Links
3 stars
REVIEW: The Everlasting Empire, by Yuri Pines | Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf
18-minute read
REVIEW: Invitation to a Banquet, by Fuchsia Dunlop | Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf
12-minute read
The region we call “China” is big, and much of it is arable, so it can support a lot of people.
Places like Europe and Africa can also support a lot of people, but the people in those places don’t have a homogeneous political and ethnic identity. So then the real question is why the region we know as China came under the control of a single nation and ethnos — and why, moreover, that nation’s occasional political fragmentation never led to an enduring cultural fragmentation (as happened after the fall of Rome).
All of the standard answers to this question seem to revolve around geography.
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Well I hate to pile on since Jane has just written a whole thing about how Jared Diamond is always wrong, but seriously bro? Have you ever been to Southern China? It’s a thousand tiny sheltered valleys and coastal refuges, so criss-crossed by mountain ranges that even today their spoken languages are mutually unintelligible. And yet, they’re Chinese. Or how about the Sichuan Basin? Look at Sichuan on a topographic map and it looks like Mordor, or if you prefer, like the Pannonian Basin in Central Europe, which got settled by the Magyars and developed into the ethnically distinct nation of Hungary. And yet, the residents of Sichuan are Chinese.
[...]
What if, he says, it’s actually entirely about ideas? Memes turn the wheel of history, so could it be memes that hold China together?
Between the foreignness and the sheer, overwhelming size of the topic, it might seem impossible to conduct an adequate survey of the history, vocabulary, and vibe of eating, Chinese-style, for Western readers. But that’s why we have Fuchsia Dunlop. She’s an Englishwoman, but she trained as a chef at the Sichuan Higher Institute of Cuisine (the first Westerner ever to do so). She’s written some of the best English-language cookbooks for Chinese food, and now she’s written this book: her attempt to communicate the totality of the subject she loves and which she’s spent her life studying.
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Did you notice that in the previous paragraph I spent almost as much time describing the texture of the food as its flavor? That’s no coincidence. Of course the Chinese care about flavor, everybody does (except the British, ha ha), but relative to many other culinary traditions the Chinese put a disproportionate emphasis on the texture of their food as well.
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Chinese chefs delight in combining textures in surprising ways, almost as much as they do flavors. In many dishes, the texture is the whole point, or at least a major one. The Cantonese dim sum snack haa gow — shrimp steamed in translucent wrappers — strikes some people as bland. But a good haa gow is only partly judged on how well it brings out the subtle inner flavors of the shrimp. Most of it is about how the skin combines pertness with falling-apart softness, and how this contrasts with the sometimes unsettling springiness of the shrimp inside. The chef will go to extreme lengths to achieve that interplay of textures with techniques that include salting, starching, shocking with cold or hot water, prolonged refrigeration, and physically beating or smacking the ingredients.
Are we doomed? | London Review of Books
19-minute read
People are living longer than they used to. They are also having fewer children. The evidence of what this combination can do to a society is growing around the world, but some of the most striking stories come from Japan. For decades the Japanese health ministry has released an annual tally of citizens aged one hundred or over. This year the number of centenarians reached very nearly a hundred thousand. When the survey started in 1963, there were just 153. In 1981 there were a thousand; in 1998 ten thousand. Japan now produces more nappies for incontinent adults than for infants. There is a burgeoning industry for the cleaning and fumigating of apartments in which elderly Japanese citizens have died and been left undiscovered for weeks, months or years. Older people have far fewer younger people to take care of them or even to notice their non-existence. That neglect is a brute function of some simple maths. In 1950, Japan had a Total Fertility Rate (TFR) of 4, which represents the average number of children a woman might expect to have in her lifetime. Continued over five generations, that would mean a ratio of 256 great-great-grandchildren to every sixteen great-great-grandparents – in other words, each hundred-year-old might have sixteen direct descendants competing to look after them. Today Japan’s TFR is approaching 1: one child per woman (or one per couple, half a child each). That pattern continued over five generations means that each solitary infant has as many as sixteen great-great-grandparents vying for his or her attention. Within a century the pyramid of human obligation has been turned on its head.
Who Would Want to Kill 314 Ostriches? | The Atlantic
14-minute read
The police came at dawn. Karen Espersen watched them drive into the valley: more than 40 cruisers in a line. They were on a mission from the government. All of her ostriches must die.
