How Markdown Took Over The World

Anil Dash | 9th January 2026

Admiring history of the simple, free text formatting language that underpins the vast majority of what is published on the internet today. Including the words you're reading right now. "The trillion-dollar AI industry's system for controlling their most advanced platforms is a plain text format one guy made up for his blog and then bounced off of a 17-year-old kid before sharing it with the world for free" (4,500 words)

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I Counted All Of The Yurts In Mongolia

Monroe Clinton | 17th June 2025

If visiting a country is not possible, exploring it via the satellite images on Google Maps can be the next best thing. This programmer got curious about Mongolia and ended up training a machine learning model to find out how many yurts there were in the whole country. Answer: 172,689. The yurt, or "ger", is still used as a temporary dwelling by rural Mongolians who have recently relocated to a city (4,000 words)

Darwin The Witness

Marco Giancotti | Aether Mug | 8th January 2026

Charles Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle is a snapshot of the world during a momentous time. "Half-unwittingly, Darwin immortalised a fast-transforming world — customs, political situations, and ways of life that were both new and just about to vanish into mostly-unwritten history." He was not an anthropologist or a geologist, but a witness to pivotal material in both fields (5,600 words)

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Defending Adverbs Exuberantly

Lincoln Michel | Counter Craft | 28th May 2025

"Avoid adverbs" and "show don't tell" are near-universal pieces of advice for writers. But is it really necessary to eschew any qualification or modification for your verbs? The answer is: it depends. Repeating information is bad writing. "Cheryl cheered happily" is redundant, because cheering is usually a happy activity. But "Cheryl cheered sadly"? That's more interesting and might be worth writing (1,500 words)

Podcast: The History Of Collecting | Moncrieff. On the dark side of collecting as a compulsive, dangerous urge throughout human history (9m 48s)

Video: Divers | Vimeo | Geordie Wood | 7m 00s

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Growing Up In '404 Not Found'

Vincent | 28th December 2025

Account of a childhood in China's secret atomic city in the Gobi Desert. Founded in 1958, "Factory 404" was initially inhabited by elite scientists. By the time this writer was born in 1991, the mystery of the bomb had long been solved, so it had shifted to become a major centre for processing nuclear waste. Sandstorms were common and water scarce. It was "a utopian bubble built on hollow ground" (2,300 words)

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I Need To Get Something Off My Chest

Sarah Lavender Smith | Mountain Running & Living | 1st January 2026

"Explant" surgery is the process of getting breast implants removed without replacing them, which otherwise needs to be done every decade or so. This ultra-marathoner, having got "the world’s smallest boob job" at the age of 34 to change the appearance of her "masculine chest", decided 22 years on to quit. Although society has normalised cosmetic surgery, it is "pretty freaking gruesome and expensive" (2,800 words)

The Paradox Of Failed Resolutions

Jillian Hess | Noted | 5th January 2026

On turning 59, Samuel Johnson resolved “to combat notions of obligation, rise early, drink less strong liquours, put books in order, scheme life”. In Octavia Butler’s notes: “my novels travel up to the top of the bestseller lists”, a goal she achieved posthumously. Robert Caro tallied the words he wrote daily; on some days it was zero. “Making resolutions you can’t possibly keep can be incredibly useful” (1,800 words)

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The Modern Peril Of The Availability Heuristic

Guy Hochman | Behavioural Economics | 6th January 2026

In times of information scarcity, the availability heuristic prevailed: people judged likelihood by memorability; familiar patterns felt more probable. With information abundance, this has evolved to dismiss what is unavailable as impossible. “Institutions designed to limit exposure, protect fairness, or filter noise now appear suspicious simply because they fail to provide visibility on demand” (1,100 words)

Operation Absolute Resolve

Dave Hartland | AV Geekery | 3rd January 2026

Aviation expert details the mission to capture Nicolás Maduro. “The word integration does not explain the sheer complexity of such a mission, an extraction so precise it involved more than 150 aircraft launching across the western hemisphere in close coordination, all coming together in time and place to get an interdiction force into Caracas while maintaining the element of tactical surprise” (2,000 words)

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The Blueprint For American Cities

