Alright treacle? This week I’m taking 💥BLAST! literally, as I’m utterly captivated by a hole in the ground. But first, some links; featuring a fair few shared with me by subscribers to this thing. Proof, were it needed, that you’re perfectly capable of doing this yourself. But just because you can cook doesn’t mean you don’t order takeaway.

• 🔡 13 miles of typography on Broadway, from A to Z: Starting in lower Manhattan at Bowling Green and running the entire length of the island, it strings together up to fifteen neighbourhoods before bleeding over into the Bronx, serving as a cross-sectional study of the City’s diversity in ethnicity, utility and design. This is a delightful and thorough typographic tour of the Main Street of Manhattan, from neon lights to mom-and-pop shop signs, from theatre marquees to building names.

• 👗 The ancient fabric that no one knows how to make: Nearly 200 years ago, Dhaka muslin was the most valuable fabric on the planet. Then it was lost altogether. In good solid long-form style, this piece explores how this happened, and whether it can be brought back.

• 💕 Can we occupy technology with love? If you work in technology or, I suppose, what was briefly and misguidedly called ’new media’, it’s a fairly disenfranchising experience. It feels as if something precious has been lost. But here, responsible technologist Rachel Coldicutt explores whether we could claw back a sense of online balance and get the negatives of the online experience under control with the application of love.

• 🌊 Where Are Those Shoes You Ordered? Check the Ocean Floor: Diving suits at the ready: more containers have fallen off ships in the past four months than are typically lost in a year. It’s heavy traffic and big seas, and also a phenomenon called parametric rolling.

• 🧔 Power beards, a Getty Museum 2-minute review: Beards have a long history of how different cultures identify warriors, thinkers, sovereigns, and leaders. Or sometimes the removal of beards is what communicates power. But how and why would facial hair follicles or false beards change attitudes or command authority?

• 📧 What a Compassionate Email Culture Looks Like: Email culture is broken, and fixing it will require a concerted effort. To start, individuals must think bigger than protecting their own inboxes, focusing instead on reducing the collective email traffic of the team as a whole. This piece in the Harvard Business Review examines the basics of email etiquette and suggest three strategic habits that can help teams move toward a compassionate email culture.

• 🧠 That Is Not How Your Brain Works: Brains don’t work by stimulus and response. All your neurons are firing at various rates all the time. There aren’t bits of your head apportioned to different psychological tasks. Forget the myths to better understand your brain and yourself.

• 🥕 At last! A comprehensive recipe for… Shredded Carrots: If we’re honest, when you think of all that’s going on, there is simply no greater foe in the world than store-bought shredded carrots. Fortunately, the web comes to the rescue, with this detailed recipe for how to shred your own carrots.

Man vs volcano

Fagradalsfjall, a low-standing volcano dormant for more than 800 years, has begun to erupt just as the technologies for high-definition photography from unmanned aircraft is widely accessible. The result is many extraordinary photographs of the eruption and lava flow as well as astonishing close-up drone footage from overhead, for the amazement of those of us closer to the centre of a tectonic plate.

You don’t have to spend very long in Iceland to find yourself reassessing your relationship with your host planet. Rather than an inert lump, suddenly it seems vibrant: evidence for this is scattered everywhere. Fagradalsfjall is in a remote spot, but volcanoes have previously erupted on doorsteps.

I have visited Iceland three times over three decades. On my second trip I was lucky enough to make it to Heimaey; the largest and only inhabited island of a volcanic archipelago off the south coast, in which the youngest island emerged from the sea during a four-year eruption in the 1960s.

Heimaey is blessed with natural harbour on its northern side, the existence of which, plus its entire fishing fleet and the adjacent town, was threatened by an eruption in 1973. Without warning, the eruption of Eldfell—fire-mountain—forced the evacuation of the whole population of 5000 to the mainland in the middle of the night.

In an act of resilience that forms a cornerstone of the Icelandic identity, relief activities were well underway. To save the harbour and as much of the town as possible, engineers spend over a month pumping billions of litres of sea water onto the lava flow to cool it and therefore stem its flow.

Drones weren’t around to capture the eruption of Eldfell but it’s still worth looking at the 16mm footage of the volcano bearing down upon the town, and whatever photos you can find. The story of this eruption is worth remembering.

Clear your mind. It’s time to get those thoughts in order. To separate cause from consequence. Ready?

Let’s go!