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The activists had been camping out for months; their numbers sometimes reached into the hundreds. They knew the government was saying that the ostriches had bird flu, but they were convinced that this was cover for some other, bigger scheme. The feds were conspiring with the United Nations and Big Pharma, they said. Small farmers’ rights were being trampled. But Dave and Karen’s birds had other, more powerful friends. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was making calls to Canadian officials; Dr. Oz had offered to evacuate the ostriches to his ranch in Florida.
[...]
By the next morning, the cull was over. All of the ostriches—314 of them, by the government’s final count—were dead.
Original link | Archive.is link
The Childless Aunt | The Sun Magazine
13-minute read
It’s time. The realization comes not as a gradual acceptance but as a sudden revelation. One moment I am grieving being deprived of an experience I’d thought was my birthright; the next, I am filled with certainty that I have grieved enough. I have dreamed stubbornly. I have pursued my goal of becoming a mom doggedly, through nearly a decade and a half of grief and disappointment, the clockwork indignity of every massive, fibroid-fueled cycle. My uterus has been the shadow dictator of my life, exerting control over many of my choices. I have tolerated it for so long because I believed it was my sole path to fulfilling my earthly purpose. I am finally ready to let go of this self-deception.
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Six weeks after my surgery, my body is mostly healed. Ahead of a trip to visit family, I stop by the mall to buy gifts. By the time I walk into a jewelry store that was not on my list of stops, my hands are full. I circle the display cases and spot a delicate gold necklace with two interlocking hearts. A salesman follows my gaze. “Who are you shopping for today?” he asks. I hesitate. A part of me wants to say my daughter. It wouldn’t be the first time. Ekin and I did it routinely, both to feed our existential hunger and to simplify our relationship for the world. But being mother and daughter has been anything but simple for either of us, and today I find that I don’t feel like simplifying. I feel like honoring the complexity of our experience.
The Perplexing Appeal of The Telepathy Tapes | Asterisk
15-minute read
But The Telepathy Tapes aims to do more than share feel-good stories. It seeks to lend credence to a truly radical claim that nonspeakers — not just the few featured on the show, but all nonspeakers — have tapped into something the rest of us have allowed to atrophy, a part of the mind capable of accessing a universal collective consciousness.
Farfetched as it may sound to the uninitiated, it’s a notion that’s garnered enduring appeal among a widespread audience. For a brief period at the start of 2025, the series eclipsed podcast juggernaut Joe Rogan on Spotify’s top podcast charts. In February, Rogan invited Dickens onto his show to speak at length for an audience of millions. By July, Spotify’s editorial team named The Telepathy Tapes one of the “best breakout series of 2025.”
2 stars
China’s Clean Energy Push is Powering Flying Taxis, Food Delivery Drones and Bullet Trains | New York Times [gift article]
4-minute read
As an American reporter living in Beijing, I’ve watched both China and the rest of the world flirt with cutting-edge technologies involving robots, drones and self-driving vehicles.
But China has now raced far beyond the flirtation stage. It’s rolling out fleets of autonomous delivery trucks, experimenting with flying cars and installing parking lot robots that can swap out your E.V.’s dying battery in just minutes. There are drones that deliver lunch by lowering it from the sky on a cable.
If all that sounds futuristic and perhaps bizarre, it also shows China’s ambition to dominate clean energy technologies of all kinds, not just solar panels or battery-powered cars, then sell them to the rest of the world. China has incurred huge debts to put trillions of dollars into efforts like these, along with the full force of its state-planned economy.
Original link | Archive.is link
When the Bears Come Back | Southlands
11-minute read
As they passed, the bear turned its head and its teeth tore through Wendy’s thigh, ripping the new leggings she was wearing that day. Blood beaded through the tear in the ruined pants. Instead of registering pain, Wendy felt annoyed. She figured she’d have to see a doctor, but she’d already promised to take her elderly mother to see a dermatologist that afternoon.
Wendy spread her arms and legs out like a starfish, doing her best to make her petite body appear bigger than it was. Ripley was gone, but the bear stopped and faced her. She yelled again, and the bear rose onto its haunches and lifted its own arms, mirroring her. For a moment, they were the same height, face to face and swaying like a dancing couple. Then the bear yawned, and Wendy knew she was in trouble.
Georgia Tech’s first football star has a heckuva story to tell | ESPN
8-minute read
Dr. Leonard Wood rode in, quite literally, to save the day for Georgia Tech football.
