Introduction to The Communist Manifesto

Tariq Ali | Verso | 21st February 2023

To mark the 175th anniversary of Marx and Engels' work, Ali looks again at it. History vindicates "very few" of its predictions about the future of capitalism, and it contains no blueprint for the communist society that might follow a successful revolution. Its "strength lay in its broad sweep, a call to transform the world," and after the Russian Revolution, everybody wanted to read it (2,976 words)

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The Merchant, the Marriage, and the Treaty Port

Jessa Dahl | Not Even Past | 17th February 2023

Reassessing Ōura Kei, a prominent 19C Japanese businesswoman, one of Nagasaki’s most famous residents, and an early exporter of green tea. But recently discovered documents show she also helped to arrange marriages between very young Japanese girls and much older Chinese men, showing that she was "not only a victim, but also an enabler of unequal power relations" (3,066 words)

Wide Awake During My Brain Surgery

Harry Forestell | CBC | 20th February 2023

Gripping account of a six-hour session of "deep brain stimulation", written by the patient. "There was no feeling to it as the brain has no pain sensors. But as the probes slid into place, there were tell-tale signs that gave away what was happening — most commonly a tingling feeling in an arm or leg — as the surgeons carefully threaded the electrodes through my brain" (1,880 words)

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For The Love Of Losing

Marina Benjamin | Granta | 9th February 2023

Memoir of a former professional gambler. When you're playing for eight, ten hours a day, losing starts to feel better than winning. "In losing there can be tremendous relief, even rebirth, in that only once you have lost everything can you walk away... Winning is far more problematic, because there is responsibility in the win – what to do with all that money! It’s the opposite of release" (4,683 words)

Things, Names, And Numbers

James Propp | Mathematical Enchantments | 17th February 2023

What real numbers are, how you get to them by way of rational numbers, and why they are needed in mathematics. A lively and discursive essay that makes a demanding topic more approachable by using lots of helpful analogies and not too much algebra. There is some algebra, and I fell at several fences, but well worth the effort, not least for the insights and asides along the way (6,900 words)

Conspiracies Are The Price Of Freedom

Terry Eagleton | Unherd | 17th February 2023

Conspiracy theories are the insecure person's defense against a confusing world with too many competing narratives. Conspiracy theories allow believers to claim a position of relative strength: They alone know what is going on. This hidden truth is always sinister, not because conspiracy theorists need more to fear, but because they need an explanation for the fear in which they already live (1,500 words)

A Wiser Sympathy

Mary Kuhn | Lapham's Quarterly | 15th February 2023

Are plants intelligent? Scientists and writers in the 19C were much preoccupied by this question. Georges Cuvier, Charles Darwin and the botanist Asa Gray all contemplated it. One 1863 article even asked "Is the plant stupid?". For Emily Dickinson, though, the crucial factor was not sentience but sentiment: whether the natural world shared her own ability to have autonomous emotions (2,722 words)

Children Of The Ice Age

April Nowell | Aeon | 13th February 2023

Previously neglected by archaeologists, in part because children's fragile bones are harder to excavate, the question of what childhood was like during the Palaeolithic era is now being answered. There is plenty of evidence that children played an active role in community survival, learning to make stone tools and ceramics. Footprints also show them playing tag and throwing clay balls (4,493 words)

The Enlightenment As Reading Project

David Wootton | The Critic | 15th February 2023

What we can learn about the 18C Enlightenment by studying not only the content of books by Montesquieu, Rousseau, Voltaire et al, but also how these books were received by readers of the day. "I hope no future historian of ideas will write about a book printed before the Industrial Revolution without asking how many copies were printed, how much they cost, and who actually owned them" (1,500 words)

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What Happened At The Crossroads?

Ted Gioia | Honest Broker | 15th February 2023

Investigation into the legendary meeting between Robert Johnson and the Devil at a crossroads in Mississipi, treating the tale neither as fact nor as fiction but as myth — a myth with many ancient variants in Western and African-American folklore. “The most common reason people made a deal with the Devil, according to these accounts, was the desire to play a musical instrument.” (5,200 words)

Inside Flipkart

Mihir Dalal | Rest Of World | 14th February 2023

Profile of a homegrown e-commerce startup, since acquired by Walmart, that beats Amazon in terms of market share in India. But despite having the edge, Flipkart is still inextricably connected to its rival: the founders met working at Amazon’s India office, their company was modelled upon their former employer, and remaining ahead is vital to maintaining investor confidence (4,809 words)

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Creatures That Don’t Conform

