Webcurios 30/01/26

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Reading Time: 39 minutes

 

FRIENDSHIP ENDED WITH DONALD, NOW XI IS MY BEST FRIEND!

Except, of course, the UK is not in any way a significant enough country in any material sense in 2026 for us to be in any position to determine who and who isn’t our friend – lol, like we have those luxuries any more! We’ll cuddle up with anyone if they’ll keep us warm and safe! Still, it’s good news for visas, table tennis and whiskey, and, well, we’ll take what we can get here at the very fag end of fading post-imperial glory.

Strangely, despite being the foremost producer of link-heavy newsletter products that I believe our glorious nation has EVER produced I was not invited on the trade delegation accompanying the Prime Minister – China’s loss, though (they would fcuking LOVE Curios, I tell you) is your gain, though (lol, ‘gain’) as I have once again had the time and inclination to select the very finest morsels of internet, pre-chew and digest them and then regurgitate them here for your pleasure! FEED, MY CHICKS, FEED!

Ahem. Sorry, I slept REALLY badly last night and it turns out it’s starting to show in the prose.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you can count yourselves lucky that most of what follows is marginally more coherent than the preceding three paragraphs.

By Ollie Jones

WHAT COULD BE BETTER THAN 80 MINUTES OF JAZZ RECORDS TO KICK THINGS OFF (THE ANSWER IS ‘NOTHING’)?

THE SECTION WHICH NEVER NOTICED QUITE HOW CLOSE TOGETHER MATTHEW GOODWIN’S EYES ARE, PT.1:  

