Hello again lovely email friends, and please join me in greeting the new joiners who, I assume, have been passed last week’s list of life lessons and then decided to come aboard. You’re most welcome. This week it was pointed out to me [thanks LB!] that Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti is perfect for right now.
🗝 An innocent man spent 46 years in prison planning to kill the man who framed him: Richard Phillips survived the longest wrongful prison sentence in American history by writing poetry and painting with watercolours. But on a cold day in the prison yard, he carried a knife and thought about revenge.
🛬 What Happens to Planes Grounded by Covid-19: They get parked up, of course, but it’s not quite as simple as that.
🗺 New Not Normal: interesting project, this. The outbreak has planted in one place, but where do we put our emotions – the feelings we don’t know what to do with? If you want to do something, you can share what you are creating to make sense of this. See also: Why it will be so hard to return to ’normal’, but that’s alright.
✍️ Over 1,000 Writing Prompts for Students: but right now it’s a good list for anyone looking to flex a little creative muscle. See also, a timely writing prompt.
👩👧 Adulting Fast and Slow: Here’s two converging observations: we live in a society of adult-like children and childish adults. A life well-lived demands a forward-leaning embrace of responsibility. This intelligent essay argues for dropping the freedom from mindset and welcome the freedom to learn, the freedom to work, and the freedom to tackle meaningful challenges.
🏙 A Car-Free Blueprint for City Life After Lockdown: Hard-hit Milan may be leading the way in reimagining how transit and commuting patterns could change as cities emerge from shutdowns.
🌈 Something to look forward to: Artistic magpie Austin Kleon reminds us of a line in Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search For Meaning: “What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him”.
📬 Good Postcard Club: I love this. Send postcards, tell the internet that you’re sending postcards. Wish you were here x
🖍 3 Ways to Colour Inside the Lines with Pages, Lines, and Wines Online: More colouring pages, this time themed around classic fiction.
Required reading required
I find it helpful to write with a single recipient in mind. I know some of you in real life, so it’s common for me to write or include something just for one person in my head. Otherwise it’d all become about mass appeal and ultimately that’s not an engaging read. This time, though, I’m writing to myself.
I would read more books if only it wasn’t for long working hours, commuting and all the other things jostling for time and attention. At least, that’s what I’d convinced myself. The stark truth, as revealed by our enforced new routine, is that time and attention go wherever you direct them. The trick might be to avoid the mediocre and hunt down stuff I can obsess about — this seems to be the thing that all the books that I’ve written about in 💥BLAST! have in common.
Not only do I have unread books awaiting my attention, I have also collected lists of book recommendations. In the day-job, for example, I’m regularly asked for recommendations about comms, strategy and advertising, but I always just end up passing on this good summary of Good Strategy Bad Strategy. After all, reading shouldn’t be work.
For something thought-provoking, Bill Gates makes frequent recommendations. If like me you lean towards non-fiction, you can pick from the best of the past 25 years and the strong science titles of our age, or whatever tech CEOs are reading. You can always get off to a fast start by reading Sapiens as if it were a blog post.
Year-ends come with round-ups, and this is never truer than the end of a decade. So there’s decade-defining books, recommendations from GQ and Slate, and the Guardian’s best books of this century (with call-outs of note from Daniel Benneworth-Gray and Jason Kottke).
If all that’s too much then why not follow the time-honoured tradition of judging by the cover. Even though many covers look the same (to prove it, here’s 5,000 top-selling book covers, arranged by visual similarity), there are still covers of note or whose design inspires.
