Feeling good today and wanted to note that. Since the back pain subsided on Saturday I’ve had a nice few days and found myself sitting in the garden feeling contented and at peace, something which hasn’t happened much recently.

Had my psychotherapy session which was also remarkable for not being full of trauma and bad thoughts and was more of a fun chat about stuff in my past, which kinda feels wrong because therapy’s supposed to be dredging up the darkest shit, right? But fuck it, why not. I might have even unlocked something, though of course I have no idea what it could be.

The uni-context

Reading this discussion between Anges Callard and Derek Thompson about Callard’s theory of the uni-context I could feel my mind racing to make connections with a thousand other things I’ve been thinking about over the years. This is obviously quite discombobulating so I’m not really in a place to give a good summary, but in short it’s a development on the idea of context collapse, something that’s been at the forefront of my mind for a good couple of decades.

The core idea seems to be that as we are connected with people outside our immediate situation we enter a wider context which requires things to be flattened or simplified. There’s no space for nuance and character in the uni-context and some ideas and modes travel better there. Anger is one which explains why both mass- and social-media stick a rocket behind negative stories while fun ones tend not to travel so well.

You see this all the time on the socials, but here’s an example from today with two Mastodon posts by Adam Greenfield, the first one, full of righteous fury (and which I totally agreed with), resonated widely with those who follow him. The second one, which totally sparked joy in my soul, not so much.

But while that phenomena, of the uni-context favouring bad news, is notable, it’s not what really interests me about the theory. Too many things interest me, so I’m going to have to come back to it, maybe with a whiteboard.

Agnes Callard’s marriage of the minds 🪜

While trying and failing to fully digest the above I looked into who Callard is and was delighted to see she’s one of those interesting people with a public profile that I’ve somehow managed to avoid, so there’s plenty to catch up on. This is a long New Yorker piece about her unconventional marriage which could be salacious but is really about philosophy and neurodiversity and how those can inform our relationships.

“For Agnes, loneliness was the experience of having thoughts she wanted to communicate but felt unable to, because she knew that her words would come out wrong or be misinterpreted. Whatever she said would be a distortion of what she was feeling."

I have this feeling all the time. I think it’s why I needed to get drunk to socialise, so I didn’t care how wrong I was getting my words.

The myth of Anthony Bourdain: how the bad boy chef became a hero to boozehounds and bullies

We finished watching The Bear last week which definitely feels like a post-Bourdain reckoning with his legacy of celebrating the toxic kitchen environment.

This last decade has found me on the periphery of the chef-bro scene, somewhat ironically given have zero interest in food. First when a Michelin starred tosser sublet in the arts space where I had a residency, and then later when I started work at Loaf which, as a cookery school as well as a bakery, overlapped with a lot of chef nonsense.

Loaf acted as a kind of buffer though, and we would laugh about some of the ridiculous characters on the Birmingham foodie scene, while taking on staff who clearly had some mild PTSD from working in other kitchens. Needless to say I have zero time for that bullshit.

The diminishing returns of having good taste 🪜

This sort of ties in with my musings about abundancy and music streaming. I don’t agree with a lot of the conclusions but there are some interesting observations around the concept of “cultural arbitrage”, where nerds trade rare knowledge for social status. But perhaps my disagreement is with the very structures such arbitrage enables which I tend to want to tear down. Hoarders of knowledge are the worst and the great thing about the internet is how everyone potentially has access to the same amount of stuff. It’s less what you know and more what you do with that knowledge.

• New Cold War Steve collage of West Midlands music — one of his ‘positive pieces’ which I’m delighted to see features Misty’s Big Adventure.
• "Inefficiency and resilience are the same thing seen from different angles." Be more inefficient.
• Every Other Hour - A forthcoming book about travelling around Wales without a car. I don’t care if it’s any good or not, that is a fantastic title.