Happy Wednesday lovely email friends, hope all’s well with you. I don’t mind telling you this week’s email almost didn’t happen, since I’d fallen straight down the rabbithole that is the Thames Television archive. Anyway, here it is, with this week’s selection of interesting things:
🎙 Which Singers Have the Biggest Vocabularies? For some stars, a big vocabulary is priceless. Singer-songwriters from Patti Smith to Nick Cave have built careers with songs whose rich language is as important as the music. This article studies how the diversity of words used by current-generation stacks up against musical legends.
🚸 Lego to remove gender bias from its toys after findings of child survey: a global survey commissioned by the company found attitudes to play and future careers remain unequal and restrictive, reenforcing harmful stereotypes that are still hindering girls and boys.
🏰 An ultimate guide to memory palaces: The brain is poor for storing information but strong at formulating ideas. Some can harness this imaginative aspect for the recall of complex information. This explains how it’s done.
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🐒 The oral history of 12 Monkeys, Terry Gilliam’s time travel masterpiece: The first time I watched 12 Monkeys, I disliked it so much that I felt compelled to watch it again. I’m so, so grateful I did. This article records the recollections of director Terry Gilliam and nine other people involved in the making of this 1996 sci-fi cult classic.
⛏ English archaeology map based on 500,000 aerial pictures: Photographs and 3D laser scans have been taken over the past 30 years to uncover hidden archaeological landscapes.
🔥 Review: ‘Who Killed The KLF?’: Hollywood Reporter looks over director Chris Atkins’ new documentary, showing how The KLF was a pop gateway into performance art. See also: John Higgs’ delightfully profound The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band who Burned a Million Pounds.
🔌 How A-ha made Norway take on electric vehicles: Surprisingly, the Norwegian pop-group was instrumental in its country embracing world-leading electric vehicle subsidies.
📥 Returning to the Office and the Future of Work: The pandemic has reminded us there’s more to life than work. So what will we do differently now?