Zhile Xie | Failed Architecture | 6th September 2022
Street lighting has been associated with surveillance and control for millennia. Now, the advent of "smart" lighting turns a mere illumination device into a signal hub that monitors and records vast quantities of video and audio in real time without the need for human input. The data can then be sold for profit through partnerships between local government and tech companies (2,438 words)
Interview with Werner Herzog as he turns 80. He is phlegmatic about ageing: "It sounds like statistics. I do not really relate it... I’ll do what I do until they carry me out feet first." He doesn't fear death. "We shouldn’t make a big fuss about it. I think that fear basically has to do with our relationship to our own demise. If you have settled that, most fear will probably disappear" (2,727 words)
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Alfian Sa'at | Sydney Review Of Books | 5th September 2022
Alphabetised autobiography, told from "Adrian" to "Zat", by a writer who grew up as part of the Malay minority in Singapore. His family history is sprinkled with what he calls "Black Magic™" — a weaving together of folklore and anecdote that feels both part of a private, personal lore and an act of "self-orientalism", as if he is "turning totems and talismans into cheap tourist trinkets" (5,418 words)
Michael Kinsley | Vanity Fair | 3rd September 2017
On Henry George, an economist who was lionised in the late 19C — "the Thomas Piketty or John Kenneth Galbraith of his time" — but has been forgotten, and deserves better. He made the best short defence of free trade: "You wouldn’t fill your harbour with rocks to keep out goods your citizens want to buy, would you? Well, that’s what you’re doing when you slap tariffs on imports" (1,300 words)
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If you find yourself wondering why there has been war and famine in the general vicinity of Ethiopia for as long as you can remember, a large part of the answer is the man in the headline, Isaias Afewerki, who led Eritrea to a righteous victory in its war of independence from Ethiopia, but has since turned Eritrea into a military dictatorship fixated on the destruction of Ethiopia and Tigray (4,090 words)
I haven't generally wanted to read or hear about cryptocurrencies for the past decade or so, but I make an exception for Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum, who talks sense at a high intellectual level, and who understands the psychology and politics of finance as well as he does the tech. Here is that rare thing, a piece on crypto worth the time of the disinterested general reader (4,900 words)
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On Sundays, Browser readers receive a special edition with puzzles, poems, books, charts, music and more - plus selections from our decade-plus archive of the finest writing on the internet. Here's a taste of this week's edition.
Problem Of The Week
The following four statements refer exclusively to a mother and her four daughters. One of the statements is true and the remaining three are false:
recommended by Paul Krugman at the New York Times "Slouching Towards Utopia is a magisterial history of what DeLong calls the 'long 20th century' running from 1870 to 2010, an era shaped overwhelmingly by the economic consequences of technological progress. DeLong argues that there are two great puzzles about this transformation: Why all this technological progress happened, and why it hasn't made society better than it is"
Problem Solved
Problem: The following four statements refer exclusively to a mother and her four daughters. One of the statements is true and the remaining three are false:
1 Alice is the mother. 2 Carol and Ella are both daughters. 3 Beth is the mother. 4 One of Alice, Diane or Ella is the mother.
Who is the mother?
Solution: If Alice is the mother then statements 1, 2 and 4 are true. If Beth is the mother then statements 2 and 3 are both true. If Carol is the mother then all four statements are false. If Diane is the mother then statements 2 and 4 are both true. If Ella is the mother then statements 1, 2 and 3 are false and statement 4 is true, which meets the precondition, so the answer must be: Ella.
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A sheet of A4 paper measures 210mm by 297mm. Why? Because math. Fold an A4 sheet in half and you have an A5 sheet with the same height-to-width ratio. For a rectangle to preserve its proportions when folded in half (or unfolded to double its size), its height-to-width ratio must be the square root of two — a number that defies exact expression, but 210mm x297mm is a fair approximation (1,345 words)
Epic appreciation of the chaotic genius of Diego Maradona, and in particular of Maradona's second goal against England in Mexico City in 1986, the "goal of the century", when he jinked the ball past the entire England team before scoring. "Everyone else out there is fighting gravity and physics and time, the way we’re all fighting them. Maradona is orchestrating them. They’re on his side" (7,500 words)
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London readers are warmly invited to join the upcoming tour Toe-Rags and Tenterhooks, on 3rd September. Explore how centuries of City of London trade, culture, and traditions left their colourful mark on the English language. Places are limited - tickets are available here.
