Optimising Yourself Should Not Be A Leisure Activity!

The most popular link last time was this anti cosmetic surgery essay, with this piece about how to include kids at gatherin gs without centering them second.

1. Rachel Cooke, a wonderful journalist who I got to edit occasionally when I worked at the New Statesman, died last week at the wildly young age of 56. This tribute from one of her colleagues at the Observer does a good job of capturing the breadth and depth of her talents.
2. This — Alive Internet Theory — is the closest thing to a browser-based art installation that I've yet experienced. It describes itself as a "séance with the living internet" and uses the Internet Archive to create a dynamic collage of everything that has happened online since the beginning. It's quite a sensory experience to let it just play in front of you. And if anything catches your eye, you can click on it and be taken to the original webpage.
3. I must confess, I have not actually listened to the album that this interview is intended to promote. But I liked hearing these two solo musicians (Finneas and Ashe) discuss why they decided to form a band and make a mostly-analogue record even though it wasn't the commercially savvy thing to do.

4. There needs to be a Pixar short about this newly-discovered type of deep sea snailfish immediately.
5. Naomi Alderman has a few words of sanity about AI-proofing your working life. Focus on honing the skills of discernment, research and perseverance, and absolutely "do not let the AI do the work for you before you have learned how to do it yourself".
6. Productivity Videos Are The Bane Of Productivity, because while we're watching people on YouTube showing us how to be more efficient, we're not being efficient at all. Optimising yourself should not be a leisure activity!
7. This piece made me weirdly jealous of Dua Lipa, but not in the way you might think.

8. Molly Young is keeping a running treasury of really good book dedications. The one above is from Epitaph of a Small Winner by Machado de Assis, sent in by Tim Berge.
9. The man who made that incredible marble musical instrument a decade or so ago seems to be having a slow-motion nervous breakdown while trying to top it? (Thanks to Uri for this link.)
10. The writer Susan Orlean is a style icon of mine. Here she is explaining how she packed for a 25-city book tour.
11. If you watch Toy Story today, it looks different to how it did when first released in 1995. This is — broadly — because it was made during a time of transition in animation. Computers were smart enough to make this kind of film but not smart or widespread enough to screen it in cinemas. So it was printed down on to standard 35mm film for theatre and home release. Then, later, they did a digital transfer and that's the version you can stream today. Fascinating to think that our instinctive "films looked better when I was a child" reaction might actually be rooted in fact rather than nostalgia.
12. We once loved pigeons.
13. Reportage from Thessaloniki, supposedly a "city that forgot itself".