The 33-year-old first lieutenant, newly settled in as a post surgeon at nearby Fort McPherson, arrived on horseback to the Georgia Tech campus in the fall of 1893. He registered as a “sub-apprentice” in a woodworking course — essentially learning cabinet and furniture making — so he could qualify as a student.
Any aspirations of becoming a master craftsman, though, were secondary. Unbeknownst to the students at that eight-year-old technical school on the northern edge of Atlanta, the man atop that steed would become their first sports star.
Wood’s story has all the elements you’ve come to expect from today’s college football melodrama. An experienced transfer, several years older than his teammates. Accusations of roster tampering. Questions of eligibility and flimsy classes. A fast turnaround to glory, followed by hot-blooded allegations from rival fans.
College football history may not repeat itself, but to paraphrase an old saying, it does rhyme. For all the wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth about the issues threatening the supposed sanctity of the modern game, it’s nothing that hadn’t happened 130 years earlier. And it happened to ensnare someone who would become Army Chief of Staff and one of the more notable U.S. political and military figures of the 20th century.
Where Do the Children Play? | Unpublishable Papers
7-minute read
Why do our children spend more time in Fortnite than forests? Usually, we blame the change on tech companies. They make their platforms as addicting as possible, and the youth simply can’t resist — once a toddler locks eyes with an iPad, game over.
I want to suggest an alternative: digital space is the only place left where children can grow up without us. For most of our evolutionary history, childhood wasn’t an adult affair. Independent worlds and peer cultures were the crux of development, as they still are among the BaYaka; kids spent their time together, largely beyond the prying eyes of grown-ups.
But in the West, the grown-ups have paved over the forests and creeks where children would have once hidden. They have exposed the secret places. So the children seek out a world of their own, as they have for millennia, if not longer. They find a proverbial forest to wander. They don’t know what we know: this forest has eyes and teeth.
What is Heather Cox Richardsonism? | Silver Bulletin
12-minute read
But even if Richardson herself was shocked by Trump’s victory, what sort of epistemic bubble is she living in if she claims the results were a surprise to everyone? Trump had won before, in 2016. And this time around, while the polls weren’t fantastically accurate, they showed as close to a toss-up as you can get: the final Silver Bulletin forecast was literally almost 50/50.
Should Richardson “stay in her lane” and only focus on history, not contemporary electoral politics? No, I’m not asking for that at all. But if you’re going to send out missives about electoral politics to 2+ million subscribers, you probably ought to “do the reading” about the many reasons that a Trump win was, at a minimum, highly plausible. Richardson, in her post-election newsletter, made almost no mention of immigration, for example, even though border crossings spiked after Biden adopted lax policies despite frequent warnings from more moderate Democrats about the electoral downside.
What did she blame Harris’s loss on instead? She does attribute some of it to inflation, along with racism and sexism. But the lynchpin was “disinformation”.
All Praise to the Lunch Ladies | The Bitter Southerner
10-minute read
Granny won me over with the government cheese. As a child, maybe 4 or 5 years old, when I’d visit her on occasional Sundays in Blue Ridge, Georgia, she’d slice me off a little treat — an orange rectangle from a brown cardboard box in the refrigerator. We would sit around her kitchen table, where she held court with my aunts by telling stories and making plans for canning vegetables. Sometimes the aunts smoked cigarettes, which they’d quickly stamp out when my preacher-grandfather came around the corner. Nevermind that my snack was processed and inexpensive, a generic type of Velveeta. In those days at Granny’s, sitting with my cheese and the grown-ups in our rural mountain town, I might as well have been tasting Camembert on the banks of the Seine.
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Students who brought their lunch, often because they couldn’t afford the cafeteria meal, sat on benches along the perimeter. Granny tried to be discreet in making sure those kids had plenty. “What have you got to eat today?” Dad remembers her asking, peeking into their bags and sometimes finding nothing but a leftover biscuit. “She would give them anything she could get her hands on,” he says. She left out extra bowls of grits and gravy or commodity foods for students to share. At least once, the principal scolded her for giving away food for free. “Do I make money for this lunchroom?” she asked him. Yes. “Do I lose money for this lunchroom?” No. “Well, don’t you ever get on to me again for giving those kids food,” my mother remembers Granny recounting. “No kid will ever leave this lunchroom hungry.”
