This week’s Five Things…

1. Lin-Manuel Miranda explains his writing process for the song One Shot from Hamilton.

2. I love this: Wild bison to return to UK for first time in 6,000 years

3. I like this vision of carless cities.

4. One for the drummers: Benny Greb (drummer and clinician extraordinaire) has released a metronome app called Gap Click. It’s not just any old metronome app. It has a number of cool tricks up its sleeve. My favourites being that you can set it to cycle between different rhythms (one bar on the beat, one bar on the offbeat) or switch between metronome and silence (one bar click, one bar no click).

5. Nadine Shah has a new album called Kitchen Sink. It's really good.

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This week’s Five Things…

1. A clever illusion that uses coloured lines to trick you into seeing a black and white photo in colour. This sort of thing always amazes me.

2. Food for thought from Ian Leslie's excellent newsletter: “if you never question the beliefs of your tribe then your ability to think for yourself withers away. That isn’t just bad for you, it’s bad for the collective intelligence of your group.”

3. We watched Hamilton on Disney+ yesterday. It's as good as everyone says it is!

4. I just finished reading Annie Lowrey's book Give People Money. The book explores the positive case for a universal basic income. I found it very persuasive. A UBI would be very expensive to implement, but could solve so many problems — for one, pretty much eliminating poverty overnight. That sounds like something worth aiming for!

5. This is for the drummers out there. I've been adding a lot of transcriptions to my website recently. If you'd like to get a brief update on new posts each week, you can subscribe here.

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This week’s Five Things…

1. I've recently started running. If you're feeling energetic and fancy giving it a go, I recommend the Nike Running Club app. The guided runs are great and the app provides useful info about your runs, so you can track your progress.

2. Food for thought from Seth Godin's blog: Should schools reward skills or talent?

3. These guys know how to juggle.

4. "Barcelona’s Liceu opera house reopened its doors on Monday for the first time in over three months to hold a concert - exclusively for a quiet, leafy audience of nearly 2,300 house plants". I hope the plants enjoyed the show!

5. To celebrate Glastonbury's 50 year anniversary the BBC have put together The Glastonbury Experience on iPlayer (100+ sets currently available to stream). The Foo Fighters 2017 performance is my favourite of the handful I've watched so far. They know how to put on a show!

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This week’s Five Things…

1. Very cool: "A circle of deep shafts has been discovered near the world heritage site of Stonehenge, to the astonishment of archaeologists, who have described it as the largest prehistoric structure ever found in Britain."

2. Basecamp has just launched a new privacy focused email service, HEY.com. It reimagines email in pretty much every way. So if you email me at some point, you might just get a response from my new @hey.com address!

3. Dave Grohl has picked up his pen to write another piece for The Atlantic. He's also started writing regularly on Medium.

4. Miniature synths by artist Dan McPharlin.

5. Hadn't listened to this in a while, Marks To Prove It by The Maccabees. Great album!

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This week’s Five Things…

1. The art and science of advanced bubble making

2. Alex Hern (The Guardian's UK technology editor) writes one of my favourite newsletters. His recent post on statues and history is a good read: “Statues don't create history, and they barely represent it.”

3. A great episode of Talking Politics on US policing and the practicalities of defunding the police. Talking Politics is consistently excellent.

4. Ever wondered what a scallop looks like when it swims? Wonder no more.

5. A fun collection of hand-cranked machines by LA-based artist Federico Tobon.

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This week’s Five Things…

1. Where's Wally? in the age of social distancing

2. I very much agree with this graph and Tim Urban's follow up tweet: "every day I've become more knowledgeable, more aware of my previous misconceptions and biases, and less opinionated as the true complexity of all this is revealed."

3. An amazing collection of photos of Lake Baikal: "as ferocious winds and cycles of melting and refreezing build and sculpt works of structural beauty—stones supported on wind-worn pedestals, undulating surface ice, encrusted beaches, crazy icicles, frozen methane bubbles, and more"

4. Following on from Five Things #196 I have another episode of the Reasons to be Cheerful podcast to recommend. This one is about building a digital society that works for everyone.

5. Musical genres ordered by overall positivity or negativity. There are some entirely predictable rankings but also a good number of surprises!

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