A Walk Down Victoria Street
Samuel Hughes | Works In Progress | 28th March 2025 | U
Rarely seen by tourists, this thoroughfare provides a superb slice of urban history — "an unusually complete panorama of London’s inner-urban mid-rise architecture over the last 200 years". A walk from Parliament Square to Victoria Station passes the Neo-Byzantine Westminster Cathedral, a zone of "overwhelming ugliness", and some signs that British design is recovering from its 20C nadir (3,700 words)
Cartier: A Precise History
Alexander Fury | AnOther | 28th March 2025 | U
Historical brand survey, replete with trivia. The first non-family member to serve as Cartier's creative director, Jeanne Toussaint, arrived in Paris as a courtesan under the "protection" of a French count. Originally, sales staff were kept in the dark about how the famous "Mystery Clocks" worked so they couldn't tell customers. And Cartier collects Cartier, buying back past creations to create a working archive (2,900 words)
Graffiti Limbo
April White | JStor Daily | 21st March 2025 | U
Anthropology students at the University of Virginia documented the graffiti left on their library's fifty-year-old carrels. While many were profane or mundane, some of the etched statements were more philosophical, such as "Grades are nothing but ink on paper!". Others were simply weary: "I’m tired of thinking." The Dean's take? "I’d rather have people writing on the walls than in the books" (1,900 words)
Who’s Boring Now?
Nelson Reed | The Flaw | 26th October 2024 | U
Three aspects of boredom — it is bad, experienced individually and distributed equally — have helped corporations "weaponise" it for profit. These are the mechanisms that keep us scrolling, watching, shopping. But what if the people took boredom back? "Boredom can signal that what we are doing at that moment is not meaningful... It doesn’t have to be an opiate. It can be a smelling salt" (4,800 words)
from The Browser eight years ago:
The Economics Of Despair
Pia Malaney | INET | 27th March 2017 | U
Rising mortality rates and worsening public health in America echo ominously similar declines in the last years of the Soviet Union, when the sickness of individuals embodied the sickness of the country. America’s new deaths are likewise “deaths of despair” from suicide, drug and alcohol poisoning, and chronic liver diseases and cirrhosis, typically associated with poverty and family breakdown (1,100 words)
Puzzle: Nomido is the Browser's daily word game. Play today's before it's gone!
Podcast: German Spies In New York | Journey Through Time. Trans-Atlantic history series. In July 1916, German agents working undercover in the US perpetrated what is still one of the largest artificial non-nuclear explosions in history when they attacked an arms depot in New York Harbour (49m 37s)
Video: A Tiny Laundromat In The Wall | YouTube | Mozu Studios | 18m 39s
Watch a Japanese artist make a realistic and detailed miniature laundromat which fits into a space the size of a household plug socket.
Afterthought:
"The highest reward for a person's toil is not what they get for it, but what they become by it"
―John Ruskin