Two doctors discuss the big "secret" that those in their field keep from their patients: medicine is a lot more uncertain than our cultural norms would have us believe. I wrote about the conflicting ideas and feelings this prompts in A Body Made of Glassand I'm still thinking about it. It's much harder to get your head round the idea that your doctor is using the best science so far rather thanthe best science ever, full stop.
My old Hot Pod colleague Nick Quah has an intriguing piece out about the "New Media Circuit". If you're a celebrity with a film to promote, it's no longer enough to be interviewed by Terry Gross or the New York Times. You have to do Hot Ones, be charming while holding puppies, wear a neck chain on Theo Von — or whatever will be the zeitgeisty thing at the point when you are trying to achieve peak cultural saturation.
Would you like to watch a minute of footage from a random park somewhere in the world? Of course you would.
My mother worked in adult further education when I was growing up and it makes me furious every time I think about how that system has been needlessly hollowed out in the UK over the past two decades. However, people and communities find a way: this is a lovelytwo part piece on running evening classes with your friends — not for profit or some other tangible end goal, but just because you like to learn stuff together.
This week in ancient continental dynasties: the Hohenzollerns have finally agreed to hand over all the priceless stuff they own to the German state. Very soon ordinary folk will be able to gaze upon artefacts including "Lucas Cranach the Elder’s portrait of Elector Joachim I of Brandenburg, Baroque ivory furniture created for Elector Frederick William and a dinner service that belonged to Frederick the Great". The descendants of the erstwhile Kings of Prussia "retain ownership of seven tobacco boxes and a number of other items on a so-called 'C-List'", though, so everybody wins.
This is a funny-sad bit of memoir about how to "make a living" as a writer. The author does a daily "horse news" newsletter at 6am every day an American race track conglomerate and one summer wrote 70,000 words of "choose your own adventure" erotica for an app. This makes my brief turn reviewing burlesque acts for a communist newspaper seem tame.
I loved the new Lorde single and am eagerly anticipating the album. But I'm also so interested in how she is belatedly embracing "the new pop star marketing machine". This is an astute analysis, but I think the writer is a little harsh on Lorde for simply wanting to try hard to have her work appreciated.
Via Web Curios, I enjoyed this song "idk i just work here" and its video — a sad-but-funny satire of every terrible minimum wage job you ever had.
Did you know that cabbage was only introduced to Japan in the 18C? Learn this, alongside many other similar facts, in this brief history of cabbage.
If you were also a "there's someone under the bed" child, I hope you find this vindicating as well as incredibly terrifying and creepy. You're not silly for checking!!
This is a fantastic but sobering read from Carla Lalli Music on what it takes — financially and emotionally — to maintain a successful presence on YouTube. You might remember Carla from the pre-2020 Bon Appetit channel, and after that all fell apart she struck out own her own. Over three years of producing weekly videos on the platform, she spent $14,000 a month on production costs, not including her own time. And even though she racked up 18 million views and over 230,000 subscribers, the ad money YouTube paid her never came close to covering her costs. She sometimes fell short in a month by as much as $10,000. Which meant a choice between taking whatever sponsors she could to try and break even, or reducing her production costs. Make it an ad or make it worse, or both. I would like to write more about this mad dichotomy at a future point, but for now I'll just say that I can't escape the feeling that we're all just working for free for these corporations, even when it looks from the outside like we're individually successful. Plenty of people would love to have the numbers Carla pulled in and yet... she couldn't afford to keep doing it.
"I tear the hair; I tore the whore; I have torn the horn. I see the sea; I saw the saw; I have seen the scene. I draw the law; I drew the loo; I have drawn the lawn. I throw the bow; I threw the boo; I have thrown the bone."
There were a lot of The Great Gatsby takes around for the centenary of its original publication, but none of them caught my interest as much as this one by Wesley Lowery. It posits the theory that the character of Jay Gatsby is subtly written as a Black or mixed race man working hard on "passing" as white so as to "outmanoeuvre the racial order of the era". I'm by no means an expert on Fitzgerald, but I found this analysis both interesting and persuasive.
