself & your friends growing older in full colour, close up". The entries are brief but the cumulative effect is pleasing. "To Searcy’s for Brian Cox’s birthday party. All human acting was there" (4,500 words)

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Party Like It’s 1789!

A.J. Jacobs | Guardian | 1st October 2022

Account of an attempt to live according to a literal interpretation of the US constitution, as a test of the doctrine of "originalism" now popular on the US Supreme Court. He carries a musket, declines to deal with his publisher's female lawyer — women being denied licences to practice law at the time of the 14th amendment — and distributes incendiary pamphlets  (4,005 words)

If You Wish To Make A Toaster

Hillary Predko | The Prepared | 29th September 2022

Interview with a designer who tried to make a toaster entirely from scratch, refining all of the materials himself to build each component. The process highlighted the complexity of the basic objects we use without thought — all his smelting produced only iron, not steel, and he struggled with the plastic casing. The final object "had the form of a toaster and it sort of worked" (2,077 words)

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Who Speaks English?

Howard W. French | Foreign Policy | 26th September 2022 | U

English is the official language of Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, Ghana, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, but students from these countries are often required to take costly language tests to prove fluency when applying to universities in Europe or the US. This measure is "of a piece with a much more systematic, albeit unacknowledged, economic quarantining of the African continent", it is argued here  (1,844 words)

Alone At The Edge Of The World

Cassidy Randall | Atavist | 30th September 2022 | U

Thrilling epic about the Golden Globe Race, in which entrants sail solo and nonstop around the world without modern technology." She felt the stern rise. Sound returned in a deafening roar. Clinging to the post by the radio, she was suddenly looking down at the rest of the cabin. She went airborne as a leviathan of water she couldn’t see but only feel somersaulted the boat" (15,773 words)

The Incredible Huxleys

Stuart Jeffries | Observer | 2nd October 2022

Review of a history of evolution, told via one family: the Huxleys. The two great figures to emerge are T.H. Huxley, Victorian biologist and Darwin's bulldog, and his grandson Julian, who was a fervent eugenicist in the 1920s and a prominent critic of Nazi eugenics in the 1930s. Their influence remains. "We live, depending on your politics, in the shadow or the light of the Huxleys" (1,317 words)

Into The Pre-Gap

Daryl Worthington | Quietus | 26th September 2022

Marking forty years since the first album was released on CD (Billy Joel’s 52nd Street, in Japan). There is little or no nostalgia for CDs, as there is for cassettes or vinyl. Yet the CD gave us two lasting musical quirks: the "pre-gap" or hidden track concealed from the sleevenotes "in the neverzone before the album proper" and the means to loosen the tracklisting by programming songs to skip (2,743 words)

Openings

Andrew Kahn | Oxford Academic | 30th September 2022

How to begin a short story — or, indeed, any more ambitious work. There are two basic approaches: Foreshadow the plot, and/or grab the attention. "If there were a contest for the best all-time opening lines of literature, either the Old Testament (‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth’) or the Gospel according to John (‘In the beginning was the Word’) might well take the prize" (4,606 words)

Paul McCartney's Memory

Ian Leslie | Ruffian | 24th September 2022

Anecdotal evidence suggests that Paul McCartney possesses a prodigious memory for music, for people, and for the trivia of everyday life. Is his capacity to draw on such memories, consciously and unconsciously, one key to his genius? "The richer and more varied our store of unconscious memories, the more combinations are generated, the more creative and insightful we’re likely to be" (2,520 words)

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How To Turn A Door Knob

Hannah Devlin | Guardian | 15th September 2022

Not to be confused with next month's Nobel prizes, the Ig Nobel prizes are awarded by the Annals Of Improbable Research for outstanding achievement in less obvious corners of science. Among this year's winners: Japanese researchers who modelled the best way to turn a big doorknob; and Brazilian researchers who studied how constipation affects the mating prospects of scorpions (740 words)

Otters As Unsung Muses

Sarah Rose Sharp | Hyperallergic | 28th September 2022

Very possibly the most enthusiastic piece ever to have been written about the place of otters in art, ranging from ancient Egyptian statues of the first millennium BC when otters were worshipped as gods, to the "high otter drama" of Pieter Boel’s Otter Harassed by Dogs in the Prado, to Audubon's watercolours, and to Seki Shuko's Meiji-era paintings on silk. Beautiful illustrations, too (850 words)

