The Newsletter of (Not Quite) Everything
I have, in my time, thrown a lot of questions at the internet. Why is there a Napoleon I and Napoleon III, but no Napoleon II. 1 Why is Europe considered a continent when it is very clearly just a peninsula of Asia. 2 Sometimes the answers to these questions end up in this newsletter as content; sometimes they end up coming out of my mouth in social situations, surprising and delighting my friends.
At some point – I’m not sure when – such questions led me to sign up to Quora, “a platform to ask questions and connect with people who contribute unique insights and quality answers”, which, annoyingly, you need to log into to read. I don’t remember what question led me there, let alone the quality of the answer, but I’m assuming – given both my interests, and the sort of thing it’s been spamming me with ever since – it was somewhere in the intersection of history, national identity and international relations. At any rate, for several years now, the site has been emailing me other examples of the sorts of questions the algorithm thinks I might be interested in. The fact it sends them to my backup email account, the one I use for group chats and other stuff I don’t want littering my main inbox, suggests that I saw this one coming.
For a long time, the sort of questions Quora would fire back at me, along with the first few words of the top ranked answer, made a pretty good fist of being Elledge-specific clickbait. “Why is England considered a country while the UK or Britain, which it is part of, is also a country?” “Why can’t we dig deeper than 12.2 km into the Earth?” “Did Henry VIII regret executing Thomas More?” And once upon a time, I’m told, the platform was actually rather good: a place filled with scientists and historians, where you might actually find an actual expert to answer your question.
