When Lethal Weapons Grew On Trees

Kris De Decker | Low-Tech Magazine | 23rd November 2022

Comprehensive study of the bow and arrow, a technology that was once used on every continent other than Antarctica and Australia (where spear throwing dominated). The oldest bow ever found has been dated to between 6,500 and 7,000 BCE. A bow can be made out of any wood, but yew is best. If you ever need to manufacture one quickly, everything you need to know is here (5,785 words)

The Names Of All Manner Of Hounds

David Scott-Macnab | Viator | Fall 2013 | PDF

This paper about a hitherto unpublished 15C manuscript is free to download but requires email registration; the list of 1,065 names for hunting dogs it contains makes makes it very much worth the extra effort. Names include: Archebawde, Bragger, Eggetene, Halibutte, Joliboye, Knave, Litilman, Mery, Norman, Organ, Plodder, Quester, Sturdy, Thrifti, Veleyne and Wyseman (11,615 words)

The Toxic History Of Colour

Whitney Bauck | Atmos | 21st November 2022

Colour has always been deadly. The Romans sent slaves underground to mine the poisonous arsenic sulphur known as orpiment so they could make gold paint. In the Middle Ages, dyers were using realgar both as an orange pigment and as a rat poison. In the 1800s, synthetic colours were developed and lead to multicoloured environmental waste that, in some cases, still causes harm today (2,298 words)

The Library Of Alexandria And Its Reputation

Peter Gainsford | Kiwi Hellenist | 22nd November 2022

Was the burning of the Library of Alexandria as catastrophic an event as we think? Manuscript evidence suggests local copies of key texts were regularly made in the Hellenic world to avoid long journeys. This book trade long outlived one library. The library's reputation as a "magical irreplaceable repository of unique items" in large part dates back to Carl Sagan's 1980 TV series Cosmos (2,536 words)

Choice Reading

Denise Gigante | Lapham's Quarterly | 21st November 2022

New York in the 19C was so full of books and paper that readers felt "lost in a sea of print". The bibliomania exhibited by a pair of literary critic brothers, Evert and George Duyckinck, is a case in point. By the time of Evert's death in 1878, the family library had swelled to over 15,000 volumes of English and American literature — a number that few other private libraries could match (2,294 words)

Kickoff

Jonathan Wilson | Paris Review | 20th November 2022

World Cup curtain raiser. Everything about this tournament, played in Qatar's "balmy winter", feels absurd. "Spectators will emerge from their hotels and the 'Bedouin-style' tents pitched in the desert, or disembark from cruise ships berthed in the gulf, and enter the booze-free stadiums. The infinite air conditioning will hum... Will the crowd have enough lung capacity to overcome it?" (1,565 words)

Things Could Be Better

Adam Mastroianni | Experimental History | 15th November 2022

In which the author tests a conjecture and makes a discovery. The conjecture: All judgments are comparisons. If I say, X is good, I mean, I can easily think how X might be worse. Now for the discovery, and make of it what you will: When you ask people how X might be different, whether X is a banana or a bus service, 90% of people default to ways in which X might be better, not worse (3,800 words)  

Welcome To Your World Cup

Adam Susman | Howler | 18th November 2022

It may well be that, like me, you have no strong interest in soccer, and even a mild aversion to this particular World Cup. And yet, since you know that half humanity will be talking football for the next month, you would like to have at your disposal one or two lesser-known facts, perhaps a mildly provocative prediction, for tactical use in conversation. If so, then commit this piece to memory (6,100 words)

Grand Narratives

Brad DeLong | Grasping Reality | 17th November 2022

Having just published an economic history of the 20th century, DeLong offers draft notes towards a prequel at scale — an economic history of the world since the invention of agriculture 12,000 years ago. In brief: the Neolithic shift from hunter-gathering to settled farming doomed most humans to poverty and servitude, which remained the worker's lot until modernity came, belatedly, in 1870 (1,500 words)

Non-State Courts

Sarah Constantin | Rough Diamonds | 17th November 2022

Can a legal system function without state power at its back? Up to a point, and there are examples to prove it — in non-state polities such as Somaliland and medieval Iceland, and among non-state communities such as the Romani and the Amish. But non-state courts still require means of compelling obedience to their judgements: Ostracism is one such, ritualised violence is another (2,916 words)

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Sacred Feathers

Elizabeth Hlavinka | Atmos | 16th November 2022

Climate change is affecting the supply of feathers available to Native American tribes for ceremonial use. Different peoples require different feathers: canaries, hawks, woodpeckers, eagles and others are all venerated. Some feathers have been unavailable for decades, but now a specialised conservation group collects feathers from zoos and sanctuaries so that these rites can still be practised (2,345 words)

