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.
🇫🇷 In France, Accents Are Now Protected by Law: An incident between a politician and a reporter caused a turning point in how accents are perceived in France, where diverse historical and cultural influences have created a huge linguistic variety. A groundbreaking rule aims to let people speak freely and without fear of discrimination. There’s overtones of political point-scoring here too, though. I wonder what Officer Crabtree would make of it.
💸 Pay Gaps Are About More Than Money: Most companies still have fewer top-ranking women, but simply promoting women into these roles doesn’t close the pay gap. Instead, more advanced analysis will reveal how best to apply anti-bias and inclusion training to remedy a culture problem alongside a comprehensive compensation audit to address pay discrimination. This article proposes using data in three stages — compensation, representation job satisfaction — to reveal hidden inequities.
🛣 How highways make traffic worse: Houston’s 26-lane Katy Freeway has come to symbolise a transportation phenomenon called induced demand: the idea that building more infrastructure will just encourage more demand.
📖 Agostino Ramelli’s Theatre of Machines: Here’s a rabbit-hole down which I fell over Easter. Published in 1588, this collection of drawings by an Italian military engineer includes Renaissance contraptions including cranes, grain mills, and water pumps. But the stand-out is a book-reading machine: a revolving wheel of angled shelves, allowing those who enjoy study to read multiple books at once.
📐 Habitat Memories: Good Design At Good Prices: pages from old Habitat catalogues: saved, scanned and shared by my favourite stationery dealer, Present&Correct. I think if I were to make a pie chart of how I’ve spent my whole life, time in classy stationery shops would get its own wedge.
🙋♀️ Why Silicon Valley’s most astute critics are all women: What does this interesting correlation tell us? The industry that is reshaping our societies and undermining our democracies is overwhelmingly dominated by males. Yet male critics seem relatively untroubled by this; they seem to see it as inevitable and pass on to more ostensibly urgent concerns. See also: Amazon Illegally Fired Climate-Change Activist Workers, so every time you see an advert chest-beating about their environmental prowess, remember not to take family-planning advice from a pimp.
🧊 The Deepest Diver in the History of Free Diving Goes Below the Ice: For the past four years, Alexey Molchanov has been the undisputed best all-around free diver in the world. He broke yet another world record last week, this time beneath an icy surface.
In your mind, picture heroes, pioneers and courageous people. Got some? Me too. I wonder how many we’d have in common.