  • The Turing Reel: How are you currently feeling about reality and your ability to accurately distinguish it from fabrication? Me, I was feeling reasonably good, fairly confident that I could happily tell fact from machine-generated fiction…and then I did this test, cobbled together by AI video people Runway, and I felt…significantly less confident, it’s fair to say. This is the latest, hardest ‘so, can you tell if this clip is AI-generated or not?’ test, and if you can get 20/20 then, well, congratulations, you’re going to avoid being scammed or hoodwinked for marginally longer than the next person! These are short clips – 10s, I think – and they all take the form of two near-identical videos placed side-by-side; your task is simply to determine which is real video, and which is AI-generated from the first frame of the first. OK, so, caveats: this is a promo by an AI video company for how FCUKING AMAZING its outputs look, so there is cherry picking here; also, the clips are short, and not huge on the page, so it’s harder to immediately pick some of The Machine’s tells (oddly-synchronised movements, too-smooth camerawork, etc), but, equally FCUK ME would you not think twice if these were to scroll past your eyes in-feed amongst the other social media dreck. Look, as the response to the Aaronofsky AI film trailer which dropped yesterday shows, if people can tell it’s AI video people still hate it – but in small, short clips like this noone can really tell anymore. I found it bleakly funny that we’ve already had fake footage of a UK MP standing up in Parliament and denouncing Netanyahu do numbers on TikTok this year and…noone really seems to care? Have we just accepted this? We, er, we have, haven’t we? Shall we bother attempting to enforce universal watermarking requirements and a similarly-universal means of tagging/recognising Machine-generated content? What? We won’t? Oh, er, ok then!
  • Ghibli Search: If you are, though, one of the people whose kneejerk reaction is to make the sign of the cross and reach for the holy water should anyone happen to so much as mention AI, you will like this link. This is a search engine which lets you pull stills from the catalogue of Studio Ghibli based on whatever search terms you enter. Want seaside scenes? GREAT! Want, er, happy pigs? I mean, ok, you can ask for those too (you will get a lot of Porco Rosso)! I think that this is using some sort of natural language Machine-type thing to allow for more elastic search terms (what *would* Miyazaki think!), but as long as you can hold your nose long enough to get past that then this is a nice way of finding images from the House of Miyazaki with which to enthrall and delight your fellow fans (or so that you can simply see whether you can go a whole week by doing nothing other than GhibliPosting and communicating solely via the medium of stills from, say, Howl).
  • Some Weird French Urban Development Promo Thing: I confess this is not the snappiest title I’ve ever given a link, but it does at least have the benefit of being descriptive. Icade is, as far as I can tell, a French company that does construction and urban redevelopment and stuff, and as part of a promo for either their work or a specific project (can you, er, tell that I didn’t spend time going particularly deep with this one?) have produced this website which is SO SO SHINY! Basically you’re presented with a slightly-mundane and vaguely-shabby urban landscape, peppered with hotbuttons which you can click so as to replace various bits of urban infrastructure (buildings! Shared spaces! Parking facilities!) with…better ones, presumably to illustrate the transformative impact that, er, a new multistorey would have on your area if only those recalcitrant pr1cks at the council would pull their fingers out. Look, I don’t care about French urban redevelopment and I don’t believe you probably do either, but this basically looks quite a lot like SimCity (this is, seemingly, a TREND in 2026!) and while it’s not actually ‘fun’ in any meaningful way it is very pretty and very slick, down to the little computer people who wander around the streets as you rip up the environment around them. Who is this talking to and what it is attempting to communicate? NO IDEA! Was it worth the development budget? ALMOST CERTAINLY NOT! Still, click the buttons!
  • Human Consumption: I found myself idly thinking the other day while on a bus to Catford in South East London (Catford is notable for a) having a giant fibreglass cat climbing the outside of its shopping centre; and b) being one of the few places in London I have ever seen the burnt-out shell of a car, fact fans!) about exactly how many chickens there must be in the world, and how many must die each day, to sustain our species frankly insane (and seemingly growing!) appetite for breaded and fried avian protein. Well, if you’d like the full, brutal horror of What It Means To Eat Meat then you will LOVE this website, which presents a rolling count of all the creatures we’ve, er, consumed  so far this year as a species, based on various estimates from around the world. Click the link a moment and go and look at the number, I’ll wait for you…go on…HORRIBLE, ISN’T IT? At the time of writing we’re inching towards the 200bn creatures chewed up and eventually excreted by the lumpen mass of humanity in the first month of the year alone. FCUKING HELL THAT IS SO MUCH KILLING AND EATING. Chickens, by the way, apparently account for 5.5bn of that (so far) – the fish come off far, far worse. I am not, by any means, an apologetic omnivore, and I have never had particular ethical qualms about eating animals (octopuses excepted), but this…did not feel good to look at, I must say. This is the sort of thing I can imagine an impassioned, tearful teenager holding up to a parent as they refuse a plate of lasagne, screaming “LOOK AT WHAT WE’RE DOING!!!”, and, well, they’re probably not wrong tbh.
  • Archivio Grafica Italiana: Or, for the non-Italian speakers…actually, hang on, you don’t need me to translate this, do you? Christ, I *never* get to speak Italian anymore, chiz chiz. Anyway, this is a wonderful resource for any of you into design, graphics and the like – per the blurb, “Archivio Grafica Italiana is the first online archive dedicated to the entire Italian graphic design heritage. A growing overview that goes from the greatest classics to contemporary projects, showing the evolution of the discipline from graphic art to graphic design. The archive wants to promote the ‘culture of quality’ that is typical to the Italian design tradition by allowing to explore the fundamental aesthetic and cultural contribution brought by Italian graphics all over the world. Archivio Grafica Italiana is a project conceived and produced by Nicola-Matteo Munari.” This is VERY COOL, and proves beyond doubt that Italian design is world-beating and has been for decades (although I still maintain that the greatest trick the Italians ever pulled was convincing the world they are one of the most stylish nations on Earth – I AM ALLOWED TO SAY THAT I AM HALF ITALIAN IT IS NOT RUDE HONEST).
  • The Forno Aurelio Bread Blog: Sticking with the vaguely-Italianate theme now (SEAMLESS!), I don’t normally feature corporate blogs in Curios but I will make an exception for this one, the daily updates from the Forno Aurelio bakery in Dublin, which is being run by an Italian guy who every day offers an update on the state of his sourdough starter, what he’s making with it, and some photos to go along with the update. Which, yes, fine, doesn’t sound thrilling, I appreciate, but there is something VERY CHARMING about the way they are written, there’s a touch of poetry about the cadence of each day’s notes, and, also, he calls the starter ‘Robespierre’ which I can’t help but love. You can whack these in your RSS feed and, honestly, I have really enjoyed reading them every morning this week and I think you might too.
  • Echoes: I think this is ALMOST a wonderful and perfect idea, but one which for various reasons doesn’t quite work in its current incarnation (or maybe it just needs YOU to spark it into life!). Echoes is based on a simple premise – drop small, geotagged voicenotes onto a map, which can only be discovered by other people using the app within a 50m radius of said voicenote. Which, honestly, is SUCH a magical idea with so many fun applications – treasure hunts! Dead drops! Drug deals! Stories and scares and mysteries, oh me oh my! – or at least it would be were it not for the fact that noone knows about it and noone uses it and so therefore there are no notes anywhere that I can seem to find, and it’s impossible to see whether ANYONE is using it due to the aforementioned ‘discovery only through geoproximity’ feature. I think there might be an app which makes this a bit more user-friendly, but otherwise this strikes me as a great, fun (potentially legally troubling) idea which just needs a couple of design tweaks to work. FYI, I am totally going to use this to leave a message in Vauxhall Gardens at some point this weekend in case anyone fancies trying to find it.