This twentieth anniversary performance of "Hips Don't Lie" by Shakira and Wyclef Jean was both baffling and life affirming. It prompted so many questions for me. Does Shakira keep laughing because she can't believe this is her most culturally lasting song (in the English-speaking world)? Why is Wyclef wearing a utility vest and an upside down flower as a hat like a Cicely Mary Barker flower fairy? And why is she dancing in a sandpit that has been constructed on a television soundstage?
I love reading about the DIY projects of people with practical skills and the will to use them. This one by Andrew Childs is a great entry in this genre. Andrew's son has type 1 diabetes and having a smartwatch that displayed his CGM data would greatly simplify the task of managing his levels while at school. But giving a nine-year-old an Apple Watch seemed like a bad idea (and the Apple Watch is apparently not that good as a diabetes tool anyway). So Andrew designed and built a custom kid-with-diabetes smartwatch instead.
Would you like to play solitaire (or minesweeper or sudoku or 2048) at work inside a spreadsheet so it looks at a casual glance like you are diligently doing data entry? Well, now you can.
Reflections on the handwriting of various famous writers, including C.S. Lewis and Dorothy L. Sayers (see above), and what it could reveal about their moods. "One thing seems quite clear to me: the loose, flowing hand is associated not just with hurry but also with happiness."
One of my (many!) unfulfilled project ideas is a hyperlocal newsletter just serving the few streets around my house. I will never actually do this but it's fun to think about the "fox spotting" column it would contain. I did really enjoy reading this profile of 88-year-old Lucy Lippard, though, who has been running a news-sheet for her village of 250 people in New Mexico since the 1990s.
Sometimes it's nice just to look at some pictures of owls in towels.
This is for the hardcore procrastinators only: the Dangerous writing app. If you stop typing for more than ten seconds (or the interval of your choice) it irrevocably deletes everything you have written. It's probably a good way to train yourself not to check your email or look at the news at the end of every sentence!
Is Anna Wintour anything like the Miranda Priestley character in The Devil Wears Prada? In some ways, yes, in others no, this former Vogue editor says. For one thing, she doesn't wear Prada:
You’d think somebody with Anna’s personality would have been attracted to the severe monochromatic blacks and navy favored by Miuccia Prada in the early 2000’s but, in fact, she preferred soft pastels and busy patterns of pink and pistachio. The first time I attended a party in her house, I was shocked by the cheerful yellow walls and drapes bursting with cabbage rose blooms. It all seemed so utterly un-Anna but, then again, as I learned from her, that’s what fashion is, a readily accessible tool that allows you to remake the actual self into a preferred version.
If I ever get to Tokyo (unlikely, for both financial and environmental reasons) I think I might like to stay in this hotel.
An update for a favourite podcast episode of mine: "Secret Mall Apartment" by 99% Invisible.
Advice from a beauty expert for someone who doesn't wear makeup and is feeling pressured to put it on for her wedding:
"I agree with you: it is radical to get married without makeup in 2025. It’s radical to choose embodied freedom – your ability to 'cry, laugh and hug' without regard for running mascara – over performance as a bride. It might be hard for your community to understand, but 200 years ago, so was marrying for love! People did it anyway."
Speaking of weddings, this is a great anecdote from someone who, with their then-partner, accidentally went to a wedding a year late. They ended up attending the nuptials of two total strangers who happened to be getting married in the same venue. Said couple thought it was hilarious, and invited the crashers to stay for the whole event and be in all the pictures. They still invite them to their anniversary celebrations, and even though the attendees aren't partners any more, they still go to enjoy the reunion of a strange yet fun day.
