Good Reads — mehrotra.tech

Good Reads No. 4

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 02:37:49 GMT

Toads, Antarctic newspapers, thoroughbred genetics, organ trafficking, and a few essays on how to live.

Magical Mystery Toads (longreads.com) — A 1935 Tokyo synthesis of a toad molecule set off decades of confused science, bad chemistry and desert mysticism. Kimon de Greef untangles how one compound got mythologised into a drug culture.
South Polar Times | Anne Fadiman (laphamsquarterly.org) — Shackleton edited a typewritten newspaper during Scott's first Antarctic expedition, complete with jokes, hoaxes and grievances. Anne Fadiman reads it as a record of what men do with darkness and boredom.
The body snatchers: how a young Nigerian man was lured to London in an organ-trafficking plot (theguardian.com) — A young man selling phone cases in a Lagos market was offered work in London. The Guardian traces the chain of persuasion and money that ended in a kidney-trafficking trial.
The ultimate horse (worksinprogress.co) — Secretariat's 1973 record still stands after fifty years and billions in breeding. The argument: thoroughbred breeders narrowed the gene pool so hard they closed off the improvement they were chasing.
Artificial Intelligence: Ars Notoria and the Promise of Instant Knowledge (publicdomainreview.org) — The Ars notoria promised medieval students mastery of the university curriculum through prayers and diagrams, no studying required. It worked well enough that people worried about where the knowledge was coming from.
Incentives are for losers (experimental-history.com) — Adam Mastroianni's complaint is that "bad incentives" has become a way of pre-excusing yourself. He argues the people worth admiring are the ones who noticed the incentive and ignored it.
Why Has History Forgotten World War II's Largest Prison Break, Which Claimed the Lives of More Than 200 Japanese POWs? (smithsonianmag.com) — In 1944, over 900 Japanese prisoners charged the fences of an Australian camp with baseball bats and knives, most of them not really trying to escape. 234 died and almost nobody remembers.
On Radical Preservation (thepointmag.com) — Starting from Jonathan Lear on the last Crow chief, who would not speak about anything after the buffalo went, this asks what preserving a culture can mean once its practices no longer make sense.
Neutrinos From Deep Inside Earth Provide a New Picture of the Mantle (quantamagazine.org) — Neutrinos escaping from deep inside the planet are letting physicists count the radioactive elements heating the mantle. It is the closest thing to a direct measurement of what drives plate tectonics.
“And All Being Is Flaming Suffering” | Morgan Meis (laphamsquarterly.org) — Morgan Meis reads Franz Marc's letters to his wife from the front, written by a painter who had spent years putting apocalypse on canvas and then walked into one at Verdun.
Girls Wrestling (thepointmag.com) — A father follows his daughter into the world of girls' wrestling: freezing gyms, fungal infections, and the odd business of watching your child learn to hurt someone on purpose.
Antonioni’s adventures with Monica (engelsbergideas.com) — Antonioni called his subject "moral coldness", and this argues the idea only became legible through Monica Vitti's face. Good on how an abstraction needs a body to be seen.

Good Reads No. 3

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 02:58:52 GMT

A scroll read without opening it, a ship sent to die, and ten other detours.

An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time (scrollprize.org) — A carbonized Herculaneum scroll, sealed since Vesuvius, has now been virtually unwrapped and read start to finish. Short, but it is the moment a two-thousand-year-old library stopped being unreadable.
Funeral Flag | Atossa Araxia Abrahamian (laphamsquarterly.org) — Abrahamian follows one cruise ship from launch to the breaking beaches of Gadani, and the flags, owners and tax havens it passed through. A whole global economy told through a single hull.
Your Book Review: Great And Desperate Cures (astralcodexten.com) — A history of the lobotomy that takes seriously why intelligent doctors did it: a Nobel prize, an ice pick, and a profession with nothing else to offer. Long, and worth it.
Nudists, peaceniks and freeloading travellers: the people keeping the Esperanto dream alive (theguardian.com) — A reported wander through the people still speaking Esperanto: free lodging networks, nudist congresses, and a hundred-year-old plan for world peace that failed but never quite died.
Inside The Lab Growing Mutant Bacteria To Terraform Earth (noemamag.com) — In a Barcelona lab, engineered soil bacteria are being trained to build structures and hold back desert. Ponsford is good on the gap between what the microbes do and what their makers hope.
How Alberta eradicated rats (worksinprogress.co) — Alberta has had no rats for seventy years, which took a permanent patrol line, poisoned bait walls and a public campaign. A case study in what total eradication actually costs.
Inventing Eliza: The First Chatbot’s Hidden Code (spectrum.ieee.org) — Weizenbaum's ELIZA source code turned up in MIT's archives, and it was stranger and more capable than the toy everyone remembers. Useful on why people insist machines understand them.
Abyss, Abysmal, Abysmally | Yiyun Li (laphamsquarterly.org) — Yiyun Li on losing both her sons to suicide, and on living inside language when nothing else holds. Short and exact, with no consolation offered and none faked.
You and Me and QVC (longreads.com) — An essay about watching QVC: Christmas in August, the colorways, the hosts' intimacy with an audience of strangers. It takes home shopping seriously as a form of company.
On This Nearly Deserted Alaska Island, You Pay to Keep Hundreds of Empty Buildings Wired for Internet (propublica.org) — A federal subsidy pays $340,000 a year to wire empty buildings on an abandoned Alaskan Navy base. The money comes off everyone's phone bill, and nobody uses the connection.
How smashing the NIMBYs created modern capitalism (worksinprogress.co) — The Glorious Revolution's real work, this argues, was Parliament untangling tangled property rights so canals and enclosures could be built. Industrial takeoff needed a way to override the neighbours.
Schopenhauer’s devoted disciples (engelsbergideas.com) — Schopenhauer was ignored for decades, then absorbed by Tolstoy, Wagner, Proust, Nietzsche and Einstein. A brisk account of how a pessimist became the century's most borrowed-from thinker.