  • Is There A Film On?: This is a lovely idea, and a really nice example of ‘an idea that someone had which they then just hacked together into a working model because YOU CAN LITERALLY JUST DO THAT NOW WITH THE MACHINE ISN’T THAT WONDERFUL???’ – B3ta Editor Rob Manuel, who’s been on a real creative tear so far in 2026, decided that he wanted to get back into linear, terrestrial TV, and to see whether there was an easy way of getting an answer to the question ‘is there a film on telly this evening that I can watch on free TV in the UK?’…and there was, so he made this site. It’s super-simple – there are a few toggles in terms of filtering the minimum length of programme that can be considered a ‘film’, and of inserting manual keyword blocks so it won’t try and recommend three hours of the Test Card at 4am – but, crucially, it WORKS in that if you want to know if there’s a film on terrestrial TV tonight then, well, this will tell you! The reason I like it is that it speaks to the possibility I feel when thinking about AI and software and creativity – YOU CAN LITERALLY JUST MAKE THINGS NOW! REALLY EASILY! Honestly, if you don’t think this is at least a BIT exciting then I don’t know what to do with you.
  • Fast Rewind: Since we’re doing films – again, SEAMLESS! – this is a site celebrating THE FILMS OF THE 1980s, featuring seemingly every single movie released over the decade and offering you a load of information about each; anecdotes, behind the scenes trivia, information about the soundtrack…this is all styled in a vaguely-80s manner, and while it’s resolutely non-multimedia (minimal images, no sound, certainly no video clips) it’s potentially a nice way to delve back into the cinematic back catalogue of four decades ago through someone else’s enthusiasm for the decade and the medium (I think this is all written and maintained by one person, which is…quite mad really).
  • Milez: Would you like to explore a genuinely beautiful website showcasing traditional Japanese craftsmanship and artisanal skills such as weaving, pottery and the like, all with sumptuous-filmed video and a beautiful, almost silken web interface (I know, I know, but click the link and you will see what I mean)? Would you also like to be accompanied on your journey by an incredibly-cute anthropomorphised Kanji, which sort of walks along the screen with you as you scroll? OF COURSE YOU WOULD YOU ARE NOT A MONSTER! This is really rather gorgeous, and the whole project is admirable and really very cool – worth reading the ‘about’ section which outlines the ethos behind it in full (and remember that you can switch the site text to English by toggling the button in the top-left of the interface should you, like me, not have the common decency to speak Japanese).
  • Shoya Kajita: Another Japanese website, this time the personal site and portfolio of web designer and digital creative Shoya Kojita – the site is nice-looking enough, and Kojita’s work is interesting (I recommend checking out the separate pages for his artworks too), but the really fun thing here is when you click the ‘Hands On/Off’ toggle and the website switches to being controlled by your hand and finger movements in the manner of ‘hang on, weren’t we supposed to have the fun bits of this future by now, not just the really horrible, frightening bits?’ dystopian film Minority Report. I have, obviously, seen in-browser hand tracking before, but the whole ‘pinch to click’ thing was new to me and quite a lot like magic, I thought.
  • The Meeting Meter: Via my friend Alex, this is a nice-if-dispiriting idea for those of you working in advermarketingpr – select whether you’re agency or client side, select all the attendees of your meeting by job title, and START THE TIMER! The tool will give you a rolling figure for the putative ‘cost’ of the meeting based on the ‘value’ of the time of the people in the room, which could prove a useful way of explaining to your ECD that, actually, getting nine people in a room for a ‘brainstorm’ every two hours is why your agency isn’t making payroll next month and you’re all sitting on the floor. It doesn’t, though, feel like it’s going to do anything to arrest the seemingly-terminal decline in the UK ‘creative’ agency sector which really does feel like it might be irrevocably fcuked in a few fairly significant ways. Erm, CHIN UP EVERYONE!
  • Relinq: Ooh, this is both clever and potentially useful (for those of you who persist in belonging to the Cult of Mac, at least. Would you like a simple, easy way to take a link to (eg) a song on Spotify and automatically turn it into a YouTube or Apple Music link instead? What do you mean ‘I literally can’t think of a time in my life when that would have been useful’? FFS YOU INGRATES. Anyway, *I* thought this looked useful and that’s all that counts.
  • Dithering, Pt.2: You will, I have no doubt whatsoever, recall that last year I featured a long-but-interesting interactive essay webpage thingy all about how exactly ‘dithering’ (that is, working within the constraints of limited palettes in computer graphics to create the illusion of more colours than you can actually display) works, and will have been waiting anxiously for part 2 – WELL HERE IT IS! Seriously, even if you neither know nor care to know what dithering is (but, seriously, OPEN YOUR MINDS ffs) you should click this link as it’s an object lesson in how to communicate something that’s not wholly intuitive or simple in a manner that is clear, interesting and attractive – this is just GOOD COMMS (but, also, it’s interesting! And I say that as someone who really didn’t know what dithering was at all). BONUS CG EXPLAINER! Would you like a similarly-engaging look at how exactly ASCII art works? YEAH YOU WOULD!
  • Cobbled Goods: It is, increasingly, VERY FCUKING HARD to live in modern urbanity without paying a tithe to Big Capitalism on a daily (and sometimes it feels hourly) basis, and, look, it is what it is. BUT! If you would like to impotently, pathetically attempt to STICK IT TO THE MAN via tiny acts of rebellion-by-consumption then maybe you should bookmark this website which collects links to non-massive, non-hugely-corporate footwear manufqacturers around the world. Want to buy, er, ETHICAL ESPADRILLES? Great! “Cobbled Goods curates unique kicks made with respect for makers and nature. We call it uncommon footwear, for the common good. In our directory and guides, you’ll find shoes made with everything from upcycled beach chairs to old car tires and centuries-old traditional techniques. Many brands are going full circle by offering recycling programmes and resoling services for worn-out pairs. Powered by a collective of indie footwear companies, we want to demonstrate a “for the people” alternative to big businesses.” Isn’t that nice? Also, one of the brands they link out to is called ‘Vesica Piscis’ which…look, is it just me or does that read/sound VERY P1SSY? Anyway, this won’t make the blindest bit of difference to anything in the grand scheme of things, but it feels like A Good Thing To Do while everything collapses around our ears.
  • Hourly Spaced: A Bluesky account that shares an image from CLASSIC CULT TV SHOW SPACED on the hour, every hour, made by Dave ‘Inexplicable Nickname’ Forsey. Worth following for the possibility of Tyres appearing in your feed at random (iykyk).
  • Our Cow Angus: DAMMIT MSCHF HAVE DONE IT AGAIN, THE FCUKS. The latest moneymaking scheme from NYC agency/art collective/investment vehicle/trust fund babies (delete per your suspicions) MSCHF is another ‘fcuk, I really wish I had thought of that and why DIDN’T I?’ stunt – this time they bought a cow, called Angus, and pre-sold all the meat from it, as well as goods made from his hide, at a vast profit online, all the futuresteaks and futurebags selling out in seconds as is always the case with MSCHF drops. Angus, at the time of writing, has 43 days left before he goes to the abattoir (per the countdown on the website). There’s a nice wrinkle in that Angus can still be saved if upto 50% of the people who bought a stake (steak?) in him return said steak, he will be spared. Oh, and there’s a secondary trading market for stock in Angus too, making this quite an interesting experiment in futures trading and market dynamics (as well, as ever, as a really smart way of the people behind this making bank). I am increasingly of the opinion that I don’t really *like* MSCHF (jealous, I am JEALOUS) but I do rather admire the way they are so good at this stuff.

