The Background Nun Playing The Violin

Dear friends,

Thank you very much for all the kind responses to my appearance on Fresh Air last week. It meant a lot, sincerely, to have so many strangers tell me they were proud of me.

If you do ever want to talk to me, you can just reply to this email. The most popular link last time was "Wordle and I Are Breaking Up", with "Help, I'm The Loneliest Person In The World!" coming a close second.

What I'm up to: I released my fifth Christmas-themed episode of Shedunnit this week. I am as surprised as you are that I still have things to say about festive murder mysteries. And for the small number of people who like my monthly reading updates, I promise the long-overdue November one will be with you in the next day or so. If you don't currently get those in your inbox and you would like to, toggle on "Reading Updates" in your account menu.

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

1. It feels like List Season has started early this year. I blame Spotify Wrapped, which was at best underwhelming and at worst terrifying for the glimpse behind the AI-generated curtain that it offered. However, I did like this list of "The New Rules Of Media" from the anti-algorithmic publication One Thing. It opens with this, which as a person who tries/is trying to share work with people on the internet felt a little too real:

Everything is a personality cult, and maybe just a cult. You have to cultivate your own, no matter how small. To do so you must always be relatable, but also ideally aspirational. Just don’t get too out of the reach of your cultists.

2. It turns out, some people (Margaret Thatcher?) are just genetically wired to need less sleep than me, a person who feels exhausted if she doesn't get 8.5 hours a night. Join me in finding them both despicable and fascinating.
3. Maybe you need to hear this: You don’t actually have to stay on Twitter.
4. One of the greatest things the internet has ever done is rehabilitate the reputation of Baroness Schraeder from The Sound of Music, mostly via that incredible McSweeney's piece from 2011. Now, comedian and songwriter Riki Lindhome has taken the lore one step further by rewriting "So Long, Farewell" to be from the Baroness's perspective. Her performance video is pitch-perfect, right down to the smallest details of the costume and the background nun playing the violin:

5. This was interesting: Anne Helen Petersen's "Brief Theory of the Modern Gift Guide" holds that we have all retreated so far into our personality-based niches that mainstream recommendation sites like Wirecutter can no longer adequately serve us.

6. Sandy Duthie, pictured above, thinks he landed his new job as a solo lighthouse keeper on a remote Australian island because of his enormous beard. I agree with him.
7. Why have I only just learned of the BBC Micro Games Archive? I spent a very happy hour the other day playing "Roman Adventure", a text-based game I last saw on a terminal in my primary school in 1994.
8. Speaking of games, I'm intrigued by "Short Trip", a recently-released illustrated game with a most charming summary — "The cats living along the mountain railway have places to be. You, the sole cat operating the tram, have the delightful duty of transporting them." Here's the trailer:

9. The train nerd in me enjoyed perusing this performance report that highlights Europe's best and worst train operators on several different factors. To nobody's surprise, the three most costly operators (Avanti, Eurostar and GWR) are in the UK.
10. Back in September, I finished reading A Radical Romance by Alison Light, a memoir about her marriage to the historian Raphael Samuel. Delving more into Samuel's work after I finished led me to the History Workshop movement. Their website has one of the most interesting "books to read" lists I've seen yet this year, themed as it is around "radical" approaches to memoir, science, craft and more. I added The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine by Rozsika Parker to my to-be-read list so fast after perusing this list.
11. A victim explains a new type of scam he experienced: a "spamalanche", where the scammer signed him up for hundreds of email mailing lists hoping to conceal the notifications of unauthorised purchases made with his stolen credit card number.
12. I nodded vigorously through Celine Nguyen's first-year review of her newsletter, personal canon. Even as I've just been gently easing myself back into newslettering the past couple of months I've had several readers ask me for tips on how to do this, and I think in future I will just direct everyone to this post. It's far more comprehensive and helpful than I could ever be. To whit:

"My high-level advice — which supersedes everything below — is that you should decide what you want from your writing, and then completely ignore any advice which detracts from this goal."

13. Self-explanatory: pics of people taking pics.

I send a few different types of post as part of this newsletter: personal essays, reading updates and book reviews, reflections on my own writing, and links round-ups like this one. If you would like to receive some but not all of these, you can adjust those settings in your account menu.

I'm writing this in my free time, but if you would like to support my work, you have a few options. Forward this newsletter to a friend and encourage them to sign up. Subscribe to my podcast, Shedunnit, in your app of choice, or if you are already a listener, become a member of the Shedunnit Book Club. Buy my books — The Way to the Sea and A Body Made of Glass — or borrow them from your local library. Purchase a subscription for yourself or a friend to The Browser. Thank you for reading.

Until next time,

Caroline