The Ars Nihil Interesting Things Roundup, Revived #2 (May 2025)

This is a quick collection of articles and wiki pages I found during the past month that I haven't already posted elsewhere.

(Featured image for this post is from AbsolutVision (Unsplash).)

Articles

📘 Pulled from my old Pocket files between 2011-2023

"She Developed a Culture of Madness": Inside the Casa Ruby Scandal by Benny B. Peterson (Washingtonian)

“Is Your Blood Clean?”: The Paranoid Pastor Who Turned His Church into a Violent Cult by Rachel Browne (The Walrus)

Rwanda: “It's hard to live with the people who killed us.” by Stéphane Bou (K.)

"Vietnam’s Village of Moroccan Defectors" by Basma El Atti (New Lines)

"How Nintendo Bled Atari Games to Death" by Julien Mailland (MIT Press Reader)

"The Red Scare never went away, it just briefly turned green" by Bill Shaner (Worcester Sucks and I Love It)

"Ghosts and Dolls" by Paul J. Griffith (The Lamp)

"The Centuries-Long Struggle to Make English Words Behave" by Dennis Duncan (NY Times)

"What in God’s Name Is Happening in Politics?" by Crawford Kilian (The Tyee)

"Monogamy Isn’t the Best Type of Romantic Relationship" by Ashley Fike (Vice)

"The Creativity Hack No One Told You About" by Keith Sawyer (Nautilus)

"What the Most Famous Book About Trauma Gets Wrong" by Emi Nietfeld (Mother Jones)

"The doctors will see you now! It’s the all-time top 20 TV medical dramas" by Michael Hogan (The Guardian)

"Instruments of Empire" by Ed McNally (New Left Review)

"Who wants to live forever?" by Kieran Setiya (Under the Net)

"60-Hour Dance Sessions, Simulated Sex, and Ketamine: Inside the World of Hardcore VR Ravers" by Mattha Busby (Wired)

"What’s making men so much more right-wing than women?" by Maia Mindel (Vox)

"Do Christian nationalists misread their own scripture?" by Dan Barker (Freethought Now)

"The Most Beautiful Words in the English Language, According to Linguists" by Bennett Kleinman (Word Smarts)

"Where to start with: Terry Pratchett" by Marc Burrows (The Guardian)

"For Many People, Food Is a Necessary Evil—So They’ve Started Eating ‘Human Kibble’" by Alba Otero (Xataka On)

"The big idea: could the English language die?" by Laura Spinney (The Guardian)

"Can Criticism Survive Inside the University?" (The Point)

"The ecstatic swoon" by Robert D. Zarestky (Aeon)

"As Bright as a Feather: Ostriches, Home Dyeing, and the Global Plume Trade" by Whitney Rakich (The Public Domain Review)

"The Fastest Way Yet to Color Graphs" by Steve Nadis (Quanta Magazine)

"The Battling Memoirs of The New Yorker" by Anthony Lane (The New Yorker)

"Pay Attention!" by Dan Sinykin (The Nation)

"Demonology" by David Gordon White (Aeon)

"Gateway Books" by Timothy Aubry (The Point)

"The Tongue Is a Fire: The Trouble with Free Speech" by Ferdinand Mount (London Review of Books

"We Must Save The Books" by Michael Kimmage (Liberties)

"W.A.S.T.E." by Madeleine Adams (The Baffler)

"Martin Crusius’ Armchair Voyage" by Richard Calls (History Today)

"Thomas Keller asked me to leave the French Laundry. It turned into my most extraordinary night as a critic" by MacKenzie Chung Fegan (SF Chronicle)

"Is the New York Times ‘Opinion’ Section Eating the Paper?" by Charlotte Klein (New York)

"Ezra Klein Should Be Honest About the Abundance Movement" by Joe Wrote (Substack)

"My Brief Hero's Journey Into the 'Art of Manliness,' Which Unfortunately Did Not Teach Me to Chop Wood" by Esther Wang (Jezebel)

"‘The Great Unread’" by Gus Mitchell (Commonweal)

"As a mother to teen daughters, I'm not that concerned about Sabrina Carpenter's influence (...but I am about Gracie Abrams)" by Celeste Davis (Matriarchal Blessing)

"Why Silicon Valley’s Most Powerful People Are So Obsessed With Hobbits" by Michiko Kakutani (New York Times)

"Can We Trust Social Science Yet?" by Ryan Briggs (Asterisk) "The Six-Year-Old Who Explained the World" by Lily Meyer (The Dial)

"America Is In A Late Republic Stage Like Rome" by Nathan Gardels & Niall Ferguson (Noema)

"Christian nationalists decided empathy is a sin. Now it’s gone mainstream." by Aja Romano (Vox)

