For a change, this will be a short one. I’d already decided to keep it brief, but then I saw this (and laughed):

Monica writes the amazing newsletter Dearest, which I hope you’re already reading because it’s ridiculously interesting. But it’s also maybe not exactly what I would call “short”…?

Fine, I’ll let it go, Monica. THIS TIME.

Today, a quick look at the future of this newsletter - which starts by turning everything the wrong way round.

This is Adele.

I mean, you knew that. It’s obviously a picture of Adele, except upside-down.

Now, please - take a deep breath.

No, really. You’ll need it. The first time I did what I’m about to tell you to do, I got a shock. A proper WAAAGGHf***ohmypoorheart moment.

Now turn your phone, or your head, and look at this picture the right way up.

…

Yeah. I’m sorry. I know. (Sorry.)

It’s called the Thatcher Illusion, so-named because the first example of it was a doctored image of Margarat Thatcher. To ‘Thatcherise’ a face, you turn it upside down, but then flip their eyes and mouth the right way up again. The result is something your brain hardly notices in an inverted image - and freaks out about when it’s right-side-upped again.

This was discovered by Peter Thompson in 1980, at the University of York, England. (Despite studying and working at that Uni for 7 years, I had no idea of this! Always something new to learn.)

And its wider significance is…well, that discussion is still going on, but it’s about our ability to form our thinking around patterns, like the relationship between eyes and mouth in a face. That rapid pattern-analysis is what we call “recognising a face” - and if you jumble up the orientation of each feature, your brain will try to leap to an approximation that turns out to be grotesquely wrong when the image is flipped the right way up.

It also works on other British ex-Prime Ministers:

And on many famous people (as long as they don’t smile too hard).

But beyond the face-science, I love this for a wider reason. It’s possible at first glance to be absolutely convinced of what your mind is telling you you’re looking at - and then be 100% surprised when you see what’s actually there. 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?

Since they’re such a great metaphor for curiosity (“you’ll never know if you don’t go look”), and have so much to teach about perceptual awareness, I’m making them my focus in Season 3 of Everything is Amazing, like I did with maps in Season 2.

This is going to get really weird. I hope that’s you properly warned.

If you’re on the free list of this newsletter, today’s the last day you’re going to get everything it has to offer.

You’ll still be hearing from me - sometimes once a week, sometimes every other week. You’re still going to get some deep, nerdy dives into all sorts of exceeeding odd things, and the occasional interview with the most curious folk I know.

But alas, you’ll miss out on everything else. The challenges, for example. Or the questions about questions. Or the anti-clickbait anti-nonsense. You’ll miss a lot, I’m afraid.

This is of course a masterful segue into encouraging you to sign up. Give it a try! It’s just 6 bucks a month, and if I prove to be a huge disappointment, you can cancel your subscription and go tell everyone that your initial suspicions about me were right all along.

And if you fancy really going for it with a year’s subscription - well, I’m afraid you missed the 25% discount, but I’m making it 10% off a year’s subscription until the end of tomorrow:

Subscribe Today

These discount offers, by the way? They’re forever. Those of you who so kindly signed up the other day, that’s the rate I’m only ever going to charge you, if you decide to keep going beyond a year. Same goes with the 10% today and tomorrow. Once you’re in, you’re never paying full price. (That’s the least I can do to say thank you for supporting Everything Is Amazing right out the gate like this.)

Right then. I said I’d keep it short - and we both know how much I can go on.

If you’re a paying subscriber, you’ll hear from me again next week. And if you’re on the free list, I’ll be back at the start of Season 3, in a few weeks.

See you then!

- Mike

Images: Rowan Freeman, Pete Etchells/Action Press/REX/Shutterstock/Guardian.

Here’s a heartwarming story about buses.

No, wait. COME BACK. Seriously. This is a fun thing - and a good lesson about how to live a truly curious life.

A few days ago, British civil servant Jo Kibble decided it was time to put sensible things aside and do something really, really stupid:

(Thanks to Kash for tipping me off about this when it was happening on Twitter.)

"I like travelling by public transport and by bus; I think it's a great way to see the country," Mr Kibble later said to BBC News. "I also really like timetables and I like the logistics of putting things together."

I’m presuming this is the answer to the question Why on earth did you do this? He followed it with: "It was just a paper exercise to keep me occupied…I had some fun doing that on commutes to and from work."

This was all done within the UK, I should add. With buses, it’s possible to cheat slightly and use the Eurotunnel’s Le Shuttle to get into Continental Europe: the bus drives into one end, waits for the journey to finish, and disembarks in France. I’ve done this a few times with a now-defunct Megabus service from the north of England to Barcelona: a quietly agonizing 37-hour bus journey that made me feel like a character in a Samuel Beckett play, even if it did get me from England to Spain for just £25.

But Mr Kibble wasn’t powered by a lack of money, or the kind of masochism that drives ambitious travel writers. He was doing it because - well, why not?

The whole thread is delightful. And by that I mean really ordinary. This is an extraordinary journey made of utterly commonplace moments, which is why it’s so relatable.

Nothing mindblowingly dramatic happens:

It’s delightfully observed - and it’s extremely British.

While travelling he said he discovered there was a "large fan following of Preston Bus Station".

"People sent me messages telling me I needed to go and visit Preston Bus Station. Luckily it was already on the route. It is a remarkable piece of architecture; seeing that first hand was surprisingly moving in a way."

(As I said, extremely British.)

At 00.29 on Saturday morning, after 21 hours and 24 minutes of sitting on buses, Mr Kibble arrived at Morecambe in the northwest of England, just short of the Lake District. The 260-mile journey had cost him £56.95.

By now, the whole Twitter thread had exploded in popularity. Congratulations flooded in - including from Baroness Vere of Norbiton, the current Minister for Roads, Buses and Places:

Speaking to BBC News, Mr Kibble sounds bemused by all this:

"It's been incredible to be labelled as quintessentially English. It's not something I had recognised in myself before, so it's an interesting window into how people see Englishness and Britishness. But according to my wife, who is Italian-South African, the fact you can go anywhere without a car is a key strain of Britishness."

And his journey has really sparked something:

"People were interested in seeing how the system works and how it's linked to politics and the geography of the area. Bus networks are a very important part of building a fairer country and an economic system that works for more people. Sometimes Twitter can be a nice place for discussions."

But he didn’t know any of that would happen when he set off. That’s not why he did it.

This is where I can imagine non-Brits looking confused. I mean, why sit on buses for a full day? How bored do you have to be? Yes, a lack of proper holidays for everyone this year has something to do with both the inspiration for the journey and the public reaction to it.

But really, this is about enthusiasm for doing something a little bit mad-looking to other people, just for the hell of it.

In other words: the perfect curiosity challenge.

A huge problem with challenging yourself to get out your bubble of overfamiliarity (see my 1st Law of Curiosity here) is our tendency to need a rational, logical reason to underpin it, so we can justify it to ourselves right now and other people later. We need to be able to explain our reasoning somehow, because it’s really psychologically hard (and weird) to say Well, um - why the hell not?

But magical things happen when you abandon reason and say Why The Hell Not. You discover all sorts of things you never knew you didn’t know. You see things and meet people you would never have met - because there was no rational reason to do so. And you feel a strange kind of joy. This is entirely aimless! I’m rebelling against all the laws of common sense! I am a Che Guevara of pointlessness!

As a Brit with a love of domestic travel, I love this bus adventure (it’s a huge thread, filled with videos that won’t display in this newsletter. Click over and read the whole thing, if you feel like I do about it).

Your mileage may vary. But the real lesson here is about whimsy: “a sudden playful desire or change of mind, especially one that is unusual or unexplained”. You have a sudden idea, it feels like it may be fun, and you steadfastly refuse to find a better “reason” that that to drive you onwards. (You already have a reason. It might be fun!)

So whatever crazyfool whimsy-driven mini-adventures you get up to, please, don’t feel that rationality should always be in charge. Your rational mind knows nothing about what you don’t yet know. That’s its biggest failing. So if you ignore it and work around it occasionally, you’ll find worlds of fascination and fun you never knew existed.

(And maybe the odd lychee or two.)

Update: I Still Hate Marketing

At the end of today (Monday 23rd), the 25% discount on a yearly subscription to Everything Is Amazing runs out, as I announced on Friday.

I’ve been utterly bowled over by how many of you have subscribed so far. It’s been the kind of thing that makes me have to grab a cup of tea and go stand in the sunshine, blinking furiously until my stiff upper lip reasserts itself. It’s been the loveliest thing. Floored, I am.

Unfortunately, other people have continued to say extremely nice and encouraging things about the newsletter. (I haven’t been paying them or anything, I swear - it just keeps happening.)

Here’s one of them, from someone whose writing I couldn’t admire more:

The Everything Is Amazing newsletter is a perfect investment in your year. Mike’s deep dives into the fascinating stories behind everyday things make him a compelling guide to the world. He is also ridiculously funny. I’ve long enjoyed his writing, and I am sure you will too!

- Jodi Ettenberg, lawyer-turned-curiosity-writer, author of the award-winning Legal Nomads and the newsletter Curious About Everything.

Thanks, Jodi!

So while I spend the rest of the day battling imposter syndrome, I invite you to subscribe to Everything Is Amazing, to join in all the fun that’s coming soon:

Subscribe

Whether you’re subscribing at the $6 a month level, or taking out a discounted year’s subscription, or even joining as a Founding Member, you are directly turning this project into everything I believe it can become. Which is a lot. So thank you. I remain super-thrilled by how all this is going.

For a preliminary breakdown of what’s currently included for paying members, check out “What You’ll Get By Going Paid” here. I’ll have a lot more to say about all this over the coming weeks and months, since I’ll be adding more stuff as I go. This is only going to get bigger.

I’ve just been told I need to post that Subscribe button twice for Unfathomable Marketing Reasons, so here it is again. (Sorry.)

Subscribe Today

OK, that’s all for now. Back in a few days!

- Mike

Images: Chan Lee, Harry Grout.

I was initially reluctant to use the word “Amazing” because I’m British and we don’t go in for those kinds of reckless, unseemly displays of emotion. A friend even suggested the title Everything Is Awesome! We haven’t spoken since.

But here’s a warning for my British readers: today, I will be using the word “awesome” a lot. Not in that modern overused sense that gets applied to everything (“wow, this slice of slightly damp burnt toast is awesome!!!!!!”) but in the dictionary-correct sense.

Let’s talk about awe.

In May of last year, the Modesto Bee (Stanislaus County, California) ran an obituary of a much-loved local resident, Mr. P. Vasquez. After a few years of ill health, he’d recently been showing symptoms of pneumonia and was admitted to hospital, where he passed a few days later.

Another obituary noted his love of the mountains, his fondness for helping people (including the local Miwok, whose traditions are currently under threat) and that he was “survived by his two children.”

Mr Vasquez lived a low-key but colourful life: born in East Los Angeles, he worked in a lot of trades (including firefighting, truck-driving and working security), and eventually bought a plot of land around 10 miles from Yosemite, which he turned into a farm. He got married, he got divorced, he grew his own food - and he went for a lot of walks on the hills above Yosemite Valley…

OK. I’m working really hard here to hold his true identity back from you, including the nickname you probably already know him by. I’ll be shocked if you haven’t experienced a moment of pure joy (and hilarity) through his most famous piece of work.

