The earliest experiments in creating a universal picture language took place during the Alpine cycling craze of the 1890s. Clubs began to put up signs warning members of upcoming sharp bends or steep ascents. Pictures were preferred in part because one could not be sure what language a cyclist in the region might speak. Yet, to this day, “the dream of a single language of the road has never been realised” (2,100 words)
“The characteristic temptation of the humanist is bringing exclusively humanistic tools to bear on questions that demand empirical evidence. The humanistically inclined put too much weight on the authority of great books. I don’t want to identify as a humanist, because I don’t want to be the kind of person for whom it feels natural to let quotation substitute for evidence when empirical questions are at stake” (4,300 words)
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The Abundance movement is becoming a major political force, and yet the conservation community is noticeably absent from its coalition. Understandable, given that it has long been about limiting human impacts. But many species, forests and wetlands now require continued human intervention to survive. “Conservation today isn’t something that happens on its own. It must be supplied” (2,400 words)
Sanjiv Bhattacharya | Minority Report | 16th February 2026
Stories about cults with Rick Ross, America’s “foremost cult deprogrammer”. He has travelled the world working with cult victims and thinks that the “US is the best place for a cult to set up shop”, not least because of its legal framework, which offers immunities and protections not available in other countries. When asked what type of person would join a cult, he replies, “every kind” (2,400 words)
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Profile of Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, who in 1825 published The Physiology of Taste, "the most influential non-recipe book ever written about food". Best known for its highly quotable aphorisms, it's well worth reading in all its peculiar, digressionary glory. "It is gut-wrenching to think just how much bad food writing could have been averted if people had only read beyond the first two pages of his book" (4,000 words)
S.Y. Lee | S(ubstack)-Bahn | 13th February 2026 | U
Writer visits two favourite buildings that stand across the street from each other in Seoul: the Jongmyo Shrine, a Confucian complex founded in 1396, and the Sewoon Sangga, a brutalist complex of shopping malls that stretches for four blocks. They are polar opposites, but also embody Seoul's many evolutions. The mall is now heading for demolition. If it goes, so does a fascinating piece of urban history (4,600 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.
Since cuneiform symbols were first used on clay tablets 5,000 years ago, humans have been recording not only information, but also stories. Some of the oldest writings were works of literature that speak to us across the millennia and continue to be published as books today. Five Books contributing editor Tuva Kahrs brings you five of the oldest books that have made it all the way from clay tablet or papyrus scroll to printed edition or e-book, influencing countless generations of readers and writers. Read more
While we may not always act as we should, research into human behaviour has taught us enough to improve things both individually and as a society, says behavioural scientist Michael Hallsworth, author of The Hypocrisy Trap. He talks us through his favourite books on human behaviour, from managing the voice in our head to avoiding the dangers of groupthink. Read more
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The full Browser recommends five articles, a video and a podcast. Today, enjoy our audio and video picks.
Podcast: Garden Symphony | Get Birding. Actor Sean Bean hosts an engaging podcast featuring birdcalls and expert imitations, best heard with headphones (31m 28s)
Synchronised figure skating is something to behold — a combination of skating with cheerleading and dance. This gold medal team performance contains dozens of thrilling jumps, lifts and spins.
Aria Schrecker | Works In Progress | 10th February 2026
“There are several measures by which humans are strangely long-lived: size, heart rate, and reproductive window. In general, the more intelligent the species, the longer its lifespan. The average lifespan of a species, across all kingdoms of organisms, tends to increase as it gets bigger. But longevity has tradeoffs, and many of the super-long-lived creatures make big sacrifices to achieve their lifespans” (4,500 words)
On how people living in a culture synchronise their behaviour in arbitrary and self-reinforcing ways — examples ranging from train-boarding in Japan and Italy to English sarcasm. “The basic force behind all culture formation is imitation. This ability is innate in all humans, regardless of culture: we are extraordinarily good imitators. Indeed, we are overimitators, sometimes with unfortunate consequences” (2,900 words)
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Sebastian Stockman | Saturday Letter | 8th February 2026
Memories of a friend who died at the age of only 43. Dan McQuade was a sportswriter in Pennsylvania and a connoisseur of "life’s inconveniences and absurd juxtapositions". This writer met him in college and ever since they had shared a deep love of the "bad lede", the opening paragraph of an article that deploys layers of inappropriately tortured metaphor. Several excellent examples are given (1,100 words)
Editor's note: we apologise for the recent bug in the system! Nomido is back, and with a new meta-challenge: instead of finding a phrase of the day, find four words that share a theme.
