The Soundtrack To All Of My Emotional Solo Bus Journeys

The most popular link last week was Will Storr's take on the "Substack Style", with oneminutepark.tv coming second.

1. Interviews with people who take their online privacy extremely seriously. I've always known in theory that we trade convenience for privacy, but reading about people who care enough to seek out the inconvenient route really got me to grasp it on a practical level.
2. Not unrelated: a compendium of the many, many articles that have been written over the past few years about how the internet "used to be fun".
3. It's my blog/newsletter and I'll conduct a one-side argument with a Guardian architecture writer if I want to. No, this is not the most beautiful sewage treatment plant. This is. (Astute readers of The Way to the Sea will already know the correct answer without clicking.)

4. The Pudding really is doing some of the most interesting data journalism and visualisation at the moment. This piece feels like a combination of a graphic novel and a phD thesis about how often Asian actors are inaccurately cast in American media (Chinese people playing Korean characters, and so forth).
5. The band Arcade Fire provided the soundtrack to all of my emotional solo bus journeys between 2005 and 2011. But, like the writer of this well-observed piece about cancellation and music fandom, I had found that the quality of their records had fallen so far that by the time sexual misconduct allegations about Win Butler surfaced in 2022, I barely noticed. It's not very comfortable to think about, but the scale of the backlash against an artist can have something to do with how good their work is currently considered to be.
6. Short fiction: "How to live well on a $100,000 advance" by Naomi Kanakia.

7. Cambridge have found lost bit of the Arthur-Merlin story.
8. I really enjoy getting glimpses of other publishing industries beyond the Anglophone world that I inhabit. This round-up of interesting new books being published in China scratched that itch.

9. Just a man about town, in his wearable fire escape.
10. A self-described "failed" comedian ponders why his comedy career didn't work out and concludes that it was because he didn't put in the time and energy to become friends with other comedians.
11. LinkedIn Is So Embarrassing.

12. An absorbing 90-minute documentary about Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, the writer and psychiatrist who developed the "five stages of grief" model.
13. The birth stories of seventeenth century women.