(Yes, you will. Big chunks of it! But your phone might do it faster.)

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I hope you’ve had a recuperative holiday break. I’m a little late in getting rolling here, thanks to what was either the worst head-cold I’ve had in years or The Virus Whose Name We Shall Not Utter. (I tested negative throughout, but - who knows?)

Either way, I’m currently on the mend. Hope you’re OK there too.

I’m embarrassingly late in saying it, but thank you to Mary Trump for using a quote of mine about the importance of curiosity as a discussion prompt in her newsletter, The Good In Us. Being extremely English, it’s taken me this long to recover from the compliment. This cartoon more or less explains why.

And employing this as a masterful segue, let’s turn to today’s topic, which is about another thing we Brits excel at. I think it’s one of the greatest and most inspiring traits in our national character. It’s the very, very best of who we are, what we do and what we’re capable of achieving in this life.

Yes, I’m talking about what colossal idiots we are.

(So proud.)

I’m a big fan of stupidity.

No, not the aggressive, self-righteous kind that makes no effort to consider the welfare of others - I think we’ve had quite enough of that stuff over the last few years - but the silly, playful variety that’s always looking for a wry angle, even on the serious issues. The kind that can wake a room up, in almost entirely the good way. The kind that makes folk laugh, then sticks in their memory in a way nothing else does. The kind that can finally make people think.

But of course it’s about perspective. To anyone employing this kind of stupidity, they’re not being “stupid” - they’re just having fun, enjoying flexing their social imagination (it takes a decent amount of empathic curiosity to make someone else laugh) and maybe trying to make an important point without being an insufferable jerk about it.

This version of “stupid” therefore becomes what other folk call anyone doing something unusual, original, strange or surprising. (Another word for this is maybe “Art.”)

This especially applies if the confused observer can’t see the point of all that silliness. Why would you make a total fool of yourself in this manner? Well - aren’t we all fools already? And hey, we’re suddenly paying attention to this thing now, right? How interesting! And hey - why the hell not?

(If your explanation for pursuing some creative endeavour has ever been Well, why not? - then you are magnificently stupid and I admire you endlessly for it.)

I’m a big fan of this flavour of foolishness, and I think it can make the world better, or at least more bearable. And it can do wonders for your curiosity - which is another way of saying it makes the world more bearable.

With that in mind, here are four suggestions for how you can gently, constructively enstupid your 2022. Please proceed with just the right amount of idiotic recklessness.

1. Make A Stupid List

When lockdowns started back in 2020, a lot of people - many with good intentions in mind - leapt onto social media and started saying things like:

• There’s no excuse now to put off writing The Great [insert your country here] Novel. If you don’t do it, maybe your problem all along wasn’t a lack of time? Just saying!

• Ready to get in the best shape of your LIFE people? #jazzercize #shakeweight

• I’m going to bake every scene in Tiger King and sell it on the blockchain. What are YOU doing? #crush2020

Today, something of a follow-up trend is emerging:

You can certainly yell at these people! That’s always an option.

But far more satisfying is beating them at their own game without exerting any effort whatsoever.

This is actually a rehash of something I wrote on my blog a decade ago. It proved so popular that someone even turned it into a poster. And it is, of course, immensely foolish. I’m a fool for writing it.

But here’s the thing I’ve recently realised: life is mostly stuff like this. Most of our days are filled with these tiny, silly, seemingly inconsequential moments, so they’re most of the hand we have to play with - and, in an absurdly low-grade sort of way, they’re satisfying, even fun. They land us in the present, they engage all our senses, and for one delicious moment, they make us pay closer attention to things we normally overlook. What’s not to love?

So, please: make your own stupid, stupid list of amazingly achievable things. Make it fatuously easy and supremely doable.

That’ll show ‘em.

2. Be Stupidly Enthusiastic

Every year for the last decade, Brendan Leonard reposts this essay at Semi-Rad. And every year, it’s needed more than ever:

“In 2022, I urge you to notice when something is awesome, as it often is, and exclaim or murmur or just make a mental note of it. Isn’t it just goddamn fantastic that you have your health, for example? Or running water, or electricity? Or that you have enough money to actually pay someone else to make you a cup of coffee? Or if you want ice cream, you are at any time in America probably only 5 or 10 minutes away from a place that sells some form of it? (Trust me on that one.)”

Enthusiasm, though, looks stupid. It’s cool to be cynical and aloof and blasé and disinterested, and it’s deeply, shamefully dorky to be enthusiastic. One just doesn’t, darling.

The problem here is how quickly this attitude corrupts your ability to appreciate other people’s joy and eventually your own, creating a feedback loop that makes everyone feel terrible:

So, bollocks to that way of thinking. Please, go forth and nerd out, freely and loudly without shame or self-recrimination. Lots of people will think you’re being stupid. They’re absolutely correct - and they’re missing an important point about enjoying life properly.

Best of luck to them.

3. Stupify Your Tech

A few years ago, I went walking with my friend Al in the hills adjoining the North York Moors. We were fighting through thick snow, with more on the way - but Al wasn’t worried, because he was carrying a Totally Crap Phone.

I on the other hand was furnished with a Samsung Galaxy something-or-other: at the time, the most advanced & expensive phone I’d ever owned. It could do everything. I showed Al a number of amazing things it could do, and he was impressed.

“You must be worried it doesn’t get damaged in all this damp.”

“Terrified, yes!”

Around 12 hours into our 26-hour ordeal - sorry, ‘adventure’ - my phone ran out of power while I was trying to update Facebook using zero bars of signal (because, dying battery). Al was building a fire at the time. He saw my frustration, laughed, and pulled out his Nokia 3310.

“I only charged it yesterday. The battery will last for at least a week. And look - 3 bars!”

Later we stretched out our sleeping bags and slept in the snow, and my burning resentment kept me warm all night.

This isn’t a mean-spirited story about bitterness, though - it’s also about jealousy. I was actually jealous of Al’s piece-of-crap phone. I was jealous that it could still do something. Worse still, it could still do the most important thing we could possibly need, aka. call for help if anything went dramatically wrong.

This adventure taught me a number of important lessons.

First: always carry an external battery pack for your smartphone so you can keep bragging about it without power-related interruptions.

Second: it’s too easy these days to use tech in the way it’s already designed, instead of deciding in advance what we need,and then seeking out tech that does that job in a manner that feels most satisfying to us.

This is a complicated idea, and something of an offshoot of this well-made point:

In Al’s case, he does a lot of mountain-climbing and he knows his way around a paper map, so the best mobile technology for him is something that lets him ring people, never runs out of power, and is tough enough to survive anything short of an asteroid impact. As the famous meme says, the Nokia 3310 is a perfect fit on all counts.

It is also a ‘cheap,’ ‘worthless’ piece of ‘garbage’ that only stupid people would be seen using in public.

If you use one, you’ll embarrass the hell out of everyone you know. Some may even stop speaking to you. Ugh. What’s wrong with you? Where’s your DeLorean parked? The Eighties just called and they don’t want you either.

At this point you could casually mention the battery life, or how much your phone cost when you got it on eBay, but really, its biggest benefit isn’t about either of these things (and they still won’t get it). It’s actually about creative constraints. The less your tech allows you to do, the more creative and curious you’re going to behave in order to wring the results you want out of it - which is the exact reverse of what’s happening with Google Search questions right now.

What’s the absolute minimum tech you need to get an interesting thing done this year?

Hey, maybe it’d be fun to test those limits and find out.

Further Reading: writer David Charles has some interesting thoughts on ‘Minimum Viable Technology’ here.

4. Stupidly Waste Time Outdoors

It must have been really hard being a writer in the olden days. Just think of it: you’d been at your desk for hours (writing by hand, ye gods) and you needed to stretch your legs, so you flung open the front door, took a great gulp of fresh air, bellowed something like “BY JOVE, THIS IS JUST THE TICKET!” and set off down the road at a brisk trot.

Then after five minutes you got bored, so you pulled your phone out, popped your headphones in and listened to Spotify, iTunes or Audible.

I mean - what did they do back then, without all our favourite apps? How could they walk for hours without going utterly mad with boredom?

Dickens was from childhood an avid, even compulsive, walker. He once wrote. "I think I must be the descendant, at no great distance, of some irreclaimable tramp." Scarcely a day went by that Dickens didn't flee his desk and take to the streets of London and its suburbs. He routinely walked as many as 20 miles a day, and once set out at 2 a.m. to walk from his house in London to his country residence in Gad's Hill, Kent, 30 miles away. As several of his walking companions described it, he had a distinctive "swinging" gait. And, like many a serious runner of today, he "made a practice of increasing his speed when ascending a hill," according to his friend Marcus Stone.

- “Frisky As The Dickens,” Merrell Noden, Sports Illustrated.

What they did, of course, was nothing. Nothing but walking along, letting their thoughts drift or be triggered by whatever they encountered - which, these days, we tend to call “doing nothing.”

This sounds like heresy in today’s productivity-obsessed world. It sounds like privilege. Who on earth can afford to take half an hour out of their day just to do nothing? Rich people, that’s who! And idiots. (And idiotic rich people.)

Unfortunately, all the evidence says that the idiots are onto something. A 2014 study by researchers at Stanford found a wealth of evidence that walking improves creativity. Going for a walk helps you work better when you’re supposed to be working. And of course there are around eleventy billion articles out there about famous writers, thinkers, artists etc. who all went for long walks to bolster their brilliance (I’m sure you’ve read a few of them). You could also read books by Annie Murphy Paul, Jenny Odell, Florence Williams or Antonia Malchik on the mindboggling value of “just” going for a walk.

But here’s another reason, and I hope you’ll think it’s a bit stupid.

The best reason to go for a walk is so you can hang out with one of the most important people in your life: yourself.

No, really. This isn’t staggering narcissism. How often do you really, really think stuff through? When do you ever have the time - or give yourself the time - to do that? How often do you stop reacting to everything and just sit with what’s already in your head, turning it over and over to find new ways to look at it?

“How do you listen to yourself? We have all these thoughts going around, and most of us just distract ourselves from all of that, because it's noisy and messy and confused and full of emotion. But can we allow ourselves just to sit with it? And really pay attention to ourselves?…

If we're losing that ability to not interrupt ourselves, how can we give that to our work?”

- Sophie Stephenson

So I reckon this nothingness is a good thing to occasionally schedule into your day. Occasionally, mind. (Sometimes I just want to listen to a podcast while absent-mindedly blundering into potholes or shrieking my way down unforeseen railway embankments. Nobody’s taking those joys away from me without a fight.)

But I reckon the walking bit is important (or any kind of physical activity), because it’ll excite your body and get your blood pumping around, and since your mind is part of your body it’ll also get worked up, yet have nothing to feed on except itself. Allow it to get to work on things that have been quietly bugging you for ages. Let interesting insights bubble up, as they always seem to do when you’re doing nothing much at all.

Let it all happen, and don’t let anything else get in the way.

Wasting time is for idiots. I honestly can’t recommend it to you enough.

Happy new year!

- Mike

Images: Tim Mossholder; Donald Giannatti; Joa70; Diane Alkier; Sebastien Goldberg.

Just a quick update from me, in the hope of finally sending you a newsletter that doesn’t trigger Substack’s “Your Email Size Is Too Big” warning when I try to send it.

Firstly, may you be feeling some of this right now…

…although you probably haven’t had the time, because of this:

However the holidays are hitting you, I hope you find a few moments of blessed sanity-reclaiming peace & quiet here and there. That was the weirdest year, and I reckon we’re allowed to take a minute to collect our thoughts. That’d probably be healthy.

I’ll be back in a few days with the last few pieces of Everything Is Amazing’s third season, with some paid-subscriber-only stuff and a final bout of bizarre optical trickery.

Regarding the latter, here are a couple of mindboggling images that didn’t make the final cut:

Colour constancy is yet another bizarre example of your mind telling you what it thinks things should look like, in defiance of what they actually look like. (Strawberries? They’re red! Any fool knows that.)

In this case, here’s the proof. Cover up the top half of the following picture and look at the solid rectangle at the bottom, and then uncover the top half again and watch that grey rectangle “change” back to red:

Mad, right?

And, courtesy of Jodi - okay, this one isn’t really an optical illusion, but try telling that to your eyes:

It’s been eleven months since I started this whole curiosity project - and along with developing an over-reliance on pasted tweets, one of the greatest joys for me has been discovering how utterly unoriginal I’m being. At every turn, I’ve found someone much smarter and more articulate got there first and wrote about it so brilliantly that anything I’ll say will automatically pale in comparison…

This is actually great, because it saves me loads of hard work. Expect my quotations to get longer and longer, until I’m pasting over entire books and fighting off intellectual copyright lawyers. That’s the dream here.

And it happened again last week, when for the first time I read Rachel Carson’s posthumously published essay The Sense Of Wonder, a short guide to introducing children to the magic & beauty of the natural world.

By her account, this was a first outline of the book she most wanted to write - but her most famous & influential work, the pesticide-lambasting Silent Spring (1962), made such an impact & created such fierce opposition from major chemical companies that it swallowed up all her time until she ran out of it.

So, this is all we have. And it’s short: a few dozen pages, or barely half an hour’s worth if you listen to the Plus Catalogue version that’s currently free for Audible subscribers.

But what’s here burns so brightly.

Her point, again and again, is that adults need to learn from children as much as children need the guidance of adults. Each needs something of the other’s way of experiencing the world.

Take her point about the names of things:

“Parents often have a sense of inadequacy when confronted on the one hand with the eager, sensitive mind of a child and on the other with a world of complex physical nature, inhabited by a life so various and unfamiliar that it seems hopeless to reduce it to order and knowledge. In a mood of self-defeat, they exclaim, “How can I possibly teach my child about nature—why, I don’t even know one bird from another!”

I sincerely believe that for the child, and for the parent seeking to guide him, it is not half so important to know as to feel.”

The problem here isn’t that kids don’t know what they’re looking at - it’s that we adults have convinced ourselves we should already know a very specific way of knowing (eg. rattling off difficult-to-memorise names of things in that super-confident manner we’re taught is the pinnacle of demonstrating a hearty, worldly education)…

And any lack of skill at doing that creates guilt, shame and avoidance tactics which affect the way we behave with everyone, children included. I dunno, it’s just a tree, isn’t it? Um. What do you want for dinner?

The antidote, Carson suggests, is for adults to relearn the joy of asking “foolish” questions like kids do, and to stop pretending (to themselves and everyone else) that it’s their job to always have firm answers to everything. That would be an excellent place to start.

But the part of The Sense Of Wonder that resonated most strongly with me is this:

"I remember a summer night.... It was a clear night without a moon. With a friend, I went out on a flat headland that is almost a tiny island, being all but surrounded by the waters of the bay. There the horizons are remote and distant rims on the edge of space. We lay and looked up at the sky and the millions of stars that blazed in darkness.

The night was so still that we could hear the buoy on the ledges out beyond the mouth of the bay. Once or twice a word spoken by someone on the far shore was carried across on the clear air. A few lights burned in cottages. Otherwise there was no reminder of other human life; my companion and I were alone with the stars. I have never seen them more beautiful: the misty river of the Milky Way flowing across the sky, the patterns of the constellations standing out bright and clear, a blazing planet low on the horizon. Once or twice a meteor burned its way into the earth’s atmosphere.

It occurred to me that if this were a sight that could be seen only once in a century or even once in a human generation, this little headland would be thronged with spectators. But it can be seen many scores of nights in any year, and so the lights burned in the cottages and the inhabitants probably gave not a thought to the beauty overhead; and because they could see it almost any night, perhaps they will never see it."

Whew.

I started Everything Is Amazing at the end of January to share everything I was (finally!) learning about seeing the world as it really is.

At first glance, this statement is a bit odd. If I wanted to do that, why not write about current affairs, politics, business, the economy, the pandemic, all the important things in the news every day? Part of my answer to that question is here - but really, I’m just the wrong person for that stuff. For example, what could I possibly add to what Ed Yong has been doing so well that he just won a Pulitzer for it? Come on.

But with the unspoken idea that the news has the monopoly on what’s truly vital comes the emotional cost of following it every day. Who over the last half-decade hasn’t been tempted to do a Paul Miller and Waldenpond themselves completely off the Internet, because they were exhausted at the amount of infuriating awfulness out there? Who wouldn’t want to escape so much horror?

(This is how I felt in 2019, after half a decade of watching my late mother succumb to the cruelty of dementia, and a year of getting my family’s affairs in order in the wake of her death. I couldn’t even get a handle on all that, let alone the news as well. Not only did I want to run away from everything, I also thought I was done as a writer, because nothing I wrote sounded like myself anymore. Time to call it quits?)

Except…this reject the world to save yourself thinking is not what I’ve learned from my favourite writers. They’re the ones who lean in when they want the good, hopeful stuff that makes life feel like it’s worth living. They pay more attention, in a careful, selective, questioning-the-questions sort of way. They’re the ones who create hopefulness and joy through curiosity, awe and wonder, in the hope that it’s the fuel others need to go out and fix what’s broken in the world.

