Things Could Be Better

Adam Mastroianni | Experimental History | 15th November 2022

In which the author tests a conjecture and makes a discovery. The conjecture: All judgments are comparisons. If I say, X is good, I mean, I can easily think how X might be worse. Now for the discovery, and make of it what you will: When you ask people how X might be different, whether X is a banana or a bus service, 90% of people default to ways in which X might be better, not worse (3,800 words)  

Welcome To Your World Cup

Adam Susman | Howler | 18th November 2022

It may well be that, like me, you have no strong interest in soccer, and even a mild aversion to this particular World Cup. And yet, since you know that half humanity will be talking football for the next month, you would like to have at your disposal one or two lesser-known facts, perhaps a mildly provocative prediction, for tactical use in conversation. If so, then commit this piece to memory (6,100 words)

Grand Narratives

Brad DeLong | Grasping Reality | 17th November 2022

Having just published an economic history of the 20th century, DeLong offers draft notes towards a prequel at scale — an economic history of the world since the invention of agriculture 12,000 years ago. In brief: the Neolithic shift from hunter-gathering to settled farming doomed most humans to poverty and servitude, which remained the worker's lot until modernity came, belatedly, in 1870 (1,500 words)

Non-State Courts

Sarah Constantin | Rough Diamonds | 17th November 2022

Can a legal system function without state power at its back? Up to a point, and there are examples to prove it — in non-state polities such as Somaliland and medieval Iceland, and among non-state communities such as the Romani and the Amish. But non-state courts still require means of compelling obedience to their judgements: Ostracism is one such, ritualised violence is another (2,916 words)

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Sacred Feathers

Elizabeth Hlavinka | Atmos | 16th November 2022

Climate change is affecting the supply of feathers available to Native American tribes for ceremonial use. Different peoples require different feathers: canaries, hawks, woodpeckers, eagles and others are all venerated. Some feathers have been unavailable for decades, but now a specialised conservation group collects feathers from zoos and sanctuaries so that these rites can still be practised (2,345 words)

The Flat Era Of Fashion

Ana Kinsella | Dirt | 8th November 2022

Fashion is flat now. Clothes are both designed and worn to be viewed in two dimensions, as product photographs on a website and outfit pictures on social media. Eccentricity is out. Local context is disappearing, too: "Today it doesn’t matter where an influencer lives, because she dresses like she’s from the internet, and that’s all that counts." Everyone is now a walking advertisement (1,139 words)

We Have Our Ghosts

Elodie Olson-Coons | Guernica | 14th November 2022

Essay that braids together several disparate topics and themes, including the troubled history of the Alsace-Lorraine region — which was French and then German and then French again — as well as the destruction of Notre-Dame de Paris, the process of making a home, the death of a parent, and what happens afterwards. Sometimes, only a good bonfire can provide closure (3,364 words)

London’s Fatberg-Busters

Jessica Leigh Hester | Atlas Obscura | 3rd November 2022

Account of a night spent with a team that maintains London's 150-year-old sewer system. Fatbergs are the enemy: they smell worse than sewage and are harder to clear. "Some of it has a 'mashed-potato consistency'. Other fat is buttery, and so yielding that someone walking across it might find themselves sinking. Over time, it hardens until it is almost geological, solid as rock" (4,294 words)

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True Colours Of Antiquity

Suzanna Murawski | New Criterion | 9th November 2022

Were ancient Greek and Roman statues generally displayed as bare white marble, or painted in stylised colours? James Fenton has argued for white. Chroma, at the Met, argues for colours, showing copies of the Met's classical statuary tricked out in antique pigments. These novelty versions confuse the modern eye. They appear "brand-new" and therefore "unreal". They are art, but not art history (1,300 words)

China’s Forbidden Treasures

Sun Jiahui | World Of Chinese | 10th November 2022

A brief history of the Forbidden City in Beijing, built in 1406 as an imperial palace. After the last Chinese emperor was deposed in 1911, the palace was turned into a museum, if not without cost. "Many eunuchs panicked, having long smuggled treasures from the palace and sold them to antique dealers. To cover their tracks they set the palace alight, destroying countless relics in the process" (1,300 words)

Biking's Greatest Uphill Achievement

Braydon Bringhurt | Bicycling | 3rd November 2022

Read the first sentences, and decide if you are minded to continue: "The trail begins at 10,000 feet in the La Sal Mountains, among the aspens of Burro Pass. After an uphill prelude it plunges 8,000 feet into the red-rock canyons near the Colorado River. It’s a feast with every Moab flavor: sculpted slickrock, cliff-edge single track, and descents that rattle the fillings out of your teeth" (7,400 words)