Rossetti, Woolf et al | Common Reader | 9th February 2026
As the curator here rightly says, "there is no indifference to Wuthering Heights". Critics have been delighting in or deploring Emily Brontë's only novel since it was first published in 1847. One anonymous reviewer from 1848 considered it to be the author's devilish cheese dream. Dante Gabriel Rossetti thought it a "fiend of a book". Swinburne called it a poem. F.R. Leavis declared Emily Brontë a genius (4,000 words)
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Paul Bloom | Small Potatoes | 9th February 2026 | U
Notes on a post-scarcity utopia. It is oft-said that if all our material needs were satisfied, humans would suffer from ennui and loss of purpose. Struggle gives life meaning — or does it? In a world without want, positional goods, which mark one’s status relative to others, would still matter. The desire to matter in some way and to someone would still remain. Attention itself is a positional good (3,100 words)
Meagan Bojarski | Mental Floss | 10th February 2026 | U
Many languages bias people against left-handedness. In Latin, right is “dexter” and left is “sinister”, which acquired its association with evil in later usage. In Arabic and Hindi, the word for left also denotes “easy”, implying that a task must be easy to be done by the left hand. A clumsy person has “two left feet” in English. “Left luck” denotes bad luck; “getting up with the left foot” is connected to a bad day (1,600 words)
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George McGowan | Mindless Algorithm | 8th February 2026 | U
Science fiction has warped our ideas of how a visit to Earth from aliens might go. Just to get here from the nearest star, let alone further afield, said aliens would have to be far more technologically advanced than us. Unless they wanted us to know, we might not even be aware of their presence. "There is no 'war' and we don't even necessarily realise what is happening. They don't land infantry with laser guns" (1,200 words)
Profile of one Michael van Erp, better known as "Cycling Mikey". When he was 19, his father was killed by a drunk driver. Ever since, he's been trying to catch road offenders in the act. As a "cycling vigilante" who shares his footage with both the Met and his thousands of followers, he is proud to say that he has pulled in £168,568 in fines. His nemesis is a lawyer known as "Mr Loophole" (2,700 words)
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Patrick McKenzie | Bits About Money | 6th February 2026 | U
Thoughts on fraud. Fraudsters tend to repeat themselves: "The dominant next adventure for a former fraudster is… opening up a new fraud." They share the same supply chain and professional services firms. They employ family and close friends, because they need loyalty in the face of threatened prison time. Properly investigating fraud is a vital but underrated function of a healthy democracy (6,700 words)
Writer recalls her bad memories of a traumatic time in nursery school in 1970s Beijing — four-year-olds were threatened with hammers — and finds parallels to 21C politics. "A friend in London talks about the mystifying phrase she keeps hearing these days: ‘This is not America, this is not who we are.’ But this is America, this is life, and this is how human beings behave. American exceptionalism will not save us" (600 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.
Heroic explorer or harbinger of doom? The impact of Christopher Columbus has become the focus of intense debate—in both academia and the arena of popular opinion—in recent years. We asked noted scholar of colonial Latin American history Matthew Restall to recommend five of the best books that explore Columbus's life and legacy. Read more
In order to have fewer failed projects, we need to address some of the deep structural incentives in the system, argues Jonathan Simcock, who spent 16 years leading and advising on large UK government projects. He talks us through books to read to understand more about big projects and why they go wrong, and how to do better in future. Read more
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Madysan Weatherspoon | Fascinating World | 29th January 2026 | U
In 1970, a Japan Airlines flight from Tokyo to Fukuoka was hijacked by nine university students who wanted to start a Marxist revolution. They ordered the pilots to fly to Cuba, seen then as a utopia by communists. But their Boeing 727 could not fly that far without refuelling. So the hijackers pivoted to North Korea. This gave the Japanese authorities the chance to plan a masterly deception and rescue (1,200 words)
Turner Brooks | Paris Review | 4th February 2026 | U
Account of a young architect's obsession with the New Haven, Connecticut, coke plant. It was 1966 and the J.M.W. Turner-esque cloud of steam that the factory produced — "so thick it looked like one could climb into it" — was mesmerising. He started making nocturnal visits to stare at the giant mechanised ovens, each seventy-five feet deep, that transformed coal into coke. Highly evocative writing (1,300 words)
The tech singularity — the point at which technology becomes a black hole of self-perpetuating creations — “will always appear as if it is about to happen”. “The singularity is simply a phantom that will materialise anytime you observe exponential acceleration retrospectively. In a thousand years from now, all the 11-dimensional charts at that time will show that ‘the singularity is near’” (2,400 words)
Chris Arnade | Chris Arnade Walks The World | 3rd February 2026 | U
There is an "expanding sterility" to 21C life. Instead of ordering food from humans, we use a frustrating app. Getting a flight rebooked traps us in a maze of chatbots. The doctrine of hyper efficiency has both made us less efficient and sucked the soul out of day-to-day interactions. Machines are good at many tasks, but not at interacting with humans. It's a mistake to outsource that work to them (3,000 words)
Paul Sagar | Diary Of A Punter | 1st February 2026 | U
Climber ponders the fall that left him tetraplegic with bitter honesty. “I took more risks than most. But there are others who took far, far more than I ever would have dreamed of.” One of those risks was free solo climbing, a controversial topic even amongst climbers. Why did he do it? His best explanation is akrasia — “situations in which a person apparently acts against their own professed best judgement” (3,300 words)