I'm going to be both serious and angry for a second, because since I last wrote to you I found out that my work is among the many, many thousands of books in the illegally pirated LibGen database that Meta has used to train its AI model. There is more detail and context about this in the original reporting here. Even some advance copies of books that haven't been published yet were included. That this is, at the very least, a copyright infringement is absolutely clear to me. I trust the various professional bodies I belong to and will be closely monitoring their attempts at litigation. But there is also an emotional and cultural component to this for me. Over the past nine months or so, I have increasingly come to feel that the platforms operated by companies like Meta are essentially extractive; that they take ideas — photos, text, content — from users, for free, make a profit off it and offer nothing of value in exchange. The world as mediated through a social network built for this purpose is a sterile and sometimes scary place. Daisy Buchanan described the feeling of having her four very personal novels harvested in this scrape as like a "brain pick" in the worst possible way. I agree, but that's also how the products of Meta and other such companies make me feel now more generally, beyond this specific incident. And I want to opt out, as far as I'm able. I'm still working out exactly what this will look like for me, someone who has work to flog online, but I do know I won't be going back to posting any of my personal images or thoughts on Instagram or Facebook. I will find a new home for the dog photos, I promise.
Man that is born of woman (saith the prayer book) hath but a short time to live, especially in British detective dramas since it is foreordained that some poor sod will be shot, strangled, drowned, or brained with a shovel before the opening credits and theme music.
I'm obsessed with the fish doorbell. This feels like such a Dutch solution to a problem to me? Take your turn watching to see if the fish need to be let through here.
At the same time as "serious" or "difficult" literature is becoming more popular (probably because of the advent of AI slop), the publishing industry has to face up to the biases involved in how these qualities are signalled with marketing.
Caitlin Dewey on choosing not to be pregnant on the internet. "My first child is now arriving in a matter of days, and most of my social and professional networks have no earthly idea. Apart from a single vague post to an alt Instagram account, I’ve largely hidden this pregnancy from social media." I hope we are moving towards a place where the people doing the performative online announcements about life events are the outliers, not the other way around.
Bells On Sundayis a podcast that feels like it is made for me and about five other people who also think The Nine Tailorswas Dorothy L. Sayers' best novel. It is simply a recording of some bells, from a church, minster or cathedral somewhere. I like these, from Saint Milburga in Stoke St Milborough, Shropshire, but they're all good.
“You can make your own plans, the day will make itself” (2024) by Katherine Duclos
Why is everything so mid? Because, as a society, we simultaneously replaced human gatekeepers with automated platforms and incentivised people to homogenise their taste.
I have been winding wool for a new knitting project recently, which is probably why encountering Frederick Leighton's 1878 painting "Winding the Skein" tickled me so much. It does not look like this when I'm doing it.
Useful step-by-step guide on how to help someone who has fallen out of their wheelchair. This is the key point: "Do what they ask, NOT what you think would be helpful."
What I'm up to: The paperback of my latest book, A Body Made of Glass, has been published this week in both the UK and the US! (There will also be an Australia/New Zealand edition, but it's not out until July.) Paperbacks very rarely get reviewed these days, so I was both surprised and happy to see this excellent review-essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books: We Are Never Well, nor Can Be So.
Neither the covers nor the text of the book's two editions have changed, other than to add some lovely quotes from people like John Green ("I loved it") and Lucy Worsley ("essential reading"). To celebrate publication, there is a giveaway where you can win a signed and personalised copy of either paperback edition: this is the form and it's open for entries until 20th March. And if you'd like to purchase a copy, all the links to do that are collected here.
Morris the dog was VERY keen on the UK paperback.
I hope the children who wrote to Alfred Hitchcock to correct his grammar on a billboard for The Birds — he put "The Birds is coming", they said it should be "The Birds are coming" — never grew out of their pedantry.
I don't normally read many thousands of words about the (parlous) state of contemporary art, but this piece is so well-written and argued that I was at the end before I'd even registered what I was doing.
