ReadGlobe · morning brief · archive
Wednesday 7 October
1 · The text
Yes, novels
Austen stops her own story to defend the novel against everyone who sneers at it.
2 min · Jane Austen · Northanger Abbey · 1817 · public domain
Yes, novels; for I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel-writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding—joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages with disgust. Alas! if the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard? I cannot approve of it. Let us leave it to the reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans. Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body. Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried. From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are almost as many as our readers. And while the abilities of the nine-hundredth abridger of the History of England, or of the man who collects and publishes in a volume some dozen lines of Milton, Pope, and Prior, with a paper from the Spectator, and a chapter from Sterne, are eulogized by a thousand pens—there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them. “I am no novel-reader—I seldom look into novels—Do not imagine that I often read novels—It is really very well for a novel.” Such is the common cant. “And what are you reading, Miss——?” “Oh! it is only a novel!” replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. “It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda”; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language. Now, had the same young lady been engaged with a volume of the Spectator, instead of such a work, how proudly would she have produced the book, and told its name; though the chances must be against her being occupied by any part of that voluminous publication, of which either the matter or manner would not disgust a young person of taste: the substance of its papers so often consisting in the statement of improbable circumstances, unnatural characters, and topics of conversation which no longer concern anyone living; and their language, too, frequently so coarse as to give no very favourable idea of the age that could endure it.
2 · One idea · Risk & uncertainty
The black swan
For more than a thousand years, a black swan was Europe's picture of something that could not exist. The Roman poet Juvenal used it for a thing too rare to be real.
Then, in 1697, a Dutch expedition led by Willem de Vlamingh sailed up a river in Western Australia and saw them. Black swans, plenty of them.
Centuries of sightings of white swans had not proved anything. One sighting of a black one was enough to end the certainty.
Nassim Taleb borrowed the bird in 2007 for the rare, huge surprises we explain away only after they happen.
In one line. A black swan, in Nassim Taleb’s sense, is a rare event that is a huge surprise, carries enormous impact, and — only afterwards — gets explained as if it had been predictable. Because they sit outside past experience, black swans dominate history while staying invisible to models built on the ordinary.
Worked example
The 2008 financial crisis was, for most, a black swan: risk models built on decades of “normal” data had no room for it, its impact was vast, and afterwards a tidy story made it seem obvious all along. The models weren’t merely wrong — they were blind to the events that mattered most.
How to use it, and where it fails3 · One number
Mothers who die from pregnancy or childbirth, per 100,000 live births, world
1985429
2020212
2.0 times lower than in 1985.
A risk nearly every woman once faced, and one that now depends mostly on where she lives.
Source: Our World in Data, world estimates, read 2026-09-24.