That second obituary, by the way? It was in the New Yorker.

For the sheer joy of reliving it, let’s pretend you don’t know the following story. One day in early January 2010, Paul Vasquez stepped out of his house and into his back yard, and saw…

A double rainbow.

“Woah, that’s a full rainbow, all the way. A double rainbow - oh my god! It’s a double rainbow, all the way. Woah…that’s so intense.”

He moves away from the trees surrounding his property until he can see the whole valley- and then he experiences something that makes life worth living: a moment of pure, overwhelming, awe-driven joy.

I mean, it’s also hilarious. If you’re not laughing, you’ve clicked the wrong link. The moment where he whispers “What does this mean?” is one of the funniest things on the whole of YouTube.

The whole thing is comedy gold - as is the remix song someone else made from it:

But it’s also something to admire. Who doesn’t want to feel like that?

For all the “LOL, how much drugs was he on? All of them?” comments flying around, I bet a lot of those 50 million views were powered by wishful envy. He just sounds so ridiculously happy. What’s his secret? How many times a week does he feel like that? Has he discovered how to live a literally awesome life?

If the internet has a Patron Saint of Awe, his name might be Paul “Bear” Vasquez.

(Rest in peace, sir. I hope you’ve found out what it all means.)

The science of awe is a pretty recent thing. I first learned about it via writer Florence Williams, author of The Nature Fix and countless articles on finding it in the Great Outdoors. UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center released this fascinating white paper on it in 2018, summarising the recent research.

It’s an exciting new branch of the study of human experience. And it matters.

If you want confirmation of this, watch the Double Rainbow video from end to end, all 3 minutes and 29 seconds of it, and tell me you don’t feel better afterwards.

Berkeley’s research suggests that experiencing awe has the following beneficial effects on us:

• increased feelings of humbling self-diminishment (nicknamed “the small self”), where you realise how relatively unimportant and temporary your struggles are compared to other things

• a deeper sense of connection to the people and places around you

• an increased capacity for critical thinking and healthy skepticism

• a more positive outlook on life

• a decreased concern with materialism, ie. Stuff.

So should we all immediately go chasing rainbows?

Based on how I felt when I saw this one in Orkney last year, I’d say HELL yes:

But that’s not really how it works. What catapulted Mr Double Rainbow into paroxysms of joy might not trigger the same thing in others.

Like serendipity, awe is really hard to engineer. It’s your thing, and you find it in your own way. You usually stumble across it, and stand transfixed while the people you’re with, experiencing the exact same situation, are all What’s up, are you OK? What’s the big deal?

And as Paul Vasquez proved, it can even hit you in your own backyard. It’s not a “travel to distant lands” thing - unless you specifically want it to be. But you can find it anywhere.

So where is it?

Wouldn’t it be fun to find out?

Today I’m launching the paid version of Everything Is Amazing.

It’s also marks the start of the last week that free subscribers will be getting everything I write: from the end of next week, any time you visit the Web version and see a padlock sign next to a post, it’s only for paying subscribers, and you won’t be able to read it unless you’re fully subscribed.

Curiosity is a weird beat that takes some explaining, so I’ve held off doing a subscription as long as possible. As I said in my Season 2 roundup last time, I want this newsletter to be a little daily reminder of things you can go out and discover - a doing newsletter as much as a reading one. And the reason is that applied curiosity, when it leads to moments of serendipity, wonder and awe, just feels incredibly great.

I could bang on about the science, and indeed I will continue to do so. Science will keep being…er, banged. (On reflection, that phrase doesn’t lend itself to rearrangement. Let’s move on.)

My point is, the real value of all this is how it makes you feel. Curiosity, awe and wonder can make you happier, but not in that ephemeral, tiny-squirt-of-dopamine way that we all get from awful clickbait hogwash. This is a longer-term thing. Something that can change you for good.

I used to think that the opposite of curiosity was “being incurious” (plus, always complaining you’re bored). In fact, it isn’t. It’s hopelessness.

Everything Is Amazing is about exploring the anti-hopelessness skills and finding out how they work. And it’s about using them. The more we use them, the more upright we feel, and the more able to tackle the challenges in our life head-on.

That’s the kind of newsletter I’m trying to write here.

If that sounds like your thing, I’d love to have you aboard as a paying subscriber, helping me build this up, helping me assemble the tools for tackling hopelessness, and learning how to chase awe wherever it can be found. That’s the grand game that’s afoot here.

Will you join me?

Subscribe

Some Reluctant Self-Marketing

Since the start of the newsletter, an alarming number of people have said really kind things about it. This occasionally sent me into a weird spiral of anxiety where I had to turn the computer off and go for a walk, or react in other British ways, like joining a queue of people for no reason, or grabbing a watering-can & watering the garden even though it was belting down with rain. That kind of thing.

Then I read this from The Oatmeal, about what compliments do to your brain, and realised it wasn’t just me. Compliments are just hard.

Unfortunately they’re also a big part of marketing your newsletter, so here are a few really nice ones I’ve received this week.

Even if you already consider yourself a curious, well-rounded person, Mike Sowden will make you feel like you've been looking at the world through a fogged up windshield.

Reading Everything is Amazing is like turning the vents on high, blasting away the fog to reveal the most random and surprisingly significant topics you didn't even know to wonder about before he showed up in your inbox with his self-deprecating brilliance. Reading Everything is Amazing might at first make you feel a little down on yourself for failing to acknowledge how much cool stuff there is to explore, marvel at, wonder about. But fixing that is great fun. And Mike shows you how.

We will all be more interesting people, thanks to the perspectives and stories found in Mike's newsletter.

- Britany Robinson, journalist & editor, and author of One More Question, a (superb) newsletter for freelance writers.

"If your inbox is not that fun, you can do at least one thing to change that and subscribe to Mike's newsletter, which provides a weekly dose of wonder and joy.

Actually, you can do two things: you can also unsubscribe from those promotional emails you get from that website you bought a USB dongle from 18 months ago, and from that date forward, has emailed you every single day to remind you that it's still in business and sells other products.

But you should subscribe to Mike's newsletter first. Because it will make your day better every time it arrives."

- Brendan Leonard, author of I Hate Running and You Can Too: How to Get Started, Keep Going, and Make Sense of an Irrational Passion, and writer at Semi-Rad.com (where he publishes some of the best things on the internet)

Cheers, folks. I’ve had my eyes shut the whole time so I don’t know what you both wrote there, but thank you!

So there you have it. Whatever those testimonials said about my newsletter, that’s what you’d be missing out on if you didn’t subscribe in some way.

Wow, I really hate marketing.

How Everything Is Amazing’s Pricing Works

Substack processes payments with Stripe, which accepts all major cards.

A month’s subscription is $6: I’m told by a Young Person that’s about the price of a tall cappucino and a blueberry muffin, whatever they are.

And normally, a year’s subscription would be $60, giving you twelve months of newslettery goodness for the price of ten.

However, until the end of Monday 23rd August, you can subscribe for 12 months for just $45 by clicking this link.

That’s less than a third of the price of a pair of new Levi’s Straight-Cut Wedgie Jeans! Again, don’t ask me about this. And judging from what young folk are wearing these days, I’m probably better off not knowing.

(I’m also adding a Founding Member subscription tier - $100 - in case you really feel like going all-in on this. This would make this whole newsletter especially your fault from this day forward, rather than the blame being spread out evenly amongst everyone who has signed up. Thank you!)

What You’ll Get By Going Paid

I’m still working out the finer details of all this - which I know makes me sounds super-professional (I say again, marketing is hard).

But here are the basics as they stand right now:

• On the free tier, you’ll get occasional public-access newsletters every week, or sometimes every other week. But if you’re a paid member, you’ll get the whole shebang: not just the big essays & occasional interviews, but also the challenge roundups, the podcast episodes, some upcoming discussion threads I’ve been planning out for a while, and also chapters of my book when they’re ready.

• Oh right, my book. Yes. So here’s the thing: I’ve been really curious for a long time about certain things that people love to hate. Any time someone says “I HATE that thing, kill it with fire” I get really interested. It feels like a challenge. What better test of your skill as a curiosity-writer than to take something lots of people loathe and find a way to make them interested in it? Challenge accepted.

  So I’m writing a few books like that.

  And the first one will be about rain.

  More specifically: the human experience of rain. As a travel writer, I discovered almost everyone hates being rained on. Which is fascinating, because I really don’t! I find it life-affirming, uncomfortable and hilarious in equal measure, but in a way that usually adds up to a positive experience I hardly ever regret. (Hardly ever. Maybe a few times! But we don’t talk about those.)

  It’s my belief that rain, and being rained on, have a great deal to teach you about the world around you - and, hopefully, so will my book, How To Be Rained On, coming very soon. But if you’re a paying subscriber to Everything Is Amazing, you’ll see it before anyone else - because I’ll be publishing each chapter when it’s ready for your eyes only, and you’ll get a free e-copy of the whole book when it’s finished.

That’s how things are looking right now. (There will be more on the way.)

Are you in?

Subscribe

I’ll be back in your Inboxes on Monday, when the 25% discount ends, and then again on Wednesday.

But from the middle of next week, I’m taking a 2-week break to go walk around a nearby Scottish island (and hopefully get rained on a few times). During this time, paying subscribers will get one newsletter per week from me, while those of you on the free list won’t hear from me until the third season begins in September.

See you on Monday!

- M

Images: Robby McCullough, Fede Casanova, Thomas Ciszewski, Jessica Knowlden, Ian Dooley, Mike Sowden

We’ve reached the end of the second season of Everything Is Amazing.

And as with the first season, it…stretched out a few weeks further than I originally planned (for the same reason as before: the arrival of some very welcome paid work I couldn’t turn down, me being a non-rich working writer and all that).

Since the end of January, Everything Is Amazing has been a side project I’ve done entirely for free. An increasingly fun one! But definitely something I’ve had to balance with the more “job”-like side of my job...

And in the last few months, I’ve found I really don’t want to do that anymore.

No, don’t panic! I’ve only just got started with Everything Is Amazing! (Why would I want to stop having this much fun?)

But I am making some big changes, starting this week.

Scroll down to the end of this newsletter - “Time For An Announcement” - for the details.

Okay. Regarding season 2, here’s everything we covered over the last couple of months.

Nerding Out About…Unreal Geography

“Here, then, is what I’m curious about right now: the midpoint between the wholly fictional Tolkien-style maps I grew up with, and the detailed, real-world OS maps I can never seem to fold up the correct way.”

1. “Charting Nonsense-Land” - The greatest hoax in British newspaper history

According to Guardian Deputy Editor David McKie: "The impact of the seven-page survey was quite astonishing. The office all day was bedlam as people pestered the switchboard with requests for more information...[they] simply refused to believe that the islands did not exist."

2. “Is Wikipedia Reliable?” - Why everyone wants a piece of the world’s biggest encyclopedia

“Alongside the funnies (& the far-less-funnies) are the spoofs and hoaxes that were good enough to go undetected.