Michelle Stacey | Smithsonian | 28th November 2025

In 1902, a train wreck in New York’s Park Avenue killed dozens of commuters, causing public outrage. A grand overhaul was planned by the railroad’s chief engineer, William Wilgus. The tracks would go underground with two levels, one for commuter trains and one for long-distance. To fund this plan, Wilgus proposed the concept of air rights — monetise whatever is built overhead as far up the sky as it goes (4,600 words)

Podcast: Garden Of England | Currently. Behind the scenes of the soft fruit harvest in Kent, where each summer thousands of temporary workers arrive to do the picking (28m 26s)

Video: Wild Summon | Vimeo | Karni and Saul | 14m 38s

Trippy, fantastical animated short that imagines a world in which humans exist on the dramatic life cycle of wild salmon, complete with river spawning, leaping and predatory fishing. Narrated by Marianne Faithfull.

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Massively Disruptive, Totally Plausible

Dean W. Ball et al | Politco | 2nd January 2026

Fifteen futurists offer their thoughts on what "unpredictable, unlikely but entirely plausible thing" could happen in 2026. Riots in Syria could reignite the civil war. Deepfake videos could derail the US midterm elections and erode public trust in reality itself. There could be public backlash against AI companies and a stock crash. Some combination of these could usher in the "American Troubles" (4,900 words)

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I Sell Onions On The Internet

Peter Askew | Deep South Ventures | 22nd April 2019

In 2014, a domain name trader bought an onion-related web address for $2,200 and somehow ended up running one of America's most successful farm-to-door onion delivery services. Specifically, he sells mild Vidalia onions grown in Georgia, US. He had no onion experience or distribution infrastructure when he started. It works: people want nice onions, he provides them, with good customer service (1,100 words)

The Post-American Internet

Cory Doctorow | Pluralistic | 1st January 2026

Speech about a predicted shift in internet geopolitics, from the writer who coined the word "enshittification" to describe decaying online platforms. Trump's trade policy has dismantled global norms that favoured the US. Crises precipitate change. With the US no longer a "neutral" tech broker, an "unstoppable coalition of activists, entrepreneurs and natsec hawks" is poised to refashion the internet (8,000 words)

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2025 Letter

Dan Wang | 1st January 2026

Dan Wang's China letter is an annual classic. He moved from Yale to Stanford this year and, back in San Francisco, found that Silicon Valley and the Chinese Communist Party share a fondness for paranoia and a general lack of humour. The US is suffering from Trump's mishandling of China, but Europe is doing worse. Still: "American problems seem more fixable to me than Chinese problems" (14,000 words)

Can We Trust Social Science Yet?

Ryan Briggs | Asterisk | 20th May 2025

Using evidence to arrive at policy decisions seems obviously right. But would the world improve if decision makers based their choices solely on the "evidence" produced by economists and political scientists? Most likely not. The reason being that even the top social science journals still regularly publish research that is wildly inaccurate, a product of a system that seems to be rigged for failure (4,100 words)

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The Era Of The Business Idiot

Edward Zitron | Where's Your Ed At? | 21st May 2025

Critique of today's business leaders, who are so detached from reality that they don't participate in the very economy from which they seek to profit. "Everything is dominance, acquisition, growth and possession over any lived experience, because their world is one where the journey doesn’t matter, because their journeys are riddled with privilege and the persecution of others in the pursuit of success" (13,400 words)

Pablo Picasso’s Stunning Repetitions

Jillian Hess | Noted | 7th April 2025

Picasso was a master realist until the advent of photography. His response was “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon”, a painting that “set the art world on fire”. He carried out 809 preliminary studies and filled 16 different sketchbooks, moving from realistic representations to geometric forms, collapsing perspectives, using shapes that didn’t belong together — birthing what would become known as cubism (1,600 words)

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The Lost Art Of Research As Leisure

Mariam Mahmoud | Kasurian | 9th March 2025

The 21C world of audio-visual distractions was predicted by major 20C figures like E.B. White, Virginia Woolf and Susan Sontag. Leisure, not as pure idleness but as an inheritor of the Greek concept of scholē or "school", is under threat. As the German philosopher Josef Pieper argued, this takes the form of "a style of unconstrained research". Don't just read — read playfully, purposefully and curiously (3,500 words)