Author's Note

Robin Sloan | Trespassers | 10th November 2022

The unwalling of GPT-3, DALL-E and similar engines has unleashed a deluge of texts and images generated by humans exploiting AIs. Sloan, something of a veteran in both writing and computing, describes here his experience of working at Google's invitation to produce an AI-generated short story meeting the critical norms generally applied by humans to fiction. Not easy, apparently (1,125 words)

The Scent Of Flavour

Linda Bartoshuk | Inference Review | 8th November 2022

On the differences between taste, smell and flavour. Taste occurs when receptors on the tongue are stimulated, smell in the nose. Flavour combines the two. When we swallow, volatiles from the food are released up a conduit between the back of the mouth and the nose and processed there. Owing to traffic on the olfactory nerve, we cannot perceive smell and flavour at the same time (4,181 words)

Cafes And The Parisian Working Class

Robert W. Brown | Berfrois | 7th November 2022

Paris had 3,000 cafes in 1789 and around 42,000 a century later, at the peak of 19C cafe culture. Cafes acted as a "living room" for working class people. In the first half of the 20C, they were also a transitional space as workers moved from the "essentially public" style of living near the street created in the early modern period to the privacy and isolation of a high rise apartment building (1,884 words)

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At The Digital Doorstep

Aiha Nguyen & Eve Zelickson | Data & Society | 12th October 2022 | PDF

Thoughtful analysis of how home surveillance tech has changed our behaviour and the labour market. "In an ingenious way, Amazon has managed to transform what was once a labour cost (ie supervising work and asset protection) into a revenue stream through the sale of doorbell cameras and subscription services to residents who then perform the labour of securing their own doorstep" (13,517 words)

The Very Bacterial Caterpillar

Jennifer Frazer | Small Things Considered | 7th November 2022

Attention-grabbing from the opening line — "Glued to the inside of your mouth this very moment (there's a 50 per cent chance) may be plump bacter­ial caterpillars" — and further detail does not disappoint. These multicellular bacteria divide in an "unorthodox longitudinal configuration". Of course, unlike real caterpillars, they feed not on foliage but on the inside of our cheeks (1,490 words)

Dandelions And Elephants

Flux Collective | Lens Of The Week | 6th October 2022

Short and suggestive note on r/K selection theory, which locates all evolutionary strategy on a continuum between two poles: r-selection and K-selection. An r-selection strategy focuses on rapid replication: make copies of yourself as quickly as possible and have them mutate freely across generations. K-selection focuses on quality over quantity, fitting a population already at carrying capacity (375 words)

SoupGate

James Ozden | Understanding Social Change | 22nd October 2022

If one sees climate change as a clear and present danger to human flourishing, should one support climate activists who throw soup at (glass-protected) Van Gogh paintings? Probably yes. Average sympathy for a radical protest will be much lower than average sympathy for a moderate protest; but a radical protest will attract many times more eyeballs, and thus a greater aggregate of sympathy (1,400 words)

Five Ideas That Might Boost Growth

Tim Harford | 3rd November 2022

If you believe, as Tim Harford does, that "raising the rate of growth is an admirable goal for any politician", then the ideas and observations here, provoked by the counter-examples of the British government in recent weeks, merit attention. In brief: Don't cut taxes without cutting spending; don't cut spending if you care about the long term; focus spending on education and infrastructure (900 words)

It’s The Way That You Do It

Samuel Jay Keyser | Berfrois | 2nd November 2022

Can one distinguish between form and meaning in a poem? Does poetic form exist only to embellish thoughts that might otherwise be expressed in prose with no great loss of meaning, if perhaps with some great loss of elegance? That, I think, is Keyser's argument here. In any case, his experimental mixing of Wordsworth's Tables Turned with Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky is a joy to behold (2,100 words)

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The Vulnerable Internet

Matt Burgess | Wired | 2nd November 2022

Egypt is the epicentre of the world's internet. It is estimated that 17 per cent of online traffic travels via underwater cables that surface there. Other routes are either too expensive or go through war zones. This Egyptian "chokepoint" is highly vulnerable, as was shown earlier this year when two of these cables were severed and entire countries (Ethiopia and Somalia) lost connectivity (1,816 words)

A Locus Of Care

Justin E. H. Smith | Hinternet | 15th October 2022

Remembering the French philosopher Bruno Latour, best known for his work on the narrative consequences of scientific discovery. "Bruno Latour was honest and generous, and I don’t think there’s any question he took up that was not, for him, a true matter of concern. He was one of our era’s best guides between the eternal Scylla and Charybdis of dogmatism and scepticism" (2,919 words)

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