"If you are not familiar with their joys, highrise trousers are fantastically comfortable and keep your lower back warm. My children still squirm with embarrassment every time they see me in them (which is most days) but that is probably some kind of seal of approval. If you are uncertain about the required cut, check out photographs of agricultural labourers in summer (ie jacketless) circa 1880-1914."
During the "Winter Stupid". Photo: Eric Wagner
I enjoyed Eric Wagner's account of his tradition with a friend that they call "Winter Stupid". This is just them going and trying to camp for a weekend, in winter, in the Washington/Oregon backcountry. The tent fell on them this time, but at least they didn't inhale any white gas fumes like on a previous occasion!
I did not and will not watch a single second Meghan's Netflix show, but I did read many takes about it, and this was my favourite.
A niche fascination of mine is the early generation of people who managed to make a career out of being internet "content creators" and, if they stuck with it, what they think about this now. This woman vlogged her life consistently between the ages of 20 and 30. She now has some reflections on that decade lived out on the screen.
Justin Myers nails what I found so uncomfortable about that saccharine "coffee with your younger self" trend that has been going around social media.
Cozy Dumpster Fire: like the Netflix cosy fireplace, but more appropriate to the times.
An interview with one of the founders of Letterloop, a social media alternative that provides "private group newsletters for friends, families & teams". She seems smart and savvy and the product is interesting, but I can't switch off the voice in my head that goes it's a blog just call it a blog this is just livejournal!.
I have never set foot on the Isle of Wight, but I have sailed around it, and perhaps this is partly why I am oddly fixated on it. This essay on how this small island in the English Channel has been the setting for generations of utopian dreams really justifies all the time I have spent daydreaming about it.
A wonderful tour of London as it has been reproduced in scenery form on studio soundstages for filming purposes. Even the title of this piece — "the imagined city of the backlots" — is evocative.
A new vibe just dropped, and I already hate it: boom boom.
I cut a long section about the trend for obsessive personal health and fitness tracking and quantification out of A Body Made of Glass because, although interesting, it didn't illuminate my central subject of hypochondria that much. I might repurpose that into an essay at some point, because I do think it's a pattern of behaviour we ought to scrutinise more than we do. This is a good overview of how useless most of the consumer tracking stuff is:
"If you look at my Oura smart ring app on the night of the 12 January, you will see my heart rate spike dramatically at 11pm, then flatline completely. You would have to assume that I’d had a heart attack and died. In fact, I was running a fever and, frustrated by the weight of the ring on my finger, tore it off and threw it across the room."
This is written as "advice for a friend who wants to start a blog", but I think it would be instructive to anyone embarking on a public creative project who needs some encouragement to be authentic and weird in their own personal way:
"What if you want to write 5000 words about the history of French grammar but fear people will get bored by that? What should you do? You should write 5000 words about the history of French grammar. It will filter your readers so you attract those who like the grooves of your mind."
Tips for good mathematical handwriting. As someone with some quite peculiar features in my writing (self-consciously adopted when I was about 13 because I wanted to seem eccentric and now unavoidable habits), I appreciated the post-hoc justification for looping the letter l, crossing z and putting a slash through 7. Otherwise somebody might not be able to read my equations!
This was the month where I realised what I need to both enjoy reading books and feel like I'm doing it purposefully: structure and planning. To that end, I spent some time finally creating a centralised list of books I want to read on my Storygraph. Then I cross-checked my various library subscriptions to see what was available in their ebook catalogues and added tags. Now if I get restless, I can quickly borrow something I already know I want to read and be immersed in a matter of seconds, without having to make any extra decisions. Decision fatigue and paralysis, I'm learning, is a big component of why I sometimes get stuck with my reading.
Overwhelm is another part of it, so taking the time to look at the podcast episodes I plan to make this year (yes, I do schedule them a year at a time!) and scoping out what needs to be read and by when was very calming. An episode I have planned for November, for instance, requires me to re-read eight Agatha Christie books, so I've spaced those out over the intervening months. Do try and guess what subject I'm covering if you like, I would enjoy that. Anyway, I never again want to be in the situation I had in autumn 2024, when I was chain-listening Edmund Crispin audiobooks on 2.5 speed just to get through them in time. Not fun!
