This plan to pipe electricity from Morocco to the UK is actually fairly plausible and will probably become the norm for renewables (cf Iceland), but the route is kinda weird when you remember there’s a grid across the EU that already feeds into the UK. Maybe a sea cable is cheaper than upgrading?
An epic rant I could quote at length because it me actually.
But you know what, I shouldn’t have to understand the business models of every little icon on my stupid pocket supercomputer to get through life!
I feel the bit on jumping read-later and bookmarking services.
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The deep historical forces that explain Trump’s win
I have a bias, when understanding our current traumas, of looking to the 1970s for when it all went wrong, but as to why, this theory of wage stagnation plus elite overproduction looks interesting. Also has the LOL of Tucker Carlson = Lenin.
Nearly two decades of my online life, for better and worse, was defined by Twitter. That time is mercifully over, and this piece by someone with an intimate knowledge of how it dominated is an essential part of that closure, with some cutting words for the successors.
This crossword calendar, in which each month grid is filled with intersecting words, is fun and cool and all but, OMFG if it doesn’t start each week on Sunday. NOOOOO! Sunday is the second day of the weekEND. Weeks start on Monday! Jesus! (via)
Two thousand years ago a conceptual artist was making bone art.
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Anil Dash’s lessons learned from burning things
One thing I like to do is make fires. It’s often considered a less socially-acceptable pastime than my other wood-destruction hobbies like writing and woodworking, but each of these ways of killing trees teaches me something vital,
I’m about a quarter through listening to the audiobook of The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber & David Wengrow. Graeber you may know as the author of Bullshit Jobs amongst other anarchist tomes, and this was a ten year project with Wengrow completed just before he died.
It looks like it might be a daunting dry tome but it’s surprisingly light and fun, helped in no small part by Malk Williams’s reading, reminiscent of Peter Jones’s performance of The Book in Hitchhikers.
The vibe is mostly “everything you’ve been told about the history of western civilisation is mostly wrong, or at best a bit more complicated”. There’s some lovely insights into the nature of pre-colonial civilisations but mostly it’s a gentle but damning teardown of anthropological assumptions about the superiority of western European culture and the inevitability of our systems of governance.
Their left-anarchist anti-capitalist hearts are clearly on their sleeves but there’s no stern hectoring, nor is there any sense of “well actually…” which would quickly get annoying. It’s fun!
Today’s photos taken in an attempt to achieve mindfulness, or whatever. www.flickr.com/photos/pe…
And so we enter the Cold War Steve jigsaw endgame - the traditional monochromatic sky where every piece is the same colour. This is where the sunken cost fallacy really bites one in the arse. You gotta respect his artistic integrity, I guess.
My brain has registered it’s winter and therefore @coldwarsteve.bsky.social jigsaw time. Let’s fucking go.
I’m currently mainlining Rachel Bloom songs, started looking up reviews of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend in preparation for a rewatch, and found this interview with her in the New Yorker, ostensibly about her Netflix special but featuring some digressions that set off the “one of my people!” buzzer.
Did you feel that in your twenties, when you were developing “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend”? Because you had success pretty early.
Yes, but I always felt not-cool. The first song I ever did was “Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury.” It was, like, O.K., all these pop songs are about, I want to be with a hot guy dancing in a club. That’s never been me. It’s much more me to fetishize an old science-fiction author, because, honestly, that’s more my type. But then nerd culture got really cool in, I don’t know, 2006, 2007. Everyone was wearing those chunky nerd glasses, and so suddenly nerddom became the norm. It’s the reason Comic Con is now called “a celebration of the popular arts,” or whatever.
Are you saying, “You’re appropriating my culture when you talk about nerd culture”?
But here’s the thing, I’m not a huge comic-book expert. The thing that I was obsessed with growing up was musical theatre. So all of the other kinds of adjacent nerd cultures, when I enter into them, I love them. I think that the part of my brain that loves sci-fi and fantasy is the same part that loves musical theatre, because it’s all asking, What if? What if the world were like this? What if people sang? What if people had hot-dog hands? It feels like the same muscle to me.
