noahpinion.blog

Who was the worst monster of the 20th century?

Hitler's regime was purpose-built for conquest and genocide — it could only keep killing or die. In this sense, the Holocaust, as horrifying as it was, was only the tip of the iceberg. It's not clear whether there has ever been another regime quite like Hitler's, even when we look back to the barbarity of premodern times.

themarginalian.org

Borges on How to Conquer Time

The vociferous catastrophes of a general order — fires, wars, epidemics — are one single pain, illusorily multiplied in many mirrors.

longreads.com

Skill Nostalgia

Nostalgia can be a toxic impulse, reactionary and uncritical, but it can also hold revolutionary potential for the future. Here, nostalgia is more than a self-soothing search for comfort; it's about engaging with loss, reconnecting with ideals that might improve the future.

longreads.com

The Brits Panning for Gold

I had no idea that gold panning still happened in Britain, let alone that there was a British Gold Panning Association and a full calendar of competitions.

themarginalian.org

The Violinist Who Solved the Ancient Riddle of How the World Holds Together

The plate tectonics model that would arise from her discovery would go on to change our understanding of life itself: Tectonic activity mixes surface and ocean chemistry, recycling elements to keep atmospheric carbon dioxide and global temperature stable, and is what allowed Earth's waters to remain liquid for the billions of years that complex life needed to evolve. Without it, we would have never risen from the oceans to measure the

notboring.co

America's Next 250

Two hundred and fifty years seems like a long time, but it's just three peoples' lifetimes at current averages. It would have been six lifetimes back then, except the average American's life expectancy has doubled over the past 250 years.

noahpinion.blog

China is winning the other tech race

The most interesting idea is that countries become great powers due to their mastery of the most important technologies of the day — gunpowder, sailing ships, steam power, mass production, steel, the combustion engine, industrial chemicals, electricity, airplanes, and so on. It's also possible to imagine that leading nations fall behind due to technological disruption. Britain's industrial revolution made mercantile trade less pivotal as a source of national wealth, so the Netherlands fell behind.

longreads.com

Happy Fucking Birthday

"Dear Mr. Benjamin Franklin," wrote a seventh grader from Winterville, Georgia. "In your time, the United States hardly existed. As I am writing this letter, it is almost the semi quincentennial, and BOY does the US exist now!"

themarginalian.org

What Makes a Person: The Seven Layers of Selfhood in Literature and Life

Characters formed within one society and living in circumstances where their dispositions are no longer needed — characters in time of great social change — are likely to be tragic. Their virtues lie useless or even foiled; they are no longer recognized for what they are; their motives and actions are misunderstood. The magnanimous man in a petty bourgeois society is seen as a vain fool; the energetic and industrious man in a society that prizes elegance above energy is seen as a bustling boor; the meditative person in an expansive society is seen as melancholic.

honest-broker.com

A Reading List for the End of Civilization

Simone Weil, building on this same insight, would tell you that the Romans became enslaved to their emperor because they had already accepted the legitimacy of slavery. They became subject to violence and domination because they had built their own empire on these values. What goes around comes around.

dwarkesh.com

Ada Palmer – Machiavelli is the most misunderstood thinker of all time

Machiavelli could have left exile and worked for any number of different principalities that would have been eager to make use of his talents. Instead, he decided to rot in the countryside and compile his career's lessons about power, politics, and human nature into a book he dedicated to the very man whose new regime had tortured and exiled him, Lorenzo di Piero de' Medici.

longreads.com

The Boeing 747 Begins Its Final Descent

This was the Wild West of commercial aviation, after planes had been proven but when the Jet Age was still new and exciting.

whyisthisinteresting

The Penguin Pool Edition

The writing, perhaps, was on the wall as early as 1970, when the Architect's Journal contacted Lubetkin to congratulate him on the pool becoming officially Grade-I listed, making it a criminal offence to damage or alter it. His statement? "My personal interpretation is that these buildings cry for a world which has never come into being."

honest-broker.com

The 50 Essential Western Films

I finally came to embrace movies about the Old West because, I gradually realized, they define the grand American mythos, whether we like it or not. We have inherited these stories, and need to make sense of them—because they tell us things about ourselves that we won't learn any other way.

themarginalian.org

Einstein and the Eagle: How Relativity Is Saving Earth’s Rarest Raptor

But no one, not even Einstein himself, imagined that this purely theoretical revolution would have practical applications that would alter the fabric of human life — relativity was the paragon of "useless knowledge."

themarginalian.org

The Only Three Distinctions Between People

Instead of rich and poor, high and low, they are to be classed, — First, by their sorrows... Secondly, all who have the same maladies... Thirdly, all who are guilty of the same sins, whether the world knows them or not; whether they languish in prison, looking forward to the gallows, or walk honored among men, they also form a class. Then proceed to generalize and classify the whole world together, as none can claim utter exemption from either sorrow, sin, or disease; and if they could, yet Death, like a great parent, comes and sweeps all through one darksome portal, — all his children.

longreads.com

The Prehistory of A.I. Slop

By the early nineteen-sixties, there was enough of this kind of thing going around that it caused both a panic and understandable excitement.

