The Ars Nihil Interesting Things Roundup, Revived #1 (April 2025)

This is a quick collection of articles and wiki pages I found during the past month that I haven't already posted elsewhere. This also might be a revival of my old Link Roundups, since this seems to fit no other descriptors. Anyways, enjoy!:

(Featured image for this post is from Patrick Tomasso (Unsplash).)

Articles

"Most American Literature is the Literature of Empire" by Viet Thanh Nguyen (LitHub)

"10 disabled artists who show it’s no obstacle" by Evan Whitton (Soundsphere)

"Scholars Have Lost the Plot!" by Milan Terlunen (Public Books)

"What is the point of an independent record label in 2025?" by Nick Sylvester (smartdumb)

"Consciousness is fundamental" by Annaka Harris (IAI News)

"The Best Stories We’ve Ever Told" (Outside)

"What Makes a Narcissist?" by Kristen French (Nautilus)

"45 Tips — That You Haven’t Heard a Million Times Before — to Improve Your Sleep" by Brett & Kate McKay (Art of Manliness)

"The 200 Greatest Country Songs of All Time" (Rolling Stone)

"How The God Kokopelli Became A 90s Bro Accessory" by Eli Yudin (Cracked)

"A dirty secret: you can only be a writer if you can afford it" by Lynn Steger Strong (The Guardian)

"How the Massacre of Beziers Marked the Beginning of Centuries of Violence in Europe" by T.D. Allman (LitHub)

"The Vanishing Acts" by Mary Siroky (Consequence of Sound)

"The group chats that changed America" by Ben Smith (Semafor)

"When you see your recipes in a $4 million book" by Nagi Maehashi (RecipeTin Eats)

"Tolkien Against the Grain" by Gerry Canavan (Dissent)

"Reckless Regard" by Sasha Frere-Jones (Bookforum)

"Why Have Sentence Lengths Decreased?" by Arjun Panickssery (Substack)

"The Cult of Doing Business" by Drew Calvert (Commonweal)

"The cat that wouldn’t die" by Nigel Warburton (Aeon)

"The Most ‘CD Album’ Albums Ever, Ranked" by Steven Hyden (Uproxx)

Wikipedia Pages

• Ignorantia juris non excusat

• Cystic fibrosis

• Coast Salish peoples

• Ancient Greek concept of khôra

• Gideon v. Wainwright (1963)

• Marbury v. Madison (1803)

• The Suzuki Hayabusa motorcycle

• Albedo

• Osteomyelitis

• The "Nixon shock" effect

• Michael Moorcock's concept of the "Eternal Champion"

• Fundamental interaction in physics

• Polynya

• California during the American Civil War

• Mesoamerican myth of the Five Suns

• Charles Kellogg, birdsong expert

• The Whiskey Rebellion

• Long QT syndrome

• Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater

• Camel milk

• The Hatton Garden safe deposit burglary

• Doggerland, the possible home of Atlantis

• Venezualan folk deity María Lionza

• The Hippe Trail of the 1960s & 1970s

• William H. Seward

• Nescafé