Duvet Burrito
How pop lost interest in the key change. Is TikTok killing off the bridge?
Science fiction is a Luddite literature.
What topological magic is this?
The super rich are inevitable.
Old News
The lost art of having a chat. The nostalgia memes that help explain Britain today.
English is a lot more French than we thought.
I’m a decade late to this story, but it’s still awful: a Mayan pyramid was bulldozed by a road construction firm.
Toast of the Toun
Voter ID in Britain is “far worse than any US state”. How the U.K. became one of the poorest countries in Western Europe.
After the Halloween horror in Korea, here are ten tips for surviving a crowd crush.
How Ukraine won the battle for Kyiv. There’s a harrowing 90-minute documentary on Mariupol: The People’s Story on iPlayer at the moment. It’s devastating to see the human impact, and to have the story of its destruction laid out all at once.
Doctors using AI catch breast cancer more often than either does alone.
The icy village where you must remove your appendix.
I binged on Fern Brady’s stuff on iPlayer last year, before she became the breakout star of the latest series of Taskmaster. Fern Brady Goes Viral has sadly dropped out of view for the time being, but there are excerpts on YouTube. Here’s a podcast featuring Brady on autistic meltdowns, understanding emotions and being the black sheep.
All 125 times a professor said “beef” in one lecture.
Crumbs. “A prankster spun a web of deception about the inventor of the electric toaster … one Scottish primary school organised a day of activities in his memory” [via Mefi]. Our kids have been at Scottish primary schools during the timespan of this hoax. This is all too close to home (appliances).
Moai on Fire
Treat your to-do list like a river.
The man who doodled his abode.
The most visited website in every country.
Smooth Criminals
How to nurture a personal library.
How catchy, disposable songs came to dominate the music industry.
Eat a Dinner, Mattress Wayne
Britain from afar. The party’s over. Liz Truss will make Johnson seem a political genius. We have to stop normalising the absurd.
The Queue is a triumph of Britishness. A rolling thread about the Queue. An interim solution to the Queue. We queue in this country.
The tipping points the world is failing to heed.
Humus Remains
Statistical analysis has laid to rest the Covid-19 lab-leak theory.
A reevaluation of key passages of the New Testament with profound implications.
Talk to the Handfish
Song of the Summer. A World on Fire.
Hot-weather tips from Cambodia, India, Saudi Arabia and Australia.
A new ozone hole has been discovered over the tropics.
The amateur investors ruined by the crypto crash.
The YouTube scuba divers solving cold cases.
How Scotland is reinventing its canals. We’ve lived a short walk from one for twenty years. Impressive to think that it was so radically improved only a year or two before we moved here.
Mammoth Finds
Months after a burst of underwater explosions created an immense crater, many Tongans are still without internet access, while Australia and New Zealand are seeing dazzling sunsets.
How Tonga thwarted a new libertarian nation.
A mammoth find in Mexico City. A baby mammoth found in the Klondike.