Holywells Park, Ipswich - May 2021

This week’s Five Things…

1. “That thing that made you weird as a kid could make you great as an adult — if you don’t lose it.” From this excellent list of (unsolicited) advice from Kevin Kelly

2. The healing grid illusion. Clever!

3. An amazing collection of long exposure photos of fireflies.

4. A fascinating long read about Nintendo’s game director, Shigeru Miyamoto.

5. “$7 (£5) pays for one vaccination in a developing country. Each vaccine is worth $5800 (£4000) in economic and non-economic value to the world, and may well save a life.” More info in the tweet here. You can donate here.

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Valletta, July 2019

This week’s Five Things…

1. A juggling, rhythmic masterclass. Michael Moschen performs The Triangle

2. John McWhorter explains the origins of a number of “rude” English words. You probably don’t want to listen to this around any kids!

3. Rob Reid explores the steps that can be taken to help prevent the next pandemic. It’s a long podcast at 3 hours 41 minutes but I found the whole thing fascinating.

4. I just finished Ian Leslie’s excellent book Conflicted on how to have better and more productive disagreements. If everyone read this book we’d live in a far happier world!

5. Will I ever get tired of re-watching Community? I’m not sure I will!

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Aldeburgh, May 2017

This week’s Five Things…

1. Thoroughly enjoyed Palm Springs (starring Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti). If you have Amazon Prime, you’ll find it on Prime Video.

2. The Talking Politics: History of Ideas podcast on philosopher John Rawls

3. One for the drummers. I’ve been updating a lot of my older drum transcriptions. You’ll find all 67(!!) of them here.

4. I’ve just finished reading A Gentleman In Moscow for the second time. If you haven’t read it, you should! I can’t wait to read it again. Maybe next year!

5. Kurzgesagt on why we need to embrace nuclear energy to stop climate change. Kurzgesagt are so very good at making these videos. Informative and entertaining, with great animations. What’s not too like?

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Šibenik, Croatia - July, 2018

This week’s Five Things…

1. “The Killers’ Mr Brightside has set a new chart record, after spending 260 weeks - or five whole years - in the UK’s Top 100.” 🤯

2. I really enjoyed this mini series on conspiracy theories by The Panpsycast podcast.

3. Eat less meat! — Your Diet Is Cooking the Planet

4. Don’t try this at home. How to safely remove bees from an old shed.

5. Max Richter has a new album!

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Berlin, April 2015

This week’s Five Things…

1. National Theatre’s film/theatre hybrid Romeo & Juliet was excellent! If you missed it, it’s on again on Sky Arts on Thursday at 10pm.

2. I really enjoyed this episode of Ryan Holliday’s Daily Stoic podcast with Agnes Callard on Socrates and Wisdom.

3. Can you steer a ship through the Suez Canal?

4. This clever little music app can isolate different instruments in a song. Upload a music file (like an mp3), and you get back a drum track, vocal track etc. It’s not perfect but still very impressive. I’m sure I’ll find it very useful when transcribing songs!

5. This is a very weird story: I tracked down my impostor

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