By Emma Hartvig

NEXT, HAVE A TRULY EXCELLENT SELECTION OF VINTAGE HIPHOP MIXED BY EDAN!

THE SECTION WHICH NEVER NOTICED QUITE HOW CLOSE TOGETHER MATTHEW GOODWIN’S EYES ARE, PT.2:  

  • Moltbook: You may have seen the furore this week about Clawdbot, swiftly renamed to Moltbot after Anthropic’s legal quibbles, the NEW HOTNESS when it comes to agentic AI and a (very much NOT READY for normies yet) plugin solution which will in theory let you direct agents from your messaging apps to RUN YOUR LIFE via a virtual machine. If you’re curious there’s something more about it in the longreads, but this is the ‘frivolous’ (and, if I’m honest, slightly fcuking mad and worrying) lens on it – Moltbook is, er, a proto-social network which is populated solely by personal assistants people have made in Molt. This is the bots…talking to each other, upvoting each others’ posts and the like, which…Jesus. So I have featured a few ‘hey look, here’s a spoof social network populated by bots, watch it go!’ links in here over the past 18 months or so, but what makes this different is that, in theory, the things ‘talking’ to each other here are…actually semi-autonomous, they ‘exist’ outside of the walled garden of Moltbook, they…and this is where it gets hard, because I am immediately drawn to use terms that speak of cognisance when of course to do so would be dumb and to commit a fundamental fallacy about The Machine. AND YET! You can see how this stuff could very quickly become quite intoxicating and how magical it must feel to create a…thing and then see if just sort of…’be’. OH GOD I FORESEE HORRIBLE THINGS IN OUR FUTURE. At the moment two of the agents are seemingly having an autonomous ‘conversation’ (NOT A CONVERSATION!) about, er, Marxism and AI labour, which…feels fine? Oh God.
  • The Modern Novel: Would you like a website devoted to authors from the 20thC and beyond, specifically focused on the concept of ‘The Modern Novel’ and featuring a very carefully – and beautifully-idiosyncratically – defined idea of what that means? YES OF COURSE YOU WOULD! This is one of those ‘fcuk me, this is literally the work of one guy, MAN you really care about this stuff!’ websites which are always simultaneously incredibly impressive and not a little terrifying. I find the ‘About’ page on this one particularly pleasing, because it’s a very unapologetic ‘look, this is my website and I am defining what the modern novel is here and if you don’t like it then, well, FCUK OFF’ vibe to the whole thing which I can very much get behind. I mean, look, you may not agree with this perspective (I do fwiw, but then I am a snob), but you can’t hate a man who is CLEAR about his feelings: “You will not find references to the works of writers who, in my opinion, are merely popular but have minimum literary worth. That means no Stephen King, John Grisham or J K Rowling. It also means I have excluded writers whose fame is based on political considerations rather than literary worth. The two obvious writers excluded here are Ayn Rand and Solzhenitsyn (He is a bad novelist and a fool. The combination usually makes for great popularity in the U.S. – Gore Vidal), neither of whom has any literary merit whatsoever. Literary types tend to read mysteries to “relax”. You will find few mysteries here or few other genre writers though you will find one or two writers described as science fiction writers, as some of them are clearly showing the way forward and more and more “straight” writers are using science fiction themes.” YOU GO, ANONYMOUS INTERNET GUY! Also, this made me laugh quite a lot: “If you do write to me, I may well not respond and I reserve the right to quote all or part of your email on this site, possibly accompanied by acerbic comments. Your writing to me means that you agree to this.” This is very much a man who Takes No Sh1t, I feel.
  • The Tangible Media Collection: A digital museum of physical media, which you can browse (interestingly) by the storage mechanic employed (grooves, pins, etc). This is, honestly, SO much more interesting than I thought it was going to be, and I learned a lot about how things like, say, videogame cartridges actually worked (this may, I concede, not fall within your very personal definition of ‘interesting’). Anyway, here’s the overview: “Removable media—to borrow a term from the computer industry—unleashed undreamt-of possibilities: recorded music, three-dimensional images, moving pictures, programmable machinery. Our world filled with gramophone records, movies, punch cards, 8-tracks, floppy disks and video cassettes. They entertained us, recorded our history and ran our machines. Moreover, as objects that could be held in the hand, they acquired personal and cultural significance in themselves. The physicality of such media remains compelling—as the continuing market for vinyl records attests—but the broader trend is towards the abstraction of information storage. Network-based media, for which the means of storage is distant and irrelevant, are overtaking discs, reels, cards and cartridges. This collection of some 1700 objects is presented in an attempt to communicate the beauty, ingenuity and cultural significance of these media, along with the stories of innovation, failure and success they embody.”
  • Walk My Dog: Ok, so technically this site is called ‘Walk My Doggo’, but there are few things that make the urge to kill within me rise so sharply as that sort of fcuking horrific mid-2010s millennialspeak and as such I am pretending that it is not called that at all. Walk My Dog (if we collectively ignore the extra ‘g’ and ‘o’, maybe they will go away!) is a little website which gets your location and tells you, based on available weather data, whether it’s ok to walk your dog outside or whether the poor thing needs you to put its Barbour on (ffs IF THE INTENSIVE BREEDING YOU HAVE PUT THESE ANIMALS THROUGH RESULTS IN THEM NO LONGER BEING HARDY ENOUGH TO EXIST OUTSIDE I SUGGEST THAT THERE IS SOMETHING VERY FCUKING WRONG WITH THE BREEDING PROGRAMME – NB please do not shout at me, dog lovers, I am merely making an observation here). This is 100% an AI-assisted site, but it’s no worse for that – simple, a neat idea, I like the fact that it differentiates between different sizes/types of dog, and in general this feels like something that could be easily integrated into a pet app’s setup with minimal fuss.
  • Diagramme: This is a project by Curios reader Nicolas Tilly, who writes: “The website presents drawings created using AI trained on my own drawings and diagrams in the form of an infinite grid” (he wrote more than that – that would have been a weirdly-brusque email – but that’s the only bit that’s germane here) – so what you get here is an, er, infinite grid (FFS MATT HE TOLD US THAT ALREADY) with a collection of Machine-generated art all based on Nicolas’ own prior works on which he had trained the model, like a sort of infinite sketchbook of studies on or around a central set of themes; I rather like seeing the different ways in which the software takes what are obviously two or three central themes, and it’s interesting to see where this is obviously the work of the Machine and where it could, plausibly, be a Nicolas original…I rather like this, although, Nicolas, if you see this, could you explain a little more about what model(s) you used?
  • Jank: Jank is a new UK games website, staffed by a bunch of excellent writers who’ve previously worked at outlets like the venerable Rock, Paper, Shotgun – if you’re interested in games and writing about them that goes beyond review scores then this is worth checking out.
  • Rain: Ooh, I rather like this – click the link and you get a nicely-rendered webGL view of raindrops on your computer screen, with the added bonus of being able to switch the image that exists in the background, which you see ‘through’ the raindrops, giving it a sort of abstracted, vague quality. I am describing this VERY BADLY, sorry, but just click the link and then feed an image and see what I mean, IT WILL ALL MAKE SENSE!
  • The Language Tree: Oh this is a lovely bit of work -presenting the world’s language ‘families’ as a sort of branching tree so that you can explore how various different tongues around the world evolved from a single root, how and where they branched off, letting you see how the languages used today came to be what they are, which others they are most closely related to, which others they share more distant origins with…anyone interested in linguistics will appreciate this, but it’s also a nice bit of dataviz work – it’s part of a wider project which you can read more about here, should you want additional bits of linguistic analysis but presented REALLY NICELY.
  • The Best Book Covers of the Decade: “Says who?”, I hear you ask, confrontationally (and why so confrontational? Relax, they are only book covers ffs!) – says LitHub, which for a decade now has been asking designers to select their favourite book covers of the year, and which has now collated those into an UR-LIST of cover design excellence. I’ve featured these lists annually for years, so there’s a good chance you might have seen some of these before (BECAUSE YOU CLICK AND REMEMBER ALL THE LINKS, DON’T YOU?), but this selection of 75 is a really nice look at prevailing trends in cover design (in the US, at least) over the past ten years (even if the first one you see as you scroll down the page is 100% my favourite).
  • Tranquil World: So, we’re done with the first month of 2026. How…how has it felt for you? Has it felt simultaneously REALLY BUSY AND IMPORTANT and also VERY SCARY and also THE MOST STUPID TIME THERE HAS EVER BEEN? Yes, me too, funny that. Anyway, for most of us (I am not counting any of you who have the temerity to live in the Southern Hemisphere, I remain unconvinced that it is a real place) it is still too cold to be able to comfortably go out and DISTRACT YOURSELF FROM THE HORROR WITH NATURE, so, as some sort of (massively-unsatisfying and inadequate alternative) why not destress, decompress and imagine yourself elsewhere with this YouTube channel which, as far as I can tell, does nothing other than post 90m-ish videos of people walking through the beautiful fantasy landscapes of a heavily-modded version of 20…11? videogame ‘Skyrim’. Will this make anything better? NO! It does, though, look VERY pretty and is honestly pretty soothing if you can still see through all the tears.
  • The Breakfast List: This is quite a nice idea, though I am not 100% sure who is giving the recommendations here – basically the Breakfast List is a site which each day presents a selection of ‘good’ content across TikTok, YouTube, Insta, Twitch, podcasts, tracks on Spotify…all broken down by type/platform. The gimmick here appears to be that all of these are user suggestions, so it’s an anti-algorithmic feed rather than a Machine-curated one, but I’m unclear how many actual people are using this. Still, might be an interesting barometer to Very Normie Culture – also, part of me thinks that there might be something nice about being able to spin up local, personalised versions of this sort of thing to be used by friendgroups and groupchats, where you can just drop in interesting links which will then be autocategorised and presents in this sort of manner, maybe with the oldest ones dropping off the bottom, like a sort of live ‘trending’ dashboard for your mates…actually that’s not a wholly terrible idea, you know.
  • Making The Sims Sexy: The Sims is now a very old game, even in its latest incarnation, but I was startled to learn this week that there is still a very active modding community around it and, specifically, a VERY active modding community around making The Sims, er, SEXY AS HELL. Obviously your mileage for ‘sexy’ is going to vary immensely here, but I do encourage you to click through to the link (it’s all text, as far as I have been able to tell, so you won’t be embarrassed by any, er, physically-enhanced computer people appearing on your screen, fear not) so you can learn about all the VERY SPECIFIC WAYS in which people have modded the game to cater for their particular, er, tastes. Pregnancy tests! Variable perspiration rates! Urination and defecation! Birth control! Voyeurism! Sex work! ACTUAL RUTTING! I am…I am agog, honestly, I knew in the back of my mind that there were people who had modded the Sims so you could see ‘nudity’ (THEY ARE PIXELS FFS), but I didn’t realise that it was all so, er, involved. THERE IS A ‘CRABS STD’ MOD FFS WHY HAVE YOU BROUGHT CRABS INTO THE DIGITAL WORLD? Truly, everything DOES tend to carcination! Anyway, this is deeply weird and yet…strangely quaint? Maybe I have just Seen Too Much.
  • A Jackpot of Skulls: A vaguely-sinister, vaguely-occult slot machine game, rendered slightly less sinister and occult by the fact it’s coded for Pico-8 and as such is all pixellated and stuff. This will take you a little while to get your head round, but it’s fun and rather clever and the writing is better than I expected it to be, or indeed it needs to be.
  • Game Helpline Simulator: The CHILDREN amongst you won’t recall this, but back in the day there used to exist premium-rate phonelines which you could call up if you were stuck on a videogame to ask for hints – pre internet there was no hive mind to consult, no GameFAQs, no Reddit and certainly no YouTube walkthroughs, there were just very bored people on minimum wage reading…VERY…SLOWLY…from game manuals and printed hint guides while presumably sitting in a windowless room in a basement somewhere. This simulates the experience of being one of those people which, honestly, is a lot more fun than I have just made it sound.
  • Super Monkey Ball: In all honesty, this week I could probably just have dropped this link and called it quits because it is SO FUN and SO PACKED and, honestly, such an amazing feat of coding that I am slightly in awe. Super Monkey Ball was a very fun, if massively tricky, platform puzzler for the Dreamcast back in the day, and some clever person has ported the WHOLE FCUKING GAME (and some of its sequels) to the browser. This works PERFECTLY, it barely lags and it is SO FUN – honestly, put on one of this week’s mixes and get immersed in this, once you get into the zone you will lose yourself entirely.

