May Golden Giraffe for Writing

Every day, The Browser newsletter selects and presents the most intriguing writing from around the web, and every month we choose the best of the best, the pieces we’ll want to read and re-read forever.

And the Golden Giraffe for May 2019 goes to….

The Night The Lights Went Out

Drew Magary | Deadspin | 16th May 2019

In which the writer collapses with a brain haemorrhage, undergoes surgery, spends two weeks in a coma, months in rehab, and returns to the working world. “I’m more irritable than I was, but I can’t tell if that’s because my brain is still swollen or because life is more irritable at the moment. I do know that I’m different. Still me, but not quite. All the pieces of me aren’t all lined up exactly as they were, and I haven’t fully accepted this yet. I liked who I was before all this. I’m not sure about this new fella” (7,100 words)

ALSO BRILLIANT: Why Books Don’t Work

Andy Matuschak | Square Signals | 11th May 2019

Books are “surprisingly bad at conveying knowledge”. Read a non-fiction book, and within a few days or weeks you will have forgotten all but a few key points. Our basic error is to think that complex knowledge can be relayed efficiently just by means of words on a page. No. To take in information you need to read slowly, think deeply, take notes; return later to the book, revise it, test yourself or have others test you. This is the scholarly method, and it does work; but it has no part in the standard reading model  (4,810 words)

ALSO BRILLIANT: The Flow Of Things

Adam Minter | Discard Studies | 6th May 2019

On the economics and psychology of the global trade in junk and trash. “There’s a limit to how much outrage activists can generate over how stuff is manufactured. You can only push people so far in terms of guilt. Discards occupy an entirely different emotional ecosystem, especially in developed countries. When a consumer donates something, or drops it into a blue bin, they typically have a reasonable expectation that the objects will be re-used or re-purposed in a way conforming to their values” (2,580 words)

Congratulations to Drew, Andy and Adam! We hope you’ll enjoy their writing as much as we did.

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