Humans have been obsessed with colonising Mars for over a century. Most work in this field relates to the physical difficulties of establishing human life on the red planet: the length of the journey from Earth, the unbreathable Martian atmosphere, the lack of water, the cold, the dust. It overlooks another vital consideration: Mars is boring. What effect might its "aesthetic sterility" have on the human psyche? (7,300 words)
"Gatekeeper" is a term with pejorative implications in the publishing realm: someone who puts up barriers to keep the masses out of the system. This is incorrect. A gatekeeper is "the picky curator who maintains a necessary membrane between your half-formed, typo-addled thoughts and the wider world. It means the tastemaker who triages opinions and batters the better ones into readable form" (800 words)
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Henry Cheng | Made In China Journal | 17th June 2026
Joan Hinton, physicist and American Maoist, moved to China in the 1940s "disillusioned by Cold War politics and the militarisation of nuclear science". In the US, she was a traitor, while the Mao regime publicly praised her as an "internationalist warrior". The Chinese authorities never truly trusted or integrated the Hintons, however. They were "useful but potentially unreliable foreigners" (3,900 words)
How the climactic scene of Ferris Bueller's Day Off, in which a Ferrari is launched through the window of a mid-century modern home and into a ravine, was filmed. The car itself was too expensive to use, so the film actually features a kit replica. The ravine had to be protected with burlap sacks. The effects worked as intended, but director John Hughes was disappointed that the car didn't sustain more damage (5,400 words)
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Trusts emerged in English law as a loophole around bad laws that were hindering social and economic progress. They allowed married women to hold property when the law forbade it. They helped group activities and civil society flourish by enabling a group of people to act legally as one person. The trust is “that most English of institutions: a fudge — but a fudge that built the modern world” (5,400 words)
Erik Gauger | Notes From The Road | 10th June 2026
A hand-drawn visual field guide. “Capsaicin, the compound that makes chilli peppers hot, is an evolutionary filter designed to punish mammals and reward birds. Humans entered the picture late and changed almost everything about the pepper’s form, flavour and range. But the underlying logic is still there in every fruit: a molecule that says no to the animals who won’t deliver their seeds far from the tree” (24,100 words)
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Matthew Morgan | Republic Of Letters | 12th June 2026
The comic’s creator Bill Watterson never budged on his principles. He fought Universal Press Syndicate against merchandising Calvin and Hobbes for six years — and won. To avoid putting out work he considered shoddy, he took many long sabbaticals, an unheard-of privilege for syndicated cartoonists. After ending it, he excised Calvin and Hobbes out of his life with surgical precision and thoroughness (6,000 words)
The full version of this Browser edition also featured hacking superyachts, handling rattlesnakes, and memories transferred through digestion — plus the day's podcast and video picks.
“One reason Elon Musk is the first trillionaire is that, relative to all the other deca- and centi-billionaires, he has a much higher tolerance for the possibility of ending up broke, in jail or on the hook for a trillion and one dollars’ worth of child support. Some of this is probably genuine skill at underwriting seemingly-low probabilities, some of it is raw risk tolerance, and some of it is poor impulse control” (1,900 words)
Music critic and longtime Beatles devotee reviews McCartney's latest album, The Boys Of Dungeon Lane. The music is part of a lifelong project of reexamining old memories for new meanings. "He continues to try. He retraces his steps. He screws his eyes shut. He tries to remember. He asks, 'Of all the people who ever lived, why me?' He reaches out into something that is no longer there" (2,400 words)
Food has never been more nutritional and less nurturing. The grocery store is the frontier of our "collective brainrot", as companies market everything in terms of its supposed health benefits. "In need of protein — you can have it as candy, see Hershey’s recent hire of a 'Director of protein business', you can also get fibre from cotton candy and collagen from cookies." It's late stage capitalism as sustenance (750 words)
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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.
