Ahoy lovely email friends and I hope all is just tickety-boo with you, or at least pointing in that direction.
This is the last 💥BLAST! for now. What a tremendous honour has been to take a place in your inbox over these last three years. I do mean that: your inbox and attention are under constant attack, so it’s been a privilege to share some things with you almost every week.
And all while steadfastly ignoring the antics of social media and broader world events, at a time when both have felt like an onslaught. 💥BLAST! has stuck to an arbitrary notion of interestingness, laced with doses of mental wellbeing and, for the heck of it, the occasional obsession of mine. Maniacal billionaires, tech giants, populist politicians and that damn virus rarely passed the test, with exceptions made only for artistic or other positive responses to them.
I love newsletters. I’m subscribed to a great many, from the good to the truly excellent. Putting them together is enormously rewarding, and also surprisingly time-consuming. This coming year I’m going to invest that time in other projects, both online and offline. Of course, projects are projects—they ebb and flow—and there’s always the possibility of picking up where we’re leaving off. If so, you’ll be first to know.
I want to thank, as I often do, those who’ve replied to me: whether with praise or criticism, in violent (dis)agreement or, at worst, automatically: telling me they’re in meetings all day (I’m sorry!) or are on holiday (good idea!) or have now left the company (well done!). And that really is the worst of it: no trolls, no conspiracy-theorists, no cryptotossers: just nice people being generous with their time. Thank you. 😘
So for now, this is not so much goodbye as chífidh mé arís thú. I leave you with every single back-issue and, as usual, a small heap of interesting things to click upon. Ready? Let’s do it!
⚠️ How can you tell if the company you’re interviewing with is rotten on the inside? There are no perfect companies, just like there are no perfect relationships; but there are many questions and techniques you can use to increase your confidence that a particular company is decent and self-aware, one whose quirks and foibles you are compatible with. See also: 3 Tips for Surviving a Toxic Workplace.
🔬 The Way You Think Everything Is Connected Isn’t the Way Everything Is Connected: Quantum physics? String theory? Yeah everything’s connected. But wait—not like that. This post pulls the real science out of the confusion.
🛖 How to design a house to last 1000 years: In a world of sustained economic growth, buildings get torn down or demolished since the present value of any extra life would be less than the cost to purchase it. But this cycle is relatively modern—medieval houses would often last for centuries, and there are examples from around the world of buildings that have lasted for many hundreds or even thousands of years while remaining in use. So it’s an interesting thought experiment: what would a modern single family home designed to maximise service life look like? What would we have to do to get an expected lifetime of, say, 1000 years? How would it differ from the houses we’re used to seeing? See also: Building without heating: how to build healthy, comfortable homes with virtually no heating.
🐩 Do Animals Understand What It Means to Die? Primates carry their dead infants; elephants return to where relatives lay dead. To explain these behaviors, scientists have to answer questions that have vexed philosophers for millennia.
🍋 Why a bank robber thought covering himself in lemon juice would help him get away with it: One day in 1995, a large, heavy middle-aged man robbed two Pittsburgh banks in broad daylight. He didn’t wear a mask or any sort of disguise. And he smiled at surveillance cameras before walking out of each bank. Later that night, police arrested a surprised McArthur Wheeler. When they showed him the surveillance tapes, Wheeler stared in disbelief. “But I wore the juice,” he mumbled. Police concluded that Wheeler was not crazy or on drugs—just incredibly mistaken.
🧪 The Gentrification of Consciousness: San Francisco’s Mission district has become synonymous with well-paid tech workers displacing non-white longtime residents. It’s now the setting for a new battle, as the coming psychedelic-industrial complex threatens to strip hallucinogenic drugs of their historical and religious significance.
👁 Fox Heads On Sticks: Michael Cumming On The Continuing Legacy Of Brass Eye: It’s 25 years since the arrival of Brass Eye. The show stands out, still, because of how it melds visual comedy and satirical comment seamlessly. Director Michael Cumming is heading out on the road to celebrate.
📻 John Peel Roulette: There are over 200 full John Peel shows on YouTube, making it hard to know where to start. So here’s a thing that loads a random show at a random moment, at the click of a button. See also: Artists open up John Peel’s historic vinyl collection.
I could never claim this as an original idea, but the inclusion of the Mystery Link has proved enduringly popular over this last year. I’ve derived a certain pleasure from the fact that, by painstakingly describing the regular list of inclusions above, I’ve been effectively talking you out of exploring them.
So what better way to sign off than with a little bit of blind mystery. Count me down, would you? In…