I liked the sound of that, so I decided to make a newsletter around it. If I could find an audience of perhaps a hundred or so people who felt the same way during my first year of writing, maybe it’d be worth building up further, while also helping me recover as a writer?

I definitely wasn’t ready for where things stand right now:

(That huge spike in late November? It turns out everyone loves a light pillar.)

Of the feedback I’ve got from you, I’ve been so gratified by…well, all of it (thank you), but one thing in particular, which I’ve heard dozens of times now: this newsletter, which is about looking harder at the world, made you feel a bit more hopeful. If that’s its legacy, that’d be more than enough for me. Job’s a good’un.

But - no. I feel like I’ve barely got started here. Since this is increasingly bigger than the thing I initially expected to build, I will be aiming a lot higher. If this turns into my fulltime job (and based on how it’s growing, that might happen sometime in 2022), I’d better get really good at this, and find all sorts of new ways to knock your socks off.

So I’d better go and start doing that. But for now, thank you. It’s been the wildest ride so far - and hell, I haven’t even got to [spoilers removed] and [spoilers removed] yet…

I’m properly excited about where we’re going next. I hope you will be too.

- Mike

Images: Samuele Errico Piccarini; Chesapeake Bay Foundation/Wiki Commons.

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This week I’ve mostly been laughing at my friend Geraldine: firstly, at her incredible, stomach-churning restaurant review…

…and then at how it became international news (literally, it was in UK newspapers a few days later) - and then this happened:

It was such a joy to see. It might enjoy it too. Go read her post to find out.

So, to today’s topic, which I’m not looking forward to exploring at all.

I first joined the Internet in 1998, and one of the first things I did was strike up a conversation with someone doing admin at (I think) AOL Online. It went something like the above. The Internet was amazing! I was excited, curious and hopeful. I couldn’t wait to see what happened next.

Unfortunately, it’s possible that what happened next was - I joined the wrong side.

That’s our topic for today.

Have you heard the shortest published story in the world? It goes like this:

“The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door.”

It’s part of a longer story by American scifi author Frederic Brown, called “Knock,” published in 1948. The longer version is…um, very 1940s? (It features aliens with names beginning with “Z”, so - yeah.)

But what really became famous was that opener, a yarn in itself that’s been quietly tormenting people for over half a century. It’s a self-contained story that could go in a hundred directions:

• There’s a supernatural entity at the door.

• There’s a zombie at the door.

• There’s an alien at the door.

• There’s a woman at the door.

• There’s a child at the door.

• There’s no knock, and/or no door.

• He only thinks he’s the last man on Earth.

• He’s not a man.

• “Earth” in this context doesn’t mean our planet - or some similar nitpicky twist with any of the other nouns in this sentence.

• The narrator is unreliable so you can’t trust anything here.

• It’s a tree branch tapping against the door, blown by the wind…

I can think of a handful of popular novels that fit each of these scenarios: for example, Nevil Shute’s utterly devastating 1957 novel On The Beach - and if you’ve read it, you know which one I’m referring to.

But the two-sentence story itself gives you nothing. It just ends, leaving you frustrated and annoyed and ready to argue over what it really means with a bunch of similarly exasperated friends or complete strangers.

Really? Was that it? There must be more. What clues did we miss? No, you’re wrong, he wouldn’t do that. Look, I just know, okay?

This is the essence of effective dramatic tension: stringing your audiences along until the next big reveal, always keeping something back from them, and leaving them to marinade in their own frustration.

"Always make the audience suffer as much as possible." - Alfred Hitchcock

It’s immensely annoying, yet it extracts billions of dollars from us every year. (Just ask Marvel.) There’s no question it’s hugely important to professional storytellers, marketers and anyone with anything to sell…

But is it actually good for us?

This may seem like a stupid question to you - but it’s terrifying to me. For the last ten years, I’ve made something of a living by hooking folk with stories, by maddening them in the service of readability, and by being an enormous shameless tease. Even worse, I’ve taught this stuff to other people, in lectures and through a storytelling course. I’m in this up to my neck.

Oh, and since dramatic tension is a way of inspiring curiosity, I’m also in danger of sinking all the arguments for the existence of this newsletter as well. Hooray!

With my heart in my mouth, I went looking for answers.

(Look! I’m still doing it. I’ve already done the research for this newsletter. I could sum up right now what I found. But you’ll just have to keep reading. That’s how awful I can’t stop being.)

Okay. Here’s what I found.

Brace yourself. It’s not all good news.

1. Everything Must Go

Let’s say this Last Man On Earth microstory has been quietly bugging you for a full week now. (If this seems ridiculous to you, translate it into that special thing you care about to a degree that other people might consider equally ridiculous.)

Now you’re out shopping, strolling down the high street. Your attention is grabbed by the word “SALE” in a clothes shop window, so you go in and have a look around. A truly fabulous jacket catches your eye. It’s 60% off normal price - but that remaining 40% is still uncomfortably outside your budget for impulse purchases. If you buy it, you’ll end up more financially anxious for the rest of the month than you really need to be.

But - it’s on sale. You might never get this chance again.

What do you do?

Incredibly, that tiny story-induced irritation in the back of your mind could have a wildly disproportionate effect here. That’s what the work of Kyra Wiggin, Martin Reimann and Shailendra Jain suggests, anyway: in their studies, participants with unsatisfied cravings for knowledge (intensified by the researchers) were more prone to splurging money on a whim than those without an aggravated curious itch.

Why is this?

It seems it’s down to our neurological reward systems, aka. that reckless flood of “oh **** it, my life is hard, I DESERVE this today” feelings that trigger an impulsive purchase:

Curiosity triggers abound in our everyday lives—we often have to wait to read a text message, finish a mystery novel or solve a puzzle. In addition, savvy businesses intentionally build some mystery in their marketing. Companies such as Groupon, JetBlue Airways and Banana Republic offer “secret” promotional deals and mystery products, and other stores distribute coupons but only reveal the amount of the discount at the time of purchase.

The findings by Wiggin and her colleagues might encourage businesses to take the practice one step further—for example, by adding some fun trivia at the entrance to a store, with answers provided on your receipt as you leave. Whether we enter a store in a state of curiosity or our curiosity is piqued by marketing ploys, the result may be the same: we will be tempted to select more lavish items.

- “How Curiosity Makes You Crave,” Cindi May, Scientific American.

So, wow. That’s not good. Us storytellers leaving you hanging - we’re making you buy loads of crap you don’t need?

And considering how deeply these narrative open-loops are baked into…well, everything in modern society (especially marketing of all kinds), is it any wonder we’re under such huge pressure to dull that pain and blow our budgets with impulse-buying?

Thankfully, there’s a way to protect yourself against the financial ravages of dramatic tension. You just need to be a bit more kind to yourself - strategically and preventatively.

It’s counterproductive and anxiety-inducing if you try to bully yourself into ‘responsible’ behaviour. The way to do it is to acknowledge that yes, as absurd as it might seem to the stern, joyless adult within you, you’re jusifiably annoyed that episode 6 of Hawkeye isn’t here yet, or it’s understandable that you’re peeved that you have to wait two whole weeks for the big end-of-season game - and you need to make yourself feel better somehow before you go make any decisions involving money.

In other words: you need to respect the curiosity-driven, story-loving person within you, instead of pretending you’re a totally rational, emotionally controlled Grown-Up (whatever the hell that is, because I’ve never met one).

As I understand this, it shifts the blame a bit. Yes, simmering dramatic tension can seriously mess up all other aspects of your life - but then, so can any other emotional response. But this doesn’t make all our emotions “bad”. It’s how we use those emotions - and how other people use ours - that are the issue here. It’s as much about intent as it is about effect.

But it certainly is also about effect. This is why we need to understand it better. We story-peddlers and curiosity-catalysts can’t just say “oh, it’s not my fault you just spent £37,000 on lunch at that idiot’s restaurant.” Maybe it’s not our fault legally, but we can certainly learn and talk more about the mechanisms affecting everyone’s decision-making abilities due to our sneaky, under-the-radar influence.

So. These findings aren’t great. I feel somewhat queasy. But this is about how we intentionally use curiosity - because of course it can be, and is, misused.

(This is undeniable. Just look at clickbait.)

2. Eee, Them Were’t Days

(With infinite apologies to anyone who has ever played any of the Four Yorkshiremen.)

- I tell you, back in those days, we didn’t know things. Not a thing!

- Aye! Nowt.

- And when you discovered something you didn’t know - which happened all the time - you just had to carry it around with you, or go to a library to fix it.

- Libraries? You were lucky. Where I grew up we only ‘ad one book for the whole village. Five Go On A Hike, by Enid Blyton. If it didn’t contain that thing you wanted to know, you were stuffed.

- A whole book? Oh, we used to dreeeeeeam of ‘avin’ a whole book. All we ‘ad were a page from a newspaper from 1906. AND it were on fire.

- At least you were warm then.

- But they were better times, though.

- AYE.

- Aye. Do you remember the ideas we used to ‘ave?

- Of course! When you spent the whole week fed up because you didn’t yet know something, eeee, it were marvellous what explanations you came up with!

- Marvellous!

- Aye. I read about all this in’t’newspaper. It’s like the opposite of perceptual narrowing - the process whereby infants “unlearn” all the ways to experience the world as they grow up, because of all the societal pressures to behave in more restrictive, more socially acceptable ways. For example, that way babies taste random things to see what they’re made of.

- Right. And when you ‘ad a question that were bugging you all week, you’d keep attacking it in your head from all sorts of different directions.

- “Widening your perceptual scope,” they call it. Like stepping back, so you can bring in more and more of the big picture. More tools with which to treat the problem, allowing you to become more and more creative…

- No wonder most fan theories are better than actual plot twists. All that time spent stewing!

- Oooh, you could end up with dozens of ways to answer stuff.

- ‘Undreds of ways.

- THOUSANDS. I actually invented nuclear fission just because I lost a strap on my duffle-coat and couldn’t work out how to button it without the wind getting in.

- I invented cognitive behavioural therapy because we ran out of teabags.

- I transcended and became pure energy because I lost my car keys!

- Not like today, though.

- No, not like today. Now folk just type their questions into Google an’ they get an answer immediately.

- One answer!

- Aye. What’s the use of one answer, I ask you? But that’s all you get. Type it in, click the first search result, off you pop. No need to even think at all!

- I worry about young people nowadays.

- Aye. Anyway, Clarence, Fred, I must dash, I’ve got a Flat Earth meeting in an hour, don’t want to be late.

- Flat Earth? Do you…do you believe that stuff?

- Of course! It’s on t’Internet. They would have taken it off if it weren’t true.

- Fair point well made.

- Aye.

3. The Other Questions

Let’s say that two-sentence ultrashort story has been gnawing at you for a full month now, and now you hate it. You hate it, you hate authors, you hate stories, you hate everyone, and above all you hate not knowing what’s next.

So naturally you start to rebel against the question itself.

While you’ve been reading this article, a very small part of your subconscious has been returning again and again to that microstory, looking for a new way to frame it so it gives you a truly satisfying answer, a new way to pry it open...

At least, it would be doing, if I hadn’t already listed a bunch of those answers directly underneath.

Those are acting on your brain like the first page of results in a Google search, and they’re now making it very hard for you to come up with anything else. Why bother, quite frankly? One of those eleven answers is probably good enough. Are we done? What a rubbish newsletter this is turning out to be. Ain’t nobody got the time.

Desperate for closure and relief from this irksome, boring annoyance, you deem this answer Good Enough I Guess, and move onwards without a backward glance.

Congratulations! You just successfully turned a mystery - a thing with infinite capacity to annoy you - into a puzzle, a thing you can quickly dispose of, allowing you to seek out new puzzles to process and discard equally quickly.

In a way, this is what Google Search is for. It’s there to take the big unanswerable questions in life (“what is love?”, “what’s the meaning of life?” or “why did they have to resurrect Sex And The City?”) and turn them into hard, fast answers (“a biological trick to perpetuate our species,” “money,” or “money.”)

Why do this? Well - because it saves us time! It means that we can ask more questions in the same amount of time, getting more done and thereby living richer, fuller lives. Obviously!

Google certainly agrees. In 2012, the Guardian interviewed Google’s Head of Search, Amit Singhal, who said this:

"The end game of this is we want to make it as natural as possible a thought process," he says. "We are maniacally focusing on the user to reduce every possible friction point between them, their thoughts and the information they want to find."

But as Ian Leslie notes in his book Curious, our curiosity - and our creativity, period - relies on that “friction”. It’s wholly dependent on us not getting answers immediately, so we can consider the questions long enough for deeper and deeper insights to develop, and continually refine how we phrase those questions, so they get better & better.

The smoking gun here is what Google Search is doing to the quality of our search inquiries. Returning to the Guardian interview:

I imagine, I say, that along the way he has been assisted in this work by the human component. Presumably we have got more precise in our search terms the more we have used Google?

He sighs, somewhat wearily. "Actually," he says, "it works the other way. The more accurate the machine gets, the lazier the questions become. So actually our lives get harder." He had to work especially hard to correct and understand spelling errors and analyse synonyms. And all along the dream has been the old Star Trek one of providing the right answer to what you think you want to know even if you don't know quite how to phrase the question."

But if we don’t know how to phrase the question in the first place, let alone rephrase it - are we even thinking about it?

Good question! I don’t know, I’m too busy writing this newsletter right now, sorry kthxbai.

(However, it’s worth remembering that our skill at asking questions is deeply tied up with social class, as I wrote about here: it’s the middle and upper class families, with a relative luxury of time and money at hand, that raise children with enough privilege to learn how to ask the best questions. This is not a level playing-field, even without Google Search getting involved.)

What we all need is better questions - including ones so rich in possibility that they’re essentially unanswerable. Or putting it another way: we need more mysteries, which are best tackled with the rigor and heart of epistemic and empathic curiosity.

We need to treat questions the same way professional musicians answer queries like “how do you play the piano?” Answer: a lifetime of compounded learning, and of rephrasing the same question again and again in new and exciting ways:

• How do you play Chopsticks?

• How do you play Beethoven’s Fur Elise?

• How did John Lennon play his Steinway Model Z?

• How can I play the slow bit of Toss A Coin To Your Witcher?

• How can I play Stravinsky’s Trois Mouvements De Petrouchka in front of these 600 people without going completely to pieces?

• How do I discover the first theme that will unlock the right flow of emotion so I can go on to score this soundtrack for that upcoming Christopher Nolan film?

(That last achievement might only be available to Hans Zimmer. Although maybe not! No harm in aiming high.)

The role of Art here is to pose mysteries (“what is love?”) again and again, and to refuse to come down hard with a definitive answer, even at the conclusion of that piece of artwork. The result?

We think about these questions properly.

We think about them all our lives.

And perhaps, along the way, we stumble across some answer to them that’s genuinely wise, and actually worth knowing.

(This is also the role of scientists, even though it’s often claimed they’re working in the opposite direction, towards boring certainty. Not so! The more science uncovers about reality, the deeper the mysteries seem to run and the more questions open up. Don’t get me started. Seriously.)

So it seems there’s hope for me and my frustration-peddling peers.

Yes, dramatic tension and questions annoying dangled in the air are incredibly maddening, and can trigger exactly the wrong kind of “dull the pain” commercial behaviour - but that feeling of annoyance, that “friction”, can also be the source of an infinity of meaningful, life-improving inquiry.

In a sense, it’s the essence of “Type 2 Questions” - borrowing from "Type 2 fun,” the kind you have when it’s unending misery at the time (say, climbing a mountain) but then you look back later and realise that pitting yourself against that challenge was the best thing you could ever have done with your day.

Answering a Type 2 Question is the work of a lifetime. Many lifetimes. It’s the work of the human condition, for everyone. And there will never be an end to the curiosity you can invest in these kinds of bottomless mysteries - or the satisfaction and sense of fulfilment they will give you, revelation after revelation.

Tantalizing mysteries can make life worth living - and so can curiosity, as long as it’s the right kind, applied in the right way for the right reasons.

Yeah. Reckon I might be in the clear here. Back to work, I guess?

Images: Markus Spiske / CouponSnake.com; Ana Municio; Reuben Juarez.

Please excuse me the week’s absence here - I had to go away and get a chunk of paying-the-bills work done, and it took much longer than expected. (I’ll never learn.)

Bizarrely, while I was away, this newsletter exploded. There are now so many more of you here than before (the warmest of welcomes to you) - making me wonder if the best thing I could do to grow Everything Is Amazing is to not actually write it! A crushing thought. Anyway, more on all that shortly.

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Before we crack on with today’s wonderment, a callback to a previous topic this season. Remember the weird optical phenomenon called a fata morgana? I was recently wandering back home here in Scotland after doing my shopping, and out to sea across the Firth of Clyde, off the tip of the isle of Arran…wait, is that…could that be…?

It was a bitterly cold day down near the ground, so that certainly fit. And sure enough, when I checked the same spot a few days later after the skies had cleared and the temperature had climbed a few degrees, nothing was visible off the end of Arran. So I’m calling it. That’s my first sighting.

