The Model Is The Message

Benjamin Bratton & Blaise Aguera y Arcas | Noema | 12th July 2022

When discussing whether an Artificial Intelligence can ever be truly “intelligent” or even “conscious” we plunge ourselves into confusion by using words that we would struggle to define even when applying them to our own minds. "The real lesson for philosophy of AI is that reality has outpaced the available language to parse what is already at hand. A more precise vocabulary is essential" (5,100 words)

Do Goats Like Goat Yoga?

Emma Wallenbrock | Slate | 7th July 2022

"Somewhat", seems to be the answer. But the choice of goat matters, both for goat and for attendant humans. The optimal matmate is probably the Nigerian dwarf goat, noted for its “calm temperament", "engaging personality" and full-grown top weight of 40 pounds, making it a touch more welcome, should it jump on your back, than a 150-pound Oberhasli or a 160-pound Nubian buck (1,030 words)

Runaway Wives In Medieval London

Charlotte Berry | History Workshop | 13th July 2022

Women fleeing abusive marriages in the 16C made surprisingly little use of their existing social networks. For one neighbour to challenge another on how he chose to manage his household was to question "an integral part of his masculinity, as well as to risk a legal suit of trespass". Best to move parish. Otherwise, the safest place to be when a husband came looking was inside a convent (1,748 words)

A Field Guide To Greek Metre

Carlo G. Carlucci | Antigone | 9th July 2022

Notes on a tongue in cheek little book about classical prosody. Vanishingly rare, it contains a translation of a 12C Latin text on the topic with delightful zoological illustrations. When it first appeared in the 1970s, it amused and annoyed classics scholars in equal measure, but its limited print run prevented wider distribution. It is now available to peruse digitally here (1,044 words)

Readers in the UK -  We would love to see you at our upcoming walking tour, Troublesome Women, on Saturday 16th July at 11.15am, in and around Liverpool Street and the City of London. Troublesome men are of course welcome! To join us, book your ticket here.

Corporate Buddhism

Judith Hertog & Carolyn Chen | Guernica | 11th July 2022

Buddhism in the US has become a default part of corporate life. The sociologist interviewed here argues that it is part of how big companies are becoming religious organisations. "They have an origin story, a mission, ethics, and a particular set of practices, and many of them have a charismatic leader, which are all basic components of organised religion. I would say that this is strategic" (2,984 words)

The Animal Crisis Is A Human Crisis

Alice Crary & Lori Gruen | Boston Review | 29th June 2022

Making the case for "inter-species solidarity" when it comes to questions of animal ethics. Habitat destruction, industrial farming and meat production are usually targeted by campaigners as being sites of transgression against animals, while the human victims — such as the low-waged workers in the meat packing plant, or the indigenous people who live in a deforested area — are overlooked (2,270 words)

Last Of The Bougainvillea Years

Zeina Hashem Beck | New Lines | 7th July 2022

Thoughts on displacement from a poet who has moved from Tripoli to Beirut to Dubai and beyond. Like her beloved plants, her life in each city feels "beautiful and out of place". The temptation to reach for familiar things in unfamiliar territory is best resisted — "I’m learning there’s imprisonment in trying to recreate the past" — but it is possible to feel anchored by the novelty of a fresh start (6,374 words)

Why Write?

Elisa Gabbert | Paris Review | 6th July 2022

Musings on a subject that receives much indifferent treatment: why writers write. This author navigates the clichés with aplomb before articulating her own purpose. "I think I write to think — not to find out what I think; surely I know what I already think — but to do better thinking. Staring at my screen makes me better at thinking. Even thinking about writing makes me better at thinking" (3,471 words)

How To Read English In India

Akshya Saxena | LARB | 10th July 2022

English in India has had many roles. Gandhi considered it "a language of slavery". Nehru acknowledged it as "a key to world knowledges". The framers of the Indian constitution saw it as "equally foreign to all" and thus "politically neutral". To many growing up in the 20C, it was the language of aspiration, still tinged with the tenets of colonialism but always full of promise and possibility (2,306 words)

A Madman’s Guide To Wagner

Philip Hensher | The Critic | 1st July 2022

Reminiscences of "a hopeless Wagnerian". Some of the music is so good that it "survives even a third-rate performance", while the rest requires expert handling. This piece concludes with a helpful ranking of the composer's most transformative passages. Good Wagner makes a permanent mark on the listener: "If I ever get a tattoo, it’s going to be of the first three bars of Parsifal" (1,425 words)

My Poison Snake

Erika Kobayashi | CrimeReads | 29th June 2022

Memoir about growing up with parents attempting to translate the entire Sherlock Holmes canon into Japanese. "My earliest years were spent in a version of Victorian England located in Nerima, Tokyo." When her father died not long after completing the great work, her mother honoured their life's obsession and "wore a deerstalker hat as she carried the urn home" from the crematorium (1,148 words)