Compared to the 6 million articles on Wikipedia, they’re the tiniest percentage - but it’s still an alarmingly big list. The 32 that managed to escape detection for more than ten years (!) include a fictitious British slapstick TV gameshow, a fake sheik, a spurious variety of Norwegian associated football, a bogus medieval torture device, an imaginary HBO miniseries (“Sheer Perfection”), a nonexistent French actor & opera singer - and an American punk rock band that was as real as Spinal Tap.

How many others have slipped through the net?”

3. “How To Go Beyond The Map”: The imaginary South Pacific island that fooled everyone who hadn’t been there…

“The overlapping composite of all those photos is what gets uploaded to our phones - and big tech would love for us to assume it’s infallible. I mean, a satellite photo is a photo of what’s actually there. How could it lie?

Try telling that to the crew of the Australian research ship R/V Southern Surveyor, which in November 2012 sailed past the South Pacific island of Sandy Island - first recorded in 1774 by Captain James Cook - and, finding nothing but ocean over a kilometre deep, officially undiscovered it.”

4. “The Imaginary Town That Refused To Stay Fake”

“If you’re ever in Delaware County, be sure to head over to the tiny hamlet of Roscoe. There’s not really anything to see there (unless you’re into fly-fishing: Roscoe calls itself “Trout Town, USA”). But drive past the gas stations and convenience stores and head just a little north, to where an unnamed dirt road meets NY 206.

Stop the car a second, stretch your legs, and look around.

Apart from the two roads meeting and a faint shadow of a knocked-down building at the side of the road, it’s nothing but trees, grass and birdsong round here. But trust me. This is a once-in-a-lifetime experience you’re having right now.

You’re standing in Agloe, Colchester: a place which, simultaneously and without contradiction, does and doesn’t exist.”

5. “Why All Our Maps Are The Wrong Way Round”

“Reluctantly, we have to leave comfortable, reassuring deterministic reasons behind. It’s not an objective issue. It’s a relative one. North and South [are at the top & bottom of our maps] because at some point, someone decided that’s how they should be.

At last, we have arrived at the real reason our maps point in the direction they currently do.

It’s because some people really, really suck.”

6. “The Case For Imperial In A World Gone Metric” (or, ‘OK America, Maybe You’re Onto Something Here’)

“It’s easy to leap to some narrow-minded assumptions here, like I did when I first learned the United States prefers using Imperial. (For any fellow Brits feeling a similar tendency towards smugness here: let’s not forget that the U.S. was the first country in the world to adopt a decimal-based currency, all the way back in 1792, when we Brits were still faffing around with shillings, guineas, farthings and the like.)

But people aren’t stupid. Examine the growth-cycle of a tradition that’s endured for centuries, and somewhere in there you’ll usually find a sensible, logical reason it got lodged in people’s brains in the first place. And it’s often about efficiency. Nobody wants to make life harder for themselves.

So is Metric really easier to use?”

Deep Dives: The science & art of curiosity

“Mind (In) The Gap” - The curious case for thinking outside your brain

“What my friend found, I’ll argue, is that she’s smarter as a writer in [a bar at her local ski resort] than she is at home. The thoughts that were so hard to generate at her writing desk were super-easy at the back of that bar. For her. Not for other people. For people who can only think deeply in something approaching silence, a bar would be the death of creativity. (I’m sort of one of those people.)

Annie Murphy Paul’s book, which is called The Extended Mind, looks deeply at the evidence for what she calls “thinking outside the brain” and maybe what my friend would call ‘going skiing.’”

Takeaways:

• When people wave their hands madly during conversation, there’s good evidence that they’re helping themselves string their words together better. (Rejoice, Italy!)

• The place where you think is going to affect how you think - potentially turning travel into a performance-enhancing drug for your mind.

• What if the best place to write a book is halfway up a tree?

“How To Hang Onto A Submarine” (and climb a mountain on Mars)

“The rover’s mission plan was to survive for 3 months: no small feat in a place with an average temperature of -60 Celsius, with the nearest mechanic 34 million miles away. Anything achieved beyond those 90 days was a bonus - and that’s how the scientists tackled every single day of the mission. In the words of one of the scientists, they treated each day “as if it was their last.”

All very impressive and meme-worthy. But this strategy paid off to an incredible degree. The 90-day deadline came, but Spirit kept rolling onwards.”

Takeaways:

• Somewhat counterintuitively, we’re most curious about the things we already know something about…

• …and perhaps this is like the ‘curious 10%’ that so effectively motivates long-distance runners (and everyone else).

• At last, the answer to a question that has haunted me for years: after Indy clambers onto the U-boat in Raiders Of The Lost Ark, why didn’t the bloody thing submerge and drown him?

“The Privilege Of Curiosity”

In his book Curious, Ian Leslie documents some of the research around this:

• In 1930, developmental psychologist Dorothea McCarthy studied 140 children in Minneapolis aged between 18 & 54 months, and found the ones from upper social classes asked more questions than those in lower ones.

• A detailed study of 30 girls under 5 years of age by Barbara Tizard & Martin Hughes found a similar pattern: middle-class children asked more questions, but also the type of questions they asked were different. They asked more “how” and “why” questions - and strung questions together to create “passages of intellectual search,” like a series of repeated, related interrogations of Google.

Takeaways:

• The ability to ask questions has a hell of a lot to do with your social group and your upbringing.

• “Your ability to be curious and explore the world is directly related to your ability to feel safe and settled. So kids that don’t feel safe don’t want to see new things - they want to go back to things that are safe and familiar.”

• The greatest scientific paper ever written is about writer’s block.

“Is This The Home Of Curiosity In The Brain?”

“The area in question is a strip of gray matter in the subthalamus, just under the area that works as a kind of neurological Grand Central, furiously shuttling messages back and forth from both sides of our brains.

It’s an unusually well-connected region. Parts of it thread their way to the cerebral cortex (the region where we seem to do most of our conscious thinking) and down into the spinal column. Yet until now, nobody’s had much of a clue what it’s for. Upon discovering it in 1877, Swiss neuroanatomist Auguste Forel called it “a region of which nothing certain can be said” - and named it zona incerta.”

Takeaways:

• Since the zona incerta is tentatively linked to the mechanisms of “binge-like eating” and sexual arousal, perhaps describing curiosity as a lust for knowledge isn’t far off the mark?

• You’d think anything called “the uncertain zone” would be a pretty good place to start doing research? No? Just me? OK. (Science is weird.)

• The Protégé Effect is a fabulous way to learn new things.

“Four Amazing Ways To Live A Super-Awful Life”

“A cognitive bias is a shortcut invented by your mind, designed to make your life easier, by keeping you sane, safe and upright.

Unfortunately, it’s also an error. Your brain is messing up - sometimes with disastrous long-term consequences.”

Takeaways:

• Negativity Bias makes everything feel so awful you stop asking questions…

• Confirmation Bias makes everything boring, because you stop learning anything new…

• Hyperbolic Discounting is a fancy way of saying “we’re all rubbish at longterm planning.”

Interview: “Jonny Miller Is Questioning Everything”

“In order to make genuine progress in the divided world we live in, we have to show up with genuine curiosity for how the other person came to this conclusion. What is their truth here? What’s underlying this opinion that they're asserting? And I think almost always, there is something new to learn there. 

I've had some interesting conversations with believers: how that set of beliefs give them a sense of meaning and purpose, and help justify their beliefs that the big companies and government don't have their best interests at heart. And you can see how these beliefs are holding up their sense of identity about who they are, and giving them a sense of purpose and mission that they haven't felt previously. These truths underneath the surface of the seemingly outrageous opinions that we see. And so it is interesting to ask, How did this person get to hold this particular perspective? It’s reverse-engineering detective work.”

Ridiculous Challenges

1. Find Your Nearest Ruin, Create A To-Do Map, Look Upwards, Uncover The Story of A Treasured Thing, Discover Who Lives 100 Metres Away

2. The 7-Day Dunk, Have A “Walk It Off” Chat, Write To A Hero, Spend 24 Hours Outside, Take A Food-Holiday

Bonus!

How about saying nuts to being original?

Time For An Announcement

So, about that “I can’t do this anymore” bombshell in the intro…

Since launch, Everything Is Amazing has been completely free to read, from beginning to end. It’s been a labour of love that I’ve had to squeeze in when I wasn’t writing other, less fun stuff to pay my bills. (In this respect, I’m like most other writers. Bread needed on the table, and all that.)

I also wanted to prove the case for a newsletter about curiosity. Because yes, this topic is…a little harder to explain than most. A bit hmmm, what’s that now, I’m not sure I…what?

So I wanted to show you my idea of how it could work in practice, and what it can do for you.

I hope you’ve seen that I’m not just trying to distract you with cool things to read (since I know your Inbox is already overflowing with stuff). It’s not just wow-look-at-this articles alongside mercilessly self-deprecating accounts of my own idiocy - although, those too, obviously.

But I’m also trying to give you things you can use, because curiosity is something best put into practice, not just read about.

Except, I’m now at the point where I need investment to do that. And with that in mind, Everything Is Amazing will shortly be opening its financial doors to the public, in the form of a monthly subscription plan, alongside the existing free tier.

I’ll announce the rates in my next newsletter - think “the price of a single trip to Starbucks every month” - and I’ll show you how to subscribe to the paid version, along with what paying members are going to get every week. Free subscribers will keep getting occasional updates, but they’ll no longer get everything (including the new stuff that’s coming from Season 3 onwards).

The main impact of going paid? If I build up enough subscribers, I can stop doing other work for money (aka. those annoying interruptions), and devote myself more and more to researching, writing and shenanigizing* this project, until it’s creating the amount of good trouble I think it’s capable of achieving.

I am of course completely terrified of doing this.

I totally identify with ancient adventurers and writers who sought out wealthy patrons to fund their publications (like Muhammad al-Idrisi and King Roger II of Sicily). Wouldn’t that be brilliant? Ahh.

Except, maybe it wouldn’t be, because then that rich sponsor could pressure me to write stuff that serves them, not you. This way, I can avoid that fate. I’m not accepting paid advertising for this newsletter, or any other sort of sponsorship for it. It’s going to remain 100% independent in that respect. Nothing but your paid subscriptions. That’ll help me stay accountable to you, and serve your needs before anyone else’s.

Does that sound good? Because for me, it’s exciting.

I have big plans. Plans I honestly didn’t have six months ago, before so many of you leapt on board this thing (which frankly I’m still reeling from). The more I dig into this work, the more I think it’s important - in a slightly British, self-mocking way, but also in the way that can make life feel richer, more deliciously surprising, and filled with genuinely thrilling moments of awe and wonder.

So really, it depends on you, and if you’re willing to help me make this project bigger, better and more impactful.

Can you help me grow this thing? Are you madly on board?

I can’t wait to see your answer.

- Mike

* Not a word.

If you’re reading this on the Web and you can’t remember who to blame for ending up here, enjoy the comforting certainty of only blaming yourself from this day forward by signing up to the email version below:

Subscribe now

Right then.

Let’s take a long, hard look at taking a long, hard look.

I have a practical exercise for you.

You may have done it when you were at school - that’s where I first learned it. But if not, be warned: it’s actually…sort of frightening? At the very least, disturbing.

You’re about to learn just how little you can trust your brain to tell you what’s in front of you.

Position yourself about a foot away from the screen you’re reading this on - and stare at the cross.

Now close your right eye, and move the screen a bit closer - then further away…until the dot completely disappears.

Your first reaction is probably to glance sideways. Yep, it’s still there. But when you look back at the cross, the dot disappears again from the corner of your vision. It’s not that there’s a hole there or anything. It’s just been…edited out, like it was never there in the first place.

There’s an elegant biological reason for this. You see things because light is hitting a layer of light-detecting cells called photoreceptors at the back of your eye. When they’re triggered by incoming light, they send a tiny electrical signal into your optic nerve (the ‘cable’ running from the back of your eye into your brain) - and the picture built up from all those signals is what we call “sight”.

But there’s a mechanical problem here. There’s a place where the back of your eye connects with the optic nerve, like the plughole in a kitchen sink. It’s not a flat, forward-facing surface like its surroundings, and it doesn’t have the same photoreceptors.

If your brain suddenly allowed you to see this area properly, it’d be alarming, to say the least: a null signal, like a fuzzy black hole, always hovering at the edge of your vision. But you don’t see that. There’s just this edited patch - which, like the ‘Healing Tool’ in photo editing software, always paints itself the same colour as its surroundings.

(Try the experiment again with the following image. See how the blind spot is filled in black this time?)

Over millions of years, your brain has learned to lie to you. It can’t see what’s in that gap - so it just kinda fudges it, telling you there’s nothing here you need to pay attention to. Don’t worry about it. Trust me, you don’t want to see this.

It’s right, of course. And anyone suffering from a central scotoma will agree. But it’s also a flaw in your vision that you can spend your entire life not knowing about (until someone shows you an image like the one above, because they want to see how much you’ll freak out).

For usually sensible reasons, your brain hides things like this from you all the time.

Unfortunately, its reasoning for doing so is deeply imperfect.

Your mind is riddled with short-cuts and fudges that either made sense at an earlier time in human history but have since been made redundant - or they’re flat-out errors that have never made sense.

The result is that, like the citizens of Besžel and Ul Qoma, we each see the same world a bit differently. We have our perceptual quirks, and they all add up to make our experience unique.

This is one of those phrases we like to trot out to excuse other people’s idiotic behaviour: oh well, I guess we’re all a bit different, eh? Or we say stuff like “hey buddy, feel free to speak your truth” without actually considering that person’s view to be as true as what we believe. The words are easy. The thinking is really. damn. hard.

Take something as simple as colour. Blue is blue, right?

Yes - except for when it’s also white.

Why did The Dress go viral in 2015? Because we can’t handle the truth that half of the world sees a different colour to the one we see. It’s so, so difficult to take in.

(I have always seen a blue dress there. When someone first told me they saw white, I stared at them, looking for a telltale sign that they were pulling my leg. Then I saw on their face that they were searching my expression for exactly the same thing. I bet you experienced something similar.)

This illustrates why shouting at people over social media is often a deeply fruitless exercise (“IT’S A DUCK, KAREN!”) - but this is also about knowing our own perceptual differences. We like to think of our own viewpoint as…if not flawless, then at least uncommonly accurate, right? What we see is pretty much what’s actually there?

Nope. Not a bit of it.

And that’s wonderful! As thousands of EnChroma colour-blindness-correcting reaction videos on YouTube illustrate, being able to see the world differently is an emotionally overwhelming thing:

(Reckon my dad would have loved a pair of these. Alas, bad timing…)

All this gets treated as a mechanical problem, but it’s really about how the mind works. For example, if you wear a pair of glasses that flip your vision upside-down, your brain will immediately start reinterpreting signals from your eyes in an attempt to turn things the right way up again - and after about 10 days of it, your sight will be corrected enough for you to ride a bike.

That’s only half of it, though. When you take those specs off again, your eyes will naturally see everything upside-down - and you’ll have to wait another couple of weeks for that effect to go away.

(This sounds like a truly horrible way to spend a month, which is presumably why nobody else has done it in the last 70 years. Very wise.)

These kinds of neurological “edits” are relatively easy to spot. I mean, we can see them. But there’s a whole other realm of cognitive trickery that escapes our attention at the same time it shapes it.

Welcome to the deeply unsettling world of cognitive bias.

Note on the above image: while I’ve often written “brain” when meaning “mind,” I’m more and more persuaded that we also think with the rest of our bodies, our surroundings and our social networks, as I mentioned here. Annie Murphy Paul’s recent work feels like a game-changer - and she’s on Substack now too. Go sign up.)

A cognitive bias is a shortcut invented by your mind, designed to make your life easier, by keeping you sane, safe and upright.

Unfortunately, it’s also an error. Your brain is messing up - sometimes with disastrous long-term consequences.

Now, I’ve noticed that us blokes have a tendency to use military metaphors here - a bias becoming an “enemy” you can “go to war with,” like the evil force of Resistance that tries to tear down your Art every day. If that’s a motivating way for you to think about it, full steam ahead, all guns blazing! (No, we don’t have steam-powered warships these days; yes, I probably need new metaphors.)

But really, this is You we’re talking about here. This isn’t Us vs. Them (which is itself a bias - see below). This is about metacognition, the skill of thinking about thinking itself, and about learning your own behaviour so well that you develop that rarest and most impactful of human skills: the ability to get out of your own way.

Here’s a whistlestop* tour of four cognitive biases that royally get in the way of living a curious life. I’ll be spending a lot more time writing about them in future newsletters (& even more time testing out ridiculous things that might serve as useful workarounds) - but for now, here’s a quick summary of each.

*Another age-of-steam saying. I really must get out the house more.

1. “Everything Is Awful”

This is Negativity Bias, also called positive-negative asymmetry. It’s the human tendency to pay special attention to potentially threatening things, which is why we can’t stop reading the most distressing news headlines every day - and exactly why the news keeps serving them to us, as I wrote here:

Not only are we exhausted from all the depressing news out there, we’re also hooked on it. It seems we can’t stop obsessing over what’s crappy and awful, even if it’s wildly unrepresentative of the amount of crappy, awful things out there.

Negativity Bias is stitched deep into our minds. Unpick it, and we’ll probably come apart. And hey, a little bit of negativity keeps you from wallowing in the kind of smug, thoughtless Oh-it’ll-be-fine-stop-moaning optimism that makes some people’s shins so incredibly kickable. (Read Brendan Leonard’s post here on how to manage negativity in a healthy way.)

But this bias can also be really, really toxic. It can masquerade as reality so convincingly that it can plunge you into despair about the state of the world and how much everything and everyone sucks, leaving you hyperanxious and traumatised, killing your questions and suffocating your curiosity.

Let’s be clear: in the Cognitive Bias Cinematic Universe, this one is Thanos. (Or Kang, if you’re reading this a few years in the future.) It’s powerful, it’s cunning, and it’ll never stop trying to bring you down.

Avengers Assemble.

2. “Everything Is Boring”

You’ve probably heard of Confirmation Bias. It’s what keeps us in our social bubbles, sharing the same stuff, hanging out with like-minded people, paying the most attention to things that confirm our existing beliefs, and growing more & more convinced that our relatively narrow experience of the world is the only important one.

(It works in the opposite direction to curiosity, which tries to push you towards what you don’t yet know.)

Confirmation Bias is your mind trying to keep you comfortable. In the words of author Nir Eyal, “you seek evidence that confirms your beliefs because being wrong feels crummy.” Admitting you’re wrong is embarrassing and humiliating, so why wouldn’t our brains do everything in their power to save us from experiencing that suckiness?

Unfortunately, always being right means you never accept you’re wrong. It also means you’re never exploring the “I guess another way to answer this is…” questions that lead to revelation, wonder and jawdropping awe. Because, why bother? You’ve got the right answer already!

Here’s Pulitzer-winning journalist and self-described “wrongologist” Kathryn Schultz on why it’s so, so important to get things wrong.

In Kathryn’s words:

“This attachment to our own rightness keeps us from preventing mistakes when we absolutely need to and causes us to treat each other terribly. But to me, what's most baffling and most tragic about this is that it misses the whole point of being human. It's like we want to imagine that our minds are just these perfectly translucent windows and we just gaze out of them and describe the world as it unfolds. And we want everybody else to gaze out of the same window and see the exact same thing. That is not true, and if it were, life would be incredibly boring.”

That’s Confirmation Bias for you. It tries to make everything incredibly boring. It’ll never teach you anything new - and you’ll get more and more bewildered at how the world makes less and less sense. Uncomfortable spoiler: it won’t be the world, it’ll be you.

Let’s not, then. (We’ll look at how another time.)

3. “Everything Is Short-term”

You know when you’re aware that spending ten minutes a day doing something will really add up - but because there’s always more pressing things to deal with, you never get around to doing it?

At a certain point of the year, the cumulative weight of this will land on you like a ton of bricks. You could have been working on it every day! It’s only ten minutes! But you spent days, weeks and months putting it off. Your horrified conclusion: you’re a lazy, unmotivated person who will never amount of anything consequential. Curiosity Epic FAIL.

Don’t pull that kind of crap on yourself, please. This is actually a cognitive bias. Everyone has it. It’s absolutely normal. And sure, knowing that doesn’t make you feel better about yourself, but it’s the right place to start thinking about a longterm fix for it and start making progress on these things.

Welcome to the magnificently-named Hyperbolic Discounting (also called Present Bias) which is a fancy way of saying “humans are really, really bad at motivating themselves using longterm goals.”

Or, putting it another way, your Instant Gratification Monkey is completely out of control:

We’ll look harder at this another time, because one solution is all about using empathic curiosity (the third kind of curiosity, behind these two)….

But for now, maybe test out Tim Urban’s super-stressful, super-effective advice here and here:

“Create a Panic Monster if there’s not already one in place—if you’re trying to finish an album, schedule a performance for a few months from now, book a space, and send out an invitation to a group of people.”

4. “Everything Is Either This Or That”

This one is really interesting because it seems to be cultural. When we think about stuff, we Western folk tend to split things into two camps and favour one side over the other. In other parts of the world, people are less prone to this. It’s truly fascinating.

It’s called a False Dilemma (where, precisely defined, a dilemma is “a difficult choice between two alternatives”). It’s also more a logical fallacy than a cognitive bias, but I’m going to risk being yelled at by philosophers because this really needs to be part of any conversation about curiosity, so I’m including it here.

The big problem with a False Dilemma is that it dumbs a complex question down into just two “answers” - and in doing so, it lobs the grenade-like word “or” into the conversation, suggesting that you have to pick one side or the other (and drowning out anyone saying Hey, why not both?).

This is the adversarial model of knowledge-acquisition-by-blazing-argument that goes back to the Ancient Greeks and maybe a lot further.

It’s how people pick “sides,” including the stories we make out of wildlife photos: which of those puffins are you rooting for?

And it’s how we completely stop listening to each other.

It’s a brick wall in the path of our thinking, it’s the end of all our questions, and it’s where we start complaining that those people over there are the problem.

Our bias towards False Dilemmas leads to a psychological effect called Splitting - which is associated with extremism, personality disorders, depressive thinking and all sorts of terribleness. The sooner we learn to move away from it (or at least work around it), the better for us as individuals, as societies, and as a species facing unprecedented global challenges in the decades to come.

No messing. We’re going to have to throw a lot of ideas at this one. More on that coming soon.

Yeah, I know I’ve said “more soon” a lot in this newsletter. But there aren’t any simple fixes here (and hey, this newsletter is long enough already).

It’s a fact that these 4 biases - and many others - stand in the way of anyone wanting a more curious, more emotionally fulfilled life. Left unchecked, they completely derail human beings. It’s that important they’re tackled properly.

I can’t wait to start doing that in Season 3.

- M

Tomorrow: The Story So Far (Season 2 Recap)

Images: Fakurian Design, Jeremy Zero, Petri Heiskanen, Wait But Why.

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Sorry for the more-than-a-week pause since the last edition. I had to step away to clear some paid work, as I did towards the end of last season. (I don’t like disappearing on you like this - so I’m going to do something about it. More on this in a few days…)

Okay. Over this second season, we’ve been looking at maps - how they’re used to prank newspaper readers, how Wikipedia is awash with deliberately faked places, how an imaginary town fought back by making itself real, how our maps might work better upside-down…

And for our final map-related nerd-out, let’s ask exactly what the hell the United States is playing at here:

And is Metric really that popular?

And what made the U.S., Liberia and Myanmar join forces like that?

And oh look, the pompous, exceptionalist UK is at it again with their special “Mixed” status.

There’s an awful lot to unpack.

For starters, don’t be fooled by that splash of yellow. Britain should really be a dark shade of green - ie. a little yellow, mixed with a lot of blue. We Brits may regularly use inches, ounces, miles and pounds in everyday life, but we’ve officially been Metric since 1965.

(It’s interesting, and by that I mean quite annoying, how often non-British news makes a tangle of this. Take this story from 1999 about the unfortunate Imperial-to-Metric conversion error that led to the loss of NASA’s $125 million Mars Climate Orbiter. Note how “Imperial” is called “English” in that story. What they really mean is US Customary, the version of Imperial that the United States uses today, which is actually based on the units of measurement England used before we adopted Imperial in 1824. If you have to write “English” here, put the word “Old” in front of it, please.)

So I’m from a culture that officially embraces Metric - and after a lifetime of loyalty to it, I took its importance for granted, and didn’t consider the value of alternatives. I mean, Metric works best! Why consider anything else? In other words: curiosity FAIL.

When I realised this, I started my reading. And now…

Oh, America. Now I understand why 5% of the world’s population won’t give up on Imperial, why the United States actually hasn’t lost its mind (not on this topic, anyway) - and what we’ll all lose if we fully embrace Metric.

Let’s take a huge step back and see how we got here.

It’s 1790, and France is an immeasurable mess.

Firstly, there’s the small matter of the entire country having just violently turned itself inside-out, in what we now call the French Revolution.

(We modern folk often assign this famous sociopolitical convulsion to 1789, but really, it’s best thought of as “most of the 1790s”. For example, the infamous ‘Reign of Terror’, that savage parade of executions that ignores the tedious bother of establishing anyone’s actual guilt using facts and the law? That only ends in 1794.)

And secondly, it’s just so hard to measure anything.

The problem is getting everyone to agree. France at this time has around 800 different measures being used in over 250,000 (!) different ways, many of them delightfully specific (for example, a quantity of arable land was sometimes measured in “days”, as in, how many days it’d take for a single peasant to farm it). So far, so practical.

But then you walk a few miles to the next village, or have to answer to the regional tax-man, and suddenly you had to explain what your “30 peasant-days of land” actually meant in a language they understood - and it all falls apart. A quarter of a million systems, all needing to be converted into each other without the help of a calculator. Merde.

This was a source of great embarrassment for a new government thrown together on the rationalist principles of the Enlightenment. Something had to be done. Quickly.

In 1790, a panel of leading French scientists thrashed out a plan. This new measuring system would base itself upon the unchanging laws of Nature, using a decimal system that would make scaling calculations easy.

One of these new units? The metre, from the Greek verb μετρέω, “to measure.” The scientists decided it should be based on the size of the Earth: more specifically, one-ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the Equator, on the meridian that ran through the middle of Paris.

At some point - perhaps after this definition was decided upon - someone pointed out that since nobody really knew how big any of these distances were (using any units of measurement), some poor, wretched souls would have to go forth into revolutionary Europe and take measurements by hand.

This awful task was assigned to two astronomers: Pierre Méchain was despatched to Barcelona, while Jean-Baptiste Delambre went to Dunkirk. Their one-year mission: to seek out brave new heights by climbing extremely tall things, so they could take enough horizon-based measurements to extrapolate the Pole to Equator curve that would determine the length of a metre.

Well, they thought it would take a year. It actually took seven - and became a true adventure. If anything, that’s an understatement:

Along the way, Delambre and Méchain would be imprisoned, injured, almost executed, scorched, frozen, mistaken for sorcerers and spies, fired, reinstated, vilified, celebrated and then vilified again. For Méchain, the task with which he had been charged would lead eventually to his death.

Somewhere near Barcelona, at the very start of his triangulations, Méchain made a small error of computation. Once this error had entered his system, it was impossible to eradicate it. For years the knowledge of this error haunted Méchain - the thought that he alone had managed to falsify what was intended to become 'the fundamental scientific value, the measure which would for ever more serve as the foundation for all scientific and commercial exchange'. In 1804, suffering from acute depression apparently brought on by guilt, Méchain returned to the Valencian coast to try to atone for his error. There he caught malaria and died.

(From Robert Macfarlane’s Guardian review of Ken Alder’s The Measure Of All Things: The Seven Year Odyssey That Transformed The World.)

But by 1799, the new system was ready to roll out - and it was glorious. To convert between units on the same scale, you just added zeroes or moved the decimal point left or right. In comparison with everything it replaced, it was so simple to calculate it was like magic.

Except, there was one problem. A biggie.

Let’s say your government completely loses its mind and hires me (hi!) to create a new system of length measurement, as follows:

1 Sowden (length) = 50 miniSowdens = 200 microSowdens

You’re a bit confused by all this, so you ask a govt official how big a Sowden is.

“Oh, it’s 50 miniSowdens.”

Yes, but how big is that?

“200 microSowdens!”

Uh….

“Ohh. Right, I see your point. Well, it’s taken from Nature! A Sowden is one eleventy-billionth of the distance from the geographical centre of Yorkshire to the Sun!”

Sigh.

A new system of measurement is only workable if someone has a pragmatic, hands-on frame of reference for it - and Metric, while fantastically precise in principle, turned out to be really damn hard to explain to a French tradesperson asking why the system they’d used all their life without any bother isn’t considered “practical” anymore.

The solution? Install a new ruler.

No, the other kind.

Alongside thousands of educational pamphlets, public lectures and “educational games” designed by government-sponsored private enterprises, Paris briefly became the wooden-ruler-making capital of the world.

Or at least it would have been, if it could keep up with demand. Despite heavy investment from the government, one month after the launch of Metric, just 25,000 metre rulers had been manufactured - far short of the 500,000 needed just within Paris alone.

You can guess how all this went down with the wider population of France.

By 1812, newly-installed French Emperor Napoleon had had enough. He’d sent police officers to marketplaces to enforce the Metric system. He’d spent a big chunk of the fledgling Empire’s cash reserves on education and pro-Metric initiatives. And in response, the French dug their heels in. Non, Monsieur Emperor. Vive l'Impériale!

So he gave up. His “Customary Measures” legislation of 1812, restricted to use in commerce (ie. those pesky marketplaces), rolled back Metric and introduced a series of messy compromises that tried to keep the bulk of the people happy, so Napoleon could focus his full energy on unsuccessfully invading Russia.

The British, of course, took every opportunity to ridicule Napoleon. Like how they intercepted his increasingly tortured-sounding love letters to his wife and plastered them gleefully all over the London newspapers.

And of course there were the cartoons:

Ah yes. Napoleon Bonaparte: history’s most famous Vertically Challenged Person.

There is of course nothing clever about ridiculing people’s height. This is especially true when it’s accidental and you’re emailing an editor who might publish your writing some day:

But back in 19th-Century England, heightist jokes were all the rage. How dare that tiny French nitwit strut around Europe so aggressively! We should go over and give that miniscule popinjay a damn good thrashing! (Haw haw.)

Yet again, this was an illustration of the kind of problem Metric was invented to fix. After British cartoonists learned through diplomats and spies that Napoleon was 5 feet and 2 inches tall, they saw it as a new way to poke fun at the nation’s sworn enemy - and started depicting him as a tiny, tiny man.

Unfortunately, they missed something important. The traditional French Inch, brought back into use in 1812, was actually longer than the British one. Napoleon’s real height? Somewhere between 5 ft 5 and 5 ft 7, which was more or less the average height for a Frenchman at that time…and also an Englishman, too. J’accuse, rostbif.

Sure, Napoleon may have been a monster who perverted the ideals of the new Republic into a greedy, dictatorial parody of itself, ultimately leaving France shrunken and bankrupt with millions of its citizens dead in his wake - but he wasn’t unusually short. Let’s give him that at least.

Metric was reinstated in France in 1840, just in time for its Industrial Revolution - but in the words of Ken Alder, “it took a span of roughly 100 years before almost all French people started using it.”

It’s easy to leap to some narrow-minded assumptions here, like I did when I first learned the United States prefers using Imperial. (For any fellow Brits feeling a similar tendency towards smugness here: let’s not forget that the U.S. was the first country in the world to adopt a decimal-based currency, all the way back in 1792, when we Brits were still faffing around with shillings, guineas, farthings and the like.)

But people aren’t stupid. Examine the growth-cycle of a tradition that’s endured for centuries, and somewhere in there you’ll usually find a sensible, logical reason it got lodged in people’s brains in the first place. And it’s often about efficiency. Nobody wants to make life harder for themselves.

So is Metric really easier to use?

The standard way of answering this is equating “easy” with “your ability to calculate with it.” This is where Metric has everything else beat. A base 10 system, and you’ve got ten fingers to count with? Game, set, match.

But as we’ve seen, calculating is only part of using a measuring system. You need to know how big those measurements are - ideally without using something else within the same system as a reference. And while Metric measurements pride themselves on copying Nature, they do so in a way that you often can’t see in Nature. Not directly, not with your own eyes, not without help.

And horrifyingly, some of Metric was just plain made up.

Take the kilogram, originally designed to be the weight of exactly 1,000 cubic centimetres of water. An issue to consider here: the weight of “water” is not a fixed thing - its weight varies with different temperatures and substances dissolved in it, meaning there are many, many “waters”. Plenty of room for arguments that would slow the whole process down. So the scientists cheated: they made a kilo, in the form of a platinum-iridium alloy cylinder (nicknamed “Le Grand K.”) and told everyone to compare their weights against it.

