Good afternoon lovely email friends, hope all is well. That there John Higgs, author extraordinare, has me thinking about William Blake. This is something I’ve not had cause to do before which, I rather think, is exactly what Higgs is up to. The best discoveries are unexpected, see. Here’s the book, the clever blighter.
🛴 Voi e-scooters are replacing more walking and cycling than car journeys: If you subscribed to this thing very early on, you may remember I am interested in electric scooters, or more specifically what they indicate. Superficially, they look like they might unlock urban dependence on high-emission transport, but not only are they not so climate-friendly after all, they also can now be shown not to reduce car journeys.
🦗 On the torment of insect minds and our moral duty not to farm them: In the continuing hunt for cheap, ethical and sustainable protein, insect farming bakes, boils and shreds animals by the trillion. This article argues it’s immoral, risky and won’t resolve the climate crisis.
🫂 How to Help Someone With Depression: The author of this article, having experienced depression first-hand, looked around and saw so people stressed out or on antidepressants that it provoked a question: how do you actually help someone with depression while remaining calm and grounded yourself? What follows is an exhaustive guide with evidence-based strategies and word-for-word scripts sourced from depression experts: things you can say and do if someone tells you they’re struggling.
🌦 How summer 2021 has changed our understanding of extreme weather: Serious floods in China and western Europe, heatwaves and drought in North America and wildfires in the sub-Arctic: a succession of record-breaking natural disasters have swept the globe in recent weeks. Their interconnectedness means it’s time to shift the focus from extreme weather, and onto compound events. See also: California’s Farmers Are Pumping Too Much Water From Their Wells.
✋ Sometimes You Have to Quit to Get Ahead: An oldie but a goodie, this. If you know anything about project management, you’ll be familiar with the idea that the force of sunk cost has a powerful distorting effect in good decision-making. Any half-decent project-management model includes mechanisms to firm up the inputs feeding a decision whether or not to continue with a thing. Keep that thought running while considering the saying: “winners never quit, and quitters never win.” What if we’ve been looking at quitting all wrong? What if, rather than a step backward, quitting with intention can be a way to leap toward your goals?
🦾 Factories of the future: we’re spending heavily to give workers skills they won’t need by 2030: When I first saw a computer, aged six or seven, my first thought was why on earth were we wasting time learning cursive handwriting. But then everything starts to look stupid at that age. Then in adulthood, one key advantage of a job I used to do was lots of factory visits—I love a factory, me. Modern factories are seldom built to house hundreds of craftspeople; they’re automated production lines. Yet the common view, no doubt exacerbated by populist politicians, is that factories create mass employment for skilled workers. So what skills should we now be training tomorrow’s workforce? See also: Where Are The Robotic Bricklayers?
😴 How did people sleep in the Middle Ages? Typically people go to sleep for seven to nine hours straight from evening to morning, but was that always the case? A book on the history of sleeping shows that during the Middle Ages people typically slept in two periods during the night.
🎶 How sad ’trailercore’ movie trailer cover songs peaked: Pick a song, any song. Slow it down, thin it out and you’ve got a cover version fit for a movie trailer. It’s so common that it’s a genre in its own right.
🥁 There’s a scientific reason why humans love drumming: More than many other species, humans love a get-together. Scientists have determined that the sound of drums alerts our senses and triggers the need to move, and being able to signify rhythm and beats is part of our social make-up.
🔥 Burning a million pounds: There’s not been a KLF reference here for aaaages so that’s as good excuse as any for this. I think about the act of burning the money and deleting the back catalogue quite often. For me what has elevated it from stunt to artwork is just how unusual it is for an artist to check out of the Hotel California that is the music business.