💥BLAST! - a newsletter
Cognitive toolkit, canal economy, Keith Mann
BLAST header

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.

No, wait! How can we monetise this?! Maybe I could start a service whereby I shout at people retraining to leave the house, all for a monthly fee of just £39 a month. Genius.

  • 🕵️‍♀️ How to think like a detective: The best detectives seem to have almost supernatural insight, but their cognitive toolkit is one that anybody can use.

  • 🚢 The World the Suez Canal Made: When the container ship Ever Given became wedged in this Egyptian passage, it highlighted global capitalism but hid its uneven origins and benefits. See also: Problematic Ships.

  • 🤑 Confessions of an Overnight Tech Millionaire: Since July 2020, nearly 750 companies have gone public, raising billions of dollars and minting thousands of new paper millionaires. Amid the frenzy, one millennial tech worker on the verge of unexpected wealth shared what was going through her mind.

  • 🧠 Mental health patients ‘missed out on care’ during Covid: A study by University College London reveals remote consultations often felt inadequate and may have made symptoms worse.

  • 🪴 The Dark Side of the Houseplant Boom: American culture is becoming more and more preoccupied with nature. What if all the celebrations of the wild world are actually manifestations of grief? Then again, I put it to those of you who joined from the start that perhaps looking for a point to houseplants is a fool’s errand. I believe now, as then, not everything has to have a point.

  • 🚶‍♀️ How Fit Can You Get From Just Walking?: Walking is good for you, obviously. But can it whip you into shape? Well, nothing can change your build like some form of resistance training, but a basic, consistent routine can get you much further than going hardcore once in a while.

  • 🤷‍♀️ Two Female Entrepreneurs: Acting Through Fake Male Cofounder ‘Like Night and Day’: Keith Mann has not only the greatest name for a fictitious male cofounder but also a far better success-rate at working with collaborators.

  • 🍿 Six Screenwriters on the Hardest Endings They Ever Wrote: Writing and shooting an ending is often the most arduous part of filmmaking, involving constant workshopping, tossed-off drafts, inner turmoil, and finally just deciding to go with whatever is there. To learn more about the art of ending a movie, this article talks to six writers who wrestled with the finales of their recent films.

  • 🌍 How Much Humans Have Altered Earth’s Landscape Since 1984: Google Earth was recently updated to include both 2D and 3D time-lapse images of Earth. Now you can go back to 1984 and see the changes to the planet over the last 37 years.