Then in 1989, someone discovered this prototype now weighed a bit less than it should. Somewhere along the way, the bar had lost 50 micrograms, enough to render it useless for modern levels of scientific accuracy.

So everyone got to work again, looking for a way to tie a kilogram with essential properties of the natural world (described as “the second most difficult experiment in the whole world,” behind the search for the Higgs Boson particle).

The new definition of a kilo now relies on three fundamental constants:

• the speed of light

• the cesium atom’s natural microwave radiation

• the Planck constant, used for measuring how atoms and other particles absorb and emit energy.

Phew. Job done?

Except…now a kilo is like the other Metric measurements: something you can’t see directly.

You can’t eyeball Planck’s constant.

You can’t see how fast light travels (hands up if when you were a kid you ever used a mirror to try to catch a glimpse of the back of your head by turning around really, really quickly).

All the nopes. It’s yet another abstract, invisible measurement for the everyday non-scientist. Is it really any wonder that Metric has taken so long to catch on?

So, turning to Imperial - with the caveat that “Imperial” is often what people call “everything that isn’t Metric” these days.

• As a Brit, I think in Miles. (Always have, maybe always will.) The Mile comes from the Latin word for thousand, and means a thousand paces. As Charles reminded me on Twitter, a pace is not the same as a step/stride - but it’s clearly a measurement invented by someone walking along at a fair old lick. A measurement wrought of human experience.

  But…that’s English Miles. There are others: Scots, Welsh, Irish, German, Portuguese, Scandinavian, Italian, Chinese, Ottoman, Saxon, Roman, Arabic, nautical…and many more. The Ye Olde English type, though, is made of 5,280 feet (which becomes a deeply inelegant 1,609.344 metres.)

• A Foot is - a foot. Right there in the name. Imprecisely but workably, that’s how long.

• An Inch is the width of your thumb - or what you do with your fingers when someone says "what's an inch?" 😄

Go back further and you find it’s all about practical issues:

• The Cubit (the ancient length measurement, not the currency of Battlestar Galactica) is the distance from your elbow to the tip of your middle finger. It’s virtually extinct now - except in the hedgelaying industry. Hang in there, guys, we’re counting on you.

• The Ell is an old unit for measuring cloth, and was defined as the length of the average adult arm: the name came from the Latin for arm, ulnia.

• An Oxgang or Bovate, used in pre-Industrial Scotland and England, was the amount of land that could be ploughed by one ox during a single season (usually around 15-20 acres).

• Pennylands, Farthinglands, Ouncelands, Halfpennylands and Groatlands were Scottish terms for areas measured by how much taxation was due on them…

Yes, all of these lack precision, so they’re useless for modern science, and would be incredibly dangerous if used for engineering purposes. But they also tell a story of people’s relationship with the space they moved through. A lexis of movement - perhaps in a similar fashion to the language of landscape that writer Robert MacFarlane has done so much to retrieve.

This is why I’m on the fence about Imperial now. There’s no question that Metric is necessary as a standardised, exact form used to make cars that don’t shake themselves to bits, planes that don’t fall out the sky and spacecraft that can launch themselves to interplanetary targets with mindblowing accuracy.

But the versions of Imperial still being used by people in everyday life deserve their place in the world too.

Anyone brought up thinking and feeling temperature in Fahrenheit can tell us something different about how we can experience the world. Anyone cooking in pounds will be thinking about food a little differently (“well, it’s just 2 cups, isn’t it?”). All these things are tiny windows into new ways of seeing what we think we already know.

And I hope the same daily experience side is true about Metric - please, Metric-lovers, weigh in with a comment! But I know of only a few examples. (When I’m packing my rucksack, I compare the weight of every item with a 1kg bag of sugar held in my other hand, so I can ‘guesstimate’ the weight of the whole thing as I go along.) Maybe it’s too soon to ask a Brit about how Metric feels. Ask us again a hundred years from now.

In summary, dear friends across the Atlantic: I apologise. There’s nothing “backwards” about your non-Metric measurements. I’m done poking fun at them, and I hope we can get back to arguing about more pressing issues, like your regrettable habit of dropping vowels for no reason whatsoever, or why you should always say “tomato ketchup,” even though we don’t have any other type of it.

You didn’t think all this meant we agreed on anything, did you?

Oh, America.

BONUS: This brilliant explainer from Verge Science, on the last big attempt to turn the US Metric, why it failed, and what measures scientists and manufacturers have taken to sneak it in anyway.

The original Twitter thread that led to this newsletter is here.

Images: William Warby, Wikimedia Commons, Luis Quintero, Nil Castellvi, Frédéric Perez.

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During this second season, we’ve been looking at fake maps - specifically, how they’re used to fool newspaper readers (and make a ton of cash), how Wikipedia is riddled with imaginary places, how this imaginary town fought back by making itself real, and now…

Now I’m going to show you why all the maps in the world are wrong.

More on this bombshell after the following clickable button that could Change Your Life Forever (subject to certain terms & conditions that are listed just beyond this page):

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It’s 1154, and Arab geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi’s masterwork is finally complete.

For years, he’s been pouring everything he’s learned about the world into a book, the likes of which the world has never seen. A book that tries to explain exactly what the known world really looks like, to an unprecendented level of detail and accuracy, without resorting to embellishment or flights of wild fantasy.

A book of facts.

Al-Idrisi has spent more than a decade on this project. Luckily, he has a very supportive publisher: the Norman king Roger II of Sicily. It’s pretty common for travel-related books to get royal backing like this: centuries later, the adventurer Ibn Battuta, whose 72,000 mile journey (if true) makes him the greatest pre-modern world explorer, will be commissioned by the Sultan of Morocco to spend a year writing up all his adventures into a single volume.

Under these conditions, there are many incentives to embellish your travel stories. In Battuta’s case, if he fabricated accounts of being showered with lavish gifts by rulers of other countries, wouldn’t that encourage his current patron to treat him the same way? And since Battuta was the sole source here, dictating his whole journey to a scribe without having to worry about what we’d now call “fact-checking,” surely it’s an opportunity only a fool would squander? Man’s gotta eat.

In contrast, al-Idrisi seems to be treating the truth with greater reverence. For fifteen years he’s worked on this, not just finding & telling good yarns but measuring, calculating, ensuring everything fits together in a rational manner. Additionally, as a royal commission, this doesn’t just have to be a work of weighty scholarship - it has to be great Art as well, as beautiful as it is correct.

Now it’s ready. And wow, what a thing it is:

“The mechanical genius of the author was not inferior to his erudition. The celestial and terrestrial planisphere of silver which he constructed for his royal patron was nearly six feet in diameter, and weighed four hundred and fifty pounds; upon the one side the zodiac and the constellations, upon the other – divided for convenience into segments – the bodies of land and water, with the respective situations of the various countries, were engraved."

- S. P. Scott, History of the Moorish Empire (1904).

Accompanying the text is a map inscribed on a disc of solid silver, weighing 300 pounds. Upon it is wrought the whole world - presented flat here, but described inside the book itself as a sphere. (The spherical nature of the world was almost universally regarded as fact by this time - which makes you wonder what they’d make of these folk.)

Incredibly, al-Idrisi’s map was more or less accurate. Yes, many coastlines were misshapen, bulging and crumbling in ways you’d never see in modern satellite imagery - but the distances used were remarkably bang-on. Al-Idrisi calculated the circumference of the world to be 37,000 kilometres (22,900 mi). That’s less than 10% short of the correct figure - an incredible achievement for the time.

In Scott’s words:

"The compilation…marks an era in the history of science. Not only is its historical information most interesting and valuable, but its descriptions of many parts of the earth are still authoritative. For three centuries geographers copied his maps without alteration. The relative position of the lakes which form the Nile, as delineated in his work, does not differ greatly from that established by Baker and Stanley more than seven hundred years afterwards, and their number is the same.”

The title for this whole 15-year project was نزهة المشتاق في اختراق الآفاق - The Excursion of One Who is Eager to Traverse the Regions of the World.

Similarly, Ibn Battuta’s book, two centuries later, was A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Travelling.

Aren’t these titles gorgeous and enticing? It says a lot that their lowfalutin, algorithms-friendly titles these days are The Travels Of Ibn Battuta, and for al-Idrisi’s masterpiece, The Tabula Rogeriana, - which sounds great until you realise it means “The Map Of Roger”. Perhaps a bit too Monty Python for modern ears.

(The names of authors were just as spectacular. Ibn Battuta’s was, in full: Shams al-Din Abu'Abdallah Muhammad ibn'Abdallah ibn Muhammad ibn Ibrahim ibn Muhammad ibn Yusuf al-Lawati al-Tanji ibn Battuta. He must have dreaded introducing himself to strangers.)

Anyway. Let’s look at the most interesting thing about al-Idrisi’s work, because remarkably enough, we haven’t got to it yet.

Here’s the whole map, carefully reproduced in 1929 by German historian Konrad Miller:

Yep. To our eyes, Al-Idrisi’s map is upside-down.

Except, well, it isn’t. What’s actually upside-down is our thinking - because these days, we’ve fallen into the mental trap of assuming that our maps point in the “correct” direction, according to essential scientific qualities dictated to us by Nature itself.

In fact, they don’t. We’ve decided it’s correct. This way of seeing the world is a human invention. (A recent one, too.) And across the expanse of human history, it seems that millions of people saw the world very differently indeed.

Hold onto your hat. This one will make your head spin.

Ask someone why north is upwards on maps, and they’ll probably say something about magnetism. I mean, that’s loud and clear, right? The arrow points to the North Pole (or near as dammit), so that’s how you use a compass, and so that’s the right way to rotate a map. Duh.

It’s similar to how science determines Left and Right, which also comes from our understanding of how matter is affected by magnetic fields - and is demonstrated by “Fleming’s Right-Hand Rule,” which I still remember from school. You use your right hand to find out the direction of motion in an electromagnetic field.

There’s one problem with this:

“When we actually predict how matter moves due to magnetic fields, we use the right-hand rule twice, so it cancels out. We use the right-hand rule once when describing how a current or changing electric field produces a magnetic field, and again when describing how a magnetic field pushes on matter!"

- John Baez, mathematical physicist, University of California, quoted by Scientific American

There’s a lot of heated back-and-forth around this, but the current unstable consensus is that because of this cancelling-out, Left and Right don’t really exist. Not really. Where there’s left-handedness or right-handedness, it’s arbitrary - that is to say, there should be places in the universe where the opposite is true without breaking the universal laws of physics.

Therefore - and this is a really odd thing to think - they’re things we’ve invented, and enormously influenced by the way our bodies are designed. (Look how I used “left/right-handedness” there and I didn’t even mean using hands.)

Our concepts of North and South are just as arbitrary. They don’t exist separately from us. We chose them.

To illustrate this, let’s start with magnetism. The first mention of a compass being used in Europe is from a book written between 1187 and 1202 AD, by the scholar & later abbot of Cirencester Abbey, Alexander Neckam:

“…they touch the magnet with a needle, which (the needle) is whirled round in a circle until, when its motion ceases, its point looks direct to the north…”

The first mention of a compass in the Muslim world? Around 50 years later. And Asia? Yep, China had them too - except around a thousand years earlier. Specifically, during the Han Dynasty period (206 BC - 220 AD).