But I don’t know. I have impostor syndrome with a lot of things. Like, I’m Jewish, but I was raised really secular. “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” is a very Jewish show; that is a combination of my experiences and the experiences of Aline [Brosh McKenna, the show’s co-creator] and other people. I wasn’t bat mitzvahed. My family didn’t even really celebrate the holidays. We did Hanukkah, and that was it. But I was still an other, because Jews were a minority in my town, so I felt different.
And, also, the way my brain works—when I get obsessed with something, it’s all I do. Right now, I’m doing a binge of “Everybody Loves Raymond.” I gravitate toward stuff that’s comforting sometimes, as opposed to the new show everyone’s talking about. I’ve always felt kind of like an out-of-touch fortysomething. So actually, coming into that is interesting.
What you’re saying reminds me of a chapter in your book, where you describe your obsession with musical theatre being completely alien to the kids you grew up with. And you decided, O.K., this is my thing. I’m going to get really good at it. And then you get to N.Y.U. to pursue theatre, and suddenly you’re with your kind of person, and so it’s not your identifying characteristic anymore. Is that a version of the impostor syndrome you’re describing?
Yes. There’s a part of me that’s kind of lone-wolfy, and I think that sometimes I used excuses, like, “Well, I’m just a musical-theatre kid, people don’t understand me.” But then when you’re around musical-theatre kids and they don’t understand you, what’s your excuse? It’s something I’m still working through. I mean, to quote “Dear Evan Hansen,” there is a little bit of me that always feels “on the outside always looking in.”
Niece asked for advice on SLR vs mirrorless cameras and I went on a long rumination about the psychological difference between the act of seeing being mediated by a tunnel of glass vs a digital screen and how this might affect the image, and I think I should start writing about photography again.
Laurie Penny has relaunched their newsletter.
I got a lot from Laurie’s writing back in the day so am looking forward to this.
The oldest forest in the world
In 2018 Charles Van Straeten’s palaeobotany team discovered the fossilised root system of a 385-million-year-old forest in New York State. Noah Kalina was sent to photograph him on site and has posted the subsequent article to his newsletter. Fascinating stuff…
My sister is emigrating (returning?) to the UK from New Zealand next month. Among the insane logistics they’ve decided to bring their cat. The very concept, not to mention the process, of shipping a pet from the other side of the planet is fascinating to me. I will have questions once they’re here.
I see the UK branch of the culture war has shifted to concern for the fate of family farms. it’s worth remembering that family farms are a direct consequence (if not the actual aim) of the Enclosure of the Commons and are basically hereditary feudalism. So yeah, fuck family farms.
My awakening re family farms came from the 2021 Farmarama podcast series Landed, where the heir of a Highlands farm with an interest in progressive regenerative farming looks into the history of his property, who it was taken from and what was lost in the process.
Why is London’s phone signal so bad?
A really thorough and accessible explainer of how your phone connects to the internet and what factors, physical and societal, might bollix that up. London is a perfect storm but this applies everywhere.
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The Amazon Tax is when you buy a thing on the internet for, say, ÂŁ20 and it turns out to be shite, but you need the thing so you buy the decent version for, say, ÂŁ40, so it’s actually cost you ÂŁ60. You don’t have to shop at Amazon for this to happen. You just have to be a tired human in 2024.
The Counterculture Switch: creating in a hostile environment
I’ve really appreciated and enjoyed Baldur Bjarnason’s recent spate of posts and commend his writing to you. Here he points to lessons from how queer counterculture navigated persecution and pushbacks in anticipation of a reactionary right-wing resurgence.
The land of milk and honey was dismal
A look back, with context and interviews, at the groundbreaking 1964 film The Colony which gave members of Birmingham’s Caribbean community a voice on national television for the first time.
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How to survive the broligarchy: 20 lessons for the post-truth world
Carole Cadwalladr often comes over like someone who has gazed into the terrifying, uncaring void and needs you to know how bad it is, and that’s mostly because she has. But this is remarkably measured - a calm, constructive fury.
A humorous illustration by Darren Cullen. (via)