Then a few days later, on another savagely frosty morning, I noticed the buildings up the coast were sitting atop inverted copies of themselves, in that telltale way I remembered from researching the fata morgana newsletter:

So that’s twice in the same week. What are the chances?

Answer: probably pretty good! I bet I’ve seen these before - I just haven’t known what I’m looking at. I could have missed them happening in front of me dozens of times. I reckon this is really about attention, and why the Protege Effect is such an amazing way to focus it.

(Want to truly learn a thing? Challenge yourself to explain it to others, and your fear of looking like a blithering idiot will nail it into your brain. Hooray for the power of strategically terrifying yourself!)

Today, staying with Weird Things Happening In The Sky, here’s something exceedingly odd that happened above Glasgow earlier this year.

One day in earlier January, city resident Steph Nixon took this photo. What the hell…? Some kind of mass celebration with multicoloured spotlights? A critical footie game? Nope, nothing scheduled. So - what was it?

When Steph’s tweet went viral, replies quickly filled up with animated GIFs from War of the Worlds, Independence Day, Star Trek and Rick and Morty. The further it got retweeted, the more imaginative the explanations became:

“Ah, this is a phenomenon not seen for a while now. It's called 'virtuous auroras' . Happens when an overwhelming feeling is inside a group of people.”

I saw nothing about this Twitter kerfuffle at the time, despite living less than 40 miles away. I also didn’t see anything in the sky when I went for my early evening walks.

But that’s not surprising. It’s very hard to see something that isn’t actually there.

One snowy winter’s night four years ago, photographer David Bell saw a similar thing - multicoloured towers of light emerging from the fog outside his window in Pinedale, Wyoming. He grabbed his coat and a tripod for his camera, crunched out into the snow and took this mesmerisingly beautiful image:

Just astounding, right?

Alas, if only these beams of light actually existed.

Another example: check out this video of Olso, from just last week (h/t Ben Stamnes).

Or how about this sight, captured by Timothy Elzinga in Northern Ontario, also in 2017?

Nope. They don’t exist either.

Okay, I’m even annoying myself now. How can something regularly seen by thousands, maybe millions of people worldwide, including multiple people stood in the same place at the same time, be described as “not existing”? And how can it not be there if it shows up on film? What is this, an episode of Most Haunted?

Last week I posted some of these images in a Twitter thread, which started with this tweet:

It went massively, absurdly viral, in a way nothing I’ve posted on Twitter has ever done before - and I started getting yelled at.

“Of course it exists!”

“You’re stupid. Get off the internet.”

“They’re light pillars, like rainbows. There, saved you a click because these [sic] guy is a pedantic newslettering idiot pushing clickbait coz he doesn't have a life.”

This withering irritation may be part of why it was so widely shared - in which case, I guess I am indeed guilty of using clickbait tactics, aka. “rile everyone up with an outrageous statement.” I guess I’m one of those people! Who knew?

(Possible answer: everyone but me.)

But there’s a scientific argument here to back up my ludicrous-seeming claim - and a deeper scientific truth hinted at, which can be extremely uncomfortable to sit with.

Here it is:

All the people on all sides of this argument are correct. These pillars of light, simultaneously and without any contradiction, do and do not exist.

Here’s the bizarre science that backs this up.

When you think you see one of those pillars of light, you’re actually seeing something like this.

As it gets colder, water in the air turns to ice crystals, which can hover near to the ground in glittering clouds with the beautiful nickname of diamond dust. The majority of these crystals are hexagonal, with a flat, reflective surface on both sides - and as they slowly drift towards the ground, most of them align themselves horizontally.

Enter a distant light source (the bulb in the above diagram). A street-light, a neon sign, a spotlight at a football stadium. Any light bright enough to travel miles, until it glints off those ice crystals in the air, and reflects down into your eyes…

Because of the way these reflections work, the light reflecting at just the right angle to hit your retinas is from crystals suspended more or less at the same distance from you (roughly halfway between your eyes and the distant light source) - but at different altitudes, like different storeys in the same house.

The illusion this creates - see the dotted lines above - is that of a column of light, hovering near or above the original source of light on the ground. It’s like how the light from a real object being bent by cold air into a fata morgana creates a superior mirage, making our brains assume we’re seeing a ship floating in the air - when what we’re really seeing is light behaving in a way we’re so profoundly not used to seeing that it plays a trick on our minds.

A light pillar exists because it’s a very real optical phenomenon you can see, presumably along with any species capable of seeing in the same visual spectrum we do. Dogs, for example. (I think dogs would much prefer light pillars as alternatives to fireworks.)

And it’s similarly real because it’s made of very real photons - well, as much as photons can be considered real. If you want to start a fight between two physicists, this might be a good topic to steer them onto.

Yet it’s also not real because it’s not there. It’s virtual. There is no pillar hanging in the sky, as anyone standing anywhere else will attest, including the people directly underneath “it”. You might as well say a rainbow is real (which of course it is, but also isn’t).

When I tried to introduce the science in these terms, it’s fair to say it didn’t sit well with a lot of people:

A lot of this may be down to my failings as a communicator / my shameless clickbaiting. But I think it’s also because an optical illusion is a False Dilemma (which I wrote about here) - the limiting fallacy that forces us to choose between two options when there are credible arguments for both being right.

These kinds of situations crop up in modern science all the time: for example, the staggering oddness of wave-particle duality, which Einstein explained like this:

It seems as though we must use sometimes the one theory and sometimes the other, while at times we may use either. We are faced with a new kind of difficulty. We have two contradictory pictures of reality; separately neither of them fully explains the phenomena of light, but together they do.

Accepting this kind of down-to-the-bone uncertainty is really damn hard. Our minds aren’t cut out for it.

But, rather disturbingly, it may be how everything is actually wired up. It’s like the fabric of existence itself is refusing to come up with any hard answers and is, as Jonny Miller would say, just sitting comfortably with all the questions.

(A common reason some folk don’t like the idea of hard science is that they worry it’ll explain everything in depressingly mechanical terms & rob the world of all its mystery. The reality: it might go in the other direction, and show that everything is so bafflingly non-intuitive to human minds that we’ll never be able to get our heads round it!)

OK. Backing away from this yawning abyss of theoretical lunacy, let’s return to the very real/unreal world of light pillars.

Hey, aren’t they just like those halos you sometimes see around the sun? Isn’t that the same principle?

Bang on, sunshine.

A parhelion, better known as a sundog, is a light pillar in a different form: reflections from ice crystals creating an illusory structure hanging in the air that can only be seen from one viewpoint. And I have it on good authority that experiencing these things in person is just overwhelming.

Take this whopper that followed my friend Antonia across a mountainside in 2015:

(Can you see the glitter of the ice-crystals hanging in the air? Fabulous.)

And staying with the Sun, and adding in the Moon:

So, it may be getting bitterly cold out there right now for those of us in Northerly parts. And when the holidays arrive, it may feel like a good idea to stay in bed, or sit swaddled in fleecey things by the fire, at least until the sun is as close to overhead as it gets at the moment. Every day may feel like Crappy Netflix Movie 1, Outdoors 0…

But ‘tis the season of deep optical weirdness - and as the temperature plummets, you might see something that’ll remind you that the real world is far stranger than it looks (and occasionally looks far stranger than it actually is).

Brave the cold, keep your eyes open, and you might see something impossible. Wouldn’t that be a thing to finish the year with?

- Mike

Images: Steph Nixon; Mike Sowden; David Bell/Wyoming Mountain Photography; TimmyJoeOnYouTube; Lee Petersen; Proteon via reddit; Antonia Malchik.

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As I write this, Storm Arwen is barrelling into Scotland, bringing with it gale-force winds, stinging rain and a worrying new trend in naming storms after fictional fantasy characters. On behalf of fellow nerds, I implore the Met Office: leave it there, guys. The last thing our frazzled nervous systems need is a Storm Sauron or Hurricane Voldemort. We can’t take. Try flowers or birds or something.

(Or chocolate bars! You must admit, Storm Curly Wurly has a nice ring to it.)

Anyway, while the wind attempts to lever the roof off my wooden cabin, I’d like to introduce you to someone who’s always curious about what she can do next, and never stops acting like it.

In 2010, I attended my very first travel writing conference in Manchester - an intimidating affair, as I knew exactly nobody and had published exactly nothing. I felt like a fraud - or more accurately, like the person attending a posh, fancily-dressed party who misheard it as “fancy-dress” and turned up dressed as Big Bird.

This feeling lasted until the third lecture of the day, given by Lola Akinmade Åkerström, on the subject of telling a good story.

Not only is Lola supremely accomplished (we’ll get to that in a minute), she is also a whirlwind of positive energy, with the rockstar charisma to take over a room, but she uses it to hold space for other people, encourage other voices and champion the ideas she believes the world needs.

The result is that in her presence, you feel fully heard and understood, you get all your self-confidence back, and you walk away a bit dumbstruck because oh wow, I never knew that, and it changes everything. Lola will make you see the big picture, and glimpse the place you want to occupy within it.

All this makes her a terrific teacher, and I’m so glad she was the first I ever had in travel writing - and I’m even happier that over the last ten years she’s become a good friend as well. She’s the best of folk.

Also, she’s astonishingly talented. And by talented, I partly mean she’s really hard-working. Lola is a master-craftsperson of everything she puts her hand to, in that she just goes for it, with everything in her being, until it pays off at the highest level she thinks she can achieve.

As a travel writer, she’s won so many awards that they take up most of the space on her Wikipedia page.

As a photographer, she’s represented by National Geographic Image Collection. (Yep, you heard me.)

During the pandemic, she co-founded Local Purse, a start-up that connects artisans and local guides around the world with online shoppers across the whole planet.

She’s written for every major travel magazine I know of. She’s been pretty much everywhere I know of. If she hasn’t yet done a particular thing, the reason is almost certainly time. (Just give her time. Let her get her breath back. Can’t be easy doing almost-everything.)

The line that connects together her dizzying constellation of vocations is her ability to tell a good story - and when we sat down a few months ago to have a chat over Zoom, from which the following interview is excerpted, she was on the verge of having her first novel published:

On the 10th of this month, in the middle of the official book tour and amidst a shower of rave reviews, Amazon picked In Every Mirror She's Black for their Gifting Guide for Fiction: Editors' Picks, alongside titles from Sally Rooney, John LeCarre, Susanna Clark, Matt Haig, and some weird little book by Frank Herbert called Dune, maybe you’ve heard of it?

It’s safe to say Lola’s debut novel has landed with all the power of everything else she’s done. It’s a rare thing. (More correctly: it’s a Lola thing.)

And to return to her mad skills as a teacher, as I write this, Lola’s self-paced storytelling course on her own teaching platform (did I mention she has a teaching platform?) is discounted by 50% , for anyone interested in bringing a bit of her magic to the way they write about the world…

Click here for the details.

Now, onto our chat.

The following conversation has been edited for clarity and to remove all my incredibly annoying interruptions (honestly, do learn to shut up, Mike).

Mike: So - Lola! As usual, you seem to be doing absolutely everything right now. Why is that?

Lola: Well - I recently found out there is a group of people called multipotentialites, and when I found out I felt like oh my god, I finally found what I am. And now I don't feel crazy.

Mike: So, like the Greek hero Odysseus, who was pretty good at almost everything. And I know you’re pretty good at almost everything because I read your Wikipedia page...

Lola: *laughs* I didn't know who initially created it (now I do), but it's a huge honour.

Mike: So you grew up in Lagos. And this is a part of the world that I know nothing about - and I learned it’s the second largest city in Africa?

Lola: Cairo I think is the biggest? [It seems to depend on how you define the edges of the city. eg. Wikipedia puts Kinshasa before both Lagos & Cairo.] But Lagos is over 20 million people, and Nigeria itself is 250 different tribes, over 500 different languages...

Mike: And it’s enormous. So did you grow up in Lagos or the outskirts? Before the age of 15, were you a city girl?

Lola: We grew up on a barrier island. There's a lagoon that separates it from Lagos Island and the mainland. So I grew up on that barrier island, but then it was still just a kind of suburb. I grew up close to water, but I'm a crap swimmer - when your parents are scared of something, they're gonna transfer it to the kids. And when you see the Atlantic Ocean right there, it frightens you, the waves are just terrifying. So even though we went to the beach, we didn't really swim much.

Mike: Right. The Atlantic’s unpredictable - like the difference between a dog and a cat. The English Channel is, ‘there’s a good boy’ - but the Atlantic, it'll just claw you at any moment.

Lola: So I do consider myself a city girl - I went to boarding school starting from the age of 9 or 10. And that was out in the countryside. I did that for about five years, just out in the country in a boarding school. And that was where I developed real growth. And it's not like a fancy English boarding school, this is like, you have your pail of water on your head, you go to the nearest village to go get the water, you study by candlelight because there's no electricity. I will say it was one of the best times of my life, because it was a kind of boot camp for kids, to create grit and resilience and be able to adapt quickly, and be productive in any situation.

Mike: So, that leads me to a question. I would describe you as a quietly driven person - you're very good at understanding when to step back and change gear, but you also seem very ambitious in a healthy way, always trying different things. So how much of that comes from that formative period of your life, how much of that comes from your parents, and how much of that awoke in you separately from those things?

Lola: A bit of everything. I grew up in a family of travellers, so my grandfather was in the shipping business, and my dad is a geologist - I mean he's retired now, but as a geologist, we travelled a lot. And that’s when you start developing your strengths. Am I a more creative person? Am I an analytical person? What do I like, or don't like? And I realised I’m a person that thrives on lots of different things. Now, why it feels like I do a lot of things is because I already know what drives me, is because I've lived in a place with lots of different cultures, and know the need for cultural understanding, making sure we understand each other or at least give space and respect to each other even if we don't agree. It’s about wanting and creating that environment. And so that translates into all I do, whether photography or writing or whatever. 

I think what makes it easier, or maybe clearer for me, was finding my own unique voice very early on. I wasn't just trying to follow trends. It's very easy to just get swept up in a trend. Trends are like waves in an ocean. Most metaphorically softer waves are, What are the new tools, new technologies, new platforms to tune your voice? But you don't try to swim in those big waves because they may drown you. You need to surf those waves. So my voice has always been consistent - but it's also adapted and evolved (like adjusting my stance on a surfboard), obviously, the more you know the better. But there is a certain deliberate consistency. I hope people feel like, she's still the same, no matter what she does.

Mike: It does seem like you have these core strengths that you always return to,  but you're also keen to experiment with whatever comes along...

Lola: Yeah, exactly. And very early on, I discovered I have five strengths, which gave me a sense of self confidence so that wherever I go, I can make changes based on them. So: I’m a really good problem solver. I'm a team player - I can figure out the dynamics and figure out what else is needed, and see if I need to adjust and help. I’m a creative person. I'm a versatile person, being open-minded - and I'm also a very quick study, which means I can quickly learn to be productive in something. So those five strengths are what’s helped me pivot. Productive right away feels like, wanting to get doing something. Then you do it, then you switch, and you learn to be productive again, and then you switch. It's because you know your strength. Just work with your strengths. 

Mike: I mean, on top of everything else you’re now a novelist. 

Lola: I’m actually coming full circle there. When I was in boarding school, I used to write fiction, that was actually how I got into nonfiction. I used to write dozens of short stories in notebooks, filling them up - and we had a sign-out sheet for them, so I was running my own little library of my own. A lot of my classmates, once I go on the book tour, they are going to bring up those anecdotes because they used to sign out for those. So, because I hand-wrote those books, they'll sign them out, the person reads it, brings it to the next person, they sign them out and so on...

So most people don't know that that was actually first, before photography, long before travel writing. It was always fiction. I wrote so many stories. I have the synopsis of many stories now. I wrote the synopsis so that if I want to rewrite them as an adult, I can do that. I have about 25 novel ideas, but one of them I started rewriting as a adult, and I was still struggling to kind of finish it for many years. And I was like, why is that?

The teenage fantasy is more wild, and then as an adult, you become a bit more cynical - but then I realised the reason I was struggling was I wasn't as close to the book, I wasn’t close to the characters, so I was having a problem creating a connection with them. So this new book is a book I was supposed to write now - at this stage of my life. Bringing in all the different experiences I've had, all the different people I've met...I felt like I needed to live a little bit more, to be able to arrive at a certain believable authority.

Mike: So, regarding the own plot twists in your life - at the age of 15 you went to the University of Maryland?

Lola: Yes. In the States. I actually started at a community college, and I transferred a year later, because I was still too young. Then they decided I was ready at 15 for a university, so I started, and then transferred for my final few years at University of Maryland, graduated at 19. My first degree - and then I got my second degree later, but started work at 19 in Geographical Information Systems.

Mike: That was your career for a long while. Considering all the things that you're doing now, are you here because you were always restless? Presumably GIS work was well-paid with a more solid career arc. When did you feel like it wasn’t the right one for you?

Lola: I always knew extensive travel in some form would be part of my future-  I just didn't know how it would manifest itself. So even when I was a GIS programmer, I would really mete out those vacations to travel as much as I could. And what also kept that job exciting was - GIS is spatial geography. It's exciting! You're working with maps and spatial information, it wasn't just straight programming, it was a bit more interesting and creative. But I think I knew that I'd always write fiction. I love to travel, and I wanted to write about my experiences when I travelled.

