Ahoy lovely email friends and I hope all is just tickety-boo with you, or at least pointing in that direction. This is the last 💥BLAST! for now. What a tremendous honour has been to take a place in your inbox over these last three years. I do mean that: your inbox and attention are under constant attack, so it’s been a privilege to share some things with you almost every week.

Hello lovely email friends, hope you’re well. Millie is supervising me closely this week. If it were up to her, all the interesting things included this week would be fish. Particularly of the canned and/or freeze-dried variety. I sometimes wonder what would happen if she met a live tuna. I sense she wouldn’t like it as much as she does when it comes in a can. Right, care for some non-fish-related interesting things?

Hello lovely email friends, hope you’re well. I was going to write that this email was prepared a little in advance, as this week I’m moving around. But then I was reminded of my favourite Simpsons joke and, of course, these emails are always prepared a little in advance. So it really makes no odds either way. 🛩 1996: Man sues Pepsi for not giving him the Harrier Jet from its commercial: The campaign was simple: buy Pepsi products, collect points from Pepsi labels and claim prizes like t-shirts, sunglasses, or—for 7 million points—a Harrier Jet. But a 12-year-old business student noticed some fine print: consumers could buy Pepsi points for ten cents each. So backed by investors, he sent a cheque and waited for his bargain jet.

Warmest greetings to you lovely email friends on Groundhog Day. While we wait at Gobbler’s Knob for Punxsutawney Phil to emerge and see, or not see, his shadow, we have a chance to reflect upon the movie based on this esoteric meteorological tradition. There can’t be many Nineties comedy films that hit upon a cultural and perhaps spiritual significance, intentionally or otherwise. What’s uncommonly interesting about Groundhog Day is it doesn’t leave you with a particular joke or wise-crack or pratfall, but rather pondering the big questions. Perhaps the biggest questions.

Hello lovely email friends. Let’s do a theme. I’ve not stuck to a theme for ages, and so this week’s theme is… ages. If you’re lucky, ageing is inevitable. I expect you’re doing it right now. Well, good. And yet it’s still taboo, which these days seems conspicuous. There was a bit of that in 💥BLAST! #53, back in the good old days. I no longer have no idea how old I am, since every time it gets close to celebrating the passing of another year, we all have to stay in. Maybe I can claim these back later, or something. Anyway, here are your links for the ages:

Hey there lovely email friends. You can already just-about notice that it’s getting a little brighter here. I am surrounded on all sides by brambles, all of whom have definitely noticed. They’re up and about already, as if it were mid-summer. Must be exhausting. Well there’s my bramble ramble, let’s see what else is going on, shall we? ❓ Phil Gyford’s Favourite Asks of 2021: Now look, when it comes to this new-fangled cyberspace malarkey, I can’t think of anyone that does it better than Phil Gyford. These days there aren’t many people who’s posts I read word-for-word every time. I could go on about this, but for now let’s just say when (if?) I grow up I want to be Phil Gyford, and so should you. Anyway, his tolerance for Ask MetaFilter is much higher than my own, and he has listed his favourite questions posted last year. You should read them.

Hello lovely email friends, hope you’re well. I recently bought another record player—not a fancy turntable, but a little portable thing—in an effort to make my records as close-at-hand as, say, Spotify. Then at Christmas I was generously gifted a little case in which to keep a small selection of my most treasured albums. To select which should be shortlisted for this exclusive collection-within-a-collection, I posed myself a question: if my home were ablaze, which would I rescue? What I’ve learnt from this exercise is I’m unlikely to survive a house-fire. Please test your smoke alarm.

Good afternoon gorgeous email friends, and let me be among the stragglers to wish you a happy new year. This week I bring you a mix of optimism and geekery, but kicking off with a clash of titans. 🤺 Garry Shandling and Ricky Gervais’s Epic Sparring Match: I don’t recall why the masterful Garry Shandling drifted into my consciousness over the festive period, but I started rewatching The Larry Sanders Show as well as Judd Apatow’s The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling documentary. The latter is lengthy and heavily-populated with stories both of the subject’s talent and support for protégés. Then, late on, we’re shown a different side of Shandling as he finds Ricky Gervais in his kitchen: a man with a comedy career built upon antagonising people. Either spontaneously or by planning, Shandling is having none of it; instead allowing Gervais to reveal himself to the camera as shallow, insecure and vulnerable. Gervais would’ve done well to heed that old advice about not meeting his heroes.