Prometheus And The Fishpond

Sigrid Schmalzer | Made In China | 27th September 2022

The Chinese state's increasing interest in "ecological civilisation" — an idealised harmony between humans and nature created by historical agriculture practices — is a double-edged sword. It both helps to cement political control by "establishing a totalising vision for top-down state intervention not only in society but also in nature," and also expands the opportunity for environmentalism (3,056 words)

How Big Is Infinity?

Patrick Honner | Quanta | 27th September 2022

Explanation of the curious child's favourite question that is (mostly) accessible to the non-mathematician. Hold tight for the introduction to set theory and cardinality. "Saying 'My love for you is independent of the axioms' may not be as fun as saying 'I love you infinity plus 1,' but perhaps it will help the next generation of infinity-loving mathematicians get a good night’s sleep" (2,352 words)

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The Storykeeper

José Vergara | Los Angeles Review Of Books | 27th September 2022

Interview with Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature. For her "documentary novels", she gathers oral testimony and collates it like a composer with musical phrases. "It’s all intuition. It just feels how it has to be... It’s not that I’m coming up with my material — there were real people sitting there. I take a piece of life and take away all superfluous things." (4,479 words)

The Disappearing Art Of Maintenance

Alex Vuocolo | Noema | 22nd September 2022

A 21C inclination towards built-in obsolescence is creating a world that is hard to maintain. As a result, we are losing the art of good maintenance, which — although expensive — can head off the need for repairs later on. It's a philosophy that could serve us well as climate change accelerates. "Repair is when you fix something that’s already broken. Maintenance is about making something last" (4,328 words)

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Whence, Wherefore, Whither Utopia?

Deanna K. Kreisel | 3 Quarks Daily | 26th September 2022

On the contemporary lack of utopias. The Victorians loved to use fiction to speculate about a better future. Now, the word "utopia" evokes "impossibility, naïveté, and dunderheadedness". Bleak as our prospects may often seem, this kind of earnest thought experiment is a necessary part of taking action: "We need at the very least to have some ideas about what we want on the other side" (2,397 words)

The Death Cheaters

Courtney Shea | Toronto Life | 29th August 2022

Dispatch from "Longevity House", a members' club for biohackers in Toronto. The founder is open about his treatment. Is it snake oil? "He concedes that the machine probably doesn’t do anything that you can’t get from a daily journal practice or meditation. But people aren’t interested in those things, which are generally free and unsexy and don’t look good on social media, he says" (4,804 words)

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Obituary: Saul Kripke

Jane O'Grady | Guardian | 21st September 2022

Saul Kripke began speculating on the nature of God at the age of three and had read all Shakespeare by the age of nine. His Naming And Necessity was "one of the major philosophical works of the 20th century". He argued that words could not have "correct" meanings, and calculations could not have "correct" results, because the ultimate rules of mathematics and of language were arbitrary (1,900 words)

How Does The Jewish Calendar Work?

Julia Métraux | JSTOR Daily | 19th September 2022

The Jewish calendar for High Holy Days reconciles monthly lunar cycles with the solar-based, year-long Gregorian calendar. The key to the calculation is that the number of days in 19 solar years equals the number of days in 235 lunar cycles. The "larger arc" of the Jewish calendar thus follows a 19-year cycle, comprising 12 ordinary years of 12 months each and 7 leap-years of 13 months each (890 words)

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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 Trees
Percival Everett | Graywolf | 2021

Recommended by Mary Corey at the Los Angeles Review Of Books:
"How can a book about the scope and horror of lynching be such a side-splitting page-turner? Perhaps because revenge, even fictional revenge, is particularly sweet when it is so long overdue. Everett, with his masterly fusion of detective fiction and supernatural avenger fantasy, transcends the familiar themes of white cruelty and Black victimhood. It is furious, political, and historical, but it is also art"

Chart Of The Week

The Cartoon Guide To Vertebrate Evolution