All Souls Politics Exam

All Souls College, Oxford | 2016-2022 | PDF

Past paper for the last six years of the All Souls prize fellowship exam. Candidates sit four three-hour papers, only two of which can be in their own subject. In each, they must answer three questions with as much originality as possible. Questions on this politics paper include: "Has the Cold War ended?", "Why not anarchism?", "What explains civil wars?", and "Is populism an ideology?" (2,354 words)

Searching For Zarahemla

Emily Fox Kaplan | Pipe Wrench | 6th December 2022

Some Mormons believe that the events described in their holy book took place in northern Guatemala and southern Mexico. This journalist joined a package tour revealing the region to the faithful. "I think I find Mormons so compelling because Jews don’t have any certainty about anything... 16 million-plus Mormons, one set of very specific answers to pretty much every question imaginable" (8,012 words)

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History In The Making

Stephen Davies | Work In Progress | 8th December

The study of history is meant to help us understand our present and our future. But a conception of history dominated by wars and revolutions will not get us very far. It is new ideas and new technologies that do most to shape the world over time. Better to understand how Newton's Principia changed science, and how the Model-T changed America, than how 1066 changed Britain (3,100 words)

The Brilliant Hackwork Of P.G. Wodehouse

Dan Brooks | Gawker | 7th December 2022

P.G. Wodehouse found a recipe for writing comic novels, and very wisely stuck to it. In innumerable novels and short stories Bertie Wooster gets into some scrape after shunning Jeeves's advice, and Jeeves, after a huff, engineers a happy ending. The formulaic quality of the stories is part of their charm. It allows for a seemingly effortless style of writing, and the levity transmits itself to the reader (1,500 words)

Clinical Trials And Biotech Innovation

Matthew Herper | STAT | 3rd November 2022

This ought to be a great century for biology. The combination of gene editing and AI is opening up vast new prospects for understanding and optimising our bodies. But how much of this life-science will get out of the labs and into production if the law requires the safety and efficacy of every product to be proven in clinical trials? Ensuring safety is vital — but is there a better way of doing it? (5,400 words)

The Weirdness Of Beavers

Leila Philip | Literary Hub | 8th December 2022

A brief history of beavers in art, history, scholarship and religion. A million years ago, beavers "the size of bears" roamed North America. The evolution of beavers remains something of a mystery: To look at, they are "part bear, part bird, part monkey, part lizard". Nobody knows when they started building dams. They seem to have a capacity for collective intelligence, like ants or bees (2,900 words)

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Why Is Everything So Ugly?

The Editors | n+1 | 7th December 2022

You can walk for hours across New York City without seeing anything that is both new and beautiful. We have at our disposal the most advanced design and manufacturing technologies in human history, yet the environment we make for ourselves is a "drab sublime" of flat-pack furniture, municipal infrastructure, home electronics and commercial graphic design. Who asked for all this? (4,100 words)

Can AI Write Authentic Poetry?

Keith Holyoak | MIT Press Reader | 7th December 2022

There is plenty of fun to be had seeding GPT-3 to write prose and make pictures, then laughing at the off-kilter weirdness of the results, which have strayed of late deep into the uncanny valley. But what of poetry, which abolished all conventions a century ago, and now strives for unusual effects? Might AI poetry be equal or superior to that of humans? The short answer is, "Yes, but ..." (3,400 words)

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Finding Language In The Brain

Giosuè Baggio | MIT Press Reader | 25th November 2022

Mathematical systems are useful for understanding language, but perhaps language is itself also a system for computation. If so, then it would follow that language is the "software" being run by human "hardware" — that is, the brain. "The language-as-calculus idea may well be the best model of language in the brain we currently have — or perhaps the worst, except for all the others" (1,495 words)

I Don’t Want To Be An Internet Person

Ginevra Davis | Palladium | 4th November 2022

Reflections on online vs "real" life, told via an encounter with someone who is "cool on a certain corner of the internet". "The internet people are in charge. They make the memes and coin the neologisms that will become mainstream discourse in five years. To define the internet is to form the base layer upon which all culture is built. In the long run, these people will win" (4,176 words)

How To Speak Honeybee

Karen Bakker | Noema | 2nd November 2022

Bees communicate mainly by dance, but they also have a vocabulary of sounds and vibrations. They have excellent eyesight and can recognise faces. They can rob and cheat. They get happy and sad. When a swarm needs to split or move on, the bees will argue and vote about where to go next. To better observe them, humans are now building a bee-sized robot which will pass as a bee among bees (4,700 words)