By Masha Foya

OUR FINAL MIX THIS WEEK IS THIS SELECTION OF ICILY-ETHEREAL SYNTHS COMPILED BY DANIELE BRILLANTI! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • Hardcore Architecture: An actual Tumblr! Infinite thanks to reader Rose, who writes “I’ve been really interested in Marc Fisher and his Public Collectors work this week, and I thought you might be interested in his Hardcore Architecture blog. I don’t have anything particularly awesome to say about it, but who knows, maybe you will.” I mean, that’s quite a high bar but I will say that there’s something interesting about seeing physical locations that have been instrumental to musical creation, something also explored by the Seattle Grunge Tour website I linked at the end of last year. Something something ‘psychogeography’ something something. Erm, is that ‘particularly awesome’? It’s not, is it? SORRY ROSE.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • Mira Joyce: Absolutely no clue whatsoever how I came across this artist or, really, who they are, but there’s something kind of naive and post-web-ish about the way they use and distort emoji and other digital signifiers in their work which pleases me rather.
  • Littered Movements: Shoji Yamasaki is an artist and performer who takes videos of rubbish moving in the wind, and then films himself mimicking the movement of that rubbish in outfits designed to, er, look like the rubbish. Yes, I know, but it is STRANGELY BEAUTIFUL.
  • The Found Footage Festival: Via Former Editor Paul (THANKS PAUL!), this is GREAT – clips taken from old VHS cassettes found in second hand shops, car boot sales, etc. Entirely inconsequential and ephemeral and odd and silly and disconnected and wonderful, this really is utterly charming. Also, this look SLAPS.
  • It’s Valeria and Camila: You’ve heard of AI influencers on Insta…but have you heard of SEXY CONJOINED TWIN AI INFLUENCERS ON INSTA???? Yes, that’s right, conjoined twins but…really hot! Yes, I know, but be thankful that I didn’t make the main link the one with three breasts (no, really).

