Good afternoon lovely email friends, hope you’re okay. There’s something about wrapping the world’s largest tree in aluminium foil to guard it against wildfires that illustrates our contemptuous relationship with the planet that raised us. I sometimes wonder whether this, and our other limitations, derives from our tendency to view the world through the lens of a human lifespan.
That giant sequoia they call General Sherman is at least 2,300 years old. Its eponym, William Tecumseh Sherman, lived for 71 years. To the tree, a human life must seem fleeting. To be named after one would be equivalent to me being named after something as ephemeral as Katy Perry’s marriage to Russell Brand.
If we were serious about preserving this or any tree beyond a human lifetime, it would begin not with what we protect, but what we burn. It means rather than continuing to explore for fossil fuels, we abandon them. This seems incomprehensibly hard, but only if viewed through the prism of our own lives.
🏠 ISO standard will create guidelines for carbon-neutral buildings: Due to be published next year, the new ISO standard will for the first time provide an internationally-recognised benchmark for carbon neutrality. It aims to clear up confusion over what the term means and how it differs from the more onerous net-zero standard.
👻 Stately Ghosts of England: This is excellent. Actress and occult buff Margaret Rutherford tours three English manors haunted by ancient ghosts with her clairvoyant friend. [Thanks AC!]
🏐 Can Welsh Handball Bounce Back From the Brink of Extinction? The ancient sport of Pêl-Law hangs on, barely, at the last court of its kind. A campaign to revive a related game may help bring it back.
🚀 Jeff Bezos Launches Us to 1892: An interesting longform argument that Jeff Bezos is no innovator. Rather, he’s copying his moves straight from industrialists of old. Having monopolised the cutting-edge industry of our day, internet commerce, he’s making an early bid to do the same with the next frontier. The people who lived through the consolidation of steel and the rise of the capitalist tyrant of the 1890s predicted exactly this.
🦹♀️ The Mysterious Figure Stealing Books Before Their Release: For years, a mysterious figure has been stealing books before their release. Is it espionage? Revenge? Or a complete waste of time?
🎧 When Songs Meet Podcasts: Music streaming and podcasts used to be two distinct things. One had songs, the other had people talking. Radio successfully combined both, but this was in another century. Now music streaming and podcasting are increasingly converging and the developments could eventually be very interesting.
🔌 The ‘Dead-Internet Theory’ Is Wrong but Feels True: A conspiracy theory spreading online says the whole internet is now fake. It’s ridiculous, but possibly not that ridiculous?
📚 Why books donʼt work vs. Why Books Work And Could Work Better: It’s not often on the web that two well-considered but opposing arguments are available, so these should surely be taken together. In one corner, the form of a book is not conducive to transmitting and absorbing information. In the other corner, the absorbing of information, or not, is a learned skill rather than a result of formatting.