Uri Bram: Welcome! I’m delighted to be here today with Lars Doucet, a writer and thinker and technologist and generally excellent person.

Lars Doucet: “Generally excellent person” Allegedly. :)

Uri Bram: I have proof and several witnesses to boot.

So, Lars, I feel weird saying it but… we’re here to talk about your brain.

Lars Doucet: Yeah so I have Tourette’s syndrome and Narcolepsy. Specifically Tourette’s syndrome with ‘all the fixins’ -- all of the sub-symptoms like echolalia, palilalia, facial tics, motor tics, verbal tics, and even sometimes the “famous” symptoms like coprolalia and copropraxia, though those are much more rare, generally. (I’ll explain what those mean).

• Echolalia -- compulsive repeating of things others have said just now.
• Palilalia -- compulsive repeating of things you yourself have said, or syllables of the same word, etc.
• Facial tics -- little twitches and involuntary movements all over the face
• Motor tics

James Dillard: Hey, everyone. I’m James, and welcome to Browser Bets. I’m here today with Maggie Lieu.

Maggie is a Research Fellow of Machine Learning and Cosmology at the University of Nottingham. And she has an awesome YouTube channel called Space Mog that can teach you all about things like white holes and the astronomical Axis of Evil, and things that I didn’t even know existed. And before her current role, she was a Research Fellow at the European Space Agency.

Anything else I should add there?

Maggie Lieu: No, I think you’ve got it all!

James Dillard: Thanks for joining us today. I’m excited to talk to you about our space-focused predictions. Where would you like to take this? What bets would you like to make?

China will get to Mars by 2035

Maggie Lieu: So I think the first bet would be

Sylvia Bishop: I’m delighted to be talking with Andrew Hunter Murray, author of Sunday Times best-seller The Last Day. Andrew, for readers who aren’t familiar with the book, could you give us a precis?

Andrew Hunter Murray: The Last Day is a story set a few decades from now in a world like our own but with one catastrophic and enormous difference - the world has stopped turning. It’s set in 2059, and for thirty years now, after a heavenly body passed close by the earth and disrupted its orbit, the same side of the planet has faced in towards the sun, and the other side has faced outwards towards the cold, dead universe.

As you can imagine, things have changed substantially. The sunlit side of the earth is far too hot to inhabit in many places - the ‘Coldside’ is uninhabitable in just the opposite way. Life

Every week at the Browser we conduct edifying interviews with interesting figures. Today we speak to Edgar Gerrard Hughes, the author of the fabulous new book, The Book of Emotions. For more, see the rest of our Browser Interviews.

Uri Bram: We're going to play a game called The Last Word, where we ask people to answer incredibly difficult questions in a very short number of words. Your book is about emotions, so I was wondering if you could start us off by telling us everything we need to know about emotions in exactly 10 words.

Edgar Gerrard Hughes: Well, it's going to be very difficult to pick apart anything about emotions... including what they are to begin with. So I guess with that in mind...

Far too broad a category to be contained in... word.

What are emotions?

Uri Bram: That's wonderful. So a big part

Elizabeth Minkel is a writer, editor, and technologist with a focus on fan culture

Uri Bram: For any of our readers whose lives have tragically not yet been touched by fanfiction, can you give us a very brief introduction?

Elizabeth Minkel: Haha, sure! So at its most basic definition, fanfiction is when you take established worlds, characters, etc. and write original work with and around them.

It falls under a broader category often called "fanworks"—fanart is when folks draw established characters, fanvids involve cutting together clips from film and TV, etc.—but fanfiction is specifically about written fictional work.

How fanfiction is and isn't like other communal writing

Uri Bram: Fantastic. So as a total outsider, something that fascinates me about this is how different it is from the modern trend for single-authored works of fiction, but how instead it seems to fit into this longer

Baiqu Gonkar speaks with Tessy Antony De Nassau, a serial entrepreneur and philanthropist. Once upon a time, Tessy was a corporal in the military, before becoming a princess of the Luxembourg royal family. In this interview, she opens up about the many different titles we take on, how social media has impacted her life and dealing with online trolls.