In 2002 I volunteered for an expedition, and that was when I put the two things together - to look at National Geographic and think I want to be a photographer and do this properly. Because it's another thing to actually be there, and say, this is it. This is why they do it. So I was in Fiji when I had that epiphany, in one of the most amazing places in the world right now, one of the most remote locations in Fiji  - people generally stay by the beach, but we were out in the jungle. I thought, I get to write about this and share it with the world. This is what I want to do. When I came back, I started plotting my exit strategy,

Mike: And I met you ten years later.  I’m not blaming you for all the terrible things that I've done in my career, but it’s a fact you were one of my first teachers in travel writing, via various conferences.

Lola: I used to work as an editor with Matador Network at the time, and I was talking about ground level writing. David Miller was the very first editor that I worked with. And I really credit. David for opening my eyes in this way - and as the one editor that said yes, the very first time. And they taught me how to write transparently. It's evolved and my voice has strengthened, but that's kind of how that progression started.

Mike: Okay, speaking of travel writing, and since you’re living in Sweden - what actually is a Smörgåsbord?

Lola: A Swedish buffet! Like, a spread of lots of different traditional Swedish items that's eaten during main events and main festivals, midsummer or Christmas. And there's even something called Julmust, I don't know how to describe it - kind of a ginger-beer type of soda? It's the same thing, they just change the labelling, they call it påskmust, which is for Easter, and then Julmust for Christmas - it’s the same thing. So that also gave me insight into Swedish society and recycling. In fact, there's a scene in In Every Mirror She’s Black where one of the characters comments on it:

“Swedes were excellent at recycling, Muna noted. So excellent that they ate the same food at every celebration, Christmas, Easter, Midsummer, it didn’t matter. She was staring, once again, at meatballs, cured salmon, pickled herring, and prinskorv - prince sausages…”

- In Every Mirror She’s Black

Mike: So am I right in saying you've lived in a lot of different countries now? How many is it?

Lola: For long periods of time I've travelled a lot - have been in some places maybe a month, a few weeks. But I don't really count those. I know some people stay somewhere one or two weeks and say “I lived in this country”? No. You vacationed there. So for me, it’s really only three countries I’ve lived in, I will say the US, Nigeria and Sweden. Even if you live somewhere for a year, it's great you lived there for a year, but - if you really feel you got under its skin, then you can claim you really lived there.

Mike: *heavy irony* Are you claiming that going somewhere for a week and then writing a Best Things To Do In [x] article, you're saying we can't do that now?

Lola: *laughs* We all make mistakes when we are younger. But there's nothing wrong with writing that as long as you turn it back to your experience. If you want to write a superlatives list. Make it your superlatives. Not saying “the best” but saying “my best”. You can give somebody a pass, if they make it their own superlatives. And I feel that also gives you the freedom to be a bit weirder. 

Mike: Right - like, we have to somewhat fit the market, but we also need to pattern-interrupt…

Lola: And that's the thing - it’s owning who you are. Very early on, I was frustrated by a lot of the industry expecting me to be a certain way, or do a certain thing, or champion certain causes, and- I'm just being me. We should inspire others to exist as their own individuals and not a monolithic voice of representing different causes or different things. Some people always want to define you, so they can put you in a box. Then you become excluded.

I talked about this in a TEDx talk: once you kind of operate outside of people's expectations, then you just naturally become impossible to ignore.

Mike: So with that in mind, what do you wish more people were curious about? What are the things at the moment where you want to grab some people and say, This is so interesting, so why are you not heading in that direction?

Lola: Wow, that's a great question. Let me think about it…

I think people should stop worrying about relevance, and focus on evolution. When you keep focusing on staying relevant, you can't easily pivot away when you feel like, Oh no, I'm living my life for other people. You feel pressure to keep up, do things this way, say these things, otherwise I will fall behind. But when you think about evolution, you're actually evolving to the best version of yourself in that time of your life. You're not supposed to stay stagnant. I'm not supposed to be, say, the older lady trying to keep up with 18-year-olds. It just doesn't make sense. But I still see people trying to do that. Why don't you let your voice evolve instead? So for me, that's what I always focus on is: what's the next version of my voice?

I just saw this quote recently - “lighthouses don't go running around an island looking for boats to save. They just stand there shining.” That’s by Anne Lamott. It’s fabulous. 

Mike: So will you now be introducing yourself to other people? Who & what is your identity right now?

Lola: I'm just a visual storyteller, or just storyteller. And then if they want to know more about my boring life, then I share. But I guess I'm a storyteller, and use different platforms to tell stories, the right platforms for the right stories,

Mike: I have to say, I usually find a little dirt on everyone just to flavour my interviews, and - I couldn't find a single person who had anything bad to say about you. And, well, it's a little bit selfish of you actually, Lola.

Lola: *laughs* I'm sure there are some private WhatsApp groups out there. But - I'm just a normal person living my life, and I don't stir up controversy for the sake of it, I know when to use my voice to add gravity to a cause I like if I feel it will move it forward. But I'm just - I don't talk if I feel my voice isn’t needed at this time. Although I don't stay totally silent either, because I think a lot of people feel like if you stay silent, then you're agreeing with something, especially when it comes to racism. A battle is fought in many ways, right? So there are foot soldiers, the calvary, the generals, you don't know what their plan is, but there are some who are quiet there and still in the fight. So there are many ways to be an activist. For me, I do that a lot through my work and trying to challenge, to understand what we think of each other, and look for a bridge to build.

Mike: Now that you're a novelist, you now have a new channel for doing this, and novels are a great way of delivering impactful ideas in a way that people feel but they don't recognise as argument, because it's entertainment. Are you feeling a bit more of a fire to use your fiction in this way?

Lola: Yeah. I've always had things to say and I've said them in different ways. Somebody was asking me about an article I did for the New York Times about raising mixed kids. And the person was asking, Did you get a lot of hate and pushback? Surprisingly, no, hopefully because I write in a way that even if the person doesn't agree, there is a nuance there that makes them pause and think. Maybe to think “even though I don't agree, that’s fine because there are many ways to confront these issues.”

I’m nuanced with these things because it lets people think. If I came aggressively at somebody, now we're not open to each other, and we're not gonna listen. When I wrote the Lagom book, that was a more objective book, it said, these are the good things and these are bad things, take what you will. And now this novel says, Okay, what if we take some of the not-so-good things, and show society and the people dealing with this not-so-good situation. How does it manifest?

With this novel - there's so many voices that we don't hear about in Sweden. Sweden is a lot more diverse than it shows globally. Sweden has a kind of one-dimensional image that's still kind of global. And I want to also show Sweden to itself, to say that you are actually a lot more multi-dimensional than you want to admit, and that it's okay to accept you're multi dimensional. Once you accept that you're complex and not perfect, then people can connect better with you. Sweden doesn't want to show that it's vulnerable. But vulnerability is what makes people connect with you, makes people see you in a different light.

To give an example, the Lagom book is in 18 different languages - except Swedish. It's like saying, there's nothing we can learn from you about ourselves. It makes sense, because I study cultural connection and understanding, and if you feel like there's nothing you can learn from an outsider, you will have blind spots because it's usually an objective third party that shows your blind spots. So this novel is - I have something to say, but to say it, I address lots of different voices in Sweden that we never hear about, that are equally as important. I use just three of them.

Mike: Now that you have the book coming out, you've proved to yourself and the world that you are this kind of storyteller too, which you know you’ve always been from the beginning, but we haven’t. But now, do you feel like, okay, I can go back to all these stories that I had when I was growing up? Does this feel like a new mission you’re embarking on?

Lola: Not so much proving to myself. But moving to a place where I’m not compromising, Because, you know, this book got over 70 rejections. At some point you wonder when do you keep going and when do you stop? But some of the comments on what they wanted me to change, I knew I wasn't going to compromise...yeah. So I think I got to the point where I was comfortable enough to take the rejection and accept it and not feel like I needed to bend.

So with a novel now, I hope it now opens up more space for me to explore more fiction writing, because that was my first love. And the people that have read this book said the story is very fast paced - it's like the emotions don't end until 400 pages. And that came from many years as a travel writer, that’s the intensity, because when you're writing a 1200 word travel piece, you have to grab the reader from the beginning, and keep their interest until the end. Yeah, my travel writing has helped with some of that too.

Mike: Is it going to go in the other direction? Do you think the process of writing a novel will affect the way you're doing the other work that you're doing?

Lola: I actually just taught a three week travel writing course with some students who started with storytelling, and one of the students was majoring in creative fiction. And you could tell in their nonfiction work. So it’s true. As I told you, fiction was my first love. And when I write nonfiction like my travel stories, there's a certain way I write them. When you're studying fiction or some of your favourite writers, you see how you’re drawn to them by the cadence and the rhythm of their writing. And when you bring that from the beginning from that fictional world, and then you start writing nonfiction, you're gonna be like okay, how can I make this feel like everything is still true? What are the right words to pick?

So coming from fiction, for people that write fiction, they can actually find travel writing easier because they have that storyteller’s-eye way of writing, as opposed to, say, tech writing or business writing, which can lead to a more clinical approach to travel writing.

So that’s my advice to new travel writers: if you don't read fiction, you need to consider that as part of your reading, and you need to read all sorts of other things that aren’t travel writing, like biographies and everything else. All of this is learning to write what you want to write. There's nothing wrong with utility/service writing, and listicles and so on. But if you want to get into the narrative travel writing, then reading fiction and reading stories and allowing authors you like to influence the way you write - it’s important. Do that.

Mike: Thank you, Lola! This was a treat.

Images: Lola Akinmade Åkerström.

I guess I should be encouraging you to read everything I write, but honestly, nothing in this email will be as entertaining as these starlings, so you could just stop right here:

Birds, man.

Anyway. My marketing people are yelling at me, so, back to it.

So far this season we’ve looked at the very real cities that float in our skies, the reason why we see faces in grilled cheese sandwiches, the Dutch artist who drew with numbers, and how staring really hard at things can make you lose parts of your mind…

But as a break from all the mindbending, let’s return to the challenges that first kicked off this newsletter back in February.

They work like this:

• I ask you to pick one (or more!) of the following challenges and have a go at it/them over the coming week.
  

• The End. Really, that’s it. This isn’t some kind of exam and there won’t be a follow-up quiz. You can ignore everything I suggest and go on to have a perfectly lovely week. However, as I said with my First Rule, a lot of the benefits of curiosity are tied up in what you don’t yet know you don’t know. So applying yourself to some fool’s random-seeming challenges is a great way to increase your chances of stumbling over something wholly new to you. That’s the method at work here. It’s indirect, but it works.

The handful of new challenges below are only for paid subscribers, so they’re locked away underneath Substack’s fancy new paywall thingy. (UPDATE: I’ve removed this! Open to all now.)

But if you’re on the free list, why not take your pick from the 40 different challenges I already publicly published across season 1 & also in season 2 here and here? No end of trouble you could get up to in there. Please, within reason, throw caution to the wind. What’s the worst that can happen?

NOTE FROM MIKE’S LAWYER: Please note that my client is not liable for the worst that can happen. Thank you.

Here are three new suggestions for things you could get up to this week - and they’re all around the topic of reconnecting.

1. Say Thanks To A Teacher

In an ITV special devoted to Adele a few days ago, actress Emma Thompson asked the singer who her biggest creative influence was as a kid. Adele’s answer: Ms McDonald, her former English teacher at Chestnut Grove Academy in South London, whom she hadn’t seen in 20 years…

Oh, just watch the video. It’s gorgeous, it’s ridiculously heartfelt, and it’s a reminder of what a huge impact our favourite teachers have on our lives.

That video is currently *everywhere* on social media, and I’m already seeing its effects:

And - yes. Me too:

No answer yet. I’ll let you know.

Now it’s your turn. You already know who: they’re the one who actually made it fun (which completely blew your mind, because - education! fun!).

They introduced you to something that stayed with you long after school ended, that maybe rerouted your thinking onto a subtly different track, a tiny shift that led to an ever-different course, leading you to a whole new life.

Or maybe they were just enthusiastic, in a way the other teachers weren’t. They just cared, so much, for so long, even when nobody else seemed to - and in doing so, they taught you that caring is the very best method of learning anything.

Or maybe they were horrendous idiots (this is valid too, if rather less gracious) who, by their utter refusal to treat you and your potential with a bare minimum of dignity and respect, created a stubborn self-belief in yourself that has served you well!

Or maybe (and this is a really hard one to think about) they really tried, and yet they failed with you. You weren’t ready. You didn’t listen. And it was only later that you realised this, you saw what they were trying to do, and made amends by learning to listen - but of course school was long over by then, so they never knew they made a difference in your life. They never knew. And that’s haunted you until now.

So this week, you’re doing an Adele. You’re going to try to find them, and try to say thanks at long last. This may be a bittersweet exercise: a few of my favourite teachers are no longer in the world, and the same may apply to yours too. But it’s worth a shot. It matters - not just the saying of thanks, but the trying to say thanks. It’s opening a door that should have never been closed.

How?

- Google is your friend, obviously. As is Twitter: I found my possibly-maybe-who-knows old English teacher on Twitter by searching for her name plus “English teacher”. It’s a little harder to find women than men because men don’t generally change their surnames when they get married - so you may need to do some sifting through old staff tallies for clues.

- drop a letter or email (I’d say a letter is better) to the school they used to teach you at. For confidentiality reasons they might not be able to give out any details, so maybe a better strategy is to ask them to pass on your letter to that teacher, wherever they are right now, in the hope that they remember you and contact you directly.

- mention Adele’s teacher, because that seems to me a great way to prove you’re genuine and not a bit of a dodgy character. Anything that shows you’re exactly who you say you are is a big plus, as is including a few details only an ex-pupil would remember.

- …and if you get an answer, please return to the comments of this post and tell me. I’d love to know.

2) Revisit The Kid You Once Were

As I’ve written about before, I love sleeping outdoors. “Wild camping” is the popular term, although it’s more like “only-sort-of-camping” because I sleep in the tiniest of tents and try to leave absolutely no trace I was even there (which should be the standard anyway).

But if I’d made more of an effort to reconnect with my childhood, I’d have been doing it for at least a decade longer than I have been. It feels like a decade lost. (All that life affirming low-grade misery I could have been having!)

When I was a kid growing up in the depressingly flat county of Norfork in the south of England, I fell in love with a book about sleeping in the woods.

But because I forgot about my love of this book for decades, I had to relearn all the lessons it had already taught me.

Getting older is wonderful! For example, I’m a fan of the way social weirdness gets relabelled with the much kinder word eccentricity, and I’m really looking forward to getting rebranded in that way. Bring it on.

But it’s also a double tragedy: not only do you forget so much, you also forget you’ve forgotten it.

And then one day you remember a book, and you think, “how could I have forgotten artwork as beautiful as this?”

And then you realise what your favourite childhood reads can still do for you as an adult:

Old diaries, old correspondences. Abandoned blogs. Anything that gives you an insight into what you were thinking ten, twenty, thirty years ago (or further) - maybe as opposed to what you think you were thinking.

There’s so much to discover. Maybe even a whole new Marvel What If version of yourself, amid the cringeworthy stuff that’ll probably make you wince. (I didn’t say this process was easy.)

Give yourself a week to go find something you’ve forgotten about who you were. Go find something incredible.

3. Take a Half-Year-Retrospective Adventure

A few days ago I took the ferry to Arran, the Scottish island closest to where I’m living at the moment.

Because I’m clearly some kind of halfwit, I only started visiting Arran this summer, after living opposite it for almost a year. It’s not like it’s hard to get to: a £4, 30-minute journey by train to the ferry terminal at Ardrossan, then another £4-ish for the 55-minute trip across the sea to Arran’s terminal at Brodick. Financially, it’s a ridiculously cheap adventure (two portions of fish’n’chips for a day’s mountain-walking!) - and yet it took me that long to discover it. What a plank I am.

But now I’m finally aware, I’m trying to go there once every month.

This time, I got myself up the Clauchlands hills to the south of Brodick, so I could look down into Lamlash (Arran’s biggest village) and only-just-inhabited Holy Isle:

Bloody windy up there, let me tell you. And I was enormously impressed that someone had brought a park bench (how? it’s a footpath!) until I learned there was an Iron Age hillfort at a similar height just round the corner, built around 2,500 years ago. How easy it is to fail to image the ingenuity of others.

But what I’m really looking forward to is seeing this same view in a few months, when the snow has descended and the colours have faded and the sound carries all the way to the horizon.

If I’m lucky enough to pick a day in the dead of winter when there’s no wind, I’d be a happy man - although it’d be hard for anyone to tell, because I’ll be wearing at least 3 jackets, two bobble hats and a balaclava. (One does not take on the elements of a Scottish winter and win any kind of meaningful victory.)

This is a great way to learn something new about a place, particularly if it feels over-familiar and difficult to feel excited about. Who hasn’t felt the wonder of their garden transformed into a blank canvas of crunchy, crystalline white powder?

