1. First up today, the recordings of three good talks from this year’s Cambridge Festival https://www.festival.cam.ac.uk/:

Hiranya Peiris, Professor of Astrophysics at Cambridge, on Decoding the Cosmos https://youtu.be/PtYHKPGPh3U

Philippe Sands, Professor of Laws (plural!) and Director of the Centre on International Courts and Tribunals at University College London, On Impunity, Pinochet and Patagonia https://youtu.be/96VlfWBAQxo

David Spiegelhalter, Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at Cambridge, on The Art of Uncertainty: Living with Chance, Ignorance, Risk and Luck https://youtu.be/d8hYzhjKiiQ

2. I could imagine (and I hope I’m wrong) that the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which I’ve just discovered, is one of the many projects whose future funding is uncertain at present under the Trump administration https://plato.stanford.edu/index.html

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy organizes scholars from around the world in philosophy and related disciplines to create and maintain an up-to-date reference work.

Here’s three random readable entries:

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel/

Ludwig Wittgenstein https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein/

The Chinese Room Argument https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/

3. I had a little surf over the weekend following in the wake of Karl Ove Knausgaard, starting with this piece from Harper’s ‘on finding mystery in the digital age’, The Reenchanted World https://harpers.org/archive/2025/06/the-reenchanted-world-karl-ove-knausgaard-digital-age/ (Harper’s allows you two free articles a month.)

The first time I saw a computer was in 1984. I was fifteen years old and living in a sparsely populated area near a river, miles away from the closest town, in a far-northern country at the very edge of the world. A sign lit up above the convenience store that closed at four o’clock every day; otherwise, the visual stimuli were limited to fields and trees, trees and fields, and to the cars driving along the roads. In autumn and spring it rained so much that the river overflowed its banks—I remember standing in front of the living-room window watching the water cover the field where we played football, the goalposts rising up from it. There was one TV channel, two radio stations, and the newspapers were printed in black and white. The news from Iran and Israel, Egypt and South Africa, England and Northern Ireland, the United States and India, Lebanon and the Soviet Union all took place far away, as if on another planet.

The Harper’s piece led me to Knausgaard’s New York Times interview with the surgeon Henry Marsh, The Terrible Beauty of Brain Surgery https://tinyurl.com/mry9v92m

Marsh was in Tirana to demonstrate a surgical procedure he helped pioneer, called awake craniotomy, that had never been performed in Albania. The procedure is used to remove a kind of brain tumor that looks just like the brain itself. Such tumors are most common in young people, and there is no cure for them. Without surgery, 50 percent of patients die within five years; 80 percent within 10 years. An operation prolongs their lives by 10 to 20 years, sometimes more. In order for the surgeon to be able to distinguish between tumor and healthy brain tissue, the patient is kept awake throughout the operation, and during the procedure the brain is stimulated with an electric probe, so that the surgeon can see if and how the patient reacts. The team in Albania had been preparing for six months and had selected two cases that were particularly well suited to demonstrating the method.

And that NYT piece led me to The Guardian review of Henry Marsh’s book, Admissions: A Life in Brain Surgery https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/may/13/admissions-by-henry-marsh-review

The book draws on more recent experiences than ‘Do No Harm’ (Marsh’s first book) – in London, Texas, Ukraine, Nepal and with ambulance-chasing London lawyers (memorably described as “rooting in a great trough of insurance premiums”). When the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard met Marsh, and wrote about him for the New York Times, he was struck most by his openness and honesty. That honesty is abundantly apparent here – a quality as rare and commendable in elite surgeons as one suspects it is in memoirists.

4. The new issue of EL Gazette came out today, full of good stories as usual https://www.elgazette.com/elg_archive/ELG2505/mobile/

5. And, finally, another gift article from The New York Times, The Cockney Accent Is Fading, but This Dish Is Here to Stay https://tinyurl.com/4uvw7wsy

Shop owners in the U.K. are fighting to win government protection for pie and mash, a working-class meal with deep roots.