Hey there email friends, happy Wednesday. I have a nagging thought; more of that in a minute. First, here are some interesting things, many and varied, upon which to click.
👩🎤 Only 21% of all artists at this year’s biggest UK festivals are female: A study also concluded that, despite festivals not going ahead in 2020, the percentage of female artists due to play the postponed events was higher than this year by 1%.
🍻 The Many Health Benefits of Non-Alcoholic Beer: German Olympians are no longer the only beneficiaries of the health-promoting properties of non-alcoholic beer.
❤️🔥 There’s no ads! Lend your support by telling two friends and/or buying me a coffee. Love you, mean it ❤️🔥
🧱 How Lego Perfected the Recycled Plastic Brick: Lego uses 100,000 metric tons of unrecyclable, non-degrading plastic every year. After 72 years and billions of interlocking polymer toy bricks, the company finally has an eco-friendly alternative made from recycled PET bottles. Not only recyclable but also at a carbon cost 70% lower than virgin petroleum-based thermoplastic.
🤸♀️ 15-Minute Beginner Stretch Flexibility Routine: bodyweight training coach Tom Merrick offers this follow-along routine suitable for real people and gym-wankers alike.
🌬 Best fan placement to move air through the house: Okay so fans don’t make it colder, but do allow you to do clever things with air movement. This video brings you experiments and anemometer measurements to figure out where to best place a fan to optimally air out the house to cool it down at night.
📆 4-Day Workweeks Can Boost Happiness and Productivity: Reducing hours without reducing pay would reignite an essential but long-forgotten moral project: making life less about work.
⚓️ Is it wrong to steal a tattoo? Celebrities have been sued for it, and tattoo artists get shunned for doing it. So how do people wind up with identical tattoos? Clue: copying a tattoo is a great and practical way to annoy your enemy.
🏢 Archive photos show Birmingham in the 80s and 90s: Generally, UK cities’ architecture were most severely damaged by enemy bombers, whereas Birmingham has proudly continued that tradition long into peacetime. The local rag takes a look back at England’s second (or third) city through two decades.
🏎 Cars that never made it etc: If you enjoyed Great cars cancelled at the last moment from a couple of weeks back, here’s something in the same vein: dead brands, cars that were developed but never put into series production, sales disasters and other motoring curiosities, car news and random automotive history.
🧟♀️ The Internet Is Rotting: Too much has been lost already. In a collective hallucination, the glue that holds humanity’s knowledge together is coming undone.
🎙 Why The Rosy ‘Creator Economy’ Is Music’s Biggest Lie: Platforms of the so-called “passion economy” tell us everyone can make bank. The reality of this scam is nowhere more evident than in the numbers out of the music industry.
🥜 What You Don’t Know About Food Allergies: Pollen-food reactions, adult onset symptoms and cross reactivity are just some of the surprising ways our bodies respond to food.
Basic necessity
In the summer, while some reading appetites turn to romantic fiction, I tend to take in an autobiography or two. Lately I’ve been reading Christopher Eccleston’s excellent book I Love The Bones Of You, in which he describes how the working-class conveyor belt put his father, as a young man, on the railways.
His father would describe how “women alongside the line would lift up their skirts and show the drivers and shovellers their knickers, and how in return they’d throw them some coal. He told that as a joke, but when you think what’s going on there it’s not quite so funny – poor people being reduced to flashing at passing trains, to humiliating themselves, in return for a basic necessity.”
My mind turns to now, and the idea of mass amateurisation, as popularised by Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody—that the new media age empowers the individual to the height of a professional institution. Then I think of the likes of OnlyFans, and wonder how much of their growth is built upon poor people exchanging humiliation for necessity.