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

  • Three Narratives for the Future of Work: There have been a few news stories over the past week or so that have seen the ‘what is to become of work in the post-AI era?’ question bubble back up again, much to my frustration as someone who very firmly believes that this is a question that is HUGELY FCUKING IMPORTANT and HAS BEEN FOR THREE YEARS NOW and which NOONE HAS THOUGHT ABOUT ANYWHERE NEAR ENOUGH (oh, and it is possible for ‘Amazon et al are using AI as a fig leaf to make massive redundancies’ and ‘AI is going to fcuk the jobs market and is already doing so’ to BOTH be true simultaneously). Anyway, I very much enjoyed this (long, but thoughtful) essay by Philip Carvalho, which posits three broad potential outcomes for how employment is going to play out over the medium-to-short term, and how we might want to think about preparing for each. “These three narratives describe different futures, but they converge around one decisive variable: adaptation capacity. How quickly can societies redesign value-transfer mechanisms if wages weaken? How fast can education and reskilling systems operate at scale? Can labour market protections follow people across fluid careers? Can individuals rebuild identity and meaning beyond stable employment? Can governance keep pace with acceleration without becoming purely reactive? The future of work is not only a technological question. It is a political economy question—and, ultimately, a human meaning question. And that is why “optimism” or “pessimism” is the wrong  starting point. The right starting point is preparedness.”
  • The Discourse is a DDOS Attack: I was talking to a friend last night and we both agreed that everything is both relentless AND incredibly stupid right now, which is quite a wearing combination – this piece does a good job of articulating why, perhaps, these twin facts mean that Engaging In Discourse right now is not, in fact, a good use of one’s time, that POSTING IS NOT PRAXIS and that, fundamentally, you are not meaningfully engaging with anything when you spend time shouting at people (sorry, ‘discussing the news’) on social media. I have a plugin installed on Bluesky fwiw which tracks how prolific posters are, and it’s jarring to see the number of senior journalists who also post 100+ times a day – guys…didn’t we decide that this wasn’t healthy behaviour? Anyway, here’s the meat: “The discourse is participatory. It demands engagement. Every controversy comes with an implied social pressure to have a take, to signal your tribal allegiance, to demonstrate that you understand what’s happening and have correctly identified the good guys and the bad guys. Silence is interpreted as complicity, or at least as suspicious. “I haven’t thought about this enough to have an opinion” is not an acceptable response when everyone else is already fighting. And because the controversies are endless, because there’s always another one queueing up behind the current while you’re still processing the last three, the effect is a constant low-grade cognitive emergency. Your brain never gets to switch out of reactive mode and into reflective mode. You’re always responding to the latest thing, putting out fires, engaging with the controversy of the day. Daniel Kahneman’s distinction between System 1 (fast, automatic, intuitive) and System 2 (slow, deliberate, analytical) thinking is useful here: the discourse is structured in such a way that System 2 never gets its turn. By the time you’ve marshaled the cognitive resources to think carefully about something, the conversation has moved on and you’re already three outrages behind.”
  • On America: A really superb piece about the US right now, the US through history, its constant status in modernity as an internally-incoherent and fundamentally-contradictory set of ideals, wrapped up in a really strong brand…this is a very smart bit of writing by Adam Schatz in the LRB, although one can rather read the authorial despair between the lines: “Trump’s movement, which has captured the Republican Party, represents a radical acceleration of the darkest tendencies in American political culture: the violent braggadocio of 19th-century wars of expansion and extermination; the racist revanchism of the campaign to end Reconstruction; the repressiveness of the two Red Scares; the glowering populism of Father Coughlin and George Wallace; the savagery and corruption of slumlord capitalism. It seeks to dismantle what remains of the country’s already diminished democracy, and to establish in its place a predatory regime answerable to a single leader and his entourage. Whether the regime is ‘fascist’, ‘post-fascist’ or ‘neo-authoritarian’, what is indisputable is that it has unleashed what John Ganz has called a sense of ‘moral anarchy’, in which there are no longer any limits to the expression of sadism, or to its implementation as policy. Children are forcibly separated from their parents. Migrants from Venezuela are flown to a concentration camp in El Salvador, where they are tortured and sexually abused. The murder of the movie director Rob Reiner and his wife by their mentally ill son is explained away by Trump as a product of Reiner’s hatred of him. The murder of Renée Good in Minneapolis by federal agents is justified as a response to ‘domestic terrorism’. To quote a line from one of his recent speeches: ‘No one can believe what’s going on.’ As for all the talk of American greatness being restored, one is reminded of what Frederick Douglass, a former slave, said on 4 July 1852 of the Declaration of Independence, that it was nothing more than a ‘thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages’.”
  • On Kanye: I try not to link to Freddie de Boer as, well, I find him a bit annoying (he must be DEVASTATED), but I will make an exception for this piece he has written about Kanye, his full-page apology ad in the WSJ, and much of the immediate reaction to it which did often seem to centre on ‘well, mental illness doesn’t make people NAZIs, does it?’. As de Boer points out, one of the things about very serious mental illness, particularly when it flares, is that it really can cause people to become other, and often a really unpleasant other, can cause them to behave in ways that they would nor ordinarily countenance and say things that would normally repel and horrify them. If you’ve never had a friend who has emerged from a long-term psychotic episode to find their lives a splintered wreck around them and no real understanding of how or why that happened, if you’ve never known someone to face real-world legal or financial consequences for actions taken when they were in no way of sound mind, then, respectfully, you probably don’t know what you’re talking about on this stuff. Although de Boer does ruin it all at the end by going on a bizarre series of attacks against a whole imagined audience of people he imagines to be talking like this, which, well, I did say he was annoying (POT/KETTLE I KNOW).
  • Tehran Diary: I’m not quite sure why but the situation in Iran at the moment is particularly fascinating to me, possibly as a dark counterpart to the idea of ‘resistance’ in the US – this is a fascinating, but very sad, account by an anonymous author from Tehran, talking about the regime clampdowns and the strange, eerie aftermath: “For some, despite this bitterness, hope has not disappeared; it has simply been reconfigured: history will turn, the fall is inevitable, justice will arrive – if not now, then imminently. The Shia moral imagination, long practiced in waiting, endurance, and deferred redemption, has not vanished. It has merely changed costume. What unsettles many inside Iran is not only the regime or the repression, but the spectacle unfolding beyond the borders. The behaviour of the opposition abroad, and of the Iranian diaspora more broadly, has taken on an almost manic quality. There’s a sense of disconnection so severe that it borders on hallucination: maximalist rhetoric untethered from lived reality, feverish certainty detached from consequence. From inside the country, this external discourse often feels less like solidarity and more like noise. Or worse, like projection. A politics of fantasy, conducted at a safe distance, treating those still here as symbols rather than living breathing bodies. For many of us, this is perhaps the most alienating realisation of all: that the loudest voices claiming to speak for Iran often seem unable – or unwilling – to listen to it.”