Have you ever seen a Han Dynasty compass? They’re…memorable.

That’s right: the ancient Chinese navigated with spoons.

Except, not really. These weren’t navigation tools, although they used exactly the same operating principles as modern compasses. Instead, this was about divination, the quest for the most feng shui way of arranging your surroundings - and therefore your life - for optimal harmony.

(It seems they also had a secondary use by jade hunters to stop them getting lost - so even this far back, they were already being used to navigate in the modern way.)

The name of these Han Dynasty compasses is the next twist in our tale. It translates as “The South-Pointing Spoon.” To them, the “top” of a compass (the neck of the spoon) pointed towards what we know as the South magnetic pole. After all, a compass just aligns itself with the Earth’s magnetic field. It’s humans who decide which way it’s pointing.

If South-Pointing Spoons were the determining factor in orientation, a thousand years of Chinese maps might have had the south at the top. Instead, Chinese cartographers pointed maps the other way, like we do. Here’s why:

“In Chinese culture the Emperor looks south because it’s where the winds come from, it’s a good direction. North is not very good but you are in a position of subjection to the emperor, so you look up to him.”

- Jerry Brotton, historian

Presumably if he had been based in the south of China, the reverse would have become true - and maybe there’s a good chance that any medieval Europeans copying Chinese navigation techniques would have learned to orient their maps with south at the top…

But no. It looks like it’s because an Emperor chose to live in one place rather than another. It’s that random-sounding.

No such confusion in ancient Egypt. Their south-facing preference is still visible on modern maps: “Upper Egypt” is down the map, while “Lower Egypt” is where the Nile empties into the Mediterranean.

This was entirely logical. Surely the “upper” part of a river is where it flows from, because water only flows downhill, right? (What kind of camel-trampled fool would argue that water flows upwards?)

Look elsewhere in the world, and you find it turns into a cartographic free-for-all. I’m not even going to get started on the number of early European medieval maps where East was depicted as upwards. (Reason: it put the Holy Land at the top.) And let’s not dwell on how some explorers drew their charts pointing in the direction they were going, sometimes without any attempt to add any other…oh, I give up.

Speaking of sailors, there is one final glimmer of hope for an objective, Nature-determined explanation to all this - and it hangs in our skies every night.

Polaris, better known as the North Star, is incredibly easy to find. Look up on a cloudless night and find the seven stars of the Plough or The Big Dipper - the constellation that’s shaped like a pan, or perhaps a spoon.

The two stars at the end facing back towards the “handle” are Merak and Dubhe (the latter’s actually a binary star - it just blurs into a single bright point at the distance we’re at). And if you trace an imaginary line from Merak to Dubhe and keep going, it’ll hit Polaris - which hovers in exactly the direction we now call North.

This “Star Of The Sea” or “Lodestar” is rightly famous for what it did for seagoing navigation. Its impact on European mapmaking cannot be understated - and probably had a lot to do with the orientation of Mercator’s influential World Map (1569), which nailed north to the top of European maps for good.

But what about previous ages? For example, were those ancient Chinese spoon-compasses referencing the shape of the Big Dipper - maybe suggesting that Han-Dynasty scholars also relied on Polaris in some way? Is Polaris therefore an unchanging point we could all agree on, no matter where and when we are?

Alas, this falls apart if you look back into human history. Because of precession (the gradual change in the Earth’s rotational axis over time, like the wobble in a spinning top), Polaris hasn’t always been in the same place in the sky. It’s only by the 12th Century AD that it became workable for accurate navigation…and 2,000 years from now, the tilting of the Earth will have knocked it out of its present position once more.

Also, Polaris is just one of a number of pole stars through history. Our current South Star is Polaris Australis - rather dimmer than its northern counterpart, and a little off our southern celestial pole. But it’s usable. (If you can see it and point to it, that’s more or less South.)

But it’s only useful to us right now. A couple of thousand years ago, we had different pole stars at either end - and after a few millenia from now, we’ll have more new ones. They tend to wander in and out over time.

And remember, depending on the period of history, this would be seen less as “the precession of the Earth” and more “wow, look at that star that hardly ever moves! What’s it trying to tell us?” Try imagining the number of ways that could be interpreted by fertile imaginations, and you’ll get a glimpse of how complicated things can get here.

So, reluctantly, we have to leave comfortable, reassuring deterministic reasons behind. It’s not an objective issue. It’s a relative one. North and South seem to be the way they are to us because at some point, someone decided that’s how they should be.

At last, we have arrived at the real reason our maps point in the direction they currently do.

It’s because some people really, really suck.

This is a screenshot from Neocolonialism, a videogame designed to make you feel very uncomfortable.

The premise is fascinatingly awful: a game of global domination, but where the aim isn’t to rule the world - it’s to liquidate it. You take over countries so you can sell them for cash at the end, making yourself as rich as possible while washing your hands of the consequences. Perhaps a better name is Sociopathic Billionaire Simulator.

This is, of course, making a point about how wretchedly unjust geopolitical power struggles can be - and it extends to the map itself, which seems to use a Gall-Peters Projection, sacrificing the correct shapes for countries to accurately show how big they are compared to each other.

Take a good look at it. Where are you in there? How important does that make you feel?

There’s a lot of interesting things to see here. Look at how South America is in fact South-East America, if you flipped it round. Look at how completely Africa’s size swamps Europe’s. And look at how detached and inconsequential it makes the so-called Western World look.

It’s saying “hey, you in the rich, self-congratulating north: how about you ****ing get over yourself?”

It’s an understandable criticism. Like the Han Dynasty Chinese, modern humans have a tendency to put the “important” people (often defined as themselves) at the tops of their maps. The industrialised, wealthy folk. The ones who are encouraged to habitually look down on the others in every way, including topographically: it seems we’re also biased to see places up our maps as higher.

(Try imagining the bottom of the Neocolonialism map as one big mountain-range and see how oddly wrong it feels to your brain. Or maybe it doesn’t, if you’re not from the northern hemisphere! If that’s the case, tell me about it in the comments, I’d love to know.)

Because of the recent global dominance of north-facing maps, this bias is baked into our minds. It’s now unthinkingly normal for us to say “up north” and “down south” (along with “out west” and “back east”, if you’re in the U.S.) - and start making social assumptions based on each. When Billy Joel sings Uptown Girl, we instantly understand that she’s from a posher part of town compared to him:

You know I can't afford to buy her pearls
But maybe someday when my ship comes in
She'll understand what kind of guy I've been
And then I'll win...

North is all about money and power (and religion and politics), and South is all about a lack of those things. At least, according to the people who first had the money and power to pay for those maps to be drawn up! They were financially sponsoring a world view - one that subtly descriminated against other places, thrusting them down the map towards assumed irrelevance, squalor and perdition.

(Many real-world exceptions to this bias now exist: for example, the United Kingdom, where we in the north are seen as the relatively muck-spattered unsophisticates - but hey, since when did humans let reality get in the way of a good irrational prejudice?)

To counteract this woeful pattern of psychological warfare against the 12% of the human race that lives in the southern hemisphere, I have a ridiculous proposal:

We flip half our maps upside-down.

Let’s say you decide to take a land-journey from the United States to the tip of South America. This is one hell of an adventure and are you sure you’ve actually, seriously, properly looked at the map? Please do that now. Perhaps sleep on it too (the idea, not the map). And then contact Andrew, who actually did this journey a decade ago, and even got himself to Antarctica in the end of it. Make sure you watch his TEDx talk. And ask him about everything. Still keen? Excellent! On your head be it.

For the first part of your journey down to South America, all your maps will be what a Westerner like me would call “the right way up”. But when you cross the equator in Colombia, Brazil or Ecuador, you’re given new maps, rotated through 180 degrees. You’re still heading towards the South Pole - but now, that means you’re going upwards.

Now you’re seeing the world like the Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres García, in this deliberately provocative sketch he made in 1943.

It’s reorientation as a blow against prejudice, even oppression. As this article says, “it isn’t too much of a stretch to think that people are less likely to care what happens in countries or regions that are ‘lower’ than them on the map or globe.”

And maybe that also goes for feelings of national self-worth. Is it fair for any country to be geographically regarded as “the lowest of the low,” as Chile, Argentina and Australia are? How would a south-upwards map of the “bottom half” of the world change the way we treat each other and see ourselves?

Or we could just throw all caution to the wind, as Melbourne University student Stuart McArthur did, and turn the whole damn thing upside-down for good:

(This map, launched on Australia Day in 1979, has now sold over 350,000 copies.)

However you choose to see the world, never forget that it’s a choice. Maybe not exactly yours, for practical reasons, but certainly someone’s, at some point in time.

And if that’s true, what other elements of our “basic common sense” views of the world are up for grabs, if we choose to look at them a bit differently? It’d be fun to find out.

Images: Shot By Cerquiera, typo-commonswiki/Wikimedia, Caleb Woods, Subaltern Games LLC, Honey Yanibel Minaya Cruz.

Welcome to Everything Is Amazing, a newsletter about finding sensible, scientific-sounding arguments for going out and doing daft things, in a way that doesn’t hold me legally responsible for your actions.

As long as you’re not a Personal Injury Claims lawyer (trust me, I’ll check), you can subscribe below:

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Thanks.

So, this one’s about doing challenges - as explained here. Should you be curious/bored/reckless enough to accept, here’s the deal:

• You pick one (or more) of these challenges and tackle it/them over the coming week.

• If you complete any - it’ll be hard to explain to anyone else why you did them! People’s faces will just crinkle in confusion and they’ll quickly walk away. This would help explain things, but they’ve gone now. Oh well.

• Still haven’t tried any of these challenges yet? Splendid! That means you have the entire first season’s to pick from, plus this lot, and these new ones below.

This week’s challenges (brought to you by the Scottish summer, which is currently this hot) are as follows:

1) The 7-Day Dunk

This is how I finish most days right now.

It’s my favourite new thing: at the point where my thoughts are congealing into something between treacle and concrete, I glug back a few glasses of water, drag on a shirt and shorts and the pair of ruined walking boots I was on the verge of chucking away last month, walk down the road and bung myself in the sea.

That’s a lot of energetic-sounding verbs because…it’s not always easy to go swimming in Scotland. Some days it’s cloudy, or a cold wind is powering in from the Atlantic, or the water’s like crushed ice, or the water’s actual crushed ice, or I just can’t be bothered*.

But for the last 3 weeks, every day, I’ve been pushing myself into the ocean - and it’s all been worth it. I’ve now reached the point where I (a) feel a steady lift of my spirits, not just when I’m in the water or after I get out, but all day - and (b) I can’t really function without it. It now sits alongside coffee as a non-negotiable part of my mind’s boot-up sequence. I can’t believe I waited so long to start doing it every day - but maybe a national heatwave is the perfect time.

Need further convincing ? Read this - and follow it up with Deakin’s Waterlog. That’ll get you moving.

For this challenge, you’re agreeing to take a dip every day of the coming week - with a twist. You’ll have to find 7 different places to do it.

