Welcome to Thursday Thirteen, my weekly digest of links to things I have found interesting and which I think you might be intrigued by as well.
The most popular link last week was this essay about "what the book section likes", with Simone Giertz's house tour a close second.
What I'm up to: Doing my best not to let January 2025 get me down. I made big batches of Priya Krishna's Everyday Dal and Coconut Saag to be my lunches this week and that's been very cheering. The saag is excellent with tofu.
Here are thirteen more things this Thursday that I wanted to share with you:
- Did I sign up for the link-sharing site are.na purely because Tavi Gevinson said she liked it in a recent interview? Yes. Do I understand anything about how it works? No. But I am enjoying clicking my way around and this recent editorial about how different the world would be if we all behaved like moss (?) was interesting.
- Timely serialised fiction from 1901. The Inheritors was written by Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford and satirises the colonial and aristocratic corruption they observed in the world. It follows a class of "cold materialists" who want to annexe and exploit Greenland.
- Lovely writing about a poet's chance rescue of an abandoned kitten in Japan in 1977:
"My cat was called simply Mii. We sometimes nicknamed her Mii-tan, but her formal name was Mii Inaba. I simply couldn’t manage to come up with a better name for her, however hard I tried. Her mew-mii, mew-mii way of crying that I’d first heard when she was hanging there in the dark had somehow stuck in my heart and wouldn’t go away. And thereafter, whenever I called her name, she would naturally answer me, mii. Mii had decided on her own name with the sound of her cries."
- Try not to cry while reading this letter Marie Curie wrote to her dead husband Pierre in her "mourning journal".
- It cheers me so much that the band OK Go is still making absurdly over-complicated music videos. This latest one is made up of 64 different takes, screened simultaneously on 64 phones. I will always enjoy the work of people who are willing to do the most.
- A poem by a gardener about the contradictions in a formal landscape.
- This generator will provide, on each click, a different euphemistic and professionally palatable way to say "hell no". My favourites so far: "That's an interesting perspective for our long-term roadmap" and "We should let this marinate a bit longer".
- A behind-the-scenes look at how a longform investigation into a stalker of Asian-American professors made it into print. Working this way is a vanishing luxury most writers today will never get to experience but it's still fascinating to read about.
- I'd completely forgotten about the game Battleships, but this online version is the perfect thing to play while on hold to the plumbing company that still hasn't fixed your leaking kitchen tap (just for example).
- Browse the peppermills of Jens Quistgaard:
- Why is Everyone Suddenly Reading Middlemarch? As a mental defence against the oncoming tide of AI slop, basically.
- Mark Zuckerberg will never understand why we don't love him. The gold chain is very funny to me.
- There are so many gems in this Trojan horse of a Vanity Fair cover story about Harry and Megan's big relaunch. It seems to be just another celebrity puff piece, but by quoting so many "insiders" verbatim without much comment from the writer, it gradually builds a picture of how unhinged your world becomes when everyone you talk to is your employee (or profiting from you in some other way) and therefore won't tell you "no, that's a stupid idea". For instance, during their ill-fated Spotify deal, "Harry wanted to host a series where he interviewed powerful men with complicated stories, like Mark Zuckerberg, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump". This was known internally as "the sociopath podcast" and was predicated on the fact that Harry's mother was "essentially murdered" yet he hadn't turned into a mad strongman. I had to pause reading at this point and stare into space for five minutes while I thought about the ego contortions required to consider that a good or even vaguely executable concept. And that's just the contents of one paragraph.
