Good Reads · No. 4

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 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.