Good Reads No. 2

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 08:09:09 GMT

Pain relief, codebreaking, kite lore, impersonators at sea, and what the Vatican makes of machines.

‘I can sense Sinatra enter my body and exit my lungs’: aboard the celebrity impersonators’ cruise (theguardian.com) — A week on a cruise ship packed with Sinatras, Marilyns and one Jeff Bezos, written like a screenplay. It ends up being about people who make a living by disappearing into someone else.
Epidurals are a miracle technology (worksinprogress.co) — The history of labour pain relief, from an Irish curse to the anaesthetic that most women in rich countries now get. Argues the epidural is badly underrated as a piece of technology.
The Renegade Bank Robbers Who Stole Back Their Own Money (narratively.com) — After Lebanon's banks froze their savings, ordinary depositors started robbing branches to withdraw their own money. Russell follows three of them and the strange folk-hero status that followed.
When Stupid Was a Diagnosis (nautil.us) — Nineteenth-century doctors diagnosed 'idiocy' in the unborn and blamed morning sickness, the weather and neurotic parents. A useful look at how medicine manufactures categories and then forgets it did.
The Art of Kite Flying (1430–1929) (publicdomainreview.org) — Five centuries of kites, tracked through what different languages call them — paper eagles, dragons, wind zithers — and the science and play they carried aloft.
The Computer That Helped Win World War II (spectrum.ieee.org) — A radio operator hears 'strange new music' on German frequencies in 1941; Tommy Flowers answers it by building Colossus. The origin of the programmable computer as a wartime improvisation.
What the Vatican gets right, and wrong, about AI (engelsbergideas.com) — Starts with a Roman-era letter instructing a wife to expose a baby daughter, then makes the case that the Church's refusal to measure people by usefulness is exactly what AI debates lack — and where it still falls short.
Your Book Review: Breakdown In Pakistan (astralcodexten.com) — A review of Masooda Bano's work on how Western donor money hollows out the local institutions it means to build. The rabbit-and-fire-hose image alone will stay with you.
Wiseman’s Children (thepointmag.com) — On Frederick Wiseman, who spent sixty years filming institutions — juvenile courts, asylums, high schools — and the people they shape. Written just after his death, and it earns its affection.
The Dacre dynasty: how Britain’s rightwing press was radicalised (theguardian.com) — How the Telegraph went from 'nice' and reassuring to something far more combative, traced through the editors who made it happen. A clear account of a press culture changing its own temperature.
The most wonderful thing that happened to Tommy McHugh (experimental-history.com) — A construction worker has a stroke and wakes up compelled to paint everything, including his ceilings. That anecdote anchors a loose, generous roundup of things worth thinking about.
On the origin of continents (worksinprogress.co) — Plate tectonics was discovered twice, by two communities using opposite methods, and neither has a lone genius to credit. A good argument about how scientific paradigms actually arrive.

Good Reads No. 1

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 07:30:56 GMT

The first issue — 12 pieces spanning science, society, philosophy, history, and more.

How Fast Is the Universe Really Expanding? (quantamagazine.org) — One of the biggest mysteries in cosmology seems to keep getting bigger.
‘She was almost a Batman figure’: Mexico’s avenging Mother Courage (theguardian.com) — When her son, Hugo, failed to answer his phone on the morning of 12 July 2005, Isabel Miranda de Wallace did not waste a moment.
What Humanity Needs To Flourish In The Next Decade (noemamag.com) — Glen Weyl founded and helps lead Microsoft Research’s Plural Technology Collaboratory, the RadicalxChange Foundation, the Faith, Family and Technology Network and the Plurality Institute.
Rust and Boll (asteriskmag.com) — Dylan Matthews Anthropic should learn from those cotton-picking socialists. The sibling inventors had, they claimed, built a machine that experts had considered impossible.
Hong Wang Wins 2026 Fields Medal, the Third Woman Ever (quantamagazine.org) — Hong Wang is now just the third woman to win a Fields Medal.
‘It makes your heart sing’: can a pioneering project show that rewilding really works? (theguardian.com) — In the silent countryside south of Grantham, three vast steel barns rattled in the breeze.
The Bourbon trap: military prowess is not a grand strategy (engelsbergideas.com) — The United States risks the fate of Bourbon France, whose strategic brilliance in the American War of Independence masked a contradictory grand strategy that led to ruin.
How civilisations fall, according to Gibbon (engelsbergideas.com) — Two hundred and fifty years after the first volume of the Decline and Fall, Edward Gibbon's diagnosis of why Rome collapsed is a warning to our own age.
The Real Problem Underlying India-China Tensions (noemamag.com) — In the spring, I joined a group of fellow Indian journalists in Beijing for an invite-only talk with Chinese think tankers and academics in the city’s glitzy central business district.
Carl Jung on Creativity (themarginalian.org) — The question of what it takes to create — to make something of beauty and substance that touches other lives across space and time — is one of the deepest, oldest questions, perhaps because the answer to it is so unbearably simple…
Agentic test processes, LLM benchmarks, and other notes on agentic coding from Galapagos Island (danluu.com) — I've been using AI fairly heavily since last November and the whole thing is a funny experience. An agent will do something that, if a human did it, you'd immediately fire them.
“Worthless Idiot, Donkey Head”: Parodies of Pedantry on the Renaissance Stage (publicdomainreview.org) — Pedantry is as old as the history of learning itself, but it is not a stable concept.