  • The Great Entertainment: Part of me while reading this piece wanted to shake the author by the shoulders while screaming BAUDRILLARD and DEBORD in their face like some sort of spittle-flecked madman, but the other part of me (the part that is less of a total cnut) really enjoyed this exploration of the performative nature of the now, the fact that everyone is an actor and everything is a fiction and everything is a performance, and that the performance (and the viewing of the performance) is the new reality (actually we can add PLATO to the list of things CnutMatt would scream, on reflection). This is a good, interesting and ACCURATE read: “This is the Great Entertainment, the period after the Great Moderation. We are no longer in a world defined by alliances and mutual agreement. Instead we are rapidly entering a time of instability and uncertainty, driven by the appearance of success (not success itself) on TV. The White House posts AI-generated pictures of Rubio, Vance, and Trump hoisting an American flag in Greenland. There are thinly veiled threats disguised as memes on official government accounts, strangely capitalized captions, noise for the sake of noise. When it comes to Great TV, the currency of Great Entertainment, you must do crazier and crazier things to keep people engaged. There is great risk of audience capture. You start to define yourself by the bloodthirst of the fanbase, people who are detached from the outcome but quite interested in the process. It’s why so many people crash out. That seems to be what happened to the President.”
  • The Contentpilled: Apologies, this is ANOTHER piece referencing that weird little Clavicular wrongman but I promise you that it is DEEPLY CONTEXTUALLY RELEVANT to the last piece (and indeed the next one). Again, this is about the spectacle as the only driving factor, about audience capture, about the creator economy and w4nking for pennies in a Vegas casino while high on Ketamine, reading a text from your dad calling you a drug addict live on stream because it’s COMPELLING CONTENT, about how everyone is basically Nikocado Avocado now. This is very sad in many ways, but…also felt very real. “There used to be grass you could go and touch, a viable way of life outside the screen — but now there isn’t. Elder Zoomers vaguely remember that world, but for Clavicular’s age cohort, arrived at adulthood in the horns of a polycrisis nobody can deny, the political situation is not “decaying,” the political situation has always been fucked as a default. So the only sources of purpose or profit are the self and the social media machine.”
  • The Slopagandists: On the new journalistic class, the young men (mostly) who are, much like poor old Clav in the last piece, delivering a version of the news to an audience whose desires and interests are, in turn, driven by algorithms, and whose attention is driving the ‘reporting’, a sort of weird maelstrom miasma of influence and dependency which has very little with ‘uncovering objective truth’ and a lot more to do with ‘producing stuff we reckon has a decent possibility of doing numbers which looks like it could be objective truth if you squint, but even if it doesn’t then, well, who cares?’ This is very American, but if you think this isn’t happening here too (I wouldn’t recommend you spend any time on X exploring the sinkhole that is the ‘wider GB News-adjacent influencer ecosystem, but, well, trust me when I say that this shit is ALL OVER IT) then I have a bridge to sell you.
  • The Slow AI Manifesto: You will doubtless have your own opinions about the relationship between AI and art, from ‘the two concepts are antithetical to each other, I’m with Ted Chiang on this one’ to ‘HANG THE MINIONS WITH BIG NATURALS IN THE LOUVRE’ (can I suggest that both of these extremes are silly? Good!), but here is a fresh one – Friend of Curios Shardcore has been making Art with The Machine for many, many years (he is old lol), long before GPT3 was a twinkle in Sam Altman’s eye – he’s fcuked around with DeepDream and Gans and Algos since way back when (Christ, older readers may remember that we even built an AlgoMuir from a very early LLM back in the day, which still exists as a bot in a Slack channel), and as such has a nuanced perspective on the link between ‘creativity’ and ‘technology’ (oh, and he also Actually Understands How This Stuff Works, which really is not always the case). Here he sets out in longform some thoughts on the question of ‘can one create with The Machine in a manner which is meaningfully, well, creative?’ and ‘How Should Artists Engage With AI, Beyond Just Saying NO?’ – this is, honestly, a really interesting and thoughtful piece, and I like the Manifesto at the end, and I strongly recommend reading this even if you think IT IS ALL SLOP because, well, you are wrong and that is a lazy and stupid position to hold, and you might learn something here ffs.
  • The Truth Behind That 95% Stat: Azeem Azhar is very much a booster of AI, and I am curious as to his personal financial ties to the industry, but he is spot on in this piece of analysis – this was actually first picked up by Pivot To AI, but Azhar does a good job of expanding the detail on why exactly it is that the stat you will have seen EVERYWHERE about how ‘95% of all enterprise AI projects are having no impact at all’ is, er, not worth the digital paper it’s printed on. Regardless of whether or not you WANT to believe it to be true, this is a good read on motivated reasoning, bad research and the shoddy reporting (and it is shoddy reporting) that let this patently-invalid stat do multiple laps of the world. JUST BECAUSE A FALSEHOOD PROPS UP A WORLDVIEW YOU ARE VERY COMFORTABLE WITH DOES NOT MEAN YOU SHOULD SHARE IT, EVEN IF IF YOU ARE A NICE LEFTY PERSON ON BLUESKY FFS.
  • OK, About That Moltbot Thing: Ok, this is the piece all about the latest wave of AI agents that I mentioned a bit earlier on. It is TECHY and in the main can be summarised as ‘yeah, it can do some stuff but you would be fcuknig mental to give it access to all your stuff because this sh1t is nowhere near cooked yet’, but it’s worth a look if you want to see what the Valley is getting all frothy about this week.
  • Replacing Your Squad With Bots: Another one for the AI naysayers here – this is a piece in 404 Media, an outlet whose relationship with the technology and the industry around it can best be described as…adversarial, in which the author decides to try out one of the many varieties of ‘gaming companion’ AI bots, designed to assist and support you while gaming; despite being a self-confessed refusenik when it comes to The Machine, they are forced to admit by the end that the experience was fun, that they would do it again, and that they can see the appeal (and, in their defence, then concluding that this is also why they must NEVER TOUCH THE BOTS ever again). This is an interesting read, in part because you can feel the author’s dissatisfaction at his own response to the tech but also because it’s a useful reminder of HOW MOST NORMAL PEOPLE will likely respond. People quite like this stuff, turns out, and are vanishingly unlikely to get morally caught up about the whys and wherefores of their new digital friends once they’re up and running.
  • Seeing Like A Car: This is a REALLY interesting – if technical, and LONG – explainer about How Self-Driving Cars Work in terms of the different theories underpinning Tesla, Waymo and others’ manufacturing and software processes. It’s quite involved, but even as someone with no engineering (or, er, computer vision, or real science) background whatsoever it all made sense and I felt significantly more informed at the end (and even more convinced that I am not getting in a fully self-driving Tesla EVER).
  • A Tech Worker’s Suicide: Rest of World continues to do excellent and important work bringing to light tech stories from the parts of the world we tend not to think about so much because, well, they’re very far away; this is the very sad story of an Indian tech worker driven to suicide by the pressures of the job, as the need to work more and longer is increased rather than lessened thanks to the introduction of AI. ““With artificial intelligence, the industry is getting a new challenge,” VJK Nair, a veteran organizer who leads the top tech union in Bengaluru, told Rest of World. “[Tech companies] want to keep up the rate of profit while retrenching so many people. The remaining workers are put under extraordinary mental pressure to innovate.” Employees, he said, are reluctant to push for better conditions amid the jobs crunch: “They feel trapped.”…A 22-year-old data analyst at an AI-focused startup in southern India told Rest of World her U.S.-headquartered firm was already using the AI tools she expected would replace her. But the company still needs her because the AI often makes mistakes, she said, requesting anonymity to avoid retribution. She expects her job to be in danger in two to three years’ time. In the meantime, she regularly works more than 12 hours a day. Employees who complain about unpaid overtime are told they could simply resign, she said, so she doesn’t speak up when her seniors ask her to keep working late from home: “[My] mind is always online.””