Ahoy there lovely email friends, I hope you’re well and starting to ease into something approaching a festive period. No 💥BLAST! next week, so I’ll see you next year. Meanwhile here’s a mix of interesting seasonal and non-seasonal things to keep you ticking over: 🥗 What humanity should eat to stay healthy and save the planet: More than 2 billion people are overweight or obese, mostly in the Western world. At the same time, 811 million people are not getting enough calories or nutrition, mostly in low- and middle-income nations. Unhealthy diets contributed to more deaths globally in 2017 than any other factor. Meanwhile the current industrialised food system already emits about one-quarter of the world’s greenhouse-gas emissions, as well as 70% of freshwater use and 40% of land coverage. What we eat needs to be both nutritious and sustainable, so researchers are trying to figure out what that looks like around the world.

Hey there lovely email friends, it’s getting pretty dark on the top half of the planet so I hope you’re getting enough light. I’ve been thinking a lot about the wonderful, sparkly life-giver that is popular music. So there’s a bit of that shiny shenanigans thrown in amongst your bunch of links this week. 🕴 Why the Year’s Most Popular Song Never Went to No. 1: Dua Lipa’s “Levitating” is 2021’s biggest song. It has hung around all year, spending most weeks in the Top 10, but in in Billboard’s Hot 100 it never got higher than No. 2. It’s a fine piece of pop, but Lipa, her label, radio programmers—everybody underestimated its potency.

Good afternoon lovely email friends, how’s it going? If you’re a Christmas person, I hope and expect you’ve dived right in already. If you’re not, I hope it’s leaving you alone. Remember, if that blasted Wham song becomes an earworm, you can always get rid of it by singing Club Tropicana. Not the vocal bit, mind—otherwise you’ll just end up with another earworm—you need to sing the trumpety bit from about 3:39 onwards. Trust me, Club Tropicana is like salt on a wine-stained carpet. Works every time.

Hey there lovely email friends, hope all’s well. Perhaps like you, I’ve been humming Beatles songs all week. I love that illusion of old songs: you can’t remember them ever not being there, so it’s strange to think there was ever a time before they existed. It’s pretty impressive, therefore, to get a change to show an audience footage of the precise moment a song they all know fell out of the mind of its creator.

Hello lovely email friends. Hope you’re okay. As a handful of you know, once the pandemic had arrived on these shores last year, I left London and headed northwards. I try and base all those pesky big life decisions on Alex Garland screenplays. I’ve been camping out in Birmingham: unattractive by reputation but, I now realise, this is just a means of keeping Londoners away. If you can live with agricultural connectivity and a lack of—nay, contempt for—public transport, then Telly Savalas was right: there are a great many things to like about Birmingham. Not only friendly people and extensive leisure and shopping opportunities, but also fine satirical artworks and an actual chocolate factory.

Nobody knows you when you’re down and out

Hey there lovely email friends. Recently I’ve had many lovely replies and I’m grateful for all of them. What a nice bunch you are. So if your prefrontal cortex aches wearily from the relentless pseudo-political tinnitus of social media, perhaps it’s a good time to close down that infinite scroll, hit the compose button and drop a note to someone you’ve not had proper contact with for too long. Meanwhile, here’s some interesting things for you.

Hello again lovely email friends. You might have noticed that I prefer to avoid covering things the mainstream media have gathered around—errant politicians and the like—not because it isn’t interesting, but because you certainly know where to find them. But COP26 is a particularly good time for coverage on emissions and the climate crisis, so this week I’m starting with a few articles that I’ve found particularly interesting. Earlier this year I completed a course at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, in which the case for economic growth as the mechanism of change was substantiated. But there is also a strong opposing argument, set out in the first link below. Both are worthy of detailed study: and I mean that not to devalue the thinking on either side, but rather that it may be necessary to support one while we figure out how to adopt the other, as time spent choosing is time wasted. And there is no time.

Good afternoon lovely email friends. How are you? I love what you’ve done with the place. I think this is the week in the year for which it’s hardest to dress. The optimum outfit is exactly between one and two layers, and nobody makes a layer and a half. So it’s a hoodie-on hoodie-off kind of week. On, off, on, off. Anyway, nearly the weekend! 🔪 Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace Is a Pitch-Perfect Horror Parody: Halloween is the perfect time, if you haven’t already, to discover Darkplace. If you know it, it’s time to watch it again. While you can (and should) watch it any time of year, the spooky season is an ideal time for your first viewing. But the show has plenty more targets besides horror. [thanks, MS!].

