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The full Browser includes a daily podcast and video pick, alongside our five recommended articles. Here's our latest!

Podcast: Madhur Jaffrey | Full English. About the actress and celebrity chef who brought Indian food to British and American audiences (57m 39s)


Video: Mysteries From A Nuclear Test Site | YouTube | Journey To The Microcosmos | 9m 8s

A bag of sand from the Marshall Islands, examined under a microscope.


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The Best Sci-Fi & Fantasy Novels, as Chosen by Fans: the 2024 Hugo Award

Every year, members of the World Science Fiction Society nominate writers for the Hugo Award, then vote for the winner. All speculative fiction is eligible – fantasy as well as sci-fi – and the shortlist is one of the most prestigious for both genres. Here, Sylvia Bishop introduces us to the nominees for the title of the best speculative novel of 2024 – and the page-turning champion. Read more


History books seek to explain and analyse the past with objectivity, but novels (or plays) written at the time show what an individual actually living through the period experienced, thought about and was preoccupied with. Read more


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What Lasts And (Mostly) Doesn’t Last

Lincoln Michel | Counter Craft | 21st August 2024

How many writers or titles from bestseller lists of yore are recognisable today? Surprisingly few. The converse is also true: Melville and Kafka lay forgotten for decades before being “rediscovered”. The books that endure usually have a dedicated following of specialist readers. They are foundational in a style or genre. Lovecraft died poor and obscure but is easily the most influential horror author today (1,900 words)


TikTok LLM

Eleanor Stern | New Inquiry | 24th June 2024

To bypass TikTok’s algorithms with their “intense, often inscrutable” censorship, users have created a “mirror-lexicon”: nazis are yahtzees, kill is unalive, porn is corn — a “replacement vocabulary” in linguistics parlance. Some of it has left TikTok’s confines; teachers worry about students using “unalive” in emails. This “algospeak” harks back to a central irony of language taboos: “proscription is productive” (2,500 words)


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Danger On The Divide

Maggie Slepian | Longreads | 15th August 2024

Cautionary tale of cycling trip gone wrong along the “Divide” — a 2700-mile-long route on dirt roads crossing New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana. “I had spent countless nights in the woods adjusting my relationship to danger. But no matter how desensitised we had become, the more time spent in the woods, the more of a numbers game you play with injury, weather, wildlife, exposure” (5,500 words)


The Myth Of Simple Truths

Scott Aiken & Robert Talisse | 3 Quarks Daily | 4th January 2016

“So much political commentary seems to proceed by means of debate rather than report. Rather than presenting facts and professing a view, commentators present views concerning the views of their opponents. Despite heated disagreements over Big Questions like healthcare, abortion, race relations and global warming, we find a surprising consensus about the nature of political disagreement itself” (900 words)


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Republican Radical Who Helped Gay Rights

Neil J. Young | Reason | 11th August 2024

On Dorr Legg — Republican and gay rights trailblazer. Moved to LA during its gay boom in the 1940s. Launched ONE Magazine, the first American publication for positive coverage of homosexuality, acquiring more than 5,000 subscribers within a year and a larger covert readership. Successfully fought obscenity charges laid against the magazine, resulting in a landmark Supreme Court ruling in 1958 (4,200 words)


Soviet Sabotage Doctrine

Daniela Richterova | War On The Rocks | 19th August 2024

Putin seems to be following the Cold War playbook for sabotage operations in the West: Disrupt policies not in Moscow’s interests. Generate strife within NATO by playing up French-American, Greek-Turkish, British-German tensions. Target key infrastructure: power plants, pipelines, refineries, rail lines, drinking water reservoirs, nuclear bomb shelters. More might be yet to come (2,900 words)


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Ground Control To Mr. Meline

James Ross Gardner | Seattle Met | 17th September 2013

Rob Meline was an elementary schoolteacher and a student favourite who made science fun for eleven-year-olds. When he was murdered by his troubled son, his students plunged into shock and grief. Scott Birdseye, his substitute, rallied the class to plan the perfect send-off. In 2013, the USS Meline, a shoebox-sized Styrofoam vessel attached to a weather balloon, was launched into space (6,800 words)


Sports Betting And Sports Media

Tommy Craggs | Bloomberg Business Week | 16th August 2024

The $10 billion sports betting industry has not just infiltrated sports media, it is the sports media. ESPN has a betting platform in its name; Deadspin is now a gambling referral site. Fans are treated first as bettors or potential bettors. The results are “oily and unlovely”: any oddity in a game — the fun stuff — is viewed with suspicion about a possible fix. Audiences watch sports like investors watch portfolios (2,800 words)


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The full Browser includes a daily podcast and video pick, alongside our five recommended articles. Here's our latest!