The Flat Era Of Fashion

Ana Kinsella | Dirt | 8th November 2022

Fashion is flat now. Clothes are both designed and worn to be viewed in two dimensions, as product photographs on a website and outfit pictures on social media. Eccentricity is out. Local context is disappearing, too: "Today it doesn’t matter where an influencer lives, because she dresses like she’s from the internet, and that’s all that counts." Everyone is now a walking advertisement (1,139 words)

We Have Our Ghosts

Elodie Olson-Coons | Guernica | 14th November 2022

Essay that braids together several disparate topics and themes, including the troubled history of the Alsace-Lorraine region — which was French and then German and then French again — as well as the destruction of Notre-Dame de Paris, the process of making a home, the death of a parent, and what happens afterwards. Sometimes, only a good bonfire can provide closure (3,364 words)

London’s Fatberg-Busters

Jessica Leigh Hester | Atlas Obscura | 3rd November 2022

Account of a night spent with a team that maintains London's 150-year-old sewer system. Fatbergs are the enemy: they smell worse than sewage and are harder to clear. "Some of it has a 'mashed-potato consistency'. Other fat is buttery, and so yielding that someone walking across it might find themselves sinking. Over time, it hardens until it is almost geological, solid as rock" (4,294 words)

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True Colours Of Antiquity

Suzanna Murawski | New Criterion | 9th November 2022

Were ancient Greek and Roman statues generally displayed as bare white marble, or painted in stylised colours? James Fenton has argued for white. Chroma, at the Met, argues for colours, showing copies of the Met's classical statuary tricked out in antique pigments. These novelty versions confuse the modern eye. They appear "brand-new" and therefore "unreal". They are art, but not art history (1,300 words)

China’s Forbidden Treasures

Sun Jiahui | World Of Chinese | 10th November 2022

A brief history of the Forbidden City in Beijing, built in 1406 as an imperial palace. After the last Chinese emperor was deposed in 1911, the palace was turned into a museum, if not without cost. "Many eunuchs panicked, having long smuggled treasures from the palace and sold them to antique dealers. To cover their tracks they set the palace alight, destroying countless relics in the process" (1,300 words)

Biking's Greatest Uphill Achievement

Braydon Bringhurt | Bicycling | 3rd November 2022

Read the first sentences, and decide if you are minded to continue: "The trail begins at 10,000 feet in the La Sal Mountains, among the aspens of Burro Pass. After an uphill prelude it plunges 8,000 feet into the red-rock canyons near the Colorado River. It’s a feast with every Moab flavor: sculpted slickrock, cliff-edge single track, and descents that rattle the fillings out of your teeth" (7,400 words)

Author's Note

Robin Sloan | Trespassers | 10th November 2022

The unwalling of GPT-3, DALL-E and similar engines has unleashed a deluge of texts and images generated by humans exploiting AIs. Sloan, something of a veteran in both writing and computing, describes here his experience of working at Google's invitation to produce an AI-generated short story meeting the critical norms generally applied by humans to fiction. Not easy, apparently (1,125 words)

The Scent Of Flavour

Linda Bartoshuk | Inference Review | 8th November 2022

On the differences between taste, smell and flavour. Taste occurs when receptors on the tongue are stimulated, smell in the nose. Flavour combines the two. When we swallow, volatiles from the food are released up a conduit between the back of the mouth and the nose and processed there. Owing to traffic on the olfactory nerve, we cannot perceive smell and flavour at the same time (4,181 words)

Cafes And The Parisian Working Class

Robert W. Brown | Berfrois | 7th November 2022

Paris had 3,000 cafes in 1789 and around 42,000 a century later, at the peak of 19C cafe culture. Cafes acted as a "living room" for working class people. In the first half of the 20C, they were also a transitional space as workers moved from the "essentially public" style of living near the street created in the early modern period to the privacy and isolation of a high rise apartment building (1,884 words)

BrowserBites explores a new idea each day, in under a minute. Join Uri Bram (Publisher of The Browser), Sebastian Park (@SebPark), and guests as they blitz through an idea in less time than it takes to brush your teeth.

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At The Digital Doorstep

Aiha Nguyen & Eve Zelickson | Data & Society | 12th October 2022 | PDF

Thoughtful analysis of how home surveillance tech has changed our behaviour and the labour market. "In an ingenious way, Amazon has managed to transform what was once a labour cost (ie supervising work and asset protection) into a revenue stream through the sale of doorbell cameras and subscription services to residents who then perform the labour of securing their own doorstep" (13,517 words)

The Very Bacterial Caterpillar

Jennifer Frazer | Small Things Considered | 7th November 2022

Attention-grabbing from the opening line — "Glued to the inside of your mouth this very moment (there's a 50 per cent chance) may be plump bacter­ial caterpillars" — and further detail does not disappoint. These multicellular bacteria divide in an "unorthodox longitudinal configuration". Of course, unlike real caterpillars, they feed not on foliage but on the inside of our cheeks (1,490 words)