The whole day respects the same order of operations: first someone writes down what the thing is, and only then goes looking for it. To find out that ants, polar bears and some birds kiss, Matilda Brindle and coauthors first had to draft a definition of kissing that would hold across species — directed, non-agonistic oral-oral contact, with lip movement and no food transfer. To ask whether people think they owe themselves anything, Laura Soter and Fan Yang first had to separate obligation from preference, and invent a Robinson Crusoe to test whether the debt survives without an audience. A preprint on bilinguals measures comfort in two languages and finds that the temperature changes and the effectiveness doesn’t. Every good measurement starts in a narrow definition, and that narrowness is the price.
The day’s counterweight is what refuses to go through there. Jay Griffiths writes that the wild can’t be bought or copied, and that is exactly why it doesn’t fit in a spreadsheet. Tove Jansson, at 41, writes to the woman she loved and spends the entire letter admitting she can’t say what she’s feeling — and the letter works. And on the other side, what happens when something can be monopolized: Gary Feinman shows through excavation that the all-powerful king is not an automatic consequence of a large population, and David Cain finds that his 2009 bucket list was, in half its items, an inventory of other people’s wants. Yesterday the thread was that text went free and understanding someone is still expensive. Today the price didn’t drop; it moved.
connection
Is it morally wrong to not take care of yourself?, Psyche, Laura K Soter and Fan Yang — the thesis is psychological, not normative: ordinary people believe, consistently and with consequences, that there are moral obligations to oneself, even when no one else is affected. More than 85% of the American adults surveyed said yes, and the study design takes the trouble to shield that answer against two classic philosophical objections — that obligation to oneself is incoherent (if I’m the one who owes and the one who collects, I can let myself off whenever I want, the “self-release paradox”) and that these obligations are in fact owed to third parties, like the player who promises the team to get in shape. Hence the Crusoe-type castaway: even with no one around, participants judged that he does wrong if he doesn’t take care of himself. What decides which items make the list is harm — avoiding self-harm and looking after your mental health became obligations, drinking tea and reading fiction stayed preferences. Soter and Yang don’t close the moral account, and that’s the best of the piece: the same belief that gets someone to sleep is the one that makes someone feel morally deficient for not producing.
I Long to Read More in the Book of You: Moomins Creator Tove Jansson’s Tender and Passionate Letters to the Love of Her Life, The Marginalian, Maria Popova — Jansson met Tuulikki Pietilä at a Christmas party of the Helsinki artists’ union in 1955, fighting over the record player; they were together for almost fifty years. The letters from that first summer, with Tooti on the Finnish mainland and Tove on the island in the Borgå archipelago, are made of two layers that don’t come apart: the enormous affection and the list of small things that hold up a life together — clay hauled from the cove for the swallows, the raisins used up all at once, a sincere thank-you for a flyswatter. “I’m so unused to being happy that I haven’t really come to terms with what it involves”, she writes, and adds that she feels like a garden that has finally been watered. In the middle of the most romantic letter she asks Tooti, if writing in Finnish, to please use the typewriter, because Tooti’s handwriting is hard — and returns to love in the next sentence, with no transition. Popova likes to stitch this to the origin of Moominpappa at Sea, conceived while Tove carried stones in the rain; the stitching is lovely and a little too neat, but the letters hold.
culture
How Not to Waste Your Wildness, The Marginalian, Maria Popova on Jay Griffiths — the argument of Wild: An Elemental Journey (2006) is not that we should preserve nature out there, but that the human spirit is one of the achievements of wildness, so that domesticating the world means castrating the source itself. “What is wild cannot be bought or sold, borrowed or copied”, Griffiths writes, and the list of what can’t be copied is the definition by exclusion: whatever doesn’t survive the transaction. The book came out of seven years of travel, from the Amazon to the Arctic, which began in a long depression in which she couldn’t walk or write — which gives the text an urgency that isn’t a pose. Where I get off is the Manichaeism: “There are two sides: the agents of waste and the lovers of the wild. Either for life or against it.” The sentence is good to read and bad to think with, and the book is better when it describes than when it splits the world into two teams.
Participants, not Prosecutors, 3 Quarks Daily, Morgan Meis — it’s a pointer to Christopher Celenza’s essay in Commonweal, and the excerpt already hands over the frame: Machiavelli and Du Bois read the dead as conversation partners, and it was by entering that conversation that they became part of the tradition they inherited. Against that, Celenza sets the habit that has dominated recent decades — unmask, expose, diagnose — christened by Ricœur the hermeneutics of suspicion, out of Freud, Nietzsche and Marx: the decision to treat all consciousness as false consciousness. The historical point the excerpt makes is worth it on its own: doubt came from Descartes and aimed at the external world; with those three it turned inward, and the story a person tells about themselves became always a disguise. I haven’t read the whole essay, so I’ll stay with what the pointer announces — but the pair of verbs in the title is already a thesis: participate or prosecute.
