Top Of The Week: Manic, Profit, Phosphorus, Burke, Policy
We’re All Viennese Now
Ian Leslie | The Ruffian | 17th May 2025 | U
Fin-de-siècle Vienna might beat all other cities for its great impact on world culture. It was a famously nervous place full of “intense over-thinkers, overstrung status-seekers, apocalyptic doomers. Suicide was aestheticised and competitive. Vienna’s intellectually inclined inhabitants had the sense of living in a city of brittle illusions, increasingly detached from the rest of rapidly industrialising Europe” (1,900 words)
The Era Of The Business Idiot
Edward Zitron | Where's Your Ed At? | 21st May 2025 | U
Critique of today's business leaders, who are so detached from reality that they don't participate in the very economy from which they seek to profit. "Everything is dominance, acquisition, growth and possession over any lived experience, because their world is one where the journey doesn’t matter, because their journeys are riddled with privilege and the persecution of others in the pursuit of success" (13,400 words)
Life’s Ancient Bottleneck
Jack Lohmann | Quillette | 21st May 2025 | U
On the role played by phosphorus in the continuation of life. It is one of six elements that is absolutely essential, and the most scarce. "Because of its rarity, it controls life — it determines who grows and shrinks, who lives and dies, what areas become biologically wealthy and which ones will be biologically poor." The phosphorus we contain originally came from molten lava that became rock, then soil (1,900 words)
The Sorrows Of Burkean Liberals
Iza Ding | Ideas Letter | 15th May 2025 | U
Obituary for liberalism. “Slowly but surely, it traded ideals for ideology, beliefs for bureaucracy, vision for administration. Change, yes. But curated, limited, defanged. For a while, this worked. Until it didn’t. And one day, you hear yourself speaking no longer of what you hope for, but only of what you must avoid. Procedure feels like pretext, forbearance like fear, restraint like paralysis, and delay like decay” (3,000 words)
Can We Trust Social Science Yet?
Ryan Briggs | Asterisk | 20th May 2025 | U
Using evidence to arrive at policy decisions seems obviously right. But would the world improve if decision makers based their choices solely on the "evidence" produced by economists and political scientists? Most likely not. The reason being that even the top social science journals still regularly publish research that is wildly inaccurate, a product of a system that seems to be rigged for failure (4,100 words)
Puzzle: Nomido is the Browser's daily word game. Play today's before it's gone!
Podcast: The Yellow Dwarf | The Three Ravens. Wonderfully voiced stories from the Lang Fairy Tales, a set of 798 fairy tales assembled by folklorists and translators Nora and Andrew Lang at the turn of the century (47m 51s)
Video: Bamboo Growing | YouTube | EBS World | 1m 12s
Bamboo grows very fast. The fastest species can manage a rate of 35 inches a day. This timelapse footage illustrates just how quick that is.
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