Lucy Jones | Emergence | 2nd February 2023

Praise hymn to slime mould, with poetic interpolations. "I can’t stop staring at its fractal shape. The way its yellow branches so directly and intentionally. Neural rivers of xanthic goo. Just like the veins of our bodies, and the vessels of our eyes, and the branches of the trees, and the clouds above, and the dendrites of galaxies. Blebs pack together, river networks of slime fan and spread" (5,312 words)

China's Policy Reversals

Andrew Batson | Tangled Woof | 8th February 2023

China is executing a series of major policy reversals — on Covid, on real estate, and on tech. These were some of Xi Jinping's flagship policies. So either Xi is proving more pragmatic than anybody had thought possible; or there has been a "quiet revolt" against him in the party leadership. Absent any hard evidence for either reading, it may be best to presume that the truth is a bit of both (1,200 words)

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Also Italian

Dylan Byron | Lapham's Quarterly | 6th February 2023

In the city people spoke a Venetian dialect of Italian. In the countryside they spoke Slovene. In the government they spoke German. Such was Trieste in 1913, capital of the Adriatic, still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, if only just, and one of the most cultured cities in Europe, beloved of Joyce, and Svevo, and Musil. Its magic survived World War 1, but did not survive Mussolini (2,250 words)

Watching Paint Dry

Ed Conway | Material World | 3rd February 2023

History of car paint in the 20C. Interesting throughout. When production began on the Model T, it took much longer to paint a car than to make one. Better paint was critical to a faster assembly line. Now robots do the painting and custom "printed" designs are not far off. Getting better at making more hard-wearing yet ever faster drying paint is "a microcosm of human achievement" (2,943 words)

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How Do I Make Up For My Lost Years?

Ayesha A. Siddiqi | 28th September 2021

Sensitive and thought-provoking response to a question from a 30 year old who fears that, thanks to years of severe depression that is only now being treated, they have wasted their life thus far. "I recommend against speaking about time as if it’s something that can be budgeted, that would imply we know how much we have. If there are ways to waste it, surely regret is one of them" (1,588 words)

Subterranean Paris

Félix Nadar | MIT Press Reader | 6th February 2023

Extract from the memoir of a 19C photographer. He describes a trip down into the sewers and catacombs of Paris and the experiments he conducted with different kinds of portable artificial light so that he could capture what he saw in these subterranean ossuaries. "In the egalitarian confusion of death, a Merovingian king remains in eternal silence next to those massacred in September 92" (4,368 words)

The Radical Idea That People Aren't Stupid

Adam Mastroianni | Experimental History | 24th January 2023

Psychology is good at identifying cognitive biases and we are very good at turning them into a general presumption that most other people are stupid. This is both not the case, it is argued, and would not be a useful way to approach the world even if it were. It can also be dangerous: "The idea that people are stupid and that only an elite few can handle the truth has led to some nasty places" (2,900 words)

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Yamagami Tetsuya’s Revenge

Dylan Levi King | Palladium | 2nd February 2023

A journey into the dark hinterland of post-war Japanese politics, when three generations of the Kishi/Abe family led the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, and the LDP entwined itself with criminal gangs, intelligence agencies, and religious cults. This history was an open secret, but a secret of sorts, until prime minister Shinzo Abe was shot dead and explanations became unavoidable (3,500 words)

The Violin Doctor

Elly Fishman | Chicago | 17th January 2023

Profile of John Becker, considered to be the best violin restorer in the world. He has worked on more Stradivarius violins than any other living person, making repairs for the likes of Nigel Kennedy and Joshua Bell. He uses a mixture of antique 19C tools and modern surgical implements. Despite an impeccable ear and a sixth sense for quality instruments, Becker cannot play the violin (4,287 words)

Mystified by cryptic crosswords? We at The Browser are here to help. Pick up the ultimate guide, by Dan Feyer and Uri Bram, and let us guide you through the meaning of those clues - so you can get on with puzzling.

The Oil Thieves Of Nigeria

James Barnett | New Lines | 26th January 2023

Steady oil production is vital to Nigeria's economic stability, but a decades-long conflict over who owns the oil in the Niger Delta has created a thriving black market. Between 200,000 and 700,000 barrels a day are lost to "oil bunkering", the practice of siphoning crude oil straight from the pipeline and processing it in unofficial but increasingly sophisticated refineries (10,231 words)

Battle Of The Botanic Garden

Mark O’Connell | Guardian | 26th January 2023

Seemingly simple story of a hyperlocal dispute (American buys English botanic garden; locals object) with hidden depths. The new owner initiates a kind of "rewilding" that his critics claim is just a failure to do any gardening. Then culture war battle lines are drawn as the newcomers reject the classic style of botanic garden horticulture as an "inheritance of colonialism" (6,207 words)

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