Hello lovely email friends, hope you’re well. Millie is supervising me closely this week. If it were up to her, all the interesting things included this week would be fish. Particularly of the canned and/or freeze-dried variety. I sometimes wonder what would happen if she met a live tuna. I sense she wouldn’t like it as much as she does when it comes in a can. Right, care for some non-fish-related interesting things?
📚 Cataloguing BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time using Dewey Decimal Classification: In Our Time is a weekly live radio programme in which Melvyn Bragg and several academics elucidate on a topic of a philosophical, historical, cultural or scientific nature: very clever people saying very clever things for forty-five minutes. The series has clocked up nearly a thousand episodes, but the website only sorts the episodes into very broad topics. Which is why this brave soul, with his librarian’s brain, has reorganised the episodes using a library classification system.
😞 Why ‘mood shame’ is bad for you: It’s sometimes tempting to beat yourself up for not feeling sunnier – but there’s good reason to embrace those grumps. See also: Why it pays to be grumpy and bad-tempered.
📈 The five Levels of Hype: It’s rightfully often spurred as misleading bullshit or ignorant boosterism, but hype also has its uses. In short: when it comes to creating a new technology you need to sell a vision to attract the resources you need (people, investment, etc.). Hype can also act as glue. At its best, it can create a shared vision pulling the actors in the same direction and thus creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
🚀 How Ad Men Invented the Future: Post-war artists sold us a vision of a luxurious, automated suburban lifestyle.
✍️ How to write 3D letters: Right, it’s definitely time for some Japanese calligraphy, is it not? And while this might not be something you need to do, it’s certainly something you need to know how to do. Also, treat this as the gateway-drug into this channel of extraordinary penpersonship.
🎤 The resurrection of Betty Boo: Unlikely pop sensation, feminist icon and comeback queen, Alison Clarkson’s alter ego is coming back again. Again!
🪆 Landscapes of Russia: panoramas and cityviews from the largest nation on Earth: The Cold War might have left an image of Russia in your head as being drab concrete, but the world’s largest nation is a rich tapestry of extraordinary landscapes.
😅 Remember when Sony released a boombox that was also a ‘groovebox’? Of course not, but somehow it’s now been plucked from obscurity and given a thorough probing. I’m a cautious fan of mashing technological ideas together—we’d never have had the smartphone without it—but does this weird Frankenstein have merit? You decide.
🙉 What We Don’t Want to Know: Do you want to know what you’ll get for Christmas? A movie spoiler? When you’ll die? The study of deliberate ignorance reveals the topics people want to remain in the dark about.