Trying To Achieve Peak Cultural Saturation

The most popular link last week was the Useless Web, with Mary H.K. Choi on quitting therapy second.

1. 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 Glass and 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 than the best science ever, full stop.
2. 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.
3. Would you like to watch a minute of footage from a random park somewhere in the world? Of course you would.

4. Why Is Everybody Knitting Chickens? Because they're great, of course!
5. 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 lovely two 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.
6. Yes, I am still listening to the Phantom Thread soundtrack very often and thus this piece about Paris Fashion Week in 1947 was very appealing to me.
7. 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.

8. This is the best lofi stream on the internet — librarians scanning microfiche + beats.
9. The Secret Diary of a Video Game Horse.
10. Will Storr has nailed why so much "popular" writing on Substack a) follows the same format b) makes me feel queasy. It's AI!

11. Beautiful perfume bottle blueprints.
12. Facebook's main legacy is... "a long list of indelible birthdays".
13. 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.