Podcast: I Loathe That For You | Myths And Legends. The Northumbrian legend of the laidly worm, or how to avoid being eaten by dragons (34m 6s)


Video: DONKS | YouTube | Felix Colgrave | 6m 37s

Ocean plastics and bottom feeders dance around, creating playful and psychedelic scenes, culminating in a submarine being stripped down to the bones. The work of an utterly unrestrained imagination.


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Five Books features in-depth author interviews recommending five books on a theme. You can read more interviews on the site, or sign up for the newsletter.

Best Noir Novels

Noir is as much an aesthetic as it is a genre of book or movie, explains the film director Simon Hawkins; and though it might be set anywhere, Los Angeles is its spiritual home. Here, he recommends five of the best noir novels—each defined by their strong settings, seedy atmospheres and suspenseful plotting. Read more


Books about J Robert Oppenheimer

It's not often that a movie about something we know a lot about lives up to expectations, but when it came to the Oppenheimer movie, science writer Mark Wolverton—who has read almost every book he could find about the making of the atomic bomb—was impressed. As a bonus to his interview (on the history of physics), he shared some recommendations of books to read for others who enjoyed it, including a sci-fi novel in which Oppenheimer's life takes a different turn. Read more


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Intellectual Menopause

Venkatesh Rao | Ribbonfarm | 15th August 2024 | U

“An individual disease that men of particular temperaments and age range (40-50) are vulnerable to. I see intellectual menopause everywhere I look, draining vitality in discourses, leading to predictably stale and lazy patterns of argumentation. I see a sheer lack of fun — and its substitution by a resentful and dolorous glee. You might even call what’s going on an early-onset intellectual pandemic” (6,400 words)


Lessons From Singapore

Eric Feigenbaum | 3 Quarks Daily | 16th August 2024 | U

In 1965, Singapore had a 27% homeownership rate. Founding father Lee Kuan Yew wanted to create a “home-owning society” where every citizen would have “a stake in the country and its future”. He adopted a three-pronged approach: create affordable housing; make financing available for all classes; help people gather down-payments. In three decades, 90% of all Singaporeans became homeowners (2,600 words)


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Why Does Ozempic Cure All Diseases?

Scott Alexander | Astral Codex Ten | 13th August 2024

Ozempic seems effective against an astonishing array of ailments — stroke, heart disease, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, alcoholism, drug addiction, and even behavioural addictions like shopping. GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic tackle obesity by reducing people’s craving for food reward, an effect that could also treat addiction. Additionally, they seem to have anti-inflammatory properties that can arrest dementia (3,600 words)


McMillions

James Lee Hernandez & Brian Lazarte | CrimeReads | 12th August 2024

Book excerpt about the fraud behind McDonald’s promotional Monopoly games. Contestants could win up to a million dollars. Every time McDonald’s ran the game, they had a 40% jump in sales, unheard of in retail promotions. The FBI got suspicious when three winners seemed related to each other. The odds of three people from the same family or friend group winning the big prizes were 1 in 120 trillion (4,700 words)


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The Faustian Bargain

Ed Simon | Next Big Idea | 8th August 2024

...And why it is compelling. The tale is an autobiography of every human. Mythical and transcendent it might be, but Faust’s story is also about paperwork — with a contract at its centre. Fascism is a Faustian bargain: the national soul exchanged for fantasies of making the nation great again. Faust holds up a mirror to modern society, with “the desire for power disguised as a thirst for knowledge” (2,000 words)


Creativity Is Not A Scarce Commodity

Howard S. Becker | 9th October 2017

On the contrary, it occurs everywhere, all the time. What’s scarce is the labelling of something as creative — “only the right kind of person, defined by the environing organisation as the kind of person who can be creative, can find creative solutions”. The informal codes around creativity demonstrate a parallel to sumptuary laws, which regulated what kinds of clothing different classes of people could wear (4,900 words)


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