3quarksdaily.com

Genetic studies support what historians have argued for decades: ancient India was a place of migration and mixture

the history of how that history has been imagined, framed and written at different times by different people over the past 200 years is almost equally enthralling.

dwarkesh.com

David Reich – Why the Bronze Age was an inflection point in human evolution

Selection went especially bonkers during the Bronze Age (around 3,000 years ago). That's when gene frequencies for everything from immune function to body fat to intelligence were most in flux. Over the last 10,000 years, selection pushed the genetic predictor of cognitive performance up by roughly a full standard deviation — most of it between 4,000 and 2,000 years ago.

3quarksdaily.com

The American anxiety about alcohol as pleasure and punishment

Over the centuries, drinking has accrued pearly layers of significance, becoming a symbolic and cultural ritual.

longreads.com

The Hardest Part Of History To Tell Is How It Felt

I was trying to find the human side of history, and humans were often my best source. When I thought about Sacajawea in the Rockies, trying to keep her infant son alive, I thought about my own kids at that age—about my wife breastfeeding them, both parties always hungry, always thirsty.

whyisthisinteresting

The Fishtail Parka Edition

In the decades after the war, surplus U.S. military gear flooded Japanese markets, and a generation grew up with an almost archaeological fascination with the objects themselves: the stitching, the hardware, the fabric weight, the precise shade of olive drab. What emerged was a cottage industry of reproduction specialists who approached American workwear and military garments the way a watchmaker approaches a complicated movement, with complete seriousness, no shortcuts, and a conviction that the original was worth getting exactly right.

dwarkesh.com

Terence Tao – Kepler, Newton, and the true nature of mathematical discovery

But the story of how we discovered the shape of our solar system shows how the verification loop for correct ideas can be decades (or even millennia) long. During this time, what we know today as the better theory can often actually make worse predictions (Copernicus's model of circular orbits around the sun was actually less accurate than Ptolemy's geocentric model).

3quarksdaily.com

The Uncommon Enemy

The West's Cold War propaganda focused on decrying Communist totalitarianism and championing democratic freedoms, but the United States and its closest allies were mostly concerned with preserving their largest businesses' access to capitalistic markets and resources.

whyisthisinteresting

The Gregorian Calendar Edition, Part II

Great Britain knew that it had a problem and that its calendar was less accurate, but inertia is a powerful force, and calendar reform was deferred until 1751.

noahpinion.blog

There isn't always a "long arc" of morality

History is contingent — the Equal Rights Amendment failed ratification by only three states out of 38, and never really got a second shot. If Hillary Clinton had won a few more votes in 2016, Roe v. Wade wouldn't have been overturned, and affirmative action in college admissions would be legal to this day.

whyisthisinteresting

The Saturday Selection, Vol. 97

How are things different now from the way they were in the golden age? The best way to answer that might be to imagine what someone from the golden age would notice if we brought him here in a time machine.

3quarksdaily.com

Why Do We Get Mad at Inanimate Objects?

The hatred for anything giving us pain, which wreaks itself on the manifest cause, and which leads even a civilized man to kick a door when it pinches his finger, is embodied in . . . doctrines of early Roman law.

whyisthisinteresting

The Gregorian Calendar Edition

By the 1500s, the incredibly slight discrepancy between the actual length of the solar year (365.2422 days) and the average length of the Julian calendar year (365.25 days) had created some problems.

longreads.com

The Longreads Questionnaire, Featuring Julian Brave NoiseCat

I grew up in a very Indian California, and it was under almost constant siege by a society habituated to extraction, displacement, and dispossession. The Native Bay Area and California that raised me was pocked with these invisible enclaves of Indian community: filled with love and holding on by a thread.

noahpinion.blog

Are we in the foothills of World War 3?

Although World War 2 officially began when Germany invaded Poland, conflicts that either foreshadowed the final conflagration or eventually merged with it began years earlier, in the mid-1930s. WW2 had foothills.

dwarkesh.com

The Library of Alexandria isn’t where most ancient knowledge was lost

the authorities and censors are always worried about the exact wrong things given 20/20 hindsight.