Hello lovely email friends. I encountered a spider, and my goodness it was a biggie. The largest I’ve seen in the northern hemisphere, just standing there in my front room. It was wider than any glass I own and I didn’t fancy my chances with any other kitchenware. So I’m ashamed to say I used the vacuum cleaner. Not the fancy but ineffective bagless one that would force me to witness the horror of my crime, but the old-style, smiley one; its eyes judging me.

Happy Wednesday lovely email friends, hope all’s well with you. I don’t mind telling you this week’s email almost didn’t happen, since I’d fallen straight down the rabbithole that is the Thames Television archive. Anyway, here it is, with this week’s selection of interesting things: 🎙 Which Singers Have the Biggest Vocabularies? For some stars, a big vocabulary is priceless. Singer-songwriters from Patti Smith to Nick Cave have built careers with songs whose rich language is as important as the music. This article studies how the diversity of words used by current-generation stacks up against musical legends.

Greetings again lovely email friends, it’s Mo here again with more things of interest. Speaking of which, last week’s email prompted the most out-of-office replies ever… not interesting ‘we’ve all gone to the pub’ ones, but boring ‘I’m in meetings all day’ ones. Guys, c’mon. Your out-of-office replies are supposed to help those that email you overcome the disappointment of you being incommunicado. So sprinkle a little interestingness… maybe one or more of the below?

Good afternoon lovely email friends, hope you’re okay. There’s something about wrapping the world’s largest tree in aluminium foil to guard it against wildfires that illustrates our contemptuous relationship with the planet that raised us. I sometimes wonder whether this, and our other limitations, derives from our tendency to view the world through the lens of a human lifespan. That giant sequoia they call General Sherman is at least 2,300 years old. Its eponym, William Tecumseh Sherman, lived for 71 years. To the tree, a human life must seem fleeting. To be named after one would be equivalent to me being named after something as ephemeral as Katy Perry’s marriage to Russell Brand.

Hello there lovely email friends, it’s Mo here. Hope you’re well and everything. You look well, anyway. This is one of my favourite times of year so, regardless of all the many and varied things that are going on at the moment, I’m doing my best to be present and not miss it. 🤞 Hope is the antidote to helplessness. Here’s how to cultivate it: Several decades ago, two psychologists stumbled upon a phenomenon that changed the way we think about adversity. When faced with a difficult situation that feels uncontrollable, people tend to act helpless and depressed. As millions have had their lives upended, this idea feels more relevant than ever. It has inspired work that offers positive insights into how people can remain resilient, even in the face of uncontrollable adversities. The key is having hope.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes afoot

Waste defines both past and future

Lies, damned lies and email-newsletter statistics

Hello again lovely email friends. It’d be all too easy for an email like this to draw upon the many troubling news stories in the mainstream media right now. As I started to assemble some links for this week, an undertone was noticable. So I’ve been particularly alert to stories of good outcomes emerging from bad situations—light from darkness—and they’re mixed in below. Hope you have a good week. 👂 How to Fail: Martine Wright is a survivor of the 7/7 London terrorist bombings. She was travelling on the tube when a suicide bomber sitting three feet away from her set off an explosion that would change her life forever. She lost both legs and was in a coma for ten days, after which she underwent a year of intensive rehab and multiple surgeries. Astonishingly, Martine went on to become a sitting volleyball player and represented Great Britain’s women’s team at the 2012 Paralympics in London. This is her extraordinary story.

Hello lovely email friends, hope everything is tickety-boo with you. I’ve been writing a lot recently, but not for any audience besides myself. Just as a means of organising my thoughts. When we convey ideas to other people we tell stories; when we do the same for ourselves we write lists. So I’m experimenting with applying the former approach to the latter situation—if you don’t try, how can you know?

Good afternoon lovely email friends, hope all is well. That there John Higgs, author extraordinare, has me thinking about William Blake. This is something I’ve not had cause to do before which, I rather think, is exactly what Higgs is up to. The best discoveries are unexpected, see. Here’s the book, the clever blighter. 🛴 Voi e-scooters are replacing more walking and cycling than car journeys: If you subscribed to this thing very early on, you may remember I am interested in electric scooters, or more specifically what they indicate. Superficially, they look like they might unlock urban dependence on high-emission transport, but not only are they not so climate-friendly after all, they also can now be shown not to reduce car journeys.