Related Links:

Professors Without Borders: https://www.prowibo.org/

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

My Book of Period Stories by Chinekwu Oreh

Uri Bram: I'm very excited to be talking today to L.M. Sacasas, a phenomenal philosopher of technology.

We’re having this conversation over instant messenger, which is an unusual way to do an interview. And I wanted to ask you first about your relationship with this technology.

Personally it’s suffused with affection and nostalgia for me — my teenage romantic flirtations (I think "relationships" might be stretching it) were conducted very largely on IM, so it's always going to have a certain halo.

L.M. Sacasas: I can definitely see how that would be the case. I was in my early twenties when I first used instant messenger, so I missed having it during those formative teenage years. I think nostalgia is a good way nonetheless to characterize how I tend to think about instant messaging, I tend to associate it with the era of dial-up

Every day, The Browser selects and summarises the five best articles from across the web on every imaginable topic. Here, instead we turn our attention to the world of academic writing and have selected five papers from different disciplines worth your attention.

Those without institutional access to some of the publications below might be interested in this additional paper. For previous editions see: Academic

Analysis Of A Building Collapse

Malcolm Hollis | Journal of Building Appraisal | 6 November 2006 | U

Autopsy of a death, but the corpse is a collapsed office block. The paper is an impersonal, technical walkthrough of the forensic process of finding the cause of the cave-in, which occurred in 1995 and killed four. The conclusion: original faults in the construction were ironically worsened by attempts to strengthen the structure to modern construction standards, leading to its disintegration

(6,239 words or DOI: 10.1057/palgrave.jba.

Byrne Hobart is the author of The Diff, a newsletter about inflections in tech and finance. ADS is the author of Applied Divinity Studies.

Applied Divinity Studies: Is there a Hotelling’s law for newsletters? It doesn’t seem absurd, at face value, to imagine that there’s a Byrne Hobart Prime writing approximately the same newsletter but say, covering a slightly different subset of events.

Or if talent plays a role, maybe a Discount Byrne Hobart who writes a worse version of the same newsletter but offers it for half the cost.

You might argue that the pressure towards homogeneity is eradicated by zero marginal costs to replication, but ultimately, we should still expect to see a lot of imitators, some of which might by slightly better at filling some demand niche, and with enough of these you would expect to lose your lunch.

What’s going on? Is

The February Revolution, the Winter of Discontent, the Textile Workers Strike of 1934... strikes and workers fight for rights have shaped our modern society.

Below we have dug through our ten year archive to bring you articles on the close of a deep coal mine, the price of a manicure, delivery worker revolt, seasonal workers as America's the new hobos, journalists stuck in content mills, and a reconsideration of the luddites.

The Last Days Of Big K

Martin Fletcher | New Statesman | 4th November 2015

Britain's last deep coal-mine, at Kellingley in Yorkshire, will close by Christmas. Its customers, big power-stations, have switched to biomass and imported coal. British coal never recovered from the miners' strike of 1984-85. The National Union of Miners is down from half-a-million to 800 members. "Thirty years ago there were collieries all over South Yorkshire. Today scarcely a trace

Baiqu: Welcome to The Browser, today I'm with Jodi Ettenberg, who was once a lawyer, then a travel food writer, until she became disabled after a faulty lumbar puncture. Now she writes about resilience, curiosity, and loss on her blog Legal Nomads. Welcome to The Browser Jodi.

Jodi: Thank you so much. It's really a pleasure to be here.

Baiqu: It's so nice to meet you. Jodi actually used to work with us at The Browser and we've been emailing back and forth. But this is the first time that I'm getting to talk to her on video.

Jodi: Yeah, I was made aware of The Browser through Tyler Cowen, who is an ardent fan. He sent me a note many years ago asking me if I had heard about it saying this seems like your kind of people. It was really wonderful to work