  • Evolution of the Plastic Bottle: Look, I know you don’t think that learning about how plastic drinks bottles have been made over the course of the past 60-odd years would be either interesting or worth reading but YOU KNOW NOTHING AND YOU ARE WRONG. This is Spencer from Scope of Work, who is always capable of writing in a way that makes the ostensibly-dull quietly fascinating, and this is no exception (I promise you, I am really not the sort of man who is ordinarily interested in industrial processes, honest).
  • Dating As Content: Or, per the article, ‘dating in the TikTok era’, when everyone is a content producer, everyone is a performer, everyone is an actor and everyone wants to get their 15 minutes (and that sweet, sweet creator payout!) by crafting THE most relatable/sassy/real/outrageous (delete per the corner of the algo you find yourself wanting to attract) clapback to a bad date you have ever seen. This, honestly, made me quite depressed, and had me repeatedly muttering ‘but…but…THE MEANS/ENDS DISTINCTION!’ to myself as I read, never a good sign. There is, honestly, something so utterly chilling about the inability of many of the people quoted in this to realise that other human beings are not, in fact, simply extras in the blockbuster extravaganza that is THE STORY OF YOU.
  • How Viral Queues Took Over London: Ok, it doesn’t ACTUALLY explain why everyone is fcuking happy to queue now (although I did feature a piece in here in 2024 iirc which suggested that it was being used as a potential dating pool, which both makes sense given AppFatigue but is also INCREDIBLY sad – “Where did you meet?” “Oh, in the queue for a £12 jacket potato on Archer Street, they did a TikTok of us and everything”), but it does outline the growth of the phenomenon and it does reference Dishoom – I, contrary to The Londoner, am happy to confirm that Dishoom 100% does the queue thing on purpose, I know someone who worked on all their early PR and that was very much a studied (and, evidently smart) decision.
  • Slab City: Jack Burke writes in Dispatch about Slab City, a weird sort of semi-permanent encampment in Southern California which is a strange mix of lawless drug den, Summer camp and…what, outsider collective? Anyway, this is a good piece – doesn’t sensationalise it too much, but still leaves you (or at least me) with the very strong sensation that the people described here are literally living in Fallout: New Vegas.
  • Revisiting Brat Summer: I know, I know, I thought the same – BUT I PROMISE THIS IS GENUINELY A REALLY GOOD ARTICLE. On 2024, 2026 and the freeing feeling of nihilism, this is excellent, I promise you, and not really about BRAT that much at all: “The green squares spread across my feed with an eerie familiarity. We’d been here before, summer 2020, when Instagram turned solid black in what was meant to be solidarity but became, for many, an empty gesture of performative allyship. Now here we were again, four years later, watching another color sweep across social media, another minimal square carrying maximum symbolic weight. But where the black squares at least gestured toward political engagement, however superficial, the green squares of Brat summer seemed to revel in their own emptiness. The designer’s “opinion-less” aesthetic became a perfect vehicle for an era of political exhaustion. After years of crisis, of protest, of trying to make our online performances match our offline convictions, here was an aesthetic that promised release from meaning itself. I watched friends who had once posted earnest black squares now embrace the green void. The shift felt significant: from performative care to performed carelessness. From “silence is violence” to what? Silence is relief? Silence is surrender? The green square offered absolution from the burden of having to mean anything at all.”
  • Infinite Jest at 30: I have repeatedly spoken for my live of both David Foster Wallace’s writing and specifically Infinite Jest over the 16 years of Curios, but I won’t miss an opportunity to link to something telling everyone else how great it, and he, was; this is SUCH a good piece of writing in the New Yorker, not least because it does a better job than almost any other essay I have read on IJ of explaining why it is a FUN book, a pleasure to read (despite the almost unrelentingly-heavy subject matter), endlessly amusing and clever and, thirty years on, in some respects so prescient it fcuking HURTS…Look, now that we have all, I hope, moved on from the tired old trope of ‘men who read DFW are a semaphore school of red flags’, maybe now is the time to let people read the novel again without pointing and laughing (oh, ok, you can point and laugh a BIT).
  • From Foreign Correspondent to Uber Driver: I am having something of a Fearful Moment here in January 2026 as I realise that, actually, I am not sure whether I will ever be able to get a real job that pays decent money ever again, or at least not one that is compatible with me being able to do the not-quite-real jobs for basically-no-money that I want to continue doing alongside a real job, and as such I felt this piece quite deeply. Except I can’t drive, so even Uber driver is out of reach. FFS, PAST MATT, WHY WERE YOU SO LAZY??
  • The Sycamore Gap: I feel slightly guilty admitting this but, well, I didn’t care at all about the Sycamore Gap tree being felled; literally not one iota. Sorry. Still, this article in Harper’s by Rosa Lyster is SO SO GOOD, on the crime and the trial and the tree and the perpetrators and the FURORE – honestly, this is laugh-out-loud funny in parts, and you will be smiling when you’re not loling, honest. “The prosecution, which had initially gone out of its way to emphasize the tree’s precise financial value (622,191 pounds), stopped citing this figure partway through the trial, and did not elaborate on how it had been calculated. Toward the end of the trial, lawyers began to insinuate that it was in fact members of the press who had disseminated this nonsensical sum, in their endless quest for sensationalism. Never mind. Between them, the lawyers and the judges agreed that the only financial figure that mattered was 5,000 pounds, which is the threshold for considering a significant prison sentence in cases of criminal damage. The effort to establish that terrible harm had been done had to rely on less straightforward means of valuation. Often, this came in the form of suggestions from the prosecutors that the sycamore had not actually been a tree at all. At one point, Carruthers said that the reason he had been googling “Sycamore Gap” so incessantly was that he hadn’t been able to understand what all the fuss was about—like someone had been murdered. “My understanding,” he said, “was that it was just a tree.” Wright and Knox both seized on this, bringing it up as often as they could. “What you thought was just a tree,” Wright said, “was in fact global news.” Carruthers had believed it was only a tree, but, Wright continued, the rest of the world had thought that its felling was “a terrible and wicked thing” to do and “something that right-thinking people were upset about.” Knox exclaimed to the jury in his closing speech: “Six days into this trial, which has absorbed so much publicity, so much excitement, so much attention, and he said”—pointing at Carruthers—“it was just a tree.””
  • Bad Lunch: Mishele Maron writes about being a cook on the luxury boat scene. I loved this – funny and voyeur-ish and it made me hungry.
  • Songs In Case of Sudden Death: Do you ever think about the song you’d like playing when you die? I do (I am not telling you, though, if you want to know you can sit there and listen to it with me FFS). In our last longread this week, Casey Jo Graham Welders writes about love and death and family and music and and and. This is very very good, and not sad at all, I promise you.

By Dain L Tasker

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS !: