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)

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.

Browser Bites

Browser Bites 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.

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)

Browser classified:

Pendo Free’s retroactive analytics and in-app guides for web and mobile can help you achieve product led growth. Sign up now to get access to our full-featured, 14-day trial and start making better product decisions and improving your user engagement.

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)

Browser classified:

Yakread merges all your content—newsletters, bookmarks, tweets, and more—into a single intelligently curated feed. It's great for keeping up with all your subscriptions without feeling overwhelmed. Give it a try.

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)

Browser classified:

Start your day by reading Morning Brew - the daily email that makes reading the news actually enjoyable. Best part? It's free & only takes 5 minutes to read. If you're interested in business, current events, or just want to learn something new there's no reason not to try it.

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

The End Of Cinema

Jared Marcel Pollen | Verso | 20th September 2022

Engaging account of Jean-Luc Godard's early years, from 1959 to 1967, when he made "perhaps the greatest series of films made by a single filmmaker" — 15 feature films including the masterpieces À bout de souffle, Pierrot le Fou, and Week-end. "If we can compare Godard’s work during this period to anything, it would be the novels of Thomas Pynchon and James Joyce" (1,500 words)

Oligopoly And Social Norms

Mançur Olson | Yale University Press | 20th September 2022

Notes on the logic of cartels. Many points of interest, including a theory of why, in many countries, the medical profession strives to limit the number of new entrants more strictly than the legal profession does. "In legal systems without much limitation on the initiation of litigation, additional lawyers can raise the demand for their colleagues by increasing the likelihood of legal disputes" (1,100 words)

In Egypt, Foreigners Dominate Belly Dancing

Chahrazade Douah | New Lines | 21st September 2022

Egyptian belly dancing is full of contradictions. Purists consider it "one of the last authentic Egyptian art forms". It is also now mostly performed by non-Egyptians. Since the golden age of belly dancing ended in the 1960s, a rise in religious conservatism has made it an unattractive occupation. Dance moves and costumes are regulated and performers do prison time for violations (2,221 words)

Philosophy’s Lost Prodigy

Lincoln Allison | Engelsberg Ideas | 20th September 2022

Recollection of Gareth Evans, a philosopher who died forty years ago at the age of 34. It was obvious, this friend writes, from their first Oxford class that Evans was "at least the intellectual equal of the tutor". Even before he graduated the great minds of the field were lining up to meet him. But not everyone was happy "to be told at whatever level of frankness that they were stupid" (1,734 words)

Tiny Murder Scenes Of Frances Glessner Lee

Nicole Johnson | Al-Jazeera | 11th September 2022

While she was convalescing from an illness in 1929, a fellow patient — a medical examiner — awoke a passion for forensics in the heiress Frances Glessner Lee. She became a patron of the field and in her 50s found her calling as the creator of incredibly detailed dioramas, known as "The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death", which were used to train police on crime scene procedure (3,949 words)

Visibility And Power

Kirsten Voris | The Metropole | 20th September 2022

The Beyoğlu district of Istanbul, home to Gezi Park, has long had a reputation as "a secular playground". In 1155, Genovese merchants received permission to live here according to their own customs, a practice that stuck as ex-pats of all kinds moved in. The opening of the Taksim mosque in 2021 marked the end of an era in which the area had avoided Erdoğan's dramatic development projects (1,272 words)

Browser classified:

Yakread merges all your content—newsletters, bookmarks, tweets, and more—into a single intelligently curated feed. It's great for keeping up with all your subscriptions without feeling overwhelmed. Give it a try.

Did Neanderthals Make Art?

Bruce Hardy | Sapiens | 11th August 2022

The answer to this question is yes, but this is a recent shift in consensus, which says more about researchers' biases than Neanderthal creativity, it is argued. "The stereotype of the artless Neanderthal and the artful modern human was rooted in prejudices of the time... Even today, some art produced by non-Western peoples is described as 'folk art' or 'primitive art' rather than just art" (2,231 words)

from The Browser seven years ago:

Mrs. Bundy

Dana Middleton Silberstein | Morning News | 3rd September 2015

On the day of serial killer Ted Bundy's execution, a local TV host tracks down his mother at home and interviews her alongside the mother of one of his victims. An emotional profile of two women simultaneously close and distant. "It has to be terrible for her," says the victim's mother; "our suffering is over, our answers are all there — and I think hers are probably just beginning" (5,260 words)

Word Watch

Maria Heim | Princeton University Press | 12th September 2022

However fugitive the emotion, Sanskrit has a word for it — including a word for the feeling that there ought to be a word for a feeling that you cannot yet quite pin down. The word is anannatannassamitindriya, the “I-will-come-to-know-what-is-unknown faculty”. Surprised? Sanskrit has your back there too. Camatkara is the "smacking sound as the lips come together in surprise" (1,290 words)

Europe's Energy Catastrophe

Benjamin Hart | Intelligencer | 13th September 2022

Interview with energy analyst. Interesting throughout. "We believe that Putin would not have moved into Ukraine had natural gas not already been a crisis. The price of natural gas skyrocketed in December in Europe. He did the calculation and realised: They don’t have enough molecules. They’re surely going to come to the table and give me what I want in Ukraine. He was incorrect" (3,070 words)

Browser classified:

There’s a reason over 4 million people start their day with Morning Brew - the free daily email covering the latest news from Wall Street to Silicon Valley. It’s free & only takes 5 minutes to read so that you can get all of the most relevant updates and move on with your day.

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.

From The Browser Six Years Ago

Cow Dung Capitalism
Lhendup Bhutia | Open | 16th September 2016 | U
The market for cow products is booming in India; not meat and milk, but dung and urine. A litre of cow urine can fetch three times the price of a litre of milk. Cow dung goes into face packs, shampoos, soap, incense; urine into cough syrups, body oils, energy drinks, floor disinfectants. “A unique marriage is unfolding here, between ancient belief systems and the market forces of capitalism” (3,100 words)

From The Browser Ten Years Ago

A New Text About Jesus — And His Wife
Ariel Sabar | Smithsonian | 18 September 2012 | U
At the time, this was bruited as the biggest event in biblical studies since the Dead Sea Scrolls: A Harvard professor announced the discovery of a scrap of papyrus, apparently from the third century AD, which referred to Jesus and to his "wife", perhaps Mary Magdalene. Four years later, the story was retracted, the papyrus was declared a forgery, and the presumed forger was uncontactable (6,300 words)

Browsings — What We Are Up To:

Uri has published an essay about Misquoting Winnie The Pooh on Dirt
Caroline talks to Lucy Worsley about Agatha Christie on Shedunnit
Robert is speaking this weekend at the Summit Of Minds in Chamonix