(Certainly not my late mum’s dogs, which used to go bananas. You can learn a lot about living a good life from watching a dog. Here’s someone who firmly agrees.)

So, the challenge. Cast your mind back 6 months - or maybe a year and six months. Any day-trips or activities that spring to mind? Anything where the sun was hot on your face (or if you’re in the southern hemisphere, where the wind dragged all the heat out your bones)? Remember how that felt, and how everything looked?

Excellent. Then it’s almost time to go back and see it again, except so, so differently. To see it transformed.

And if you need some inspiration, click this.

Now get moving. You’ve got a week to either plan this or just get it done. Best of luck!

Images: Lucasz Szmigiel; Mike Sowden.

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There are also…rather more of you here than I was expecting. The reason is that when psychologist and bestselling author Mary Trump started her own Substack last week on the subject of kindness, she demonstrated her own in a very specific way by linking to my newsletter in her first post (!). So it’s been a warp-core-breach, she cannae hold kind of week regarding new subscribers.

The warmest of welcomes to you all - and thank you so much, Mary. Whew.

Okay. Continuing with this season’s theme of visual illusions, let’s look at one of the trippiest of them all: our own reflection, if it’s looked at in a very specific way.

We start with one of the most interesting, lovable and nightmarish creatures on our planet (delete as applicable to your tastes).

This is a tarsier, a primate from the islands of Southeast Asia.

Right now, you’re having Some Kind Of Reaction to that picture. Tarsiers are the Marmite of the primate world: either you find them unbearably cute or stomach-churningly creepy. A tarsier is, by anyone’s definition, an unusual-looking creature. In the words of Ze Frank, “it disguises itself in the forest by pretending to be a small teddy bear undergoing a colonoscopy.” You may find this adorable or horrifying.

But let’s stop making it all about you for a second, and turn to the actual facts.

Tarsier eyes are each as big as its brain. They’re so big that their skulls and their brains have developed in unusual ways to accomodate them (imagine humans with eyes like grapefruits - or even better, don’t). The eyes of a tarsier take in an extraordinary amount of light - enough to see prey even in the dimmest conditions. Basically, tarsiers see everything. Their eyesight is so good that there’s one of them watching you right now. At least one. Maybe more.

Also, their eyes don’t swivel. They’re locked in place. To look at you, a tarsier has to turn its head right at you and stare. Nothing personal. It’s not rudeness, it’s just how it’s built.

So let’s return to that Reaction you’re having.

Generally speaking, if something smaller than you is staring at you, it’s cute - babies, for example - and if it’s larger than you, it’s intimidating and even threatening. This certainly applies to the animal kingdom, except pretty much all non-human creatures interpret a stare as a challenge of some kind (for both these reasons, never trust a YouTube video with a title like “How To Outstare A Moose”).

The same applies to humans too, more or less. To stare at another human being, even if it’s done without anything creepy in mind, is to escalate the emotional intensity of your gaze - and if they see you doing it, it can land on the other person’s awareness like a ton of bricks. (I have it on good authority that this is something women have been trying to tell men for years.)

Only tarsiers get a totally free pass with staring. They know no other way.

This newsletter isn’t about tarsiers, though.

When I was a student in York, I used to play a trick on people in the street, using staring.

The rooftops of York are high affairs, and always worthy of a good stare. Always something interesting going on up there - architecturally, ornitholigically, historically - if you just slow down and look. Take the above pic of Monk Bar, one of the historical gateways into the city, looking stupendously lovely in the late autumn light.

So my friends and I weaponised the interestingness of High York in the service of mischief.

Here’s how we did it. First, one of us wandered into the middle of the street in York’s busy pedestrianised centre, stopped suddenly, and theatrically looked upwards. “Woah. What is that?”

After a few seconds another of us wandering past, only to stop and stare upwards as well. “Bloody hell.” Point, point, excited jabbering at each other, certain amount of clutching forehead in alarm, some pacing up and down, always returning to stare upwards, jaw agape.

By now a few people had stopped. They were peering upwards as well. This was the dangerous time. They’re hooked, but they’re not yet using their brains properly. Any moment now, one of them will ask, What are we looking at? This is where our artistry came in, and our gambler’s instinct. You’re stretching the hoax out as long as you can, doing a runner a split-second before the game is up.

(This got a lot easier when we got mobile phones: you can fake doing a call to a friend, which creates an invisible please don’t interrupt me bubble around you, thus making their questioning impossible - and then of course you walk away before the “call” is finished.)

The aim of the game was to get the maximum number of complete strangers gawping upwards in one go. Achieve double-digits, and you are a proper legend.

This kind of thing is always popular with students, in that it’s small-mindedly hilarious, slightly mean, and a great distraction from doing anything even remotely useful with your day. For those reasons, it’ll always be a hit in academia.

But what this isn’t is original. It goes back at least to 1969, when researcher Stanley Milgram used groups of actors to hoodwink people into staring upwards in a street in New York. His unsurprising findings: as the number of actors increased, so did the number of passers-by who copied their behaviour.

More recently, Andrew Gallup did a similar experiment in Oxford, England - and as Ed Yong noted here, not only were there differences in staring between genders, there were also interesting patterns to be seen in where people weren’t looking. Maybe, as is so often the case with many creative pursuits, paying attention to what people aren’t doing is the way to discover the really good stuff.

Anyway. Fascinating. And a tragic indictment of my lack of commitment as a student!

Is this what today’s newsletter is about?

No.

But trust me. We’re really close now.

This is a lovely stock photo of someone with a really nice-looking eye. What a colour! (I hope it’s real.) The blue of the Mediterranean in the height of summer. A blue that almost makes you feel the hot sand between your toes.

I hope it makes you feel calm and relaxed, because you’re going to need it. What follows might freak you out no end.

This newsletter isn’t about animal-staring, the kind tarsiers excel at. It’s also not about everyday human-staring, the kind procrastinating students take great delight in tricking other people into doing.

No. There’s another kind - a radical version that can bend your brain in the strangest ways.

That’s what today’s newsletter is about.

At first glance, this looks like a very boring animated GIF. I’m presuming you’re seeing what I see: a ring of pink dots, each disappearing in turn to give the illusion of motion.

But try staring at the cross in the centre, without blinking or moving your eyes, for about 30 seconds.

You’ll know when you’ve done it long enough: you’ll hear yourself say What the…???

Yes, all the dots disappeared. And that illusory moving circle turned green. And then you moved your eyes, and everything sprung back into what it was before, into what it actually is.

Want another one? OK.

Try doing the same with this image.

Wild, right?

It’s known as Troxler’s Fading, after the Swiss physician Ignaz Paul Vital Troxler who recorded it in Vienna in 1804 (although credit should actually rest with English natural philosopher Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles, who recorded it a decade earlier.) What’s happening here is still being debated, but in essence, it seems the neurons in the retina of our eyes work like the ones in our brains: they tune out & ignore anything that doesn’t seem important.

And by important, I mean noisy. Or the visual equivalent. The things that are high-contrast, brightly coloured, and above all, in apparent motion. Movement is the great attention-grabber in our visual systems.

This isn’t to say that the thing we’re looking at has to be moving. It can be absolutely still and we can still see it - which is why we don’t blunder into parked cars and brick walls when we’re out for a walk, why distant mountains have a very reassuring habit of not vanishing, and why the world isn’t a hallucinogenic dream of things fading in and out of your vision like those pink dots did.

The key here is the kind of staring you’ve been doing. You’re not a tarsier (I’m presuming), so your eyes can dart left and right without you needing to turn your head. This allows for a looser, more relaxed kind of staring, where your eyes are making tiny, involuntary saccades, exactly like when we’re reading something, as I explained previously.

With every saccade, even the tiniest one, you’re rotating your eye so the incoming light lands on a different set of neurons in your retina. You’re not giving each of those neurons enough time to grow “bored” with the unchanging view - or rather, to de-prioritise anything in your visual attention, so Troxler’s Fading starts kicking in…

But if you fix your gaze on a single point and stare without moving your eyes or moving your head (which is incredibly hard), and you stare at it for long enough…

OK. Here’s a wee health warning.

None of this is technically dangerous, or else I wouldn’t be writing about it publicly, and neither would all the reputable sources I’ve been reading on this topic. In all recorded cases, it’s a safe way to alter your consciousness.

But when journalist Jenni Avins (see below) describes this kind of staring as “like tripping without the drugs,” she’s not kidding.

I hope that’s you warned.

Every world culture knows about the dangers of mirrors. A still pool of water, a facet of natural glass, a highly-polished metal plate or shield - anything that can throw your reflection back at you will inspire thoughts of other worlds, glimpses of things that should never be glimpsed, and Evil stalking the Real that only a mirror can reveal. Cue the origins of thousands of stories across every world culture.

Now it seems some of this is grounded in scientific fact.

In 2010, psychologist Giovanni Caputo of Italy’s University of Urbino published the results of an experiment he ran on 50 individuals between the ages of 21 and 29 years old. Participants sat in front of a large mirror in a quiet, dimly-lit room, and stared fixedly at their own reflection without moving their eyes.

In every case, it didn’t take long for some really crazy shit to make an appearance:

At the end of a 10 min session of mirror gazing, the participant was asked to write what he or she saw in the mirror. The descriptions differed greatly across individuals and included: (a) huge deformations of one's own face (reported by 66% of the fifty participants); (b) a parent's face with traits changed (18%), of whom 8% were still alive and 10% were deceased; (c) an unknown person (28%); (d) an archetypal face, such as that of an old woman, a child, or a portrait of an ancestor (28%); (e) an animal face such as that of a cat, pig, or lion (18%); (f) fantastical and monstrous beings (48%).

Caputo recently followed this up with a 2019 study of 90 participants that included 15 portrait artists. This time, the focus on their gaze wasn’t their own reflection but the face of a stranger sat opposite them. And what they saw was as wild as before. (Check out some of the sketches at Scientific American here.)

Staring into your own eyes is one thing - better the devil you know, and all that. But consensually gazing into a stranger’s eyes is another. It’s always an overwhelming emotional act.

If you’re up for having your heart ripped out today, here’s artist Marina Abramović’s endurance-based 2010 performance “The Artist Is Present” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where she sat in a chair and stared into the eyes of strangers. This is what happened when her former lover Ulay, whom she hadn’t seen in twenty years, sat down in front of her:

Journalist Jenni Avins tried something similar in 2015 (“I just took a brief hallucination break with a colleague”) and wrote it up for Quartz:

"Then she told me why she laughed halfway through our sitting. ”You started to look like a weird little animal!” she said.

“YOU started to look like an animal!” I shrieked. “A lion!”

“You were a lion!” she yelled. “A lioness,” she corrected herself.”

What’s going on here?

The simplest theory seems to be around how our minds react to Troxler’s Fading. When our retinas start tuning out huge chunks of reality in front of us, all levels of our consciousness are equally flummoxed. But we’re designed to adapt quickly, and on some level we know that nothing has really disappeared here…

So we fill in the gaps with whatever might fit. Our imagination. Our memories. Our hopes and fears. That crazy scene in that film we saw the other week. That cute/horrifying primate we saw on YouTube with the absolutely massive eyes…

Extreme staring, it turns out, can be as much a gateway to our subconscious as the psychedelics-based psychotherapy that environmental journalist Michael Pollan has been writing about recently. Employed in the right way, could it be a way to tap into deeper wells of creativity and problem-solving insights? And perhaps, as an enlightening deep-dive into self-awareness, it holds similar potential for relieving mental suffering, including depression, anxiety, and addiction?

On this point, the science is still firmly out. At least, as far as I’m aware in my very early reading on this topic. Perhaps time will tell.

One thing that is clear about our most popular form of staring: as just reported by the Guardian, staring fixedly at screens is causing an "epidemic of myopia” (short-sightedness), according to the American Academy of Optometry and American Academy of Ophthalmology. Maybe you’re not in danger of hallucinating there, but it’s doing far worse things to your health.

An easy way to ease the pressure: go outside, or stare out of a window, and fix your eyes on something near the horizon, so your eye muscles get stretched the other way. Then allow them to completely unfocus and relax. Do this at least once an hour.

Here’s a tarsier demonstrating correct form:

Happy looking! (Just don’t look too hard, please?)

Thanks for reading.

- M

Images: Jeremy Hinton/Wikipedia; Bautsch/Wikipedia; Amanda Dalbjorn; Inga Gezalian

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Before we begin today’s leap into whatever-the-hell-is-this, here’s something I saw a few days ago, and I cannot for the life of me think of a way to naturally fit it into anything I’m writing, so I’ll just drop it here and pretend there’s a reason:

Okay.

In keeping with this season’s theme of optical illusions, floating cities and other brain-bending tomfoolery - let’s look at the impossible work of a man who knew how to look harder than anyone else.

It’s 1938, and Dutch artist Maurits Cornelis Escher is hating the view.

He’s living in Belgium, his latest attempt at making a new home after leaving Italy in disgust at the rise of Mussolini’s fascism. Switzerland was his first port of call, but he found it cold and uninspiring. Nothing to spark the internal fires of obsessive enthusiasm that his work depends on.

Now it’s Belgium, which he’s rapidly growing bored with. In three years, with the War tearing Europe apart, he’ll retreat with his family to the Netherlands, where he’ll stay for the rest of his life. But for now: sigh.

Perhaps he’s regularly having That Conversation with himself. You know the one. I should be thankful, grateful, happy. Anything but this infuriating restlessness. Surely I have enough. What’s wrong with me?

It’s true that until recently, life seems to have treated him well. His early lane-change from architecture into graphic artistry has served his career well. He is happily married to his Swiss wife, whom he met while exploring Europe, and he has two young sons, with a third on the way. Financially, he’s not struggling. It seems like he’s living the dream.

But not everything is good. His son is in recovery, recently ravaged by tuberculosis. The shadow of international conflict is falling across Europe. He finds Belgium an absolutely miserable place to live.

And there’s his career. His artwork is seen as interesting, but it doesn’t quite fit. So severe! All those bold lines! He’s regarded as an oddball. Despite being a fan of Rennaisance Art and the work of the Impressionists, he feels increasingly pulled in a different direction…

** Day And Night (1938): woodcut printed from two blocks, 39 x 68 cm. **

“Grey rectangular fields develop upwards into sillhouettes of white and black birds; the black ones are flying towards the left and the white ones towards the right, in two opposing formations. To the left of the picture the white birds flow together and merge to form a daylight sky and landscape. To the right the black birds melt together into night. The day and night landscapes are mirror images of each other, united by means of the grey fields out of which once again the birds emerge.”

- Escher’s notes from The Graphic Work Of MC Escher (1954).

When you look at this picture, you’re flipping between world views. Either you’re seeing the white birds, and the bright, presumably sunlit day scene with its cheerful flotilla of steam ships puffing their way upriver - or you’re seeing the black birds, and your eye is drawn to the night-shrouded landscape where the houses have their lights on and the sky’s already eaten the horizon & is creeping nearer…

Except, that’s not quite right. The black birds are in the daylight side, and the white ones are flying into the night. These aren’t just mirror images: they’re like the Ancient Chinese yin-yang symbol, each side containing part of its opposite.

(Yīnyáng - “dark/light” - is a representation of the concept of dualism, where apparently opposite or contrary forces are often complementary, interconnected, and interdependent in the natural world.)

Perhaps, as Europe plunges into the greatest paroxysm of violence in world history, Escher is quietly reminding everyone that ‘sides’ are never clear-cut things, and that boiling the world down into a series of false dilemmas is a great way to stop appreciating what’s actually in front of you.

Or maybe he just likes the pattern. He’s been obsessed with tessellation (identical shapes that fit together) since he saw it showcased so spectacularly on the walls of Spain’s Alhambra palace:

The mathematical regularity so often seen in nature (for example, in a honeycomb) excites his brain - this weaving of the Real, even the intensely banal, into something surprising and thrilling.

This isn’t to say he doesn’t bend reality in his work. Scroll back up to that window’s-eye-view up at the top (Still Life And View, 1937) and take a closer look. What did you miss?

But Escher’s love of the fantastical is primarily inspired by what he sees around him, not what he can dream up out of next to nothing.

In a lecture later in his life, he’ll explain this further:

“If you want to express something impossible, you must keep to certain rules. The element of mystery to which you want to draw attention should be surrounded and veiled by a quite obvious, readily recognisable commonness.”

By looking closely at the real world, and trying to understand how it works, Escher will invite his initially small but intensely loyal fanbase to explore some very strange mysteries indeed.

It’s 1954, and British mathematician Roger Penrose has just discovered Escher’s work at a conference in Amsterdam, finding himself "absolutely spellbound".

He isn’t the first. While Escher remains unpopular with the more traditional art scene (his work is considered insufficiently lyrical & far too intellectual for its own good), many scientists and mathematicians adore its playful geometries and obsessive precision in mapping the weird. Now here is a kindred spirit: an artist who sees with numbers.

