Living Descendants Of Mark Anthony

Theodore Kopaliani | Antigone | 19th October 2022

Extreme genealogy. The claim made here is that Bagrationi family, which ruled Georgia for a thousand years until the Bolshevik revolution, is directly descended from Mark Anthony, who died in 30BC. The author is himself a Bagration; perhaps he paints the lily here and there; even so, the family tree is quite a sight, with its massed ranks of kings and queens plus the odd saint and priestess (1,690 words)

Inside The Proton

Charlie Wood & Merrill Sherman | Quanta | 19th October 2022

Popular science done right. Status update on the proton. The proton was first imagined a century ago as a featureless lump in the middle of a stylised atom. Then it was re-imagined as a bundle of quarks. Now, thanks to quantum mechanics, it must be re-imagined yet again as a mere abstraction, a "haze of probabilities", which collapses, when observed, into a sort of tiny seething soup  (1,900 words)

Space Filled Me With Sadness

William Shatner | Variety | 6th October 2022

Extract from the actor's co-written memoir describing his trip to space in Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space shuttle. "I discovered that the beauty isn’t out there, it’s down here, with all of us... It was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered. The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness" (1,266 words)

Revisiting The Playground

Jon Winder | History Workshop | 17th October 2022

Prompt to consider the history of a familiar structure: the children's playground. The idea that children require a dedicated place for play is a recent one — they first appeared in Britain in the mid 19C. Especially in densely populated urban areas, their value seems clear. Yet studies show that children can play anywhere with anything. Do playgrounds diminish this faculty? (1,025 words)

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What Happened To Rod McKuen?

Dan Kois | Slate | 10th October 2022

Notes on collective cultural amnesia, prompted by the rediscovery of a man once mocked as "the most understood poet in America". Rod McKuen sold millions of books and records in the 1960s and 1970s, but was then almost entirely forgotten. He walked the line between "being beloved, productive and yet also totally disparaged". His most popular poem is titled "A Cat Named Sloopy" (6,570 words)

Beyond The Raw/Pasteurised Divide

Trevor Warmedahl | Milk Trekker | 18th September 2022

Dairy-based wisdom from a nomadic cheesemaker on a hot topic in his field. Pasteurisation is generally thought to be a binary state — milk either is or isn't pasteurised. However, it is argued here, that heating this "is just one form of steering the microbial communities of raw milk" and certainly doesn't result in dairy products that are necessarily "sterile" or free of pathogens (1,617 words)

Publisher's Note: readers in New York are invited to meet Browser Publisher Uri Bram & fellow Browser readers at the Our Dark Academia event today, Saturday 15th, 8pm-11pm. There will be drinks, nibbles, crafts and readings. Email uri@thebrowser.com if you'd like to find us – this is a free public event unaffiliated with the Browser. –Uri

1,600 Years Of Medical Hubris

Robert Graboyes | Bastiat's Window | 12th October 2022

How on earth did doctors get away with the hocus-pocus which passed, until relatively recently, for medicine? "Why, just fifty years ago, we would have thought your daughter's illness was brought on by demonic possession or witchcraft … But nowadays we know that Isabelle is suffering from an imbalance of bodily humors, perhaps caused by a toad or a small dwarf living in her stomach" (1,900 words)

Will The Wise Man Get Drunk?

John Dillon | Antigone | 10th October 2022

Is it wise policy to get drunk in good company every now and then — with a view to seeing the world a different way, speaking with fewer inhibitions, and hearing what others say when they, too, have unbuttoned? Plato seemed to think so, but only if the drinker was already virtuous: "Relaxation will bring out the worst in foolish people, but in the wise it will bring out the best" (4,100 words)

A History Of Nauru

Peter Dauvergne | MIT Press Reader | 22nd July 2019

Nauru was a paradise in the Pacific until the first Europeans arrived with guns and whisky in the early 1800s. Degradation turned to disaster in 1899 when the island was found to consist largely of phosphate, a valuable fertiliser. Opencast mining stripped Nauru bare — and then the phosphate ran out. Nauru survives now by running detention centres for refugees deported from Australia (3,400 words)

Little Rules About Big Things

Morgan Housel | Collaborative Fund | 11th October 2022

Admirable anthology of aphorisms and axioms. "History is driven by surprising events but forecasting is driven by obvious ones". "A lot of people don’t realize what bet they’re making". "Small risks are overblown because they’re easy to talk about". "People who cause harm get the most attention". "Slow progress amid a drumbeat of bad news is the normal state of affairs".  (2,260 words)

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What Counts As A Bestseller?

