Good afternoon gorgeous email friends. This week I am thinking about waste. This began literally: my domestic wheeliebin, collected weekly, is dragged out to the kerb almost empty. My recycling bin, collected fortnightly, always bulges with cardboard, cans and plastics. That the respective volumes of my household waste is at odds with the municipal collection suggests I’m not in step with the general population.
But then, another way to think about this is visibility. Domestic waste is highly visible, since I handle each item of it. But waste resulting from my actions is usually obscured: the banana I didn’t buy, that nobody bought, was grown and transported for my convenience but ultimately wasted. So while I may appear to be out of step, it may be that my passive waste is much greater. Who can say.
A more efficient future will demand an attitudinal shift from thinking only about the waste we can see, to all waste—whether we handle it or not. So waste in the biggest sense is this week’s tone.
No 💥BLAST! next week as I’ve decided to inject a short fallow period. Each of us has something we’re good at advising others to do but terrible at doing outselves: this is mine. Feel free to crack open a back-issue such as this one on bananas, this one on ducks, or this list of forty things I’d learned just by living for forty years.
🏺 Lessons from the Vessel: Designing cities to prevent suicide: Just as the pandemic was looming, the last place I visited was Thomas Heatherwick’s extravagant installation of stairs to nowhere in Manhattan. I elected not to climb it. In July, a 14-year-old boy jumped to his death from the Vessel: the fourth suicide that has occurred there since the pseudo-public space opened in March 2019. Remarkably, it is also the second time the Vessel has been closed due to a suicide: After the third death in January 2021, new safety measures were put in place, but it took only two months to be proven ineffective. What happened at the Vessel is devastating, but not unexpected.
🍽 I Use Food To Bond With My Father In Prison: The father of this food journalist first went to jail when she was just a few years old and, as a result, so many of the early food memories she associates with him are related to his incarceration. This is an interesting account of food. loss and love.
🕵️♀️ Hush-Hush Boom-Boom: Charles Glass ponders the creation of the CIA. Without James Bond creator Ian Fleming, according to journalist Alexander Cockburn, ’the Cold War would have ended in the early 1960s. We would have had no Vietnam, no Nixon, no Reagan and no Star Wars.’ In may 1941, Lieutenant Commander Fleming undertook a secret mission to Washington, in which he was ‘whisked off to a room in the new annexe of the embassy, locked in with a pen and paper and the necessities of life’, a colleague recalled, and there he wrote, ‘under armed guard around the clock, a document of some seventy pages covering every aspect of a giant secret intelligence and secret operational organisation’. This, the CIA’s official history reports, was the genesis of ’the nation’s first peacetime, non-departmental intelligence organisation’. See also: How ordinary people are convinced to become spies.
🖨 The rise of 3D-printed houses: 3D printing is already employed to make things ranging from orthopaedic implants to components for aircraft. By varying the shape, and sometimes the composition of each layer, objects can be crafted that would be difficult or impossible to produce with conventional techniques. And unlike conventional processes, no material is wasted. The house the robots built
🦄 The rise of the one-person unicorn: Speaking of rising, the way we build startups is changing, and with that change comes the rise of a new breed of company: bootstrapped, cash generative, and growing like crazy.
🚙 The haunting abandoned wrecks of rural France: Southern France is covered in abandoned cars. Once you venture off the beaten path, they seem to grow like chanterelles in the autumn. Each one has a unique story to tell.
🌊 Europe’s July floods: So rare and extreme, they’re hard to study: When researchers compared the floods on the river Ahr to historic flooding records, disasters of this magnitude would be expected to have a return period in the neighbourhood of once every 15,000 years—so large that the researchers don’t have much confidence in the value. Even if they took the absolute lowest value in the uncertainty range, the return period is once in 700 years. Did a 1912 Newspaper Article Predict Global Warming?
🤪 How Life Became an Endless, Terrible Competition: Meritocracy prizes achievement above all else, making everyone—even the rich—miserable. Maybe there’s a way out.