Penrose is similarly enthused. He rapidly scribbles out some ideas for a homage to Escher, then turns to his father (the psychiatrist Lionel Penrose) for help. Together they throw together a paper for the British Journal of Psychology, depicting a joined staircase that can be sketched in two dimensions but is absolutely impossible in three.

After the article’s publication in 1958, the Penroses send a copy to Escher as thanks for the inspiration. Escher writes back:

“Your figures 3 and 4, the 'continuous flight of steps', were entirely new to me, and I was so taken by the idea that they recently inspired me to produce a new picture, which I would like to send to you as a token of my esteem. Should you have published other articles on impossible objects or related topics, or should you know of any such articles, I would be most grateful if you could send me further details.”

** Ascending And Descending (1960): lithograph, 38 x 26.5 cm. **

“A rectangular inner courtyard is bounded by a building that is roofed in by a never-ending stairway. The inhabitants of these living-quarters would appear to be monks, adherents of some unknown sect. Perhaps it is their ritual duty to climb those stairs for a few hours each day. It would seem that when they get tired they are allowed to turn about and go downstairs instead of up. Yet both directions, though not without meaning, are equally useless. Two recalcitrant individuals refuse, for the time being, to take any part in this exercise. They have no use for it at all, but no doubt sooner or later they will be brought to see the error of their nonconformity.”

- Escher’s notes from The Graphic Work Of MC Escher (1954).

It’s the 1960s now, and nonconformity is all the rage. Hair is getting longer, psychedelics-powered artistry is flourishing, and anything that seems to scream to hell with the rules is increasingly in vogue.

Escher is having none of it - but it’s still seeking him out anyway. Both Mick Jagger and Stanley Kubrick will unsuccessfully try to charm him into something collaborative (his delightfully cranky response to one letter: “Please tell Mr Jagger I am not Maurits to him”).

Because of the fantastical elements of his work, Escher is acquiring a reputation as a surrealist. As a self-identifying “reality enthusiast,” it’s the very last thing he wants. Take Ascending & Descending, where he’s clearly turning his imagination to the futility of so much in the human-centred world. In a letter to a friend, he says:

“Yes, yes, we climb up and up, we imagine we are ascending; one step is about 10 inches high, terribly tiring - and where does it get us? Nowhere.”

But until the end of his career, his work will continue to speak to something deeper - a rebellion against human incuriosity, or a constant rallying-cry for the act of paying attention.

His very last piece, Snakes (1969), draws your eye towards infinity, as if to say This is as far as I can see, what about you?

After a lifetime of studying and playing with the geometries of landscapes, human architecture, plants and insects with an intuitive grasp of the mathematical relationships underpinning them, Escher will leave his work to speak for him, accompanied by a handful of accompanying notes and letters. To the last, he remains a man at his desk, doing things by hand (including making prints of his work: Day and Night eventually proved so popular that he had to reproduce it himself 600 times). The art is his whole message.

For this reason, it’s dangerous to read too far into his work, to attempt to translate it into anything it essentially wasn’t.

But it’s fun to speculate, so let’s do that.

Look again at Ascending & Descending, my favourite of all his works. Yes, the staircase is grim to contemplate, and an easy thing to cynically stick a new label upon (like “traditional employment,” or “social media,” or even “Metaverse”). Depressing, right? Especially the ‘you can have a rest by going downhill!’ side of things, which seems particuarly bleak.

But I love it because of everything else in the picture. It’s not just an infinite staircase - it’s a building.

Where do all those doorways lead? Especially that one at ground level, with steps leading underground? Look at that doorway on the far left of the staircase - presumably it connects with the rest of the house. The monks aren’t trapped. They’re just so fixated on the staircase that they don’t see everything else the building offers.

This is also true of the “recalcitrant individuals” - one staring at the ground in apparent misery, the other looking up at his fruitlessly toiling peers as if thinking oh well, I guess if everyone else is doing it…?” They also appear to see none of it.

Perhaps this is a stretch. Perhaps it’s just down to Escher’s lifelong love of architecture, combined with the need for a “quite obvious, readily recognisable commonness” to frame his endless, universe-breaking staircase. But maybe it’s also his curiosity, optimism and love of the as-yet-unknown, finding a way to creep into even his most downbeat piece of work?

Certainly doesn’t seem impossible.

For more examples of Escher’s work, check out Nishant Jain’s thoughtful post here at SneakyArtist.com.

Images: WikiArt.org; Kadir Celep.

If all of that sounds like nonsense, reading this may help! It also may not. Welcome to the kind of newsletter this is.

Or if you haven’t already done so, you could just subscribe and find out the hard way:

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Also, a special hello to those of you who are part of the small flood of new subscribers because Doug, author of Snack Stack and two fabulously curious books, was just interviewed by Substack for Halloween, and, presumably in a moment of pure confusion, recommended me to readers as well.

Doug’s an impossible act to follow! But I hope to keep your disappointment to a minimum.

Today, a bit later than planned (apologies for that), I’m breaking with tradition with a small rant, before I get back to business as usual on Wednesday. 

I’m not a good ranter, so this newsletter isn’t the ranty type. I can’t pretend to be relevant, or provide pithy cultural commentary in a Anne Helen Petersen fashion, and the only time I have my ear to the ground is when I’ve tripped over something.

Nevertheless, this week I have Some Thoughts About A Thing That Just Happened - and since they tie in with the guiding themes of this newsletter, off we will shortly go.

Before I do that: if you’d prefer reading something timeless, witty and inspiring, try Brendan Leonard’s ode to Wikipedia, which will make you feel better in places you weren’t even aware were feeling bad:

Or if you get a kick from immersing yourself in the wildly unconventional biographies of others, try this story of Joe Carstairs, courtesy of Valorie at Unruly Figures.

My point is, you may prefer those things to what I’m about to do, which is this:

Okay. Let’s talk about a billionaire’s depressing vision of our digital future.

A few days ago, Facebook’s parent company (also called Facebook) changed its name to Meta, and Mark Zuckerberg released a video outlining his vision for what he calls the Metaverse: a seamless network of virtual experiences that’ll try to create the perpetual illusion you’re “inside” the Internet while you’re online.

I’ve posted that video up there, but really, I’m deeply conflicted about inviting you to watch anything but the first 5 minutes. If you’re a fan of shiny new tech, it’s fascinating. If you’re a human being with an above-zero intolerance for corporate cringe, it’s frequently a really hard watch. 

This isn’t a roast, though. I have no wish to attack Zuckerberg for his presentation skills, because I’ve done speaking in front of hundreds of people and that ruined me for a week. Here, he’s addressing millions. Who knows what state he’s in as I write this? (I reckon he’ll be doing a lot of surfing from here until Christmas.)

Instead, this is about what he said. A few things in particular, which sounded horrifying. Properly dystopian, if I’m hearing them right - which is why I haven’t been able to get them out my head for days, and why I pushed back a newsletter I was writing for the weekend, so I could write this instead.

Let us count three awful, haunting ways this is the hardest of Nopes.

It’s Not Real, Mark.

When I wake up my laptop every morning, I see a view of Greece. That’s how I’ve set it up: a little burst of “ahhh, I really wish I was back there” to propel me into my working day.

The Metaverse will go much further. By going online (presumably by popping on some kind of headset that you quickly forget is there), the real windows of your house will dissolve away to show the scenic vista of your choice. Meanwhile, other parts of your home will be spruced up, any way you choose: virtual maps, virtual furniture, virtual windows showing entirely different landscapes, and so on.

This has been a standard trope in scifi for the last half-century. And the reason it’s endured is that it should look amazing.

VR headsets are already a thing in videogaming, and I’ve tried one, and it astonished me. If that’s where we are right now, the eventual Metaverse version could look overwhelming.

Zuckerberg’s presentation zooms in on this. He strolls through an augmented version of his house, and at first, what he’s saying is really encouraging:

“This isn’t about spending more time on screens - this is about making the time that we spend better. Screens just can’t convey the full range of expression and connection…they can’t convey a deep feeling of presence.”

YES. Fantastic. I mean, it flies in the face of Facebook’s entire strategy to date, but maybe this is what he really thinks? Maybe the Metaverse is about gently guiding people towards those serendipitous offline experiences that really make life worth…

“We’re going to be able to feel present, like we’re right there with people, no matter how far apart we actually are…”

That - uh, that’s a tall order! But okay, I guess. So what about encouraging the offline…

“An embodied Internet…you’re going to really feel like you’re there with other people.”

To illustrate this, Zuckerberg fashions an avatar - basically a skinny, airbrushed teenage version of himself - and goes to his living room to meet some similar avatar-clad friends for some painfully scripted-looking hijinks and forced chat.

This, we’re being told, is “being present” with our friends. Never mind that Facebook already knows that its services create huge body image issues for kids. “Thirty-two per cent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse,” went an internal report in March 2020, part of a recently-leaked trove of documents that’s come to be known as the Facebook Papers. No - it’s fine because in this version of the future, we’ll all be cartoons? So, er…

Anyway, that beautiful virtual landscape outside our bedroom window, though. Nature in all its glory. Isn’t it great?

Not quite. It just looks great. If it was actually great, we’d be feeling all the benefits of being out in the natural world, as outlined by science writer Florence Williams in her recent book The Nature Fix.

Some excerpted findings (source):

• As little as 15 minutes in the woods has been shown to reduce test subjects’ levels of cortisol, the stress hormone.

• Increase nature exposure to 45 minutes, and most individuals experience improvements in cognitive performance.

• Researchers in England have shown that access to green spaces reduces income-related mental health disparities.

• Aerosols present in evergreen forests act as mild sedatives while also stimulating respiration.

• Water and birdsong have been proven to improve mood and alertness.

• Nature’s benefits might be due to something as simple as the fact that natural landscapes are, literally, easy on the eyes. Many of nature’s patterns —raindrops hitting a pool of water or the arrangement of leaves —are organized as fractals, and the human eye moves in a fractal pattern while taking in a view. Such congruence creates alpha waves in the brains —the neural resonance of relaxation. (This sounds like an argument for VR depictions of nature - but this study has shown no increase in positive mood levels from using VR like this.)

• Most people get a lot of benefit from city parks and as little as five hours a month does the trick.

• Awe, which many people experience in nature, is, according to one study, associated with increased generosity toward other people.

There is also the not-small matter of us having to preserve these things that impact our health so beneficially, because right now, we’re doing the opposite of that, with the ecology-ravaging polluting and the heartbreaking extinctions and so on. And the climate clock is ticking down as a result. And we should probably have some kind of conference about it - ah, yes, exactly like that. Good start. Carry on.

What we need from the Metaverse is technology that encourages us to go outside, to form a deeper relationship with the actual natural world around us, and to start caring about it so much that we take action and learn how to slam the brakes on the wheels of this runaway train.

(A good start: holding politicians fully accountable to their promises. Just an idea.)

What we definitely don’t need is to stay indoors, using technology to pretend there’s nothing wrong with the view from our window.

But Where’s All Your Money, Mark?

One thing noticeably missing from Zuckerberg’s presentation was his company’s entire business model.

In 2020, Facebook made $86bn in revenue. Of that staggering amount, 98% came from Facebook Advertising, via advertisers paying Facebook to show ads to its 3 billion users across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. (That’s according to Facebook’s annual report filed in Washington D.C.)

And yet Zuckerberg’s idyllic Metaverse has nary an advert in sight.

Does this mean Facebook…I mean Meta is going to throw away its wildly successful business model and pivot to something gentler, kinder, less invasive & awful?

Of course not. And that means ads will be baked into every aspect of the Metaverse. If you’re a free user, the ads are going to be everywhere - as in, plastered all over your virtually enhanced home. They’re going to render things like tables and chairs unusable until you click or swipe the ads away. That lovely view? It’s going to be travel advertising, at least at first, until you irritatedly wait for the timer to go down so you can yank the damn thing off your windows and stand there, fighting to get your Zen back before the next unsolicited ad-storm appears…

You know what’s so great about screens when the ads get too much? They’re great because you can look away. Ah. Isn’t that nice? No ads.

That’s not how virtual reality will work in practice. You will have to step right out of VR to get rid of them. Because they will be everywhere, all the time. And of course Mark Zuckerberg knows it.

And yet his presentation pretends otherwise.

This is what traditional scifi calls “Appearing Quite Evil”.

*deep breath* But It Isn’t Real, Can You See How That Might Be A Problem Here, Mark?

Meta’s new logo appears to be an infinity sign, except wilted. This feels entirely appropriate.

The language Zuckerberg is using through his presentation is careful but highly suggestive. It’s saying that Yes, many online things are terrible, but we’re going to fix them to the point you will want to do everything with this. You’ll want to do business in it. You’ll want to socialise in it. Put your lame family board games away because these games will be fantastic.

Again and again, he implicitly hammers this home. Despite his initial diclaimer that he doesn’t want you “spending more time on screens,” he shows you all the ways he thinks you’ll actually want to. It’s not subtle.

But there’s one bit in particular that freaked me out. Zuckerberg talks about how everything will have its Metaverse version of a chatroom, which will be an entire VR world. Your business’s world. Your best friend’s world. Your world, where you can bring friends. Your game’s world. And in the blink of an eye, you will be able to teleport between them.

Sounds great, right?

There’s a scifi short story I read once (I wish I knew where) which had something similar - except it was real teleportation. Teleport tech had changed everything. You stepped through a doorway and you stepped out another one halfway round the world, or across town, or in the house next door. The flipside of this convenience: everyone was mentally and physically unhealthy and heavily medicated because everyone had stopped going “outside”. The Outdoors had become a terrifying, uncontrollable place filled with danger & horror, a little like how the British countryside used to be seen back in the days of Thomas Hardy. Always feared, always bypassed.

So nobody ever went through…where their front door used to be, before houses started being built without them. Nobody went outside. Ever.

(Except one person, of course: the hero of the story, which starts as they make that fateful decision to break their way through the wall to see what’s surrounding the “inner world”.)

Could the Metaverse encourage something similar? Days or even weeks where you don’t really need to leave the house, and you’re getting just enough fake stimulation to drown out the increasingly clamouring needs of your physical body, until…?

Look. I enjoy using the online world. Even Facebook! It’s not great, but it’s also not Super-Bad. As an archaeology student I studied the past, and let me tell you, today is pretty damn good in comparison to a lot of history:

But the thing that’s really messed with my normally sloth-like composure is something I’ve learned from playing too many videogames.

I have spent nearly 40 years playing games on home computers, from my first fumblings on Manic Miner on the ZX Spectrum all the way to the *cough cough* hours I’ve put into The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim.

Like most gamers, I’ve frequently butted up against the limits of believability in whatever I’m playing. There’s always a point where, however skillful the game designer is, it suddenly just feels like a game. I don’t mean “just” in a sniffy, dismissive way, because the journey to this point is usually an artfully-designed and rewarding one (otherwise I & millions of other players wouldn’t have persevered so many times). But beyond here, the spell, however convincingly cast, is permanently broken. It’s clearly not real.

What does this word mean, “real”? In the context of this newsletter, it means Filled With Endlessly Interesting Stuff You Have No Idea You Don’t Know. (Hence the need for applied curiosity, to try to stumble over it.)

And part of the reason for this is that the physical world around us wasn’t designed by humans. Yes, some stuff in it certainly is - but they didn’t design reality itself.

Virtual worlds are most definitely designed by humans. This means they’re limited to what the human imagination is capable of cooking up, and the human-made computing hardware that can make it happen. In every way, a virtual world is anthropocentric. It’s by, & for, human beings.

The actual world, on the other hand, has a wonderful and occasionally disturbing tendency to ignore our wishes and surprise us in its unfathomable complexity, boundless novelty and awe-inspiring beauty. It is a mystery that we will never get to the bottom of, and most days, that’s kinda why life is worth living.

Zuckerberg’s Metaverse, on the other hand, is a million miles wide and just one pixel deep. All the mysteries will already be solved (apart from the bugs - they may be the only true surprises left). The Metaverse will ultimately be devoid of awe and wonder in exactly the opposite way the real world is ultimately brimming with them, if you just put your headset down and go discover a way to see them.

It’s therefore regrettable that Zuckerberg’s vision seems to be of something pointing inward, into these confected human pseudo-worlds, and not outwards, towards the infinite capacity for serendipity and joy provided by the amazing world around us.

My friend Tom nailed this point perfectly:

…even if he did it in a Facebook comment. (Oh well. Also: I am clearly that nutter today.)

So no, Mr Zuckerberg. Thanks but absolutely no thanks. I’m open to being convinced out of how I feel here, but damn, I’m feeling it so hard. Your energy is certainly admirable, but your facial expressions are…confusing, and your ideas are pretty wretched.

I hope you’ll forgive me as I keep yelling at this particularly noxious cloud you’ve guffed into the world, and keep steering everyone I know towards something else (but in particular, towards the joy of exploring where you actually are).

I like your surfboard though. Always wanted to give that a go.

Maybe see you out there sometime?

Images: Semi-Rad; xkcd; Meta/Facebook.

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But for today's bewilderment and freaked-outness, we’re looking at our favourite topic: ourselves!

More specifically, humanity’s cognitive obsession with its own appearance…and it starts with the most expensive grilled cheese sandwich in human history.

