Lessons learned from making newspapers

There’s bravery in brevity. Small is considerate, difficult, and valuable. Most books should be a blog post. Most blog posts should be a tweet. Most tweets shouldn’t be.

Keep track of what delights you about other newsletters — not what engages you (that’s too easy — A.I. can do that). Engagement is good for a few sentences. Delight builds anticipation for the next issue. You’re probably not producing enough delight. You probably should be.

When stuck, apply another constraint.

https://www.cjchilvers.com/blog/35-lessons-from-35-years-of-newsletter-publishing/

Felipe de Brigard - "Nostalgia doesn't need real memories - an imagined past works just as well"

https://aeon.co/essays/nostalgia-doesnt-need-real-memories-an-imagined-past-works-as-well

A more tractable version of this second reading was championed by Charles Zwingman's medical analysis of nostalgia in 1960, according to which what the subject wants is for gratifying features from past experiences to be reinstated in the present, presumably because the current situation lacks them. Although a person might feel nostalgia about a childhood friendship, her longing would actually be satisfied not by travelling back in time but by improving her current relationships. There are two advantages to this approach. First, it helps to understand nostalgia's particular instantation of Gorgias' paradox: the nostalgic individual wrongly attributes the desirable features of the object to an unrecoverable event, when in reality those features can be dissociated from it and reattached to a current condition. Second, this approach can help to understand recent findings suggesting that nostalgia can be motivational, and can increase optimism, creativity and pro-social behaviours.

Neuroscience tells us that, when we imagine, we redeploy much of the same neural mechanisms that we would have employed had we actually engaged in the simulated action. When we imagine biking, we engage much of the same brain regions we'd have engaged had we actually been biking.

Coined by the Swiss physician Johannes Hofer in 1688, 'nostalgia' referred to a medical condition - homesickness - characterised by an incapacitating longing for one's motherland. Hover favoured the term because it combined two essential features of the illness: the desire to return home (nostos) and the pain (algos) of being unable to do so. Nostalgia's symptomatology was imprecise - it included rumination, melancholia, insomnia, anxiety and lack of appetite - and was thought to affect primarily soldiers and sailors. Physicians also disagreed about its cause. Hofer thought that nostalgia was caused by nerve vibrations where traces of ideas of the motherland 'still cling', whereas others, noticing that is was found predominantly among Swiss soldiers fighting at lower altitudes, proposed instead that nostalgia was caused by changes in atmospheric pressure, or eardrum damage from the clanging of Swiss cowbells. Once nostalgia was identified among soldiers from various nationalities, the idea that it was geographically specific was abandoned.

Indeed, feeling nostalgic for a time one didn't actually live through appears to be a common phenomenon if all the chatrooms, Facebook pages and websites dedicated to it are anything to go by. In fact, a new word has been coined to capture this precise variant of nostalgia – anemoia, defined by the Urban Dictionary and the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows as 'nostalgia for a time you've never known'.

Although memory and imagination are usually thought of as different, a number of critical findings in the past three decades have challenged this view. In 1985, the psychologist Endel Tulving in Toronto observed that his amnesiac patient 'N N' not only had difficulty remembering his past: he also had trouble imagining possible future events. This led Tulving to suggest that remembering the past and imagining the future were two processes of a single system for mental time-travel. Further support for this hypothesis came in the early 2000s, as a number of scientific studies confirmed that both remembering the past and imagining the future engage the brain's so-called 'default network'. But in the past decade, it has become clear that the brain's default network supports mental simulations of other hypothetical events too, such as episodes that could have occured in one's past but didn't, atemporal routine activities (eg, brushing teeth), mind-wandering, spatial navigation, imagining other people's thoughts (mentalising) and narrative comprehension, among others. As a result, researchers now think that what unifies this common neural network isn't just mental time-travel, but rather a more general kind of psychological process characterised by being self-relevant, socially significant and episodically, dynamically imaginative.

Arwen E Nicholson - "There is no planet B"

https://aeon.co/essays/we-will-never-be-able-to-live-on-another-planet-heres-why

In fact, we would have been unable to survive on Earth for around 90 per cent of its history; the oxygen-rich atmosphere that we depend on is a recent feature of our planet.

The earliest part of our planet's history, known as the Hadean aeon, begins with the formation of the Earth. Named after the Greek underworld due to our planet's fiery beginnings, the early Hadean would have been a terrible place with molten lava oceans and an atmosphere of vaporised rock. Next came the Archean aeon, beginning 4 billion years ago, when the first life on Earth flourished. But, as we just saw, the Archean would be no home for a human. The world where our earliest ancestors thrived would kill us in an instant. After the Archean came the Proterozoic, 2.5 billion years ago. In this aeon, there was land, and a more familiar blue ocean and sky. What's more, oxygen finally began to accumulate in the atmosphere. But let's not get too excited: the level of oxygen was less than 10 per cent of what we have today. The air would still have been impossible for us to breathe. This time also experienced global glaciation events known as snowball Earths, where ice covered the globe from poles to equator for millions of years at a time. Earth has spent more of its time fully frozen than the length of time that we humans existed.

Anthony Lane - "Shock and Aftershocks of the Waste Land"

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/10/03/the-shock-and-aftershocks-of-the-waste-land

The shocks have triggered aftershocks, and readers of Eliot are trapped in the quake. Escape is useless:

DA

Datta: what have we given?

My friend, blood shaking my heart

The awful daring of a moment's surrender

Which an age of prudence can never retract

By this, and this only, we have existed

Which is not to be found in our obituaries

Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider

Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor

In our empty rooms

I happen to think, for what it's worth, that these lines, which come toward the end of "The Waste Land," are the greatest that Eliot ever wrote. They cast a shadow of a doubt over everything that we believe about ourselves, at different stages of our lives; over the stories of ourselves that we tell to other people; and over what they tell of us in turn. As always with Eliot, abstraction is offset by the taut particularity of physical things: the spider, the wax seals, and the shuddering blood, concluding in the long and mournful double "o" of "rooms." And the word "surrender" could be applied to so many daring souls: a lover at the instant of ecstasy, a religious devotee, a hounded warrior, a corruptible politician, a wooer who hastens, like Eliot, into a proposal of marriage, or a Dostoyevskian gambler, with the family jewels in his pocket. All of them will face that overwhelming question: "What have we given?" It is something that each of us must ask, on our deathbeds, though nobody wants to die in shame.

the Last of Us (series)

Really good.  "You're forgetting amo!" was a fun feeling while watching.

Story just as good as the game, and eerie to recognize so many settings, actions and dialogue.

Renske Jonkman - "Dit verdronken land"

Prettig te lezen. Al greep het niet enorm diep, een mooi boek.

Triangle of Sadness

Fun film where a luxury cruise turns bad when a choppy sea (and sea food?) makes guests puke all over the ship (quite the scene), then some of them get stranded on an island.

Amazing scene; Woody Harrelson and some drunken Russian oligarch trading left/Lenin quotes while the ship is heaving left and right.

Martin Marprelate - "Notes from Noho / a god at work in Noho"

Interesting short story in Dodgem Logic.  Some tone to the writing that is nice.

(author's name is likely a pseudonym as it was used as such in the 16th century with seven tracts written against the episcopacy of the Anglican church)