This is a loose structure, though, with plenty of room for spontaneity and mood-reading. I did a fair bit of that this month, actually, which resulted in what was, for me, a very satisfying blend of genres and styles for the 28 days of February.
I'm going to whisk through the by-now customary Ben Aaronovitch section; for those who are new to these monthly reading round-ups, I've cut out most of the anxiety-inducing politics podcasts I used to listen to and instead, I'm making my way through the Rivers of London series on audiobook. I managed two in February, which tells you just how much time I was devoting to podcasts before. Foxglove Summer I think is my favourite of the series so far: I enjoyed the tension that came from born-and-bred Londoner Peter Grant having to spend time in the countryside.
Body Work was more of a departure for me, being the first in the series of comics/graphic novels that runs alongside the novels. I haven't tried to read a graphic novel of any kind in years, and I was disconcerted to find that the app I used to use, ComiXology, has since been folded into Amazon. Still, I must admit that ComiXology's "guided view" technology makes reading a work like this in the Kindle app an absolute dream. I did most of it on my phone while travelling and was impressed by how seamlessly I could swipe from panel to panel even on such a small screen while not losing the sense of the artist's original page layout. Obviously, it's a different kind of story that works for this more visual format, but I enjoyed it very much.
I read this 1961 crime novel for a recent Shedunnit episode where I investigated Agatha Christie's taste in crime fiction. She gave this book first prize in a "Don's Detective Novel" competition, and I could see why. Although some of its subject matter is much more of the 1960s than the interwar era when she became famous for her mysteries — blackmail, extortion and pornography all feature — the plot is well worked out and has a good reveal at the end. I would recommend this if you are in the market for a quick, satisfying read that straddles the divide between the golden age whodunnit and the later twentieth-century thriller.
I love that Ali Hazelwood writes the same book over and over again in different settings and millions of people buy them every time. I mean that sincerely. I need things I can rely on these days. All of her stories are about a burgeoning relationship between a physically large, often Scandinavian, man and a petite, athletic, brainy woman with insecurities. Because I know exactly what I'm going to get, I find her stuff very comforting to read, even if it is at this point veering towards the predictable and forgettable. In this new novel, her usual character types are transplanted to the world of high-level American collegiate watersports, with a large swimmer and a small diver navigating their kinks and feelings. Now that I'm writing this a couple of weeks later, I'm not sure I can recall the details of the plot, but I enjoyed a nice brain break while I was reading it, and I appreciated all the little Easter egg references to her other books that were sprinkled throughout.
Despite my intention to try and read more non-fiction this year, I found that I couldn't settle to any one book of that type this month. I've got a few on the go and I hope to finish one next month. I did fly through this quite short guide to modern creativity, though, and found in it some thought-provoking ideas as I continue to refine my relationship with social media and this newsletter.
I already counted myself in Agatha Christie's debt, but now I can add something else to the slate: I owe her for making me read Elizabeth Bowen for the first time. Bowen was one of Christie's favourite authors, so I picked up 1949's The Head of the Day for that aforementioned podcast episode. I was completely enraptured by it. It's a tense, claustrophobic tale set in London towards the end of WW2, focusing on a quartet of characters with complicated inner lives. Two are potentially engaged in espionage and counter-espionage, while romantic and family relationships interfere. There's also a hint of Bowen's Anglo-Irish background, with a younger English character unexpectedly inheriting a rural Irish "Big House", which his mother travels over to inspect as he is still doing military service.
As discussed at the start of the year, I'm pretty out of practice in reading literary fiction like this, so for the first fifty pages or so the intense interiority of the style and slow-paced plot was quite hard going for me, but by the end I was gripped like it was a thriller. I thought it had similarities both to Edith Wharton's 1912 novel The Reef and Patrick Marber's 1997 play Closer. I loved it and have already borrowed two more Bowen novels from the London Library.
