Hello lovely email friends, happy Wednesday and so forth. If you can hear this week’s subject line as a lyric nested within a jangly yet observational Beatles song, that might be appropriate.

• 🤗 A Counterintuitive Way to Cheer Up When You’re Down: Making people happy makes you happier too. So when you most need to get happier, try giving happiness away.

• 🐋 How did blue whales get so damn big? The most populous creatures tend to be smaller. Indeed as populations increase, individuals tend to get smaller. So what’s the deal with blue whales? Easily the biggest creatures ever to occupy the Earth, what do they get out of being gigantic? Also I was today years old when I noticed there are two whale emojis. 🐳

• 🖼 The Art World Has Bigger Enemies Than Forgers: Something that’s been on my mind a lot, of late, what with all the cryptobullshit swirling around. Rich people have ruined art in a lot of ways. Art is being produced, sold, resold, and donated, at a more rapid rate than ever before because the art is money now. Everything is money. It’s capital, baby. But what made these works worth so much? See also: A Ranking of the World’s Most Instagrammed Museums.

• 🤖 Nothing Breaks Like A.I. Heart: An essay about artificial intelligence, emotional intelligence, and finding an ending. Excellent piece of work, this.

• ✍️ How to create compelling characters: I’m not a writer but I appreciate the art. Character development is not only writer’s intuition. Why is it that some characters are more compelling than others? Using personality psychology creates just the right blend of surprise and believability.

• 🏴 Debranding Is the New Branding: From Burger King and Toyota to Intel and Warner Brothers, major brands are discarding detail and depth. Why now, and what’s the rush?

• 📸 The story behind Albert Einstein′s most iconic photo: I’d always assumed the whole tongue-out thing was some kind of alteration, but that most famous image of Einstein is the real deal.

Mrs Mills’ piano comes to stay

There must have been a precise moment at which the idea of the recording studios on Abbey Road, St Johns Wood became more important than the premises themselves. It’s hard to pinpoint but it must fall sometime between Elgar first taking up the baton and a certain Liverpudlian four-piece posing for an album cover on the crossing outside.

Much of how music is now enjoyed was invented in that building. Eventually though, recording innovation fanned out around the world. Abbey Road played little part in the most recent leap; the shift to computers. Many huge artists no longer need darken the doors of a large and expensive recording facility at all.

Yet the idea of Abbey Road persists: many square-inches of it and much of its equipment have been recreated in digital form so distant artists can use them entirely from their own laptops. To my ear, though, the most desirable feature of the studios has stayed firmly put in a corner of Studio Two, until this week.

A modern-era record company is a bit like a bank. But in the middle of the last century, the hardened rules of hit-making hadn’t yet been tightly defined so, broadly, if it could be committed to a record, it was worth recording. EMI’s stable of artists therefore ranged from classical to comedy, with the odd rock ’n roll four-piece thrown in.

That diversity of repertoire explains why the hallowed Studio Two contains a honky-tonk piano: a Steinway Vertegrand purchased by the studios in 1953 and then modified for that jangly, bar-room sound. EMI saw an opportunity for old-time hits to be sold on record. And in Mrs Mills, they had the perfect player.

In the early Sixties, Mrs Gladys Mills was working in the civil service by day and gigging as a honky-tonk pianist by night. Having been spotted by a manager, she signed to EMI and made her first recording: a medley single that made her a household name. With a cheery smile and extraordinary technique, Mrs Mills continued to record Roaring Twenties standards and contemporary covers on the Studio Two honky-tonk, all in that distinctive old-time, stride style.

If you’re yet to hear a Mrs Mills record, you’ve still heard this exact piano many times: Mills’ recording contemporaries, The Beatles, used it on some of their best-known singles. When Penny Lane or Lady Madonna lodged is in your head, this very piano helped put it there.

But even so, the piano is still named in honour of the woman who played it the best. Mrs Mills’ piano still sits in the corner of Studio Two, over forty years after her passing. And this week a good approximation is also sitting on my laptop, as the excellent Spitfire Audio has released Mrs Mills’ piano as a virtual instrument.

Everyone keeps their bookshelf behind them: it’s better for video calls. But dare you ponder what a bookshelf might say about its owner?

Let’s go!