Does new media empower, or bring out the worst in us?

Hello there lovely email friends, hope you’re staying cool. I ventured outside briefly and now I look like a lobster trapped in a postbox. Anyway, I’ve ventured far and wide for you this week, virtually though as it’s too hot to move around. A fair few of these are worth more than a skim, when you have time this week. 📮 Open Letter to the Good Guys: Originally an Icelandic newspaper article, now translated by its author. Gentlemen in particular, please give this a thorough read. Women have worked long and hard enough to curb men’s violence; now it is men’s turn.

Hello lovely email friends, hope all is well with you. In the Nineties, any trip I took into London was an excuse to stock up at the little Anything Left-Handed shop on Brewer Street. The capital used to sustain a broad variety of small stores catering to specialist items; of course, almost all have now shut up shop and moved online. But closing the physical specialist store and making left-handed whatnots highly available hasn’t led to me buying more; possibly the opposite. It wasn’t availability that made sales, but rather occasion: I had tied the act of going to London together with the headspace for whether I needed left-handed scissors, can-openers, drumsticks or whatnot.

Good afternoon once again lovely email friends, hope you’re well. Somehow, the door to my fridge became covered in magnets from various travels. Yesterday I happened to notice the most recent addition was not from some far-flung country but from the fantasy world of Miniatur Wunderland; Hamburg’s delightfully bonkers model railway. I have eulogised tiny worlds before, so it may not surprise you that I was delighted to see this effort to preserve Hong Kong in miniature. I have enormous admiration for those who are built for such precise and detailed obsessions.

Hello you, hope all is well. How is it Wednesday already, I ask myself. In contrast to last year feeling fallow, this one feels hectic. Not complaining, though. Anyway here’s some fun things upon which to click. Shall we? 🙋‍♀️ How to Ask Useful Questions: Asking useful questions is a skill, and it requires practice. Inexperienced questions go unanswered because answering them would take too much effort, so the recipient doesn’t bother. For better answers, you’ll need to tailor the form of the question to the type of information you’re seeking.

Good afternoon once again lovely email friends. Looking at the week ahead, I’m starting to wonder how I’m going to fit everything in. With the return of Love Island on Monday, which long-time readers may remember I consider one of the most important contemporary cultural touchpoints but also immensely time-consuming, there may not be enough hours in the day. Nice problem to have. 🎺 A Beginner’s Guide to Miles Davis: As a jazz trumpeter, bandleader, and composer, Davis was one of the most influential and prolific figures in the history of jazz. So prolific, in fact, that Spotify is brimming with his works, but with re-recordings and jazz being so improvisational, this huge body of work is a little impenetrable for the more casual listener. This guide was written to welcome non-experts into Davis’ incredible world.

Hello lovely email friends. I hope wherever you are the gift of sunshine far outweighs the snag of pollen. I tend to steer well clear of ‘current affairs’ here since there are many better places for them. So where possible I’ve tended not to bring up, y’know, all that has been happening. But I particularly enjoyed reading Linus Torvalds, the noted Finnish computer scientist, head-on tackling an anti-vax conspiracy theorist on a mailing list discussing the operating system Torvalds founded. It is bristling, as internet-based discussions often are, but it is also the best plain-English explanation of the vaccine I have found.

Good afternoon lovely email friends. I finally got a haircut, and it’s a delightful thing to experience after so long. Also I had the presence of forethought to find a picture of myself looking reasonably collected, which I could point at while pleading “that guy—make me look like that guy”. So now I look like that guy, if he ate nothing but cake for a month. 💖 Feel free to stop striving: learn to relish being an amateur: A nice examination of what it means to do things for love rather than money; it needn’t mean sacrificing your aspirations, it simply means that you become the custodian and narrator of your own experience of striving. See also: The joys of being an absolute beginner – for life and, from far back in the archive: We’re all a bunch of amateurs.

Hello lovely email friends. There’s been a welcome improvement in the weather here, so suddenly lots of things are getting done. Many people would spend lottery winnings on a massive house, whereas I think I’d buy a modest home and a maybe a warehouse in which to work on things independently of favourable weather. For now though, the sun is shining and things are getting done! ☸️ How will the next Dalai Lama be chosen? It would be fun to think that you’ll just get a phone-call, Postcode Lottery style, to tell you it’s fallen to you. The reality is more nuanced, as you might expect, and also much more politically charged. This spiritual reincarnation will have political consequences for America, China and India.

