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