It’s 1994, and Diana Duyser can’t believe her eyes.

“I went to take a bite out of it, and then I saw this lady looking back at me," she’ll later tell the Chicago Tribune newspaper.

She yells to her husband to come look, and they stand transfixed above what will come to be known as the Holy Toast. What does it mean? Because it must mean something, surely?

Then she does what any of us would do: she packs it in cotton wool in a clear plastic box and waits for eBay to be invented so she can auction it off to GoldenPalace.com for $28,000.

(And if you’re wondering how it didn’t evolve into an entirely new lifeform during these ten years, here’s some science about how a grilled cheese sandwich can last a decade without going moldy.)

Clearly, What It Meant was a nice chunk of money in someone’s retirement fund, and an entire generation of Americans treating cheese-sandwich grilling with the same obsessiveness as the folk mining Bitcoin a decade later.

But no, hey: what does it mean? Isn’t it a sign of something? A message?

Say you’re the gentleman who arranged to have an ultrasound scan of his testicles, only to discover…

If these were your family jewels, wouldn’t you want to know what this face is trying to tell you about them?

Or how about that eerie countenance in the Cydonia region of Mars, first glimpsed by the Viking 1 orbiter on July 25, 1976?

I mean, doesn’t it make you think?

Yes! It absolutely does. It makes me think “isn’t it amazing how humans can look outwards and inwards at the wonders of creation, and everywhere they look, they see their own image?”

Is this kind of staggering narcissism unique to humanity, or is it a normal neurological tic that affects every other species? Do zebras look up and think “bloody hell, I can see myself in those stripey clouds! Is this a sign I’m destined for more than eating grass, running at 40 mph and surprising predators with my deceptively powerful kick?” Do snails look up at lorries and think “WOW NICE HOUSE!” and so on?

(Someone should look into this. Although I’m really not sure…how they’d do that?)

But mainly, it makes me think Oh boy, it’s so hard to see the world properly with all our cognitive biases in the way.

This particular bias is called Pareidolia, a branch of apophenia. It’s our mind’s tendency to hunt for familiar patterns in the random arrangements of everyday things (pareidolia is the visual version of it) - and it’s always looking for shortcuts. Or, putting it less judgmentally, it’s trying to save you as much time as possible.

One way it does this is using your imagination a little like Google Lens: take a “picture” with your eye, then compare that picture to the vast library of possibly-similar pictures held in your memory, and finally, render a verdict.

(Imagine if you couldn’t do this. Perhaps there would be no such thing as a glance: too slow, too meaningless. Everything would be instantly fascinating - which doesn’t sound so bad until you consider that everything would be instantly fascinating. You know that thing when you’re a bit tipsy and suddenly the back of your own hand is just amazing and you just can’t look away? Imagine that with everything, every second of every minute of every hour you’re awake every day. Yeah. No.)

So, your mind makes guesses. All the time. It doesn’t just see: it also assumes it already knows what it’s looking at, based on past experience and the surprising influence of your imagination telling you what it wants to see.

It’s why a series of Canadian banknotes issued in 1954 had to be recalled after consumers spotted the Devil in the details…

And it’s why you can look at this photo, and instead of seeing a hummingbird with its wings outstretched, you see…something else.

This bias is even more pronounced with human faces. There’s a region of your brain called the right fusiform face area that’s strongly associated with processing the patterns of human facial features, letting us spot the faces of our loved ones in a sea of strangers. And when it gets activated, it so easily drowns out other conflicting messages. It’s like a megaphone at a town hall meeting.

Only problem is: like every other process, it’s working with the same "corner-cutting” visual guesswork inputs. And it’s easily tricked into making mistakes, as with Upside-Down Adele.

And by mistakes, I mean, seeing faces everywhere. This is the You Can’t Unsee It skill, as the following image indelibly demonstrates:

So, we’re easily swayed by this bias. Whether this bias explains, say, the Holy Toast - well, that’s another matter, and I’m leaving that well alone. (It’s very easy to use pareidolia to explain away every strange phenomenon reported in human history as perception-addled superstitious twaddle - and in doing so, use science as a blanket excuse for incurious ignorance. Let’s not do that.)

If you want to live a more curious, attentive life, this bias may seem like a royal pain in the backside. But I think it’s rather wonderful - and it might be just what we need in decades to come.

To explain this, let’s go back to the time I persuaded a team of archaeologists to celebrate the death of my boots.

It’s the final day of the University of York’s 2002 excavation of Quoygrew, on the island of Westray in Orkney.

If you have any experience of archaeological digs, the phrase “final day” might have sent a thrill of remembered horror through you. These are awful things to experience: not only do you have to wrap up weeks and weeks of work in basically no time at all (discovering a million loose ends as you do so), there’s also the not-at-all-small matter of tidying up.

With an ongoing dig, this means backfilling - laying down huge sheets of plastic and dumping all the season’s excavated soil on top, to protect the archaeology from the elements until next year. If you’re lucky, you’ll have a JCB driver at hand to haul the bulk of the soil in - but it’s still backbreaking work, done at an agonising pace, from morning until night.

I’m doubly miserable, because my boots have exploded. I bought them five years ago, for my very first dig at a Roman villa in West Sussex, and they’ve accompanied me the whole time I’ve been studying Archaeology. But alas, no further: the elemental rigours of fieldwork have turned the leather brittle and each one has split almost in half. I don’t walk anymore: I flap.

I’m genuinely sad about this. I feel like I’m about to lose a friend.

So my colleagues, thinking it might cheer me up (and also because they’re desperate for some light relief on The Worst Day Ever), announce that my ruined boots will be ceremoniously interred in the backfill, to serve as part of the archaeological record for countless future generations to marvel at…

(Okay - it’ll only be until next year, when it’s all opened up again. But won’t those archaeologists, whoever they turn out to be, look at my boots and be filled with awe that we worked that hard?)

It’s a deeply solemn ceremony:

My boots are down at the end of the line, buried in soil under a makeshift capstone. James, the site’s director (looking at the camera in the above photo), murmurs something deeply Canadian, shovels & mattocks are lifted aloft, and just for a second, it seems as if the wind drops below 50 miles an hour and the rain lessens slightly, as if the Norse Gods themselves are paying tribute…

This is, of course, the kind of ridiculous nonsense that you get up to when you’re digging yourself silly on a Scottish island for 6 weeks. But it’s stuck in my memory because it feels like one of the few times I didn’t feel ashamed for getting sentimental about the things I wear.

It’s called Anthropomorphism: the attributing of human traits, even consciousness, to things that cannot technically be thought of as “alive” in the normal sense. It’s somewhat related to animism, the spiritual root of Shinto, Hinduism, Buddhism, pantheism, Paganism and many other respectful ways of regarding inanimate Nature. Both require a leap of imagination and an unusual (in Western scientific terms) emotional attachment to the non-human world - and since kids naturally excel at those things, there’s research being done on how useful they are as conceptual tools for teachers.

So yes, yet again, it’s humans looking at things and seeing themselves. But when it comes to the things we wear, maybe that’s what we desperately need right now.

Eight days from now, the COP26 UN Climate Change Conference is kicking off in Glasgow, a few dozen miles from where I am right now - and one of the things discussed will be the new “Right To Repair” laws that have just come into force, both in the EU and in the UK. The idea is that as a consumer, you are paying for the right to be able to fix the thing you’re purchasing. It cannot be built in a way that stops you (or the repairman you hire) from tinkering with it yourself.

These laws only apply to electrical goods - but I’d love to see a wider push to encompass everything else, including clothes.

How often these days does our clothing get repaired, as opposed to just being chucked in the bin because it’s “better” to buy a new one?

This is a huge problem. We’re already throwing £140 million’s worth of clothes into landfills every year, and it’s been estimated that by 2050, the fashion industry will be using up to 25% of the world’s carbon budget, making the second most polluting industry (oil being the first).

The answer isn’t to demonize fashion. (I like wearing clothes! Almost as much as the people around me like me wearing clothes!) And there are bigger problems that also need tackling as a priority. But our wear-out-and-chuck habits are clearly unsustainable in the long run, and it’s already causing problems now.

I think we all need to relearn the skill of repairing things - or, more correctly, we need to relearn to take our clothes to the skilled folk who can do that for us.

(For example: Alpkit, manufacturer of the bivvy-tent I’ve been using to sleep outdoors this year, has an absolutely brilliant service where you can bring in your outdoor gear for repair - even if that stuff isn’t made by Alpkit.)

OK. Why would you do this? Why? Certainly not for the money: it’s rarely cheaper to get your clothes patched up. Easier? Nope, not that either. Doing your bit for the environment? Yes, but we’re still really terrible at motivating ourselves against longterm goals, however urgent they’re becoming at a global scale. For now, we need something more visceral, more gut-punchier. So - what?

I’ll tell you what, if you promise not to laugh.

We can do it because of love.

Well, okay. I’m both British and a bloke, so I have a hard time sitting with that word without squirming. Tell you what: let’s call it affection. The warmness of emotion you feel for a Thing that’s been with you a while. A shared emotional history. A feeling that’s almost impossible to put into words without other people raising their eyebrows, and without you feeling like you’re being an over-sentimental fool.

Except - no. Surely we can stop being so down on sentimental attachment. Why the hell wouldn’t we care about our beloved Things? Are we really so blinkered in our supposed stewardship of everything on this planet that we can’t imagine treating it with even a fraction of the respect we extend to “our own stuff” (which is, in every sense, Most Definitely Not Our Own Stuff)?

So maybe pareidolia and anthropomorphism have an important role to play, as we learn to undo the damage wrought on our increasingly unbalanced ecosystems.

Maybe we need to see a little of ourselves in everything, to help feel more of an attachment to the world around us and more of a sense of responsibility towards it. And maybe that’ll help us relearn to reuse - not because it’s always cheaper or easier (because it’s rarely either), but because that relationship matters to us, so we don’t want it to end just yet.

(And hey, when it does have to end - how about giving your beloved Thing a proper Viking burial? Trust me, it’ll feel great!)

Call me a sentimental old fool if you must. But I think a bit of socially accepted affection in the right non-human places might make a big difference.

UPDATE: Here’s a lovely example of treating your relationship with your clothing as something worth writing about, by Emily at Travelling Lines:

“Finally I decided to face my denial. I wasn’t going to get a new pair of gaiters. I was going to fix these. It really caused a shift in my attitude towards gear in general: why replace when you can fix?”

Shameless Emotional Appeal

This is a post from season 3 of Everything Is Amazing! I hope you found it tolerable*.

If you’re new here and want more, you can read through seasons 1 and 2 here and here. (Plenty of good stuff in there! Hopefully not better, because that would mean I’m getting worse as I go along. But I’ll let you be the judge of that.)

If you like what you’re reading - would you consider becoming a paid subscriber, for a few quid/bucks a month? There are two pretty decent reasons to do this:

1) You get access to subscriber-only posts that are locked for anyone on the free list. (For example, the last one was about the book I’m writing - which I’ll also be drafting in front of paying subscribers, chapter by chapter, as I put it together.)

2) Because you like this newsletter and what it’s about, and you’d like to help me make more of it. You really would be making a difference here. With every new paying subscriber, I can afford to spend more time on writing & researching it, I can afford to use better-quality facts, and I can make the jokes slightly funnier. Incremental improvements in all areas.

So I’d truly, madly, dearly love your help, if you’re willing?

(Thank you!)

Subscribe now

*British for “amazing”.

Images: Gregory Roberts/BBC Future; JPL/Wikipedia; Miami Herald; Helio C Vital/EarthSky; Youssef Naddam.

Before we get started, here’s part of a fascinating article that has been tickling me for weeks now, but I have no idea where to put it in my brain (if that’s even a good idea). So I’m pasting it here, thereby making it your problem too. Sorry/thanks.

Okay! Let’s talk about books.

A few yea…

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Welcome to the 3rd season of Everything is Amazing, a newsletter about using curiosity to live better, think deeper and concoct semi-plausible excuses for doing really foolish things in public. (“Oh don’t worry, I’m just curious, Constable. Yes, I’ll come along quietly.”)

If you’re on the free list, the last time you heard from me I was explaining why reading anything is so hard (and so amazing) - and if you’re a paying subscriber, you’ve also been joining me on a quest to make a practical, personalised map of the Internet that’s actually fun to use.

Since there’s much more subscriber-only stuff on the way and I reckon some of it is quite good*, you may be gently or even vigorously stimulated by the idea of signing up for as little as $6 a month. Please behold the button that could make that happen:

Subscribe now

*I’m British.

Okay. Today we’re squinting at the horizon, in search of something that cannot possibly exist and yet actually does.

Imagine you’re going for a stroll somewhere, one Autumn morning.

It’s good to be out, even if the air’s cold enough to make your breath steam. For the first time this year, it feels like winter’s on the way. Everything’s aglitter with frozen dew, and the sky is the colour of faded denim. It’s so, so clear today. You feel like you could see forever.

You work your way up a track that ends atop a coastal cliff, one of the few high points in this region. And as you get to the top, with the sea before you - you see a city, far in the distance.

It’s an absolutely magnificent sight, with only two things wrong with it.

Firstly, you’ve never seen a city here. Not that close. The nearest one is over a hundred miles away. The visible horizon from up here is, what, thirty miles? What’s going on?

And secondly, there’s that rather disconcerting way it’s hovering in the air. You can actually see sky underneath it - and under that, the sea.

How do you react to this?

As a modern human who did Science at school, I reckon you’d presume there was some scientific explanation. Hmm. Maybe it’s like how the road ahead seems to turn into water on a really hot day. Or maybe you remember how water bends straws, and you get thinking Hm, well, in a sense the air around us *is* a liquid, or more correctly a fluid, so why couldn’t it…

But let’s hold a second.

Perhaps your real first thought is woah, His Dark Materials was right! Or woah, Comstock really built Columbia. Or perhaps it’s a glimpse of Heaven. Or you wonder if you’ve been sent a vision, for some reason that’s yet to be revealed to you.

An over-rationalist person would be dismissive of such interpretations - and in doing so, throw out 90% of the value of having a human imagination.

This unnerving What-If space between first seeing a thing and feeling certain you know what you’re looking at is the realm of pure Art. It’s where writers go hunting for metaphors, similes and analogies, to bring their descriptions to life in someone else’s mind when the bare facts don’t suffice. (Isn’t it interesting that they have to do that? How even in non-fiction, what we call “good writing” is bolstered by so much that’s imaginary?)

It’s a place kids know well, until they have it machined or ridiculed out of them by the worst of our educations systems and by peer pressure. It’s a place adults know well, when they’re lost in a good made-up story to the point their brain is temporarily, but completely, fooled into thinking it’s describing reality. It’s the workplace of Artists, and also of anyone using their imagination to accomplish anything - which describes, what, everyone? So we all go there. Frequently.

(It’s also where we think the craziest conspiracists, Flat Earthers etc. spend all their time, hence this world of imagination’s somewhat tarnished reputation. But to cling to something that’s so easily and rigourously contradicted by almost everyone else, you have to dig your heels in and refuse to imagine. Complete certainty, whether it fits the evidence or ignores it, is a tantrum against thinking itself.)

So, please, enjoy this moment of Not Yet Knowing. Enjoy how it makes you feel. (“What does it mean?”)

But, as Nature-sleuth Tristan Gooley would say, there are clues here. With any unusual phenomenon, a good rule is to ask what else is unusual. What’s different about today? Aha - that it’s bitterly, unseasonably cold? OK, what else?

Observe now. Record now. Judge later.

If accounts are true, that’s exactly what Jesuit priest Father Domenico Giardina did on August 14, 1643. Looking across the Strait of Messina from Sicily, he suddenly saw “a city all floating in the air, and so measureless and so splendid, so adorned with magnificent buildings, all of which was found on a base of a luminous crystal.”

As he watched, the city shimmered and became a garden. And then a forest. And finally a landscape of vast armies, locked in combat over the ruins of buildings - before the whole thing disappeared completely.

As Marina Warner writes in her book Phantasmagoria (2008), Father Giardina reacted like any scientist (or Gooley), writing all his observations down to ponder later. His conclusion was that minerals and salts “rise up in hot weather in vapours from the sea to form clouds, which then condense in the cooler upper air to become a mobile specchio, a moving, polyhedrical mirror.”

That’d be a credible stab at an explanation even now. In 1643, 61 years before Isaac Newton’s Opticks was first published, it’s astonishing.

Some modern critics think he might have been high. By the 17th century, Jesuits had started drinking the tea of a psychoactive plant from Ecuador called Guayasa (similar to Yerba Mate). Only, there’s little evidence that any Jesuit priests were drinking it, or that Father Giardina was knocking it back at the time. (It sounds like the same sniffy he was clearly on drugs argument that plagued Paul “Double Rainbow” Vasquez.)

Or perhaps he just imagined the whole thing. No way of telling now.

Except - other people have seen these cities too. Modern people. They’ve even captured them on film:

And here, from Alaska in 2016:

So these visions are real?