Beware Of The Perfect Gentleman

R.F. Jurjevics | Vice | 28th November 2022

Let's say you are a man with an "open face". You seem strong, gentle, trustworthy. You have got "the look". That's the good news. The bad news is that fraudsters and catfishers seek out faces like yours for use in "romance scams". Your pirated photo may be used to defraud dozens, even hundreds, of people. And, thanks to Google's reverse-image search, those victims may then come looking for you (4,600 words)

52 Things I Learned In 2022

Tom Whitwell | Magnetic Notes | 1st December 2022

Tom Whitwell's annual assemblage of unexpected facts and claims maintains its usual high standard. "A bolt of lightning contains about ¼ of a kilowatt-hour of power. Even with recent energy price rises, it’s only worth about 9 pence". "In the UK people tend to turn left when entering a building, in the US they turn right — important to remember if you are booking a trade show booth" (1,500 words)

J. Edgar Hoover: Head Of The State

Charles Trueheart | American Scholar | 1st December 2022

“There probably will never be anybody like Mr. Hoover again — nor should there be”, says Beverley Gage in her "subtle and discerning" new biography. Hoover turned the FBI into his private deep state, pandering to presidents while collecting "scandalous dossiers" on them. He died "just in time to avoid witnessing the public repudiation of his life’s work and the destruction of his reputation” (1,320 words)

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When You Can Taste Everything You See

Julia Skinner | Atlanta | 2nd November 2022

A food critic with synesthesia explains what it is like to navigate a world in which everything she sees has a flavour. A particular stretch of road "tastes" like blueberry pop rocks, while a nearby building's facade is "caramelly". Sometimes her sense associations produce surprisingly delicious invented recipes, but often not: chocolate cake with raw tomatoes was not a hit (967 words)

Two Conspiracy Theories About Cola

Dynomight | 20th October 2021

Debunking of two ideas about cola beverages. The first states that the classic cola recipe contains enough sugar to make the drinker vomit, but this effect is offset by an anti-nausea drug. The second claims that because Mexican coke is made from "pure sugar" rather than corn syrup, it is healthier. The evidence does not support either theory, and we shouldn't be drinking sugary drinks anyway (2,596 words)

Deconstructing Brian Eno's Music for Airports

Dan Carr | Reverb Machine | 11th July 2019

Analysis of Eno's landmark 1978 ambient album, which was a continuation of years of experimentation with the tape machine as an engine for composition. He focused on generative systems rather than melodies, creating loops of different lengths that keep interlocking in new ways as they repeat. There is a clever tool here that the reader can use to make their own piece in browser (1,722 words)

The Art World’s Catholic Problem

Daniel Larkin | Hyperallegenic | 27th November 2022

Relationships between major museums and the Catholic Church are too little critiqued. Mounting exhibitions of Old Masters is difficult without the full co-operation of the Vatican and other church collectors. "Why are we as art critics getting it wrong? Why does the Vatican get to play the ventriloquist, subtly but effectively influencing what we write and do not write?" (2,437 words)

Social Credit In China

Zeyi Yang | MIT Technology Review | 22nd November 2022

How China's "social credit" system works, as set down in a new national law. Officially it consists of two separate mechanisms — one for scoring people's financial creditworthiness and another for scoring their pro-social behaviour. Some local governments have been linking the two, threatening financial reprisals for anti-social behaviour. But this is not national policy ... Yet (2,700 words)

Building Fast And Slow

Brian Potter | Construction Physics | 23rd November 2022

Part one of a deep dive into why the Empire State Building was completed on time and within budget whereas the World Trade Center took for ever to build and cost the earth. The Empire State Building was designed with speed of construction paramount. Every possible component and process was an industry standard. Beauty was never on the spec sheet, somehow it just happened (3,900 words)

The Death Of Key Change

Chris Dalla Riva | Tedium | 9th November 2022

For 30 years or so until 1990 there was a pretty good chance that a Billboard hit single would be written in the key of C, and would feature a key-change in the final verse. But after 1990 something happened. Hit songs were being written in all keys equally; late key-changes had disappeared. Why so? By this analysis, it was hip-hop and computer software that changed the fundamentals (2,200 words)

How Many Yottabytes In A Quettabyte?

Elizabeth Gibney | Nature | 18th November 2022

World governments have agreed on new names for very big numbers. Ten to the power 27 is henceforth a ronna. Ten to the power 30 is a quetta. The last such update took place in 1991, when 10 to the power 24 was christened the yotta. But with the world's computers now expected to produce a yottabyte of data annually in the next decade, the yotta was starting to seem notta lotta (870 words)