The Women's Prize was set up to highlight the very best of women's writing—whatever their subject matter. We spoke to Salma El-Wardany, one of this year's judges, about the six books that made it onto their fiction shortlist: skillfully told novels that will appeal to a wide audience, from Virginia Evans's heartwarming epistolary novel The Correspondent to Susan Choi's Flashlight, a heavyweight family saga that sweeps through the decades and across oceans. Read more
With hindsight, it seems inevitable that the Allies would eventually defeat the Axis powers in World War II, but at the time it seemed anything but. Tim Bouverie, author of the prize-winning Allies at War: The Politics of Defeating Hitler, talks us through some of the best nonfiction books about the war and the alliances that led to Allied victory. Read more
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Justin Garson | Blog of the APA | 8th June 2026 | U
There are two paradigms of depression. One sees it as a chemical imbalance or brain dysfunction. Despite little evidence to support it, this is the dominant paradigm. The second view sees depression as a functional signal of the brain that some of our needs are not being met. Like physical pain, it is a useful signal that something isn’t quite right. “Depression isn’t pathological; it’s purposeful” (2,400 words)
An American crow once disappeared into the near-vertical shaft of a decommissioned mine for over nine minutes and emerged with a bat. Another crow made a pointed tool out of a wooden splinter and used it as a probe to retrieve a spider in a hole. An Indian crow was observed killing a rat by drowning it, periodically pulling it out to see if it was dead and plunging it back in if not (2,200 words)
On dogs in art history. Interesting throughout. From the Odyssey onwards, dogs have been included in artistic works to "humanise humans". They make us feel less lonely as a species, inject humour, even give a painting an olfactory dimension. "They point to things, they tell us where to look, they make connections both between things in the image and gesture to us as observers of the image" (2,800 words)
The word toska appears six times in the first four chapters of Crime and Punishment. No English translator has rendered it correctly. Here is Nabokov attempting an explanation: “No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels, it is a dull ache of the soul, a sick pining” (1,700 words)
Exploring the "folk art glory" of vacuum-form signage. Seen "on every Main Street in America", these three-dimensional plastic thermo-formed signs first began appearing in the 1950s, replacing neon, which had in turn superseded wood and paint. Advances in plastics had companies competing to offer affordable options to "mom and pop" stores. The designs are now pure Americana nostalgia (1,400 words)
Podcast: Darkness Falls | World War Il With Tom Hanks. The actor voices what feels like an audiobook chapter about the escalating anti-Semitic policies and violence of the Nazi party in the 1930s (41m 03s)
A paper conservation expert takes us inside an "elaborate masterpiece" of a book, including its unusual leather bindings and illustrations.
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Podcast: Darkness Falls | World War Il With Tom Hanks. The actor voices what feels like an audiobook chapter about the escalating anti-Semitic policies and violence of the Nazi party in the 1930s (41m 03s)
Exploring the "folk art glory" of vacuum-form signage. Seen "on every Main Street in America", these three-dimensional plastic thermo-formed signs first began appearing in the 1950s, replacing neon, which had in turn superseded wood and paint. Advances in plastics had companies competing to offer affordable options to "mom and pop" stores. The designs are now pure Americana nostalgia (1,400 words)
Paul Lukas | Inconspicuous Consumption | 6th May 2026
People are combating overconsumption by documenting everything single thing that they own. "Your personal inventory is constantly in flux. Every time you go to the supermarket, pick up a new ChapStick at the corner store, or get your daily mail delivery, you suddenly have more objects; every time you take out the trash, sell something on eBay, or eat an apple out of the fridge, you have fewer" (1,400 words)
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On dogs in art history. Interesting throughout. From the Odyssey onwards, dogs have been included in artistic works to "humanise humans". They make us feel less lonely as a species, inject humour, even give a painting an olfactory dimension. "They point to things, they tell us where to look, they make connections both between things in the image and gesture to us as observers of the image" (2,800 words)
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Argument for flipping the way we think about mental health diagnosis. Most patients treat their diagnosis as an immutable identity: "The noun arrives with the gravity of a verdict. Patients receive a diagnosis the way defendants receive a sentence: as a statement about who they are and what their life will now be." In fact, a diagnosis is just a "revisable lookup key that exists to find treatments faster" (2,500 words)
There are two paradigms of depression. One sees it as a chemical imbalance or brain dysfunction. Despite little evidence to support it, this is the dominant paradigm. The second view sees depression as a functional signal of the brain that some of our needs are not being met. Like physical pain, it is a useful signal that something isn’t quite right. “Depression isn’t pathological; it’s purposeful” (2,400 words)
Leanne Ogasawara | Dreaming In Japanese | 8th June 2026
Profile of artist Chang Dai-chien, who was dubbed the “Chinese Picasso” in the 1950s. He made a splash in Paris, walking the streets in his “Song dynasty robes and Dongpo hat”, completing his look with a wooden cane and a beard that came down to his chest. He is said to have outsold Van Gogh, and this figure may not include his many forgeries, still hanging in major museums around the world (1,200 words)
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An American crow once disappeared into the near-vertical shaft of a decommissioned mine for over nine minutes and emerged with a bat. Another crow made a pointed tool out of a wooden splinter and used it as a probe to retrieve a spider in a hole. An Indian crow was observed killing a rat by drowning it, periodically pulling it out to see if it was dead and plunging it back in if not (2,200 words)
The scientific community remains baffled by Long Covid. Understanding it requires a systemic approach, which modern medicine has largely rejected in favour of specialisation. The human body is like an intricate mechanical watch and the pathogen is a grain of sand. “The disease is the whole entity — the watch steadily grinding its own gears down in an inflammatory attempt to chew through the sand” (4,700 words)
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