brazil
Vinte palavras girando ao redor do sol, Quatro Cinco Um, Maria Fernanda Barros — a review of Graciliano Ramos: vida e obra, by Wander Melo Miranda, and it starts in the right place: the self-portrait Graciliano wrote in 1948, in the third person, summing up fifty years in two pages of an arts supplement. Five suits, collar 39, shoe size 41, always wrote in the morning and by hand, liked swearing, read the Bible while an atheist, had a horror of doorbells and of people who talk loud. The axis Melo Miranda pulls out of that ordinary life is the arbitrariness of power, and he anchors it in an unjust beating from his father in early childhood, which the writer told his daughter Clara decades later with the conclusion that defines him: “That was my first contact with justice”. Barros praises the book’s lean prose — spare the way its subject’s books were — and drives in two objections worth the read: calling Graciliano and Rosa the greatest Brazilian prose writers of the 20th century is an injustice to Clarice, and the research isn’t after anything new. What also stays is the Graciliano who was hard on himself, capable of dedicating Caetés to Cassiano Ricardo with a “Please don’t read this rubbish. It’s appalling” — and of tearing a Joel Silveira story into little pieces, in front of the author, before inviting him out for a cachaça.
science
Examining Social Emotion Regulation in Spanish-English Bilinguals, PsyArXiv — the study starts from a settled finding, that emotional reactivity is lower in a second language, and asks what that does to comfort: does reinterpreting someone’s situation work better in the native language, through fluency, or in the second, through distance? The competing hypotheses were preregistered, which is the honest part of the design. With 250 Spanish-English bilingual women in the US, negative images and audio that either described or reinterpreted the scene, the result was twofold: negative affect was lower in the English rounds, replicating the lower intensity in L2, but social reappraisal reduced negative affect equally in both languages. That is, language moves the temperature of the feeling and doesn’t move the effectiveness of whoever calms you down. It’s a preprint, women only, US only, almost all with Spanish as a first language and high proficiency in both — but for anyone who lives half their life in a borrowed language, it’s a data point that shifts the intuition instead of confirming it.
What Archaeology Reveals About the Rise of All-Powerful Rulers, Nautilus, Tim Vernimmen interviews Gary Feinman — the tidy story says farming produced surplus, surplus produced inequality, large populations demanded a strong chief, and democracy was a Greek bolt of lightning that spread afterwards. Feinman spent a career excavating houses in Mexico and in Shandong and found the opposite of what was predicted: in almost every house dug up someone was producing something for exchange, and the warehouses that would let a central power accumulate and distribute never turned up — with no monopoly on a resource, coercion has nothing to lean on. Teotihuacán and Monte Albán back it up on the symbolic side: open plazas, murals with processions of masked officials instead of named kings, temple tops wide enough for groups, and no opulent tomb in the manner of the classic Maya at Palenque. The two tests cited (PNAS in 2025, comparing largest and smallest house at more than a thousand sites; Science Advances in March 2026, crossing governance and scale in 40 contexts) arrive at the same number: population size explains about a quarter of the variation in inequality or degree of autocracy. The rest is choice, and the interview leaves the mechanism up to the reader — which is a shame, because that’s exactly where it would be most useful.
findings
- Buried underpants and a new definition of kissing win 2026 Ig Nobel prizes, Nature, Chris Simms — the ceremony was on September 3, in Zurich. The biomechanics prize went to the definition of kissing that lets the category travel across species and dates the habit to around 21.5 million years, back to the ancestor of the great apes, which implies sapiens kissing Neanderthals. The soil science one went to the burial of a thousand pairs of underpants in more than 25 countries, dug up two months later as a cheap measure of soil biological activity. And the economics one went to Piff and colleagues’ work on rich people behaving less ethically — which, read on the same day as the Feinman interview, is the same question asked three hundred years apart.
- How to Outlive Your Bucket List, Raptitude, David Cain — he opened the bucket list he wrote in 2009 and hadn’t touched in ten years: 55 of 113 done, almost all at the easy end (books read, cities visited). “Attend South by Southwest” was in there, and today he doesn’t remember what it is. The mechanism he isolates is good: when you invent wishes by the dozen, there’s no sense of what’s being traded — 95% of any goal is paying its cost, and the Ferrari on the Autobahn costs ten thousand dollars that would have gone to something else you’d have preferred. The observation that sticks is about the whole old list: not one item involved other people, except as scenery.
stalled sources
Espiral (Lalai Persson) at 68 days, Philosophy Now at 36, The Public Domain Review at 40, Off Brand at 46, Anti-Mimetic at 54, A List Apart at 69, Out of Office at 75, web.dev at 102, Literary Hub at 105 and The Sunday Long Read at 33. Safe to treat as finished by now: Gurwinder (253), Dirt (297), First Round Review (315), Eat Your Nuts (342).