Hello lovely email friends. I hope things are going alright for you. This week sees the release of the eighteenth studio album by the unstoppable Gary Numan. The end of Numan’s last tour was, as it has turned out, the last live event I saw before we all buckled down to observe restrictions, and it’s still ringing in my head.
Numan is sci-fi for the ears. Working again with producer Ade Fenton to further refine the electro-industrial vein of the last two albums, this new release explores mankind as a virus: penned from the perspective of the planet it infests. Exactly the kind of dystopian forward-thinking you’d expect from an artist whose breakthrough hit, more than four decades ago, was about a robot prostitute.
👂 ‘Talk to me’: A train driver asking men to open up: As Scotland’s only woman freight train driver, Heather Waugh was already a pioneer. Then a tragedy from her past inspired her to take on a new mission - getting men to talk about their mental health.
🏢 It’s not their job to buy you cake: Working remotely for the last year has revealed just how much of office culture is accidental, arbitrary, and sexist. Incidentally, this whole time I’ve not been in an office, there have been no barriers to getting stuff done. Funny, that.
🚔 The campaign to keep police out of mental health services: A “transformative” new mental health model wants to bring police into support services. Campaigners say it will criminalise the most vulnerable.
👩👦👦 100 Visions of Motherhood: Motherhood is filled with love, joy, struggle, beauty and sorrow. To celebrate these many layers, photographers share images that represent its many possibilities. The complexities and nuances, and even the decision not to become a mother, and the fear and inevitable loss that comes with all of this. This collection of 100 photographs images represents a global and intergenerational take on motherhood’s many forms.
🧼 Inside the Movement to Clean Up the World’s Most Toxic Sites: A sprawling initiative identifies pollution hotspots so the communities affected by them can act.
💡 Lights at sea: I’ve spent a surprising amount of this last week looking at this map of all the blinking beacons from OpenStreetMap. You wouldn’t think lighthouses would be quite so engaging, but I just can’t look away from those little blinking lights…
🌳 The farmers putting trees back into the UK’s fields: It’s hoped a 12-year trial in Devon will persuade policymakers to back silvopasture to benefit the soil, livestock and climate.
🧘♀️ Training to Be Relaxed in Stressful Situations: Many of us face things every day that stress us out: overwhelming number of tasks, a big meeting, a project that feels really tough, behind on paying bills, someone is upset at us, there’s a family crisis, the world feels chaotic. Can we find a way to be relaxed in almost any stressful situation? Absolutely. It just takes some training. And lots of practice.
🕳 Social media companies say they want to be transparent. So why aren’t they? The rules that social media companies put in place to maintain user safety are sometimes necessary, and sometimes absurd.
🎧 Delia Derbyshire: The Myths and the Legendary Tapes: I don’t think I really understood what a ‘docudrama’ was until I watched this impressive portrayal this week. Derbyshire’s work at the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop is widely heard but under-credited. This impressive film examines the life of the woman behind the works.
🎻 The dark future for the world’s greatest violin-makers: Cremona has long been known for its fine stringed instruments. But now, after the Italian city became a virus hotspot, its craftsmen face tough times.
🙄 How much Bitcoin comes from dirty coal? A flooded mine in China just spotlighted the issue: An immense coal mine in Xinjiang flooded and shut down over a weekend in April. The resulting blackout halted one-third of all of Bitcoin’s global computing power. The accident highlights that Bitcoin is a creature coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel of them all. See also: Here’s the harsh truth about crypto.