Pain relief, codebreaking, kite lore, impersonators at sea, and what the Vatican makes of machines.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Five centuries of kites, tracked through what different languages call them — paper eagles, dragons, wind zithers — and the science and play they carried aloft.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.