Hello,
Welcome to the newsletter — it’s been a while!
I should start by answering some questions you might have:
Where have you been?
Erm... Nowhere, really. I wish I had a better answer for why it’s been so long but life just got in the way. Work has been reasonably tough and New York has been opening up. I buried myself in the job and then at 5pm each day, when the whistle blew, I slid down the dinosaur’s tail, through the roof of the car, and hightailed it out into the world to see all these places that finally didn’t have “Closed until further notice” signs hanging in the window.
Why does the newsletter look different?
I’ve finally given in and moved from MailChimp to Substack. I won’t bore you with all the details of that particular decision, but in short I felt that MailChimp had clumsily morphed into a mar-tech stack for running e-commerce campaigns. Given that all I do is slap together a few links and a bit of commentary, I no longer felt like paying $30 a month for all that surplus capability.
Quick thoughts on Substack:
It’s delightfully easy to use by comparison.
Readers can comment under each newsletter if you follow the link, and I encourage you to do so.
I can post blogs without emailing them to you all, which gives me a neat and discrete space to get into some of the stuff that previously would have been too long as intro-fodder.
So maybe I’ll do a post and bore you there about MailChimp vs Substack? Let me know in the comments.
The end of that last point made me sound like a YouTuber. Crap.
There are some question marks for me around the Substack platform but for now, if it gets me back to writing, then I’ll answer them at a later date.
Is the newsletter always going to be this short?
All my muscles for putting this thing together have stiffened up. This intro might be the first thing you’re reading, but as ever it’s the last thing I’m writing. A dull ache is developing. It’s as if I’ve gone for my first run in a while. This edition is a cleaning out of the links that have built up. In fact, in the end I only went through the last three hundred links I had saved. I binned the rest. It felt amazing. Like a digital exorcism.
Right, that’s enough of that.
If you’re new here, welcome, if you’ve been here before, welcome back, and if you unsubscribe when you see this, you’re welcome!
On with the news...
A new study puts forward the “babble hypothesis”, which suggests that it is the quantity of speaking from an individual — not the quality of speaking — that determines who the “leader” is. I’ve been in these meetings. My life is these meetings.
Apple is back with another superb instalment of the Apple at Work series.
Just going to leave this here: “Analysts have cited Burger King’s marketing as a drag on performance”. Called it.
A slightly older piece (can you tell I’m clearing out a backlog?) but this description from Dave Dye of moving Milky Bar through the creative process feels as timeless as it does infuriating.
Why does the same London billboard keep showing up in ad campaigns?
Excellent initiative from Arsenal football club who are making ads for local businesses.
Lego is donating MRI scanner kits to help hospitals reduce anxiety in children.
I enjoyed this blog post from Tom Darlington about Dark Matter and Trojan Horses.
This chap Rob Mayhew seems to be everywhere at the moment — brutal.
Please don’t get me started on the “metaverse”. Just don’t. It’s not a thing. Here, Chenoe Hart makes a compelling argument for the complete opposite — instead of us disappearing inside screens, what happens when screens become so thin, so cheap, and so instantly reactive to their environment that we can no longer see the edges of their surface? Take it with a pinch of salt — the only proper way to consume any sort of tech-futurism — but something in this feels infinitely more plausible than the idea of ever pulling on one of Zuckerberg’s cursed helmets.
The Gender Pay Gap Bot was one of the highlights of International Women’s Day, popping up alongside disingenuous platitudinal posts from companies across Twitter and revealing if they practice what they preach.
The Drink is a two-minute short film, made entirely with CGI on a platform called Blender. The creator, William Landgren, studied footage of old movies to get a sense of the angles and grading, bought some of the more complicated props from an online marketplace called Sketchfab, and found a voiceover artist on Instagram to bring the script to life. Oh, and he’s 14 years old…
Somebody call the police, this piece has murdered the whole concept of TED talks.
A beautiful exploration from the New York Times of WH Auden’s poem Musée Des Beaux Arts. The mechanic of scrolling and zooming works superbly, accompanied by writing that explains the poetry simply, without pandering to, or patronizing the reader.
Fight Club ends very differently in China.
The Federal Reserve has written a paper about the opportunities and risks in creating a Central Bank Digital Currency. Like all writing on the subject it raises more questions than answers. Unlike 99% of writing on the subject it’s clear and (relatively) simple to read.
107 years after it sank, The Endurance has been found.
I will grudgingly admit, cursed helmets aside, that I’m mildly intrigued by the idea of “passthrough” in VR. Like poor man’s AR?
The original proposal for C4 Ceefax quiz Bamboozle. Yup, niche.
In his talk Everyday Futures (~30mins), Nick Foster asks why our visions of the future so often scrub away any evidence of the present. He asks, where does the old stuff go? And what do the lives of regular people look like in these impossibly polished utopias?
Dave Grohl did Hot Ones. I would love to have a pint with this man.
The poignant story of Fail we may, Sail we must.
Let’s be careful out there.
Welcome back, welcome to Substack. With care, K
Welcome back!