Vasti's Regency romances are of the type that show absolutely no resemblance to history at all, but I have enjoyed them in the past in the same brain-switching-off way that I enjoy Ali Hazelwood. However, this one was a disappointment because of the peculiar pacing. I'm not sure a book of this type is ever going to work if the most exciting set piece (a near-fatal runaway carriage incident) happens in the first couple of chapters and then the hero and heroine fall requitedly in love before the halfway point. What is left to happen? Not much, it would seem.
My reading of this 2022 thriller is entirely owing to getting better organised. I saw someone — I think the author Sarah Perry, but can't be sure — recommend it ages ago on Instagram. I scribbled down the title and immediately forgot about it. Then I rediscovered my note when I was compiling my TBR on the Storygraph, saw that my library had this available for ebook borrowing, and dived right in.
It's in some ways quite a conventional domestic noir thriller, set in northern England with the mother of a teenage son as the protagonist. Right at the beginning, events come to a head when her son stabs a man one night outside their house — an act that is completely at odds with her previous knowledge of her child. After an exhausting night at the police station, she wakes up the next morning and finds that it is... the day before the crime. And this keeps happening, with her skipping backwards through time. She decides that this is happening so that she can solve her son's crime before he commits it, and it turns into quite an interesting reflection on cause and effect.
This is the Shedunnit Book Club book for March, which I read a little ahead so I could record a podcast episode about it. It's the first Inspector Morse novel, from 1975. This was also my first time reading a Morse book despite loving the television series for decades.
It isn't often that I read a book that inspired a major screen adaptation and think "I like the TV version better", but that was the case here. Last Bus to Woodstock is very of 1975 in many ways, chiefly its attitude to women and sexual assault, and that's not a milieu I tend to seek out in my crime fiction. The character of Morse is consistently well-drawn and I admired Dexter's plotting, but I don't think I'll be stocking up on more of this series in book form any time soon. I will be watching random episodes while I eat my dinner, though.
Oh, I wanted to like this novel so much. I formed a very positive impression of Mary Robinette Kowal when she appeared on my friend Helen's podcast last year and the premise of this book — Jane Austen but with magic — felt tailor-made for me. Unfortunately, said magic is almost entirely redundant in this world since its only use is for people to make pretty illusions for drawing room entertainment, and the surrounding comedy of manners and courtship is of pretty low quality. I was also irritated by the wholesale borrowing of entire characters from Austen's novels: there is a Mr and Mrs Bennet, a Frank Churchill, a Georgiana Darcy, a sort of Lady Catherine de Burgh, and so on. Perhaps this was meant as homage, but the copy and paste was too entire for my tastes. Not for me, unfortunately.
I completed the month with a Heyer, since I'm reading all of her crime fiction in order this year for an eventual podcast episode. First published in 1933, as with the one I read last month, Why Shoot a Butler? is a light-hearted detective story set among wealthy English people, with more of a focus on character and atmosphere than plot. I enjoyed it as a good example of its type, rather than because I had grand expectations of an excellent puzzle. The one stand-out feature for me was the protagonist Frank Amberley, who is both the book's amateur sleuth and its romantic hero, yet remains incredibly grumpy throughout. Since he is a barrister by profession, the same as Heyer's husband, I did wonder if this was a private domestic joke.
That was my reading for February: twelve books, right on track to hit 120 in 2025. I also managed to meet my objective of reading one work of literary or experimental fiction (in this instance, The Heat of the Day) and one non-fiction book (Show Your Work!) per month, plus I managed to fit in a graphic novel as well. All very satisfactory, although I do think I could still stretch myself more when it comes to non-fiction. I'll work on that for March.
If you would like to follow along in real time, you can see what I'm reading at any given moment on the Storygraph. I just use that as a tracker, though, I don't publish any reviews there.
