Happy New Year! Here’s our first Top 5 list of 2023.
Financial Times
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Secret Lives of MI6’s Top Female Spies
“For the first time ever, SIS officers reveal why women often make the best spies for our times.”
Posted inTop 5
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week we are sharing stories from Thomas Hale, Sam Edwards, Kim Cross, Jaq Evans, and Matti Friedman
Posted inEditor's Pick
I Spent 10 Days in a Secret Chinese Covid Detention Centre
“What I learnt when I was ‘taken away’ to an island quarantine facility in the middle of the night.”
Posted inNonfiction
Cabin Fever: A Reading List for the Perpetually Isolated
How the pandemic made us confront what it means to be alone.
Posted inHighlight, Nonfiction, Quote Posts, Quotes, Uncategorized
Japan’s Lonely Cherry Blossoms
Millions of people turn out to see Japan’s famous sakura blossoms. This year, Covid-19 kept the usual crowds at home, though the blossom makes a fitting metaphor for evanescence.
Posted inCommentary, Essays & Criticism, History, Quotes
The Lost Art of Getting Lost
Pam Mandel’s absurdly earned travel resume is why she always have time for the same sentiments from other voices of this rootless era.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Olive Oil Trouble
Olive-oil fraud was already common in antiquity. Galen tells of unscrupulous oil merchants who mixed high-quality olive oil with cheaper substances like lard, and Apicius provides a recipe for turning cheap Spanish oil into prized oil from Istria using minced herbs and roots. The Greeks and the Romans used olive oil as food, soap, lotion, […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Sale of the FT and an Oral History of the News Business
The FT Group, which includes standout business newspaper the Financial Times, is being sold for $1.3 billion to Nikkei, Japan’s largest media company. Established in 1888, the FT has been lauded for its digital transition as the newspaper industry has declined. “Riptide” is an oral history project that was first launched in 2013 about what “really happened to […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Rise of Independent Travel Magazines
Subject matter can be almost self-consciously esoteric. The latest issue of Ernest includes a piece by Queen guitarist Brian May on diableries (19th-century stereoscopic photographs of clay model demons). Cereal has 10 pages on Anglepoise lamps; Avaunt has a feature headlined “Politics of map projections”. The new magazines also move away from the traditional “colonial” […]