Dandelions And Elephants

Flux Collective | Lens Of The Week | 6th October 2022

Short and suggestive note on r/K selection theory, which locates all evolutionary strategy on a continuum between two poles: r-selection and K-selection. An r-selection strategy focuses on rapid replication: make copies of yourself as quickly as possible and have them mutate freely across generations. K-selection focuses on quality over quantity, fitting a population already at carrying capacity (375 words)

SoupGate

James Ozden | Understanding Social Change | 22nd October 2022

If one sees climate change as a clear and present danger to human flourishing, should one support climate activists who throw soup at (glass-protected) Van Gogh paintings? Probably yes. Average sympathy for a radical protest will be much lower than average sympathy for a moderate protest; but a radical protest will attract many times more eyeballs, and thus a greater aggregate of sympathy (1,400 words)

Five Ideas That Might Boost Growth

Tim Harford | 3rd November 2022

If you believe, as Tim Harford does, that "raising the rate of growth is an admirable goal for any politician", then the ideas and observations here, provoked by the counter-examples of the British government in recent weeks, merit attention. In brief: Don't cut taxes without cutting spending; don't cut spending if you care about the long term; focus spending on education and infrastructure (900 words)

It’s The Way That You Do It

Samuel Jay Keyser | Berfrois | 2nd November 2022

Can one distinguish between form and meaning in a poem? Does poetic form exist only to embellish thoughts that might otherwise be expressed in prose with no great loss of meaning, if perhaps with some great loss of elegance? That, I think, is Keyser's argument here. In any case, his experimental mixing of Wordsworth's Tables Turned with Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky is a joy to behold (2,100 words)

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The Vulnerable Internet

Matt Burgess | Wired | 2nd November 2022

Egypt is the epicentre of the world's internet. It is estimated that 17 per cent of online traffic travels via underwater cables that surface there. Other routes are either too expensive or go through war zones. This Egyptian "chokepoint" is highly vulnerable, as was shown earlier this year when two of these cables were severed and entire countries (Ethiopia and Somalia) lost connectivity (1,816 words)

A Locus Of Care

Justin E. H. Smith | Hinternet | 15th October 2022

Remembering the French philosopher Bruno Latour, best known for his work on the narrative consequences of scientific discovery. "Bruno Latour was honest and generous, and I don’t think there’s any question he took up that was not, for him, a true matter of concern. He was one of our era’s best guides between the eternal Scylla and Charybdis of dogmatism and scepticism" (2,919 words)

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A Feminist-Materialist Quest For Everlasting Life

Anne M. Thell | JHI Blog | 31st October 2022 | U

Margaret Cavendish, 17C writer and philosopher, spent much of her time (when she wasn't publishing the first science fiction in English or sparring with the Royal Society) pondering immortality. A favourite thought experiment was what she called "Restoring-Beds, or Wombs" — spongey sacks hidden in "the Centre of the World" that could restore any being placed inside to perfect health (2,065 words)

The Ghostly Radio Station No One Runs

Zaria Gorvett | BBC Future | 15th July 2020 | U

The radio station MDZhB has been broadcasting a 4625 kHz drone every day since 1976, occasionally interrupted by a voice reading words in Russian "such as 'dinghy' or 'farming specialist'". Fans call it "the Buzzer". Its purpose is unknown. The Russian military has never claimed it. Conspiracy theories abound, but it is probably just a placeholder, waiting to be used in a moment of crisis (2,244 words)

Amid War, Bat Rescue Continues

Wojciech Mikołuszko | Undark | 31st October 2022

The Ukrainian Bat Rehabilitation Centre lost all of its funding and some of its staff this year. They now rescue bats that are trapped in bombed out buildings. The Russian Ministry of Defence accused them of using the bats as bioweapons, but Ukrainians have stepped up to help, hosting hibernating bats in their homes when conservation facilities become inaccessible thanks to military activity (1,861 words)

On Spookiness

Eliza Brooke | Dirt | 19th October 2022

Why is "spooky" a fun and cosy aesthetic, whereas a "scary" atmosphere can give one nightmares? "Technically, spooky means ghostly or spectral, two words that relate to liminality. To me, spookiness is a suggestion... I suspect that spookiness is a lot like love, in that everyone experiences it in a way that seems so private, so specific, that they believe nobody else feels it quite as they do" (2,896 words)

from the Browser eight years ago: My Grandma The Poisoner

John Reed | Vice | 27th October 2014

Grandma is 94 now, and barely knows who or where she is. Clearing out her old house, and finding the chemicals in her shed, I start to understand why, when she was younger, people were always dying around her — her children, her husbands, her boyfriend. "I don’t wonder whether Grandma got what she deserved as a mother; I wonder whether she got what she deserved as a murderer" (4,025 words)

The Diaries Of Ned Rorem

Ted Gioia | Honest Broker | 23rd October 2022

The American composer Ned Rorem, who turned 99 this week, has been keeping one of the world's great diaries throughout his amazing life, and publishing it in tantalising fragments. His Paris Diaries came out in 1951: "Picasso shows up on page 2. On page 4 Rorem meets Jean Cocteau, and is painted by the Vicomtesse de Noailles, with whom he starts a love affair before we get to page 5" (2,980 words)

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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