Journeys Of The Pyramid Builders

Daniel Weiss | Archaeology | 13th June 2022

A cache of papyri discovered on the Red Sea coast has provided new insight into the lives of the people who constructed the great pyramids at Giza. Logbooks reveal the structures of the workforce, as well as what its members ate, where they went and why. One archaeologist describes these records as the closed thing to going "back there for fifteen minutes to see what was happening" (3,486 words)

Readers in the UK -  We would love to see you at our upcoming walking tour, Troublesome Women, on Saturday 16th July at 11.15am, in and around Liverpool Street and the City of London. Troublesome men are of course welcome! To join us, book your ticket below:

Browse London: City Ambling Tours - Confirm Booking

Browse London: City Ambling Tours

Tehran’s Red-Light District

Sadaf Tabatabaei | Failed Architecture | 6th July 2022

The Shahrinaw area of Tehran served as the city's red light district until it was destroyed during the 1979 revolution. It had been contentious for decades: in 1953 the neighbourhood was enclosed in a tall brick wall with a single gate. Its 600 houses were demolished in three days and the area is now occupied by a park and a cultural centre, but remnants of its old fabric can still be found (3,098 words)

The World Needs Uncles, Too

Isaac Fitzgerald | GQ | 7th July 2022

On the decision not to have children. It is both a selfish and an unselfish one. He contributes to the community that raises children by being a good uncle and a helpful neighbour, always ready to step in. This, in turn, benefits him too. "I feel a lightness of being — an unanchoring in my heart — that seems harder and harder to come by these days. It’s a feeling I relish. I revel in it" (3,538 words)

In The Loop

Asad Raza | Bookforum | 1st June 2022

Interview with Geoff Dyer about his latest essay collection, a book with an "intricate structure" about "last things". Nietzsche features heavily, because he "enters his last phase, where he’s right on the brink of going nuts", but Jack Kerouac and Roger Federer also make appearances. Every thing could be the last thing: "You never know when you’re going to run out of steam" (1,749 words)

Podcast: The Dinner Where It Happened (1790) | This Day in Esoteric Political History. Discussion of an early test of American democracy: when Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson met to thrash out a compromise about the powers of the Treasury and the location of the US Capitol (16m 49s)

Video: The Incredible Logistics Behind Weather Forecasting | YouTube | Wendover Productions. "Day in the life" documentary about how the US National Weather Service collects and interprets the vast quantities of data required to publish accurate forecasts (21m 50s)

A Mirror Of Nature

Mike Edmunds | Inference Review | 10th June 2022

On the significance of the Antikythera mechanism, an astrological calculator found in a first century BCE shipwreck. It was long thought to be anachronistic. Scholars could not believe that Ancient Greece had produced something so similar to what was in use a thousand years later. This position has more to do with 20C interpretations of history than classical technology (2,733 words)

The Holy Anarchy Of Fun

Walter Kirn | Common Sense | 3rd July 2022 | U

Having fun at a time when the world is anything but is "elementally subversive". Fun, as defined here, is the opposite of seriousness: a bouncy, slightly risky feeling of ceding control just enough to escape the feeling of surveillance, vigilance and gloom. "Fun is ideologically neutral, advancing and empowering no cause. Fun is self-serving and without ambition...Your fun belongs to you alone" (1.463 words)

Ruffled Feathers

Lyndsie Bourgon | Walrus | 4th July 2022

For years, a small town in British Columbia was terrorised by a flock of feral peacocks. They ate plants, scratched cars with their talons, and chased the rubbish collection truck down the street screeching. Some residents felt they added to the gaiety of the neighbourhood, while others campaigned for their removal as the area became more gentrified. A case study in community tension (1,989 words)

Did The Early Medieval Era Ever Take Place?

Jonn Elledge | The Newsletter of (Not Quite) Everything | 4th July 2022

On the "phantom time hypothesis", a niche conspiracy theory positing that the early Middle Ages never happened, because rulers around the turn of the second millennium secretly jumped the calendar forward 297 years. Superficially, there is some evidence to support this theory — but only if you ignore everything that happened in Asia, the Islamic world and the Eastern Roman Empire (1,453 words)

Save The Pink Apples

Agostino Petroni | Afar | 28th June 2022 | U

Pink apples have been grown in Italy's Sibillini hills since Roman times, with the trees thriving at altitude and the fruit's thick skin protecting it from disease. Cultivating them doesn't scale commercially, though, and the apples had all but vanished. Now, a few dedicated fans are attempting a revival, both for the fruit's sake but also as a way to attract young people back into farming (2,665 words)

A Plane Of Monkeys

Jackie Flynn Mogensen | Mother Jones | 23rd June 2022 | U

The animal testing supply chain is in trouble. Factors include strained global logistics, a ban on primate imports from China, and opposition from animal rights groups. Whether or not you think such testing is ethical or even desirable, it is the case that life-saving medications and vaccines are currently trialed with monkeys first, and that has now become much more difficult and expensive (6,963 words)