Yes. They absolutely are. They’re not someone’s fevered imaginings. There are now thousands of credible observations of them captured on camera, not just by floating-city enthusiasts but by journalists, sailors, businessmen on the way to work, everyone who was around at the time, on a scale that defies even the most paranoid imaginings of any conspiracy theorist (you’d hope, anyway).

Look, here’s a photo from NASA’s website:

I don’t know about you, but having seen that bit with the waves in Interstellar, this sight would make me lose my lunch (and I’m not sure from which end). RUN! TIDAL WAVE INCOMING.

If you’re sceptical that these are all legit, I applaud you. Photos and video are so easily faked nowadays. At least one atmospheric scientist is unsure one of those videos up there from China isn’t fabricated. (And as a general demonstration of what’s possible these days - deepfake Tom Cruise, anyone?) Also, me telling you these are real - well, I could be deluded. Or lying! You’d be right to question my opinion and ask for something that backs it up. Asking questions is always good, when you have the opportunity (or privilege) to do so.

So by way of evidence that these visions aren’t fictitious, here’s one of the more trustworthy news services from my country, reporting on a floating ship in March of this year.

OK. Let’s go back to the imaginary you, standing on that hill.

Your school-science rememberings were indeed on track here. It’s exactly like the heat haze mirage, and exactly like the way a straw seems to bend when it’s stuck in a glass of water & viewed from the side.

When light passes into a medium with a different density, it refracts to a different angle (you may dimly remember this as Snell’s Law, from school).

You were also right in considering the unusual temperature a clue. It’s telling you there’s a temperature inversion, where a layer of colder air is hugging the ground (a reverse of the normal state of things). And since cold air is denser than warmer air, that band of coldness is bending light to form a Superior Mirage (above), where objects over the horizon seem much closer, and can even appear to be hovering high in the air.

Learning that light bends is a profoundly unsettling thing. Take the phrase I’ll believe it when I see it, often delivered as a rock-solid truism: if you actually can see it happening, surely that’s reality? This bias is so ingrained in us that when we see something like Teller’s Shadows illusion, we are absolutely fooled because, hell, we can see it happening:

Magicians rest their entire livelihoods on our lack of ability to disbelieve what our eyes are telling us - and are often willing to go to court to protect their secrets. In Teller’s case, he successfully pursued a Belgian YouTuber who offered to reveal the secret of the Shadows illusion to other magicians for $3,050 a pop.

But really, we’re tricking ourselves. What we see is, most times, exactly what we see. How we interpret what we see is the source of confusion here, and the thing magicians manipulate by focusing our attention in sneaky ways we’re barely aware of…

And in the case of the superior mirage known as the Fata Morgana (from Morgan Le Fay, King Arthur’s treacherous, scheming half-sister), we assume we can see castles in the air instead of a curving beam of light.

Incidentally, if you’re lucky enough to see a Fata Morgana, keep watching it. As the air moves around, the moving light will create some very strange effects:

Maybe some part of you is thinking Meh, scientific explanations kill the fun. I want an actual floating castle! (I certainly hear that. So here’s an actual one. Sort of.)

However, this un-funness is largely a myth. The more you dig into modern science, the weirder it usually gets.

Take ducts, the scientific term for those bands of cold or warm air near the ground. As Robert Macfarlane notes in his book Landmarks:

“Because the curvature performed within a thermal inversion is stronger than the curvature of the earth’s surface, light rays can be continuously guided along the duct, following the earth’s own curvature, without ever diffusing up into space. In theory, therefore, if your eyes were strong enough to see that far, a duct would allow you to gaze around the whole earth and witness your own back and shoulders turned towards you.”

(And presumably if that were true, around that back & those shoulders you’d also see a cumulative picture emerge as that light continued to circle the world, seven rotations a second. This is…probably best not thought about for very long. Our minds aren’t designed that way.)

But the biggest optical illusions can only be seen with space telescopes - the ones that point outwards, into a universe so befuddling that humanity should be scared to look.

Take the truly barmy cosmic mirage known as gravitational lensing, where the light from a single object twists as it passes a source of gravity strong enough to bend it. Here’s the most perfect example I’ve seen:

This eye-like object is actually two galaxies, one far behind the other. The red one in the centre is nearest - and as the light rays from the more distant blue galaxy (which by a fluke is almost exactly behind the red one from our perspective) pass it on all sides, they all get bent inwards towards us.

The result looks to us like a ghostly horseshoe - but that’s really just a single dot of blue light being stretched in ways that are almost too fantastical to comprehend.

All of this is backed up by hard science. That doesn’t mean it’s the certain truth, of course (good science isn’t dogmatic), but it does mean it’s been attacked from all sorts of directions by all sorts of clever people, and what’s left is their best hypothesis about what’s actually out there…

And what’s out there looks absolutely wild.

(Nobody should ever accuse scientists of lacking imagination. Especially cosmologists. If the Olympics had an event called Conceptual Gymnastics, cosmologists would have cabinets at home stuffed with Gold medals.)

This is why optical illusions are the focus for season 3 of this newsletter. Not just because they’re amazing to look at (and then some), and not just because I’m a science nerd (and then some)…but because curiosity frequently requires the suspension and delay of disbelief in order to truly flourish.

Yes, you are seeing this, even if it looks absolutely impossible.

No, you don’t know what the hell you’re looking at. (And right now that’s a feature, not a bug.)

And yes, this is a weird state of mind to be in, in a world that prides itself on certainty and knowing and finding answers instead of sitting with questions.

As I hope to show you over the next 8 weeks, the world is frequently a lot stranger than it looks - and as you’ll see, it looks pretty damn strange indeed when you pay close attention to it. And as I said previously: “Isn’t that the joy of optical illusions, that they can pull the rug away from you like that? How often does that happen in life? Isn’t it a thrill?”

Prepare yourself for a lot of rug-pulling.

(And a lot of cool pictures.)

See you next time,

M

Images: Anchorage Daily News; NASA/Mila Zinkova; Ludovica Lorenzelli, DensityDesign Research Lab/Wikimedia; Joe LaCour/Earth Sciences Picture Of The Day; ESA/Hubble & NASA; Stephen Crowley; Tomas Eidsvold.

Quick thanks to Facebook this week for responding to recent accusations that it’s ruining our societies, democracies, children and health by booting itself off the Internet for 6 hours. It was a terrific time to be alive, unless you were these folk:

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Paying subscribers are currently midway through a two-parter on mapping the Internet better, with much more to come. You can subscribe for as little as $5 a month (post-Brexit Britain friends: that’s only 2 chickens and a lump of coal!) And on the free list, we’re shortly heading forward into the upside-down world of optical illusions…

But before all that, some advice about emails, reading, goldfish (I promise it’s relevant) and that ever-present urge to do this to your phone:

Firstly, thanks for reading, because let’s face it, email is awful.

I really do mean that. It should be marvellous, but…here we are. (And it’s been years since I worked in an organisation! I probably have no idea how much worse it’s got.)

There’s still a side to emailing that I love. I have good friends I occasionally write long, rambling emails to, the kind Roxani is talking about here:

Now, you’d have to ask my friends if they enjoy receiving them. I’m too scared to do so. But writing them - it’s great for my mood and good for my soul, every single time.

It’s like those moments in the real world where you’re both sat comfortably and the sun’s high and the beer’s cold, and you just talk and talk, and suddenly it’s Wednesday. Or October. Whatever happens to the time in those moments, that is surely part of living a really good life. It’s what time should be for.

But with email, there’s also the Sisyphean grind of mucking out your Inbox every day, of “processing” rather than enjoying. Or you just give up, and start treating it like an informational landfill. In doing so, you miss everything - and the rot sets in. Friendly messages from people you’d like to know better go unanswered, and start to gather a weight of guilt and self-loathing that make them impossible to respond to without a 5,000 word apology that would even make Cheryl Strayed break out in a cold sweat…

But this is why Email Debt Forgiveness Day was invented! A yearly chance to pluck social redemption from the jaws of unending horror.

And it’s this Thursday!

Here are the rules from the official website:

On September 30th:

1. Dig out the email you’ve been avoiding

2. Write a reply, ignoring the amount of time that has lapsed

3. Add a link to this page, you can even use this email template

4. Send and enjoy your anxiety-free day.

Listen to this episode of the podcast Reply All for the details.

Unfortunately, part of the problem here is reading anything online. Take this newsletter. Quite a lot of you aren’t reading this paragraph. Based on previous open rates, I reckon maybe 50-60% of you are here (although thanks to an Apple Mail update that landed last week, that’s going to get much harder for me to confirm in the future).

You might not stick around for long, though! According to a Nielsen Norman Group study in 2006, the average time that people read individual emails is 51 seconds. (I very much doubt it’s improved since then.) Since most of us read about 200 words every minute…well, over half of you are gone now. 😢

It’s also incredible that any of you are reading - hopefully not because this email is unusually rubbish, but because reading itself is such a thoroughly miraculous dance of sensory mechanics.

Take the following statement:

Apparently one in three Britons are conceived in an IKEA bed, which is crazy if you think about it because those places are really well lit.

Okay. If I asked you to describe the experience of reading that line, you’d probably say your eyes smoothly moved from left to right.

But they didn’t. That’s not how we read at all.

Reading is actually about two things, and the first is jumping.

Your gaze leaps from place to place incredibly fast, an unending string of tiny hops - on average, less than a fifth of a second per jump.

(Try it. Look around you right now. Hophophophophop.)

These are called saccades - tiny movements caused by the squeezing and tugging of muscles in your eye. They’re astounding complex, not just because of the speed of them (which is startling) but because somehow, your eye always knows where to look next. It’s plotting future leaps and turning them into the electrical signals required to twist those muscles in just the right way to point your eye just so. Again and again and again. In other words, what we call “looking” is really a vast network of visual systems working together at unbelievable speed to…

Sorry. Carriage return. I felt that paragraph was getting too big. Your brain hates enormous unbroken blocks of text unless they’re beautifully crafted, and I have no illusions about my work here.

(I also hope it hates those emails where every sentence is its own paragraph, aptly nicknamed “broetry.” Similarly best avoided.)

Anyway. Saccades aren’t where you do your reading. They’re just the bits in between reading. During a saccade, your brain stops processing signals coming from your eyes, essentially switching them to standby mode. If they didn’t, your vision would be an overwhelmed smeary mess, an unending, pulsating Jackson Pollock of a thing that would drive you completely potty in minutes.

Very sensibly, your brain fudges this process, giving you the appearance of awareness while only collecting an undetailed “gist” of a glance to work with. It’s similar to how a Thatcherised Adele can play tricks on you.

In fact, almost all of the “seeing” part of reading only happens when your eyes stop. There’s only a ridiculously small part of your vision that’s capable of actual reading.

Hold your arm out in front of you, and do a thumbs-up. Your thumbnail? That’s the size of it. It ain’t big.

It’s called the fovea centralis, and it’s part of your retina. It’s tiny - and yet it’s the only place where you see with 20/20 vision (if you’re lucky to have such a thing), and can distinguish fine colour and detail. Nowhere else can do this.

I say again: it’s incredible that you can read anything.

Well, whatever. You’re getting bored now. That nice picture helps (cat!), but if you wanted a science lecture, you would have watched something by Professor Brian Cox, who also has really great hair. It’s been minutes since you checked your email. Are we done here?

Bear with me. Look, here is a popculture meme to lazily manipulate your emotions:

Hey, do you remember the good old days where you could grab a paperback after dinner and curl up on the sofa, and you read until bedtime but couldn’t stop, and then you turn the last page and it’s daylight and there’s a voicemail saying you’ve been either expelled or fired?

Those days were the best. Ahh. But then the Internet came along, and apparently we now have the attention spans of goldfish…

OK, no. Hold on. I know the study you’re thinking of.

It was referenced absolutely everywhere a few years ago - released by the Consumer Insights team at Microsoft Canada, and quickly announced as fact in lots of credible publications. (Look, it’s in Time magazine!)

Then BBC reporter Simon Maybin asked what should have been an obvious question: um, how did Microsoft actually measure this? (This is called “fact-checking,” and it used to be all the rage in pre-Internet times.) While the bulk of the report concerned a study of the brain activity of 2,000 Canadians, the “sub-goldfish attention span” statistic came from a company called Statistic Brain.

In Maybin’s words:

“A quick Google and it is easy to find where they got it from. The Statistic Brain website looks pretty trustworthy too. It even says they "love numbers, their purity, and what they represent"…

As if to prove it, the number-lovers at Statistic Brain source all their figures. But the sources are infuriatingly vague.

And when I contact the listed sources - the National Center for Biotechnology Information at the US National Library of Medicine, and the Associated Press - neither can find any record of research that backs up the stats.

My attempts to contact Statistic Brain came to nothing too.

I have spoken to various people who dedicate their working lives to studying human attention and they have no idea where the numbers come from either.”

Technology Strategist Faris Yakob did more digging:

“A reverse image search led me to the source of the claim, a software manual called Building Information Modeling and Construction Management. Here the chart is sourced to the National Center for Biotechnology Information and US Library of Medicine but when asked, both denied any knowledge of research that supports it.”

If that wasn’t bad enough, here’s the clincher: goldfish don’t have short attention spans. It’s a myth. There are umpteen studies stating as such, going back decades. This is something even a schoolkid could investigate. I know this because I found this award-winning study by 9th-grader Katie (no surname given) for the American Museum of Natural History, which logically and rigorously concluded that goldfish retain a practical spatial map of their surroundings for at least 6 months.

So much for that statistic. Alas, there’s plenty of other trustworthy research suggesting our attention spans are indeed changing for the worse, like this fascinating research on the ‘half-life’ of the popularity of topics in online media.

But this is kinda beside the point. Whatever the science is, paying attention online right now just feels hard. Anecdotally, I haven’t met anyone who hasn’t struggled with it. How does anyone keep up?

Here’s something that works for me that might work for you. It revolves around one simple but seemingly nonsensical statement:

It Is Impossible To Read Anything Online.

By “read,” I mean anything over, say, 250 words.

And by “online,” I mean on a device that is currently connected to the Internet.

I am a professional Internet dopamine addict. Even if I’m not actively using it, knowing my phone or browser could have an onscreen notification that (allegedly) requires my attention is enough to distract me towards it. I’ve timed it. This urge frequently kicks in after less than 30 seconds.

Unless you really are Neo in The Matrix, that’s not enough time to read a book. It’s not enough time to read an article. It’s barely enough time to read a tweet.

My attention is tugged away - and when I bring it back, my thoughts have to start all over again. This happens maybe a hundred times every hour. (I used to think this was merely an occupational hazard. I was kidding myself.)

The solution is nicely dumb: I just read everything offline.

My laptop’s F2 key disconnects it from the house network. If I want to really read and think about something, I press that button, and do the same to my phone. Zero internet!

It may seem an inconsequential act, but I’m teaching my subconscious to know when I’m fully offline, while also creating a tiny but tangible obstacle that I have to hurdle to get connected again. It’s not much! Hardly anything. But it seems my brain knows - because it’s helping. I’m leaning in for longer.

But by far the most impactful thing I do is click the browser plugin button that bundles up all the words on screen and sends them to my Pocket account.

You could use Instapaper for this, with the bonus that it’ll sync with a Kindle. Or you could use one of the new crop of read-later apps aiming to be the “Spotify for reading.”

But however you do it, get your reading brain away from an open Internet connection, into a place where you know nothing virtual is going to distract you or interrupt you. It’s like browsing the Internet is the saccade - and going offline is using your fovea to zoom in and actually see what you’ve found.

In my case, Pocket is where I send all the articles, many newsletters and a fair few emails that I want to read. (Bonus for researchers of all kinds: it creates a paper-trail as you go.)

Your dopamine-craving brain may fight like hell at first. It’ll need training. But if you persist, you might find these are little changes that make a huge difference for your ability to read without interrupting yourself, as they’re doing for mine right now.

Hope that helps.

Thanks for reading. See you in season 3!

Images: Sam Burriss, Bacila Vlad, 愚木混株cdd20.

And this is its first subscribers-only post, where I start repaying your kindness at supporting this newsletter with…whatever this is!

EiA is currently in an intermission between Seasons 2 and 3 (the latter is starting at the end of next week), and this is the first of a two-parter, so I’m sure there’s a clever name out there somewhere for such things. It’s one of those, anyway.

Before I get going with today’s stuff, a bizarre update on a previous newsletter. Remember the story of Metric vs Imperial? It’s become more timely than I could have ever expected, because the UK government announced 2 days ago that it’s going to allow British shopkeepers to trade using pounds and ounces, instead of insisting they always use Metric.

As far as I can tell, this isn’t going to change much on the ground (most of us already use a mix of both in our everyday lives, particularly a preference for miles rather than kilometres) - so it’s less a “post-Brexit bonfire of European Union red tape” *sigh* and more a confirmation that we’re even more eccentric than we first appear.

(And considering my country is one that still legislates that All beached whales and sturgeons must be offered to the Reigning Monarch, that’s saying a lot.)

Anyway. Today, a question that‘s been quietly bugging me for years - and one that might be a lot more important to our mental wellbeing than it seems at first glance:

What does the Internet actually look like?

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