"How to Make a Living as a Writer" by Gabrielle Drolet (The Walrus)

"MAGA Maoism: Trumpism as a Third World Movement" by Drew Pavlou (Drew Pavlou's Iceberg Journal)

"How Onlyfans Took Over The World" by Aella (Knowingless)

"The Art of the Critic" by Nick Ripatrazone (Metropolitan Review)

"Marx: The Fourth Boom" by Devin Thomas O'Shea (Los Angeles Review of Books)

"Against Life Extension" by Francis Fukuyama (Persuasion)

"Descartes Be Damned" by Costica Bradatan (Literary Review)

"The 100 Greatest Country Albums of All Time" (Rolling Stone)

"From boiling lead and black art: An essay on the history of mathematical typography" by Eddie Smith (Practically Efficient) 📘

"On the American Beat" by Jonathan Clarke (The Smart Set) 📘

"What's the Point of Handwriting?" by Navneet Alang (Hazlitt) 📘

"A Brief History of the DJ Mixer" by Joshua Glazer (Cuepoint) 📘

"Consciousness Began When the Gods Stopped Speaking" by Veronique Greenwood (Nautilus) 📘

"The Age of the Essay" by Paul Graham 📘

"Weird, Rare, and Everywhere" by Arno Kopecky (Hakai Magazine) 📘

"Why Do Canadians Say ‘Eh’?" by Dan Nosowitz (Atlas Obscura) 📘

"How the Internet Changed Language—for the Better" by Kjerstin Johnson (The Ringer) 📘

"It’s Not You, It’s Me" by Helena de Bres (The Point) 📘

"The Pixar Theory of Labor" by James Douglas (The Awl) 📘

"Through the Looking Glass" by Daniel A. Gross (Compass Cultura) 📘

"Henry Green Is As Good As His Word" by Michael Gorra (The Paris Review) 📘

"The Fantasy of Opting Out" by Finn Brunton & Helen Nissenbaum (MIT Press Reader) 📘

"When an American Town Massacred Its Chinese Immigrants" by Michael Luo (The New Yorker)

"Demystifying the stone ruins of pre-colonial Africa" by Isaac Samuel (African History Extra)

"The Authoritarian Mirror: Why MAGA Can’t See What They’ve Become" (The Rational League)

"What We Don’t Know Will Hurt Us" by Anna Merlan (Mother Jones)

"What Hot Dragon-Riders and Fornicating Faeries Say About What Women Want Now" by Anna Louie Sussman (Wall Street Journal)

"A Smiling Public Man" by Jeffrey Meyers (Salmagundi)

Wikipedia Pages

• Eidetic memory

• The Chinese room argument

• Freedom House Ambulance Service

• Café racer motorcycles

• Mod (subculture)

• The Five whys from Toyota's Taiichi Ohno

• The Rich man and Lazarus parable

• Monumental sculpture

• Australian green tree frog

• Merle (dog coat)

• Roan (color)

• Antinomy

• Germ theory of disease

• The Mayerling incident

• Hydroplane (boat)

• Broadside (printing)

• Discworld novel series

• Common European Framework of Reference for Languages

• Palladian architecture

• Plunderphonics

• Skunkworks project

• Koncovka and Fujara, traditional Slovakian flutes

• Baedeker travel guides

• Entropic gravity

• Tuya volcanoes

• Engineering design process

• Anatomy of Criticism by Northrop Frye

• Jacobethan architecture style

• List of Crayola crayon colors

• List of unsolved problems in physics

• Free fall (physics)

• Infrasound

• Lyman series in physics & chemistry

• Half-life

• Mimeograph

• The Ère des attentats ("Era of Attacks") in 1800s France

• DARVO

• Carcinoma and Angioma tumors

• Glass harmonica

• Polaroid SX-70

• Young Farmers (photograph)

• Romuva (religion)

• Margaret Clitherow

• Hand-in-waistcoat

• Bulla (seal)

• Children's literature

• Umibōzu

• Urban exploration

• Extended Copy Protection

• Bouquet garni

• Auricle (anatomy)

• Novaya Zemlya effect

• M-theory

• Gauge theory

• Photonics

• Kinematics

• Baryogenesis

• Obelisk

• Home rule

• Bitumen

• Arcology

• Long-range acoustic device

• Ashikaga Takauji (shogun)

• Antikythera mechanism

• Typology (theology)

• Battle of Clontarf

• Marquis de Condorcet

• Panpsychism

• Philippa Foot

• The Orkneyinga saga

• The concept of Roman Charity

• Jean-Baptiste Greuze (painter)

• Comancheria

• Buoyancy

• 1561 celestial phenomenon over Nuremberg