As An Unsuccessful Teenage Oboist...

Dear friends,

You find me fully in the grip of what I call The December Delusion, in which I believe I can definitely get a lot of work done ahead so I can take time off over Christmas while also going to social events, doing a choir performance most nights, getting all the gifts bought, and sending Christmas cards. My best wishes to all those who also celebrate this annual event.

If you ever want to talk to me, you can just reply to this email. The most popular link last time was whichcountrytomoveto.com, with the well-dressed font man coming second.

What I'm up to: I'm the guest on NPR's Fresh Air today, in conversation about hypochondria with Terry Gross herself! It airs live across the US throughout the afternoon, depending on where you are based, and then will be available to listen back after broadcast here and here too.

Here are thirteen more things this Thursday that I wanted to share with you:

1. A superb video explaining how to use data visualisation techniques to master the timings of any complicated roast meal.
2. In the past few weeks, I have been looking critically at my media diet. I am keener than ever to understand politics and policy without having to imbibe a constant flow of psychodrama to get it. I get most of my news from radio and podcasts, so these are the switches I'm making.

• Music rather than talk radio as my everyday background. For me, that means BBC Radio 3, ClassicFM and BBC Radio 6 Music, depending on the time of day. The brief hourly news bulletins let me know which stories are truly cutting through to the wider population and which are not (and can therefore be safely ignored as Westminster/Washington bubble stuff).
• Podcasts that broaden my horizons rather than narrow them. For ongoing monitoring and consumption, I like:
  • Monocle's daily show The Globalist, which is made from London but covers all countries equally — ie an election in Iceland or a major new law in Australia gets as much airtime as the latest UK government announcement.
  • Podlitical from BBC Sounds, which comes from the BBC Scotland newsroom in Glasgow and covers UK politics with a Holyrood/Cardiff/Stormont bias.
  • Three feeds from BBC Local Radio/Regions that are infrequently updated but always worth the time when they are: Multi Story, In Detail and In Court. All three aggregate often very good local reporting on big stories that rarely gets much air time on bigger channels. Multi Story sadly hasn't been updated since 2021, but I live in hope.
• Lastly, I like to drop in temporarily on shows made by outlets based in a place I'm currently interested in. At the time of writing, for instance, the Irish general election has almost finished counting, and I'm listening to Election Daily from the Irish Times to get my information about it.

3. Are your local community spaces online (Facebook groups) totally flooded with Boaver stuff too? This longread about how big data changed the US dairy industry felt timely.
4. Fancy architecture, but for dogs:

5. On breaking up with Wordle.
6. I remember so vividly that morning after an awful night before, when I had taken a big romantic swing and it had not worked out the way I had hoped. A colleague, immediately understanding the nature of my distress and knowing that we could not discuss it properly while at the office, emailed me an extremely appropriate edition of the "Ask Polly" column (then published at The Awl, RIP) on the hour, every hour, until we could leave and go to the pub for a weepy debrief. Heather Havrilesky, the writer of that column, now publishes it independently and occasionally sends out a classic from the archive. This is how I came to read 'Help, I'm The Loneliest Person In The World!' for the first time in a decade and find myself sobbing at my computer screen. I am so different now, and yet I still need the same advice. Maybe you do too.
7. Sometimes it's good to stick your face into some very mass culture. This is a playlist of the 100 most streamed songs on Spotify, ever.
8. The modern equivalent of those chalk figures carved into hills? People are making interesting designs with solar farms.
9. Paul Graham on how the age of AI is going to divide us into the "writes and the write-nots", because there will be no reason for people who don't enjoy writing or aren't good at it to ever do it. This is bad, by the way.
10. A well-reported piece about coming to terms with the fact that you might not ever "recover" from burnout.

"Burnout asks me whether I really need to claw at the whole world with both hands. And it suggests that what I’m holding is already more than enough. There is a wealth all around. I need only to dwell within it, and witness it, rather than rushing on to the next thing. And I need people, of course, to care for and receive care from, so that I can continue to remain here as long as my body lets me."

11. WhenPhoto, a game where you are shown a series of photographs and must guess the year in which each was taken.
12. I am a sucker for a vlogger who documents an interesting-to-me life. This one is an oboe student at Juilliard. As an unsuccessful teenage oboist, I am hooked.
13. Buying a TV in 2024 is surprisingly hard, if you want it to a) look good b) work with all your other stuff and c) not spy on you too much.

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Until next time,

Caroline