Jordan Pruett | Public Books | 11th October 2022

The word "bestseller" is deceptive. We might assume that a list of bestselling books ranks those titles that have sold the most copies, but no. As this historical analysis shows, these rankings are actually carefully curated by editors. One author sued the NYT after his exclusion, only to lose the case because, since it was subjectively compiled, the list was protected by the right to free speech (2,577 words)

The Transformations Of Science

Geoff Anders | Palladium | 10th October 2022

What is science for, and who should control it? Excellent questions and many non-answers are to be found in this essay. Since the 17C, science has evolved: from private activity to public, from never-ending inquiry to settled authority, from individual endeavour to state-sponsored justification for policy. Can we ever trust the science? Sometimes, and with caveats aplenty, it seems (3,178 words)

Psychiatry Wars

Rachel Aviv | Guardian | 11th October 2022

Extract from a book about mental illness, concerning the story of Ray Osheroff whose struggles with depression put him at the centre of a battle for the future of psychiatry. After a stay at a psychiatric hospital that prioritised psychoanalysis, he sued the institution for failing to prescribe him antidepressants. In the case, "the 20C's two dominant explanations for mental distress collided" (5,221 words)

What Happened To Rod McKuen?

Dan Kois | Slate | 10th October 2022

Notes on collective cultural amnesia, prompted by the rediscovery of a man once mocked as "the most understood poet in America". Rod McKuen sold millions of books and records in the 1960s and 1970s, but was then almost entirely forgotten. He walked the line between "being beloved, productive and yet also totally disparaged". His most popular poem is titled "A Cat Named Sloopy" (6,570 words)

Diplomatic Dining

Bompas & Parr | WePresent | 22nd September 2022

Pivotal geopolitical moments have often occurred over dinner. From the boeuf à la mode that the Founding Fathers consumed as they wrangled over the new capital of the United States to the schweinwürst that Hitler fed to Kurt von Schuschnigg as he threatened to annexe Austria, food has long been a form of soft power. Menu design still ranks among an ambassador's most important jobs (4,242 words)

There Are Three Types Of Meetings

Cam Daigle | 4th October 2022

Guide to having better meetings. Perhaps the key point here is that meetings cannot be fixed by holding more of them, nor can their problems be solved by abolishing them altogether. Being thoughtful about who attends, what the purpose of the gathering is, and where the power imbalances are is the only way to ensure productive discussions that don't devolve into pointless rambles (2,854 words)

Svante Pääbo And The Human Story

Editorial Board | Quillette | 6th October 2022

Concise explainer of why Svante Pääbo's Nobel Prize is so well deserved. Pääbo has sequenced the Neanderthal genome, discovered a previously unknown hominin species, the Denisovans, and shown that all three lineages — Neanderthals, Denisovans, and Homo Sapiens — overlapped and interbred 50,000 years ago. "He hasn’t just benefited humankind. He has illuminated it" (800 words)

Collision Course

Lauren Smiley | Intelligencer | 3rd October 2022

True-crime yarn, gloriously told. Family nets $6 million by staging car-crashes: They inflict moderate injuries on one another before each crash, then claim big insurance payouts afterwards. "Mize hurt you one at a time, pulling tools from a briefcase, cold and businesslike. He’d gash your brow with a razor or box cutter, scuff the wound with sandpaper, gripe if you didn’t bleed enough" (8,700 words)

What We Get Wrong About Inflation

Tim Harford | 6th October 2022

In 1963 Milton Friedman defined inflation as “a steady and sustained rise in prices”, which was "always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon”. But Friedman's rule hardly describes current conditions: Prices are rising because Russia has cut off Europe's gas. Is this still "inflation"? Governments are confused. "The recently signed Inflation Reduction Act is no such thing" (865 words)

Diaries

Alan Rickman | Guardian | 25th September 2022

Extracts from the actor's diaries covering the filming of Sense And Sensibility, Michael Collins, and Dogma. (The Harry Potter films are elsewhere.) "The trouble with this job is that you can watch yourself & your friends growing older in full colour, close up". The entries are brief but the cumulative effect is pleasing. "To Searcy’s for Brian Cox’s birthday party. All human acting was there" (4,500 words)

BrowserBites explores a new idea each day, in under a minute. Join Uri Bram (Publisher of The Browser), Sebastian Park (@SebPark), and guests as they blitz through an idea in less time than it takes to brush your teeth.

Browser Bites

Browser Bites explores a new idea each day, in under a minute. Join Uri Bram (Publisher of The Browser), Sebastian Park (@SebPark), and guests as they blitz through an idea in less time than it takes to brush your teeth.

Party Like It’s 1789!

A.J. Jacobs | Guardian | 1st October 2022

Account of an attempt to live according to a literal interpretation of the US constitution, as a test of the doctrine of "originalism" now popular on the US Supreme Court. He carries a musket, declines to deal with his publisher's female lawyer — women being denied licences to practice law at the time of the 14th amendment — and distributes incendiary pamphlets  (4,005 words)

If You Wish To Make A Toaster

Hillary Predko | The Prepared | 29th September 2022

Interview with a designer who tried to make a toaster entirely from scratch, refining all of the materials himself to build each component. The process highlighted the complexity of the basic objects we use without thought — all his smelting produced only iron, not steel, and he struggled with the plastic casing. The final object "had the form of a toaster and it sort of worked" (2,077 words)

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