The Newsletter of (Not Quite) Everything
Newsletter (Digital)
So, I don't want to seem like the online media cliché that I so obviously am here, but welcome to my Substack.
Paying subscribers get a weekly newsletter, every Wednesday at around 4pm, generally composed of the following things:
A brief commentary on the week’s top existential terrors (a.k.a. the news);
A links round-up: infrastructure news, animal videos, memes and anything else that provides comfort to the mildly nerdy and extremely online;
An long-ish article about something extremely nerdy, most likely in the realms of transport, history, geography or language;
A short-ish article concerning the map of the week: you can probably guess what this covers.
Free subscribers get to read some of the weekly newsletter, before the paywall comes slamming down just as they’re getting into it. They also get a weekly email, generally on a Saturday, containing a single article: sometimes that’ll be something new (in which case, paying subscribers will receive it, too; only fair); more often than not it’s something from the paywalled archive, now released to the wider world.
Becoming a paying subscriber isn’t expensive – it’s £4 a month, or £40 a year, so substantially less than £1 a week; bargain! But, if for whatever reason you can’t afford that (unemployed, under-employed, penniless student and so forth) just email me and ask for a free subscription, and you can have one, no questions asked.
I hope the newsletter brings you joy – or, at the very least, that it doesn’t make your life any worse. Source
Actions
Media Outlet details
| Scope | N/A |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Country | N/A |
Similarweb UVM
|
Request pricing |
Comscore UVM
|
Request pricing |
Recent Articles
Search ArticlesA more perfect union
Also: how Jameson and Diaz are actually the exact same name. All this went to paying subscribers in June. Some years ago now I read a book1 about US politics which repeatedly insisted on confusing the hell out of me. Firstly it referred to Kansas City, Missouri, which baffled me because surely Kansas City would be in Kansas.
The Last Laugh
This week: oh god, she’s calling it Kemistry. Also: why is every English word for toilet a euphemism? And some notes on Winston Churchill’s cats. It’s easy to mock Kemi Badenoch’s Conservative party. It’s fun, too, so let’s give it a go. I knew we were in for a fun ride this weekend when the party kicked off its annual jamboree in Birmingham with an 88-foot, AI-generated replica of the Bayeux Tapestry.
The Audacity of Hope
This week: Andy Burnham’s bringing sunshine back. Also: of Cardiff, Welshness and what it means to be a capital; and a helpful map of accident blackspots. There were two moments, during my three days in Liverpool for Labour, which I found genuinely unnerving. The first was in the exhibition hall, when the people at the Oxford Dynamics stand decided to demonstrate that their vaguely dog-like robots could jump onto boxes now, and I let out a yelp.
Oxford’s five hundred year grudge
All this went to paying subscribers in June… In 1827 University of Oxford decided to review the written rules and regulations which governed life in the city of dreaming spires. By then the university was 731 years old, and some of its statutes had stood unchanged for centuries. That explained the strange thing those reformers encountered when they came to consider the oath that holders of Bachelor of Arts degrees had to swear to become Master of Arts.
I’ve been to see a particle accelerator
In 1930, physicist Wolfgang Pauli put forward a theory he was very obviously a bit embarrassed by. The standard models of nuclear physics predicted that beta decay – a form of radioactivity, in which an atomic nucleus emits an electron (or a positron), changing a neutron into a proton (or vice versa) – should happen at specific, discrete energy levels. Experiments, though, showed it instead happened at a continuous spread of different energies.
Book Club: Nut Country
Jonn here. A couple of weeks ago at Waterstones Nottingham, I was interviewed about 31 Inventions That Built Our World by the writer Martin Fitzgerald. Martin has his own book to talk about: The Umbrella Man and Other Stories concerns those who witnessed the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. It’s a book about memory, how we construct our shared history, and what it feels like to find yourself “at the centre of the most scrutinised six seconds of the twentieth century”.
Oligarchy In the UK
To receive one £36m donation from a cryptocurrency billionaire may be considered a fortune; to receive two begins to look like carelessness. And yet here we are, watching Reform UK rolling around in a big pit of money, like a less amusing Scrooge McDuck. The first donation, from Ben Delo, a man whose ethical record is so impeccable he’s been pardoned by Donald Trump, came Friday night accompanied by a Telegraph column explaining that it would ensure “a fair fight and a level playing field”.
Some notes on South America’s incest drug hippos
This week: two bits from the archive, on two very different subjects, as well as two (two!) special offers. One is that, if you are one of people who’s been kind enough to purchase a physical copy of 31 Inventions That Built Our World, I will give you a frankly insane 50% off a year of this newsletter – meaning that you got the book for, effectively, free.
A very short history of cartography
Jasper is up a mountain1, I’m off on tour, so this week you’re getting another of the chapters I wrote for31 Inventions That Built Our World, only for my editor to ask me why I’d written it because we had too many chapters already and this one didn’t really fit. This week’s topic is maps, in all their glory. If you’ve not had a chance to pick up the book yet – don’t worry, I’m sure you’ll get round to it – you’ll be relieved to hear that a chapter about the Tube Map specifically did make the cut.
Here’s how you dig a big tunnel under the ground
On Wednesday I forgot to mention the upcoming dates in my World Tour Of Places That’ll Let Me Talk At People About 31 Inventions That Built Our World. This is the sort of oversight that makes my publicist all sad – and will do the same for me, soon enough, if it means hardly anyone turns up to listen to me. So! As an excuse for promoting my upcoming events, below you’ll find one of my favourite pieces from the archive.