Greetings again lovely email friends. Many treats for you this week, including a couple I left out last week and they haunted me ever since. Here we go: 🤙 To be more tech-savvy, borrow these strategies from the Amish: According to Donald Kraybill, professor of Anabaptist and Pietist Studies, the Amish adopt technology selectively, hoping that the tools they use will build community rather than harm it. There’s a mindfulness to this strategy, from which anyone could learn by example. This intriguing article is fronted by an extraordinary photo by Dina Litovsky.

Hello lovely email friends. I hope things are going alright for you. This week sees the release of the eighteenth studio album by the unstoppable Gary Numan. The end of Numan’s last tour was, as it has turned out, the last live event I saw before we all buckled down to observe restrictions, and it’s still ringing in my head. Numan is sci-fi for the ears. Working again with producer Ade Fenton to further refine the electro-industrial vein of the last two albums, this new release explores mankind as a virus: penned from the perspective of the planet it infests. Exactly the kind of dystopian forward-thinking you’d expect from an artist whose breakthrough hit, more than four decades ago, was about a robot prostitute.

Good afternoon lovely email friends. Many lovely things for you this week.Today is not only Odometer Day but also Root Canal Appreciation Day. For these opening remarks, maybe I can get some mileage out of one or both of those; you know the drill. 🧠 The ultimate list of digital mental health support: It’s Mental Health Awareness Week again, the overarching lesson of which is we’re getting long on awareness and short on support. I wrote more last year and the year before.

Hello lovely email friends. Yesterday I ventured out of the house. It reveals how mundane tasks slowly sink into your subconscious when you don’t do them for a while and find they take more preparatory thought than you expect. I’m sure I could once leave the house while barely awake, but the contemporary me needs to invest attention into it. Keys: check. Wallet: check, and so forth. So I think from now on I should retrain. Just as the attractive people on TV cycle while being shouted at, all without leaving the comfort of their improbably well-appointed living rooms, I too should train for leaving the house whether I need to or not: going through all the motions until it is subconscious again.

Well hello there lovely email friends. As I write this there are kids playing in the street, just like people tell you used to happen in the old days. After such a long period of physical and emotional suppression, their after-school shrieks and howls are somehow cathartic. Like green shoots busting up between the paving slabs, the lack of traffic has allowed them to emerge. There isn’t a level of noise they can make that would annoy me today.

Hello lovely email friends, hope you’re well. I’m getting a little older today. At least, it’s conventional to mark that fact once a year and today is that day for Iggy Pop, Her Majesty the Queen and me, plus 21 million or so others. The rest of you will also get a little older, but will have to make do without the occasion being marked. Unless, of course, you choose to mark it yourself, in which case: welcome!

Hi again lovely email friends. Many and various treats for you this week. 🤳 Beauty filters are changing the way young girls see themselves: The most widespread use of augmented reality isn’t in gaming: it’s the face filters on social media. The result? A mass experiment on girls and young women. 🗝 Exploring the unreleased music in Prince’s vault: It’s been five years since Prince died, but his estate continues to churn out new music from the prolific artist. This article explores the 8,000 or so unreleased songs locked away in Prince’s vault.

Hello lovely email friends, we’re all still recovering from chocolate-induced inertia over the weekend, so I’ll keep this one short. (If you’re after something longer and haven’t yet got to the one about pianos or volcanos, there are plenty of back-issues still available.) Onwards! 🐠 Five ways fish are more like humans than you realise: Everything you know about fish neurobiology, such as their lack of memory or pain perception, is wrong. When scientists have conducted experiments to discover more about them, their social lives and mental faculties, they’ve found fish have more in common with us than we might like to admit.

A priceless piano you know and love can now be yours

When a volcano threatens a town, can it be stopped?

Hello email friends, Mo here again. Hope all’s well. Let me know either way, would you? I’m still sick, so even more stuck indoors than I otherwise would be. But it’s not all bad: I’ve refreshed the 💥BLAST! website so I could fit in some of the kind things some of you have replied. So if you were waiting for me to tease out some of those year-old bugs before recommending to chums, now’s the time… 😘

A new online era may be fast approaching

Hey gorgeous email friends. No sooner I had marked a hundred uninterrupted weeks of writing and sending these here emails, something came along and interrupted. So if you noticed the break last week; sorry about that. I have shingles, and it’s as unpleasant as people say. The universe frowns upon tall poppies. This week I’m back up and about in a limited way, thanks to a range of painkillers. And I’ve also had my first Covid vaccine, for which I’m extremely grateful. But hey, you didn’t come here to hear about my viruses; let’s get down to rooting out some interesting things, shall we?

What’s sailing over your head?

Hello lovely email friends. Millie and I can’t agree on a temperature. There used to be a small overlap of what we both consider comfortable, at the top of my range and the bottom of hers. I’m coming to realise, as we age, my range is going downwards and hers is rising. So she is usually to be found pressing herself to a radiator, and I’m usually outside. This is how you compromise with a cat.

Good afternoon lovely email friends. I’ve been thinking about all of us enduring social distancing while also in the era of unregulated social media. Nobody saw the latter coming, because they occupy a space previously uncapitalised. As time passes, the overlapping of these two things will seem more significant. 🧹 Improve Your Life With These Tiny Chores: Completing these five home projects, like undergoing a good spring cleaning, will give you a fresh start. See also: Change Your Life in 5 Minutes a Day by Joanne Mallon. Frankly, over-indexing happiness at the moment is good and solid, so see also also: Your Happiness Calendar for February 2021.

Hey once again lovely email friends. There’s been a respectable amount of snow here this week. Not by Scaninavian standards, but enough to cause me to snap a broom. It has also been enough to throw my perception of days off by one, so thi list of small delights was very nearly late. Not that it would really matter, but as the time of sending was chosen deliberately it’s better to stick to routine. Hope you’re alright.

Hello lovely email friends. Since last I wrote, I shaved off my beard on a whim. For my own gentle amusement in front of the bathroom mirror, opportunities for which are limited these days, I started by going for a Geoff from Byker Grove. Yet, with lockdown hair, the result was Lemmy. Who knew that the distance between Geoff and Lemmy is measured only in time. 💸 It’s Not That Hard to Buy Nothing: Amid the disruption of last year, some re-evaluated their relationship with things. This article explores what they learned.

Good afternoon lovely email friends. If you’re observing a Dry Veganuary, on top of everything else, you have my utmost respect. If not, well, there’s always next year. You can’t build castles in swamps, and all that. 📸 Britain from the Air - 1945-2009: A unique collection of aerial photographs capturing changes to Britain’s cities and landscapes from the 1940s to 2009 has been made freely available to everyone on Cambridge University Library’s digital library. I should warn you; this is a serious rabbithole. Glorious.

Hello you, happy new year and all that. You don’t need resolutions; you’re just fine as you are. 🚓 Who really killed Ford Timelord? Now that The KLF have reemerged, it’s gotten me thinking again about the fate of that cop car that featured on the Doctorin’ The Tardis artwork and elsewhere. Given the car was one of the few constants through the band’s career, whatever happened to it? ⛓ A Chain Just Cut Through A Capsized Cargo Ship Filled With Cars And The Process Is Fascinating is a monster headline But yes, this ship full of cars capsized and needed cutting up for disposal. What a mess, but amazing stuff. (Thanks RC!)

Hello petal, hope you’re having a peaceful Twixtmas. There’s been a little snow here; not enough for all-out tea-tray tobogganing but enough to make the neighbourhood seem sparkly and serene for a little while. 🗓 Public Domain Day 2021: copyright is finite, so every 1st of January a selection of works drops into the public domain. This time around it’s works from 1925, including The Great Gatsby and Mrs. Dalloway, silent films featuring Buster Keaton and a wide range of music.

Hello petal, hope you’re well. I bought myself a dangerous-looking Japanese-style wood saw and am currently learning how to use it. It involves breaking muscle-memory developed from years with a regular panel-saw. Although I’m far from mastering the new technique, I may have been doing it all the hard way all this time. Such short days necessitate faster cuts, after all. 🧪 The Journalist and the Pharma Bro: Why did Christie Smythe upend her life and stability for Martin Shkreli, one of the least-liked men in the world?

Good afternoon lovely email friends. Hope you’re well. It’s a busy time of year, so I’m kicking 💥BLAST! into a slightly lighter format. Please feel free to reply with the best picture you’ve taken recently. 💩 On the moral obligation to stop shit-stirring: In the kind of shit-stirring this article examines, provocation or aggravation is carried out through speech acts that have the grammatical form of advice even though they’re not actually intended to help those to whom the purported advice is offered. When you offer sincere advice, you hope that it will be acted on. But this isn’t the case with shit-stirring.

In a forest, subterranean fungi means no tree stands alone

This new normal is joyless. What's next?

Productivity for this era

We hear it’s needed, but where is it found?

Political polarisation needn’t pull us apart.

The catharsis of origami.

Mastering an instrument played without touch.

Blinking LEDs are a blight.

Christmas is coming. Or is it?

Seriously, ducks though.

What does social distancing mean for friendships?

Something’s missing. Does the answer lie in classic radio shows?

Ideas are plentiful. So why do we value them?

Free-flowing information is the perfect environment for hoaxes

Motorways bypass landmarks, but create them too.

To bring the world to its knees, you've got to have a lair.

Myers Briggs is pseudoscience. Why do we love it?

We think we’re more mentally flexible, just like everyone else does.

The modern work environment isn’t here to stay.

MIDI was ahead of its time. Now it’s maturing.

Commuting needs audiobooks. Not commuting needs them too.

When vigilance turns into surveillance.

Often imitated, never equalled let alone surpassed.

Access to too much bad news has bad consequences.

In the reinvention of TV, game shows got left behind.

Why is my new passport so fugly?

Racism needs confronting. By White people.

The internet made everything findable... and nothing mysterious.

Getting excited about VR just as it runs out of road.

Non-trivial and non-obvious pointers for regaining mental health

Finding focus through all the distractions of the new normal.

It's Hedgehog Awareness Week.

Book recommendations worth noting.

Forty learnings from forty years

It's a busy, busy world.

Now's the time to dive in to virtual art collections.

Ikigai: A Japanese concept to improve work and life.

Report finds older people are widely demonised.

Hello again lovely email friends. Hope you’re getting on okay at what’s proving to be a weird time for many. I should also welcome those who have come on-board recently. For the third and final time, whereas usually an email comes together in a week, this one has been brewing for months. this week’s 💥BLAST! is a round-up of interesting things that surfaced too late to be included in the relevant email. Some more about what’s to come in future at the bottom, but first…

Hello lovely Blasters, following on from last week here’s a look back at more emails from the first year of 💥BLAST! together with interesting things that I’ve collected thereafter. 17. Moon: 👨‍🚀 Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin & Michael Collins Return Through Customs and Immigration: Returning from the first moon landing, the three astronauts were taken to Honolulu to sign an immigration form an declaring a cargo of moon rocks and dust. 🌜 Soar around the Moon, carried by the music of Debussy, in this breathtaking space flight: The video traces the flow of sunlight over the Moon’s surface.

Baader–Meinhof phenomenon by regular email 📩

What's so appealing about a model village?

Can a fashion doll make you mindful?

Online dating has become big business.

You are feeeling sleeepy.

What is the right balance between security and privacy?

🍌 🍌 🍌 🍌 🍌

You won't believe your eyes.

Where's your head at?

After all, singers always find songs

What traditions are starting, and which need to end?

Journalists began reporting on their own pay

How is streaming changing content?

Does your gift spy on its recipient?

And this time, they're useful

Is a CGI celebrity any less real?

It's the only way to live...

Perhaps too much to give it away...

Work it!

Heads up!

Bottoms up

Reversing increases in loneliness and social isolation

In our open-plan, hotdesking future, work is not in progress

Our future is not at steak

There's a brand new talk, but it's not very clear

We like our stuff in good order, so why are so many things unrepairable?

Robot butlers! At last!

Big fish 🐡 small fish 🐟 cardboard box 📦

Are recent cultural touchpoints already obsolete?

Turning squabbles into constructive debates: needed now more than ever

Hang in there

Fiiiiiiiiiiight!

Now turn the cassette over

Tranquility Base here, the Eagle has landed

If it makes you happy, it can't be that bad

❤️ Love vs Money 💰... FIIIIGHT!

Does this guilt-ridden age define us?

All Da Vinci, no Dan Brown

Can a photograph be an act of protest?

More is happening in the Exclusion Zone

Trees are good, trees are good

Amazon is getting hard to understand, or to keep up with

I just can't get you out of my head

I'd make a pun here but there's nul points

Time to get amongst the balls...

How is working out working out?

It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine

I like to move it, move it

If you tolerate this your children will be next

One good plant pun, but I should probably leaf it there.