Stone of Hope | AGNI Online
15-minute read
By deifying MLK, promoting his murder as a kind of transcendent sacrifice for the moral soul of a country, we confine his vision of a promised land to metaphor. Relegating MLK to a symbol—a stone of hope to which we should all aspire—disempowers those in the shadow of his excellence, particularly Black boys and men. While growing up bookish and articulate, my quickness to outward expressions of anger meant King’s dream never felt like it could be mine. How could I imagine myself as good enough to pick up the work he continued and all that’s left to do? For me, it has become increasingly important to remind myself that MLK was a Black man, no more exceptional than his faith in us. He was not a magical negro alluding to a mythical utopia. King, made of flesh like you and me, advocated for concrete changes, spoke on policy reform, and organized strategies for action. Actualizing the democratic ideals of liberty and the pursuit of happiness is not a matter of resources but of will.
The race to make the perfect baby is creating an ethical mess | MIT Technology Review
15-minute read
A new field of science claims to be able to predict aesthetic traits, intelligence, and even moral character in embryos. Is this the next step in human evolution or something more dangerous?
Original link | Archive.is link
The NFL has entered the Scorigami Era | Silver Bulletin
12-minute read
Superkickers, rule changes, dual-threat QBs and analytics are changing the sport — and producing weirder scores.
1 star
The Monks in the Casino | Derek Thompson
7-minute read
Spishak and Kyle are extraordinary cases. Not every young man is addicted to pornography or gambling. But look deeper at their stories. Waylaid by the pandemic, two young men work from home and spend much of their lives alone; remaining inside, they surround themselves with computer monitors—“in many ways, [Kyle’s] life had two monitors, one for gambling and one for everything else,” Cohen writes—where they stream entertainment that allows them to avoid the messy frictions and complications of life. This is a profoundly ordinary description of being a young man in America today. When the sociologist Liana Sayer led a group of researchers to analyze leisure time in 2024, she found that one group had, by far, the most “sedentary leisure time alone”—that is, time spent sitting in a room by themselves, typically in the company of screens. It was young, unmarried men.
#97. The Paradox of Aging | Play Makes Us Human
4-minute read
But here’s the paradox. Study after study, using a wide variety of methods, has revealed that, on average, old people report themselves to be happier than do younger people. This has been found in cross-sectional studies, in which people of different ages are surveyed at a given point in time, and in longitudinal studies, in which people are surveyed at more than one point in their adult lifespan. The older they are, the more content they are.
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The theory was first proposed by Laura Carstensen in the early 1990s, and she and her colleagues and students have expanded on it ever since. The essence of the theory is this. As we begin to realize that we have fewer years left on the planet, we become gradually more concerned with enjoying the present and less concerned with activities that function primarily to prepare for the future. Young people are motivated to explore new pathways and meet new people, despite the disruptions and fears associated with the unfamiliar. Such activities provide new skills, information, social contacts, and prestige that may prove useful in the future. But with fewer years left, the balance shifts. The older one is, the less sense it makes to sacrifice present comforts and pleasures for possible future gain.
AI ads are going mainstream | Understanding AI
5-minute read
If Taylor Swift — arguably the most famous musician in the world — is using AI to promote an album, the technology has clearly entered the mainstream.
And Swift isn’t alone. AI-generated ads have become more and more prevalent in recent months. Companies large and small have released AI-generated ads — some without even disclosing it.
The Anti-Sports Personality of the Year Awards 2025 | The Guardian
5-minute read
Another year, another raft of sporting cheating scandals for our annual anti‑Spoty awards. Where the BBC Sports Personality ceremony this week rewards the cream of athletic endeavour, the Guardian instead shines a light on the darkest corners of sporting skulduggery.
Some Interesting Apples | Vimeo
3-minute video
Some Interesting Apples is a community film about the UK’s only orchard solely dedicated to the cultivation of selected wild-grown chance-seedling apples. These are often roadside apple trees, ‘planted’ unwittingly by someone who drove past and chucked their apple core out of the car window. If the variety is resilient enough, it will grow into a tree, however tough the conditions are.
The best science images of 2025 | Nature
1-minute read
The Sun’s fiery surface, a tattooed tardigrade, rare red lightning and more.
Cats, dogs, and babies, in Taiwan | Marginal Revolution
1-minute read
Overall, our findings challenge popular narratives and suggest that pet ownership may support, rather than displace, fertility.