Links to Blackwell's are affiliate links, meaning that I receive a small commission when you purchase a book there (the price remains the same for you). Blackwell’s is a UK bookseller that (I believe) ships internationally at no extra charge.
What I'm up to: Making my umpteenth attempt at Couch to 5k. Feeling gleeful because I finally worked out how to read a graphic novel on my phone. Arguing with my choir director about how to rhyme "married" and "mermaid" in a folk song. Pulling out the mittens I'm knitting for the seventh time because I still can't do colourwork reliably. Normal end-of-February things.
I love Gina Trapani's visualisation "My Life in Weeks", which plots out her existence alongside major world events like the Clinton inauguration and the first broadcast of The X-Files. And it stretches into the future, with boxes yet to be filled. Thinking of a life in weeks rather than years or eras, in the same way that Oliver Burkeman's Four Thousand Weeksdoes, is so much more comprehensible to me.
I'm a big advocate of coming up with the name for a project first and then retrospectively working out what it should be. I don't know that that's what happened with the podcast It's Reigning Men, but I have my suspicions. It's delightful, though — I've always wanted to listen to half an hour of backstory for King Harald V of Norway.
I found this 2013 article by Christopher Fletcher, Keeper of Special Collections at the Bodleian Library, quite moving. Every time they acquire a manuscript that has pins in it — a centuries-old pre-word processing technique used by everyone including Jane Austen to attach edits and additions to a manuscript without having to rewrite it completely — they carefully remove the pins, date them and save them in a special box. Just in case anyone ever wants to do another PhD on "the use of pins in literature", I suppose.
Seb Emina's coinages for the new types of social media user are excellent (they're number three in this digest). I think I'm a Deskatarian who aspires to be a Gutenberg Girl. Which are you?
"In recent weeks, two of the people who I consider my formative editors in this stupid business have verbally shaken me by the shoulders and tried to wake me from this stubborn nostalgia. 'YOU NEED TO ACCEPT THAT 2014 WASN’T REAL,' each of them said to me."
As a savoury food goblin who would probably put salt on salt if that was physically possible, I excited to make Molly Goldberg's Pickle Soup.
This is a great primer on what the audiobook boom means for publishing at the moment. It also includes a suggestion to replace podcasts with non-fiction audiobooks, something I've been trying out for myself this month and really enjoying. Essay collections are where it's at, I think. More on this in my February reading update, coming your way on Monday.
I know very little about K-pop and am not in the market for a new music fixation at the moment. But I loved this live performance by Blackpink's Jisoo because the choreography is exactly the kind of thing I was trying to do to Britney songs when I was nine.
An interview with Nadia Odunayo, the woman behind my reading tracking platform of choice, the Storygraph. When asked if she would ever consider selling to Amazon (like Goodreads), she said: "That’s not something we’re interested in."
What if we took the pharmacological concept of a "minimum effective dose" and applied it to other areas of life? Reading for only eight minutes a day or regularly doing a bad drawing is still doing something.
These days, what with the decline influence of mainstream media and social media's increasing disinterest in sane, normal posts and links, it often feels like authors have to hand-sell each individual copy of their book. Why not do this on dating apps?
This Lonely Island medley is worth it for the cutaways to the audience alone, because then you can see which celebrities are vibing like mad and singing along, and which ones are thinking to themselves "why are Lady Gaga and Andy Samberg singing to me about incest, mustard and Captain Jack Sparrow?"
Finance is ruining popular art (again). "It’s democratic: Everyone’s brain gets melted. Critique dies. Numbed consumption wins. We pay good money for this."
In a historic churchyard in Manhattan, there is a grave of a woman who never existed — Charlotte Temple, the heroine of Charlotte, A Tale of Truth, a novel by Susanna Rowson first published in 1791. For a few decades in the nineteenth century, it was the most popular grave in the whole place for visitors, and was likely erected as a cash grab.
You can now buy Paper Apps™, or as they used to be known, "notebooks".