The question posed in the headline remains unanswered, but the journey is nonetheless a delight. The legend's flexibility is responsible for its enduring appeal. "The interesting thing about the Arthurian legend is that it has periods of both ebb and flow... It’s able to be moulded to fit with current preoccupations, such that it can find applicability no matter what the mood of the moment" (4,954 words)
Eighty years on, Disney's 1942 film Bambi is held in high regard. Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein found it impressive and it was Walt Disney's own favourite. Its characters "live animal lives centred around birth, death, rutting, raising children, finding food and dodging predators" and once Bambi's mother dies, she stays dead. There is no uplifting return as a benign spirit or guiding star (1,607 words)
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Dispatch from time spent among the ambergris gatherers of New Zealand. This strange waxy substance comes from the intestines of sperm whales and is "cured" by exposure to sea and sun. It is prized by perfumers for its scent but hard to identify and is often mistaken for stones or dog poo. Hunters are territorial and competing collectors have been known to issue threats (1,410 words)
Samuel Gregg | Engelsberg Ideas | 30th August 2022
Overview of the relationship between technology and economics over the last two centuries. At best, we can declare the results of this modern technological project to be mixed, especially in the financial sector. "While technology has helped diminish uncertainty and risk in some areas, it has proved incapable of eliminating human fallibility, weakness or our inability to know everything" (2,515 words)
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Every four years, devotees travel to Lyssaraia, a tiny village in the Peloponnese, to watch ten hours of an 80-hour film titled Eniaios. This epic, composed "almost entirely of black and white flashes", was made by Gregory Markopoulos. He had "a borderline messianic conviction that his work had the power to redeem our media-polluted epoch", and this writer thinks he may have been correct (4,128 words)
In praise of vows, from one who has had reason to know: a member of the Bruderhof. It is incorrect to say that a binding bond erodes personal liberty, he argues. The release from "the sterile freedom of endless options" provides greater latitude. "Ultimately, to take a leap of commitment, even without knowing where one will land, is the only way to get to a happiness worth everything" (3,423 words)
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London readers are warmly invited to join us for our next walking tour, on Saturday 3rd September. In 'Toe Rags and Tenterhooks', we'll explore how centuries of City of London trade, culture, and traditions left their colourful mark on the English language.
Conversation with Nick Reynolds, Britain's only sculptor of death masks, whose subjects have included Peter O'Toole, Malcolm McLaren, Ronnie Biggs, William Rees-Mogg — and his own father, Bruce Reynolds, who masterminded the Great Train Robbery. "When you die, you look amazing. All tension is released from your face. Ideally, I would get to them while they were still warm” (3,500 words)
Food occupies a fraught position in fan culture. Cooking dishes mentioned in Game of Thrones is a way enjoying the show, but when the maker is a professional chef with fans of her own, it gets complicated. "If everything is fandom, then a restaurant can be, too. Elizabeth did not just attract fans; it has fans. With its networks of symbols and signature dishes, it is its own IP" (8,934 words)
From death masks to direwolves, the world is full of strange-and-wonderful things to think about. Think more new things every day with the full Browser: get five outstanding articles, a podcast and a video daily.
On Sundays, Browser readers receive a special edition with puzzles, poems, books, charts, music and more - plus selections from our decade-plus archive of the finest writing on the internet. Here's a taste of this week's edition.
Recommended by Parul Sehgal at the New York Times: "The Book of Unconformities is among the most mysterious books I’ve ever read — a dense, dark star. It’s the biography of a few notable stones, including a chunk of pockmarked meteorite, mica prepared in Nazi concentration camps, and the layer of marble under Manhattan. Raffles is serenely indifferent to the imperatives and ordinary satisfactions of conventional storytelling. I intend this as praise"
The Browser Sunday edition is a smorgasbord of delights. If you enjoyed this taster, subscribe for puzzles, crosswords, art, charts, articles and more each Sunday - plus five articles daily, in your inbox:
Explainer of Wikipedia's editorial philosophy. The goal of Wikipedia is "to mirror the current consensus of mainstream scholarship". Fringe theories deserve little or no space. If Wikipedia had existed in 700 BC it would have reported "as a fact without qualification" that the Earth was flat. Wikipedia is "academically conservative, as is fitting for a standard reference work" (6,500 words)
On mistakes in general, and on typographical errors in particular, with digressions into Biblical errata, Freudian slips, and sloppy drafting. "The U.S. Constitution isn’t particularly long — only a few pages — and yet it’s filled with grammatical and spelling errors, as well as confusing syntax. Capitalization is inconsistent, apostrophes are dropped, and even 'Pensylvania' is misspelled" (6,600 words)
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