Podcast: Why Are There So Many Shipwrecks in the Great Lakes? | There's More To That. Maritime archaeologist explains the fascinating process of diving, recovering and documenting shipwrecks, which she considers to be "time capsules" (32m 39s)

Video: Shanti Rides Shotgun | Vimeo | Voyager | 8m 18s

Heartwarming feature about a take-no-prisoners style driving instructor in New York City.

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The Uses And Abuses Of Manet’s Olympia

Todd Cronan | Nonsite | 3rd January 2025

Édouard Manet's Olympia caused a "firestorm" when first exhibited in 1865. Its subject matter — white model Victorine Meurent formally poses on a bed in the nude while her black maid Laure brings her flowers — provoked over a century of commentary, primarily about the nudity, not the racial dynamics. The "staging and artifice" of Olympia prevents the viewer indulging in false empathy for its figures (2,900 words)

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The Boring Part Of Bell Labs

Elizabeth Van Nostrand | 19th November 2025

What did Bell Labs do in between the moonshot projects like inventing the transistor and solar cells? The writer interviews her father, who was in the applied division, working on things like improving inventory control and designing "slide rulers so salesmen could estimate costs". Interesting throughout. This mundane, industry-applicable work enabled the expensive experimental research (4,400 words)

“I Awoke At ½ Past 7”

Elena Mary | Aeon | 17th November 2025 | U

Blame the Victorians for our current obsession with self-improvement, as they arguably pioneered the diary as a productivity tool. The advent of mass-printed diaries changed diary-keeping from a practice of Christian soul-searching and reflection to one of jotting down tasks and meetings. They also included pages of printed information: train timetables, holidays, weights and measures, tide times (3,700 words)

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The Problem Of Knowledge

Cyril Hédoin | The Archimedean Point | 14th November 2025 | U

The challenge of designing a system of rights boils down to a problem of knowledge. In diverse societies with sufficiently specialised labour, people pursue different plans based on private and dispersed knowledge. Some of these plans will inevitably be incompatible and cause conflict. “Disputes about rights are mostly due to the fact that we disagree about what counts as externalities and how to value them” (3,100 words)

The Weird World Sauna Championships

Sarah Everts | Walrus | 14th November 2025

If you thought sauna-ing was more about relaxation than competition, think again. At the world sauna theatre championships, competitors stage performances in saunas, complete with music, costumes, acrobatics and fancy towel-twirling. Some write their own stories, others adapt from other media (one entrant this year did Peaky Blinders). Judges award marks for both artistry and technical difficulty (2,300 words)

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What Is A Production Process?

Brian Potter | Construction Physics | 13th November 2025

Anything that isn't taken straight from nature and used in that form has some sort of production process. This useful essay maps this onto a simplified model comprised of five universal factors, from the transformation method used to turn materials into a product to the costs associated with doing so. To improve efficiency, one or more of these factors must become cheaper and/or faster (4,200 words)

Podcast: Liberal Values In Authoritarian Times | The Good Fight. Conversation on authoritarianism in fiction and real life (56m 30s)

Video: My Love-Hate Relationship With Porcelain | YouTube | Florian Gadsby | 15m 51s

A visual essay by a potter about returning to throwing with porcelain clay after several years of using only stoneware. The only thing more mesmerising than his footage of work on the wheel is his speaking voice.

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Woolrich’s Window

Adrian McKinty | CrimeReads | 13th November 2025

On the work of Cornell Woolrich, who provided the "narrative DNA for some of Hollywood’s greatest thrillers". Hitchcock's Rear Window was based on his 1942 story “It Had to Be Murder”. Although he moved the action to Greenwich Village, the claustrophobic style came from Woolrich's years living with his ailing mother on the top floor of the unfashionable Hotel Marseilles at 103rd and Broadway (1,300 words)

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The Gallery Of Maladies

Kate Wagner | Late Review | 6th November 2025

Wonderful essay about experiencing a combination of hypochondria, Long Covid and more generalised health paranoia. "With symptoms so severe, a diagnosis of mere anxiety... seems to its victim insulting. This is one of many tragedies of the hypochondriac, that they defend themselves against the prospect of recovery by flattening an ailment into an emotion or worse, a conspiracy" (5,700 words)

James Watson, Dead At 97

Sharon Begley | Stat10 | 7th November 2025

Begley died in 2021 but left this "B-side" obituary of Watson to be published upon his death. She did not hold back. "His signal achievements, and the way he accomplished them, inflated his belief not only in his genius but also in how to succeed: by listening to his intuition, by opposing the establishment consensus, and by barely glancing at the edifice of facts on which a scientific field is built" (2,000 words)

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A Tale Of Three Chatbots

Cory Doctorow | Pluralistic | Date | 11th November 2025

Customer service is the place to look to understand our AI future. This aspect of business has always been a drain on profits, which is why it has become gradually worse over the past two decades via outsourced call centres staffed by people who have no authority to help customers. The friction, the sludge, is the point because it makes us give up. AI chatbots are the sludgiest sludge of all (1,500 words)

Where Do The Children Play?

Eli Stark-Elster | Unpublishable Papers | 7th November 2025

In most human societies, children have preferred to spend their time playing and exploring with peers in a world separate from adults and their scrutiny. The anthropological evidence for this pattern is rich and widespread. Deprived of this critical phase of unsupervised exploration, the internet has become the only place left where children today "can grow up without adults" (3,100 words)

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What Is The Ozma Problem?

Maloy Das | Fascinating World | 1st November 2025

How do you explain right and left to someone using language alone, without a show of hands or pictures? Kant used handedness to weigh in on the great scientific debates about the nature of space. A hand floating in space, though identical in every possible way to its counterpart, can only be either a right hand or a left hand. “The intrinsic quality of handedness is impossible to explain without showing” (1,500 words)

What Socialism Got Right

Kristen Ghodsee | MIT Press Reader | 6th November 2025

Historian of post-Communism, while acknowledging the enormous harms of the various 20C regimes, enumerates the benefits that are now vanishing under capitalism. These include a powerful sense of community, accessible and subsidised cultural life, improved workplace equality for women and planned neighbourhoods with civic amenities. These are lessons, not political heresy, she argues (1,500 words)

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Unparalleled Misalignments

Ricki Heicklen | 1st January 2018

Continually updated list of unparalleled misalignments, defined by the compiler as "pairs of non-synonymous phrases where the words in one phrase are each synonyms of the words in the other". For example: each word of "American Art" corresponds to that of "Yankee Doodle", but the phrases themselves don't match. Other gems include "father figure/dad bod" and "dark matter/midnight mass" (3,300 words)