What does different mean here?

I don’t know - what does it mean? I’m asking you. Would it feel like cheating if you chose 7 different parts of the same beach, river-bank or lakeside? Then don’t do that! (Cheating is unsatisfying and won’t fill you up.) Want to sample one of each of: a pond, a lake/loch (freshwater and sea), a stream, a river, a bay and a beach? Sounds like a good adventure! Too limited with available hours that you couldn’t spare the time to go more than a few miles from home? Okay - what options are available to you? Pick one of those.

And for “dip,” I suggest immersing yourself to the neck. This obviously includes the worst part of outdoor swimming: when the never-warm-enough water reached The Body Areas We Do Not Speak About. There’s only one sensible way to deal with this - straight in, just get it over with - but your capacity for suffering may be greater than mine, in which case, feel free to spend half an hour inching the water up your shivering, misery-wracked body. Each to their own!

7 places. 7 days. In you go, then.

* Okay, it’s usually this.

2) Have A “Walk It Off” Chat With Someone

This is inspired (okay, stolen) from Isaac Fitzgerald’s wonderful newsletter of the same name, within which, amongst other things, he interviews interesting people by going for a walk with them - and allows the route itself to create some of the things they talk about.

(This is the technique behind one of my favourite books about curiosity, so I’m completely sold on it.)

It’s also a great way to have a chat with someone without being indoors facing your laptop, grinding yourself down with chronic Zoom fatigue. Instead, you’re going out for a walk. Both of you. At the same time.

If you’re lucky enough to be physically near that person, arrange to meet up and go for the walk together - except, not simply to just “go for a walk” (that’s when you start thinking “well, since a walk is basically doing nothing, what else could I do at the same time?” and you introduce pets, kids, shopping, chores and so on…). No. You’re meeting to talk, and the walk’s just the excuse.

If that person is elsewhere right now, and if you have the data, you could make it a streaming video call over your phone - except a call where you mostly turn the camera the other way, to show them (and for them to show you) the walking-experience of being in a different place. Compare and contrast.

Or you could just have what us old-timers used to refer to as a “phone call” (look it up, kids). That might work even better.

However you do it, take a tip from Isaac, and let your surroundings intrude on the conversation. Talk about where you are, and ask about where they are. Make a kind of two-way window between their part of the world and yours - like this one, only rather less literal.

Do your first one in the coming week. That’s the challenge.

Who’s it going to be?

3) Write To A “Hero” (Without Being A “Fan”)

I’m stealing this from the second lesson of my own writing course, for two reasons: (a) it applies to non-writers as well, and (b) it’s the most intimidating and sadistic task I set my students, so I figure it’ll have much the same marvellous, joyful, stressful and horrible effect here. Enjoy!

If you’re doing this right, this task should scare the s*** out of you. That’s what you’re aiming for here.

So. You got interested in [whatever your current obsession is] because of someone you admire who does it really well. You love their stuff. You revere them. You kinda wish you were them.

And so of course you're scared of them.

Come on. Admit it. You haven't contacted them because you just don't think you're there yet. Not even acceptably close. You care about their potential opinion of you, and you don't want to blow it with a clumsy introduction - so you want to wait until you’re ready, when the time is just right.

Bad move. The time is never "right". This is something we tell ourselves so we don't have to do uncomfortable things. (In the UK we call this "bottling it".) It’s how we never, ever reach out to people we’d give anything to be in contact with. This is how networks stay small, how creators toil in lonely darkness, and how fear devours ambition and spits out regret.

(It's also how your story fails to get out into the world - because you failed to show your face enough times for others to get interested in who you are and what you're doing.)

Here’s one awful-feeling antidote to this.

For this challenge, you're going to send one of your heroes a personal message, in the hope they get to read it. You're going to connect with them - but not like a fan who can’t stop gushing out compliments, and definitely not like an aspiring Them-clone who turns everything around to focus on yourself (“I love your work - but hey, you should see what I’ve been doing, check this out! And this! You can subscribe here!”)

Instead, you’re going to give them your best shot at actually getting a meaningful reply.

For starters: are you a true fan? Excellent - then you know what they’re obsessed about right now. Is there anything about this thing that you know that they might not? Send it their way. Add something to their obsession. Help them with it.

Or - ask them a question. A good question, one that they haven’t already answered in exhausting detail a bazillion times in loads of places you missed becuse you didn’t look hard enough. Depending on how interesting your question is, you may even trigger a little of the Ben Franklin effect, opening the door to further conversations. Or you might just get a terrific answer, aimed specifically at you, from someone you admire. Win-win!

Okay, maybe not always. There are caveats. First: whatever message you send, you may never hear back. Highly accomplished people are very busy, because of that “highly accomplished” bit. It may take a while, or you may never hear a peep - simply because they’re overwhelmed, nothing more than that.

Second: some creatives love to get mail.

Others, not quite so much:

And the rest are somewhere in between.

(So find out which of these they currently are before you set your expectations of getting a reply - or before you write to them in the first place!)

None of this is putting you off the idea? Superb. Allow me to throw ice-water on your swelling confidence: you're going to do this today. By the end of today. The day you’re reading this.

The reason is fear. Given enough time, your fear of doing this will metastasize into pure, unyielding Resistance. You’ll create all sorts of sensible-sounding, utterly self-deluding excuses for not doing it. It’ll never happen, starting from tomorrow. So you need to get this done TODAY.

Permission to freak out is granted.

Good luck!

4) Spend 24 Hours Outside

A full day without a solid roof over your head. Sound like fun?

The easiest way to do this challenge is to just go camping (as I’m doing in a few weeks when I walk round Arran, just across the sea from me now).

Take a full day, and just walk, bike or drive (or kayak, or…?) somewhere new. Take a tent, sleeping bag or bivvy bag, do everything outdoors, and for one day that for the first time in years feels like it’ll never end, watch our world make a full rotation around you:

The hardest way is to stay home and do it.

Because, you can’t use that home. At least not the indoors bit. So how’s this going to work? Are you sleeping in the garden (thereby ticking off this challenge as well)? What happens if you need a wee, or worse*?

Or are you staying awake for 24 hours, like some Greeks used to do at the weekends? (They called this “un-nighting”: you spend all night in bars, going between glasses of wine & cups of coffee, then stagger home at dawn, grab a cold shower and head to work. In 2007 I tried the tourist equivalent of this in Athens. How I felt the following day is…still very easy to remember.)

You’ve got a week. Pick your day and get out there.

*I reckon some bending of the rules is permissable here.

5) Take A Food-Holiday

My friend Annemarie is in Greece right now, doing what every cell of my being is yelling that I should also be doing at this time of year: eating Greek food.

It’s not just that Greek food reminds me of my childhood in Cyprus, and my 2 months in Corfu in late 2019 - but that’s certainly a factor. Our taste-buds have an amazing ability to “date-stamp” memories, allowing us to be swept back to earlier moments in our lives. That’s a useful thing when you’re pining for a place and feeling a bit sad that life’s got in the way of your next visit.

Food can’t change reality, but food can certainly help you deal with it - and maybe, along the way, teach you something new, if you’re willing to be a bit more adventurous with your diet.

My options, then:

1) Scroll through pictures of Greek food on Pinterest and therapeutically eat ice-cream until I throw up.

2) Take it out on Annemarie over Twitter (not very friendly, and anyway, why should she care? She’s in Greece).

3) Spend a week pretend-eating my way round Greece.

Pretend-eating is big business. Isn’t that the promise that sells all those cookbooks we buy every year - that we can “eat like a [resident of country]?” But how often do we make the effort to actually do that, properly? In my case, hardly ever. And yet I always have access to ingredients of the close-enough-I-guess variety, and no excuse for doing this. Δεν υπάρχουν δικαιολογίες! Get moving, old son.

This week, you could do this too. Choose a cuisine that makes you happy every time you eat it, and really nerd out. Plan seven days of meals, do your research, find the traditional recipes, mix in the weird new fusion-foods that are gradually taking over, and learn (by reading and by tasting) as you go.

Alternate, less healthy approach: my friend Doug now writes an absolutely fascinating newsletter about snacks from around the world. Take this as an excuse to plunder his archives and then leap off to do your own research - and then, say, snack your way across Europe. Or Asia. Or down the Americas!

NOTE: Bonus points awarded for both these approaches if you ask a person actually living in your chosen country right now for suggestions!

Images: Mike Sowden, Mehdi, Elena Rabkina, galyafanaseva, Taylor Grote.

In the next edition of Everything Is Amazing: What if all our maps are the wrong way round?

The intensely curious Albert Einstein once said, “Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”

In fact, there’s no evidence he ever said this. In the immortal words of Mark Twain, “most quotes on the internet are rubbish - and you can quote me.” But my point is that you are supremely adapted to do some things above others, and if this evening, that thing is watching England w̶i̶n almost win Euro 2021 instead of reading this newsletter, I won’t hold it against you. I trust you to make the right call here.

(After all, you’re a genius.)

By the way, you know this is a newsletter, right? The kind you could get emailed to you?

Subscribe now

Just checking.

Okay. Today, let’s go to a country that is transforming the way its people go to work, and see what we can learn from them.

Ever heard of the 4-day work week?

It’s a thing that people tend to yell about, and usually for good reason. Last week it flooded the news cycle once again, triggered by the results of a recent study of 2,500 employees in Iceland’s government and the Reykjavík City Council.

If you were on the scheme, your weekly hours at work were cut - but you were still given exactly the same weekly wage as before. In one sense, a pay-rise…but in another, a challenge, to get at least the same amount of work done in less time, with the powerful incentive of being able to go home earlier and use that newly-minted time at home in any way you wish.

I only had the vaguest idea about how all of this worked, so I started reading around.

The term “4-day work week” is actually a bit confusing, since it includes:

• working less overall hours for the same pay…

• ... and cramming more hours at work into less days (eg. 4 days of 10 hours each, instead of 5 days of 8 hours)…

• …or the least desirable option for employer and employee alike: “sorry, because of things not being great right now, we’re making cutbacks - so we’re cutting your hours. But hey, now you get the whole of Friday off. Maybe you could get a second job?”

What’s getting the most attention, and is the subject of the Iceland study, is the type where folk are asked to work less hours for the same money. In line with many studies elsewhere, Iceland found that despite people being at work for less time, their weekly productivity either stayed the same or went up:

The trials led unions to renegotiate working patterns, and now 86% of Iceland's workforce have either moved to shorter hours for the same pay, or will gain the right to, the researchers said.

Workers reported feeling less stressed and at risk of burnout, and said their health and work-life balance had improved. They also reported having more time to spend with their families, do hobbies and complete household chores.

Will Stronge, director of research at Autonomy, said: "This study shows that the world's largest ever trial of a shorter working week in the public sector was by all measures an overwhelming success.

"It shows that the public sector is ripe for being a pioneer of shorter working weeks - and lessons can be learned for other governments."

- BBC News

Sounds great, right? Workers are happier, and companies either make a small profit (in workplace overheads) or a big one, when productivity actually goes up.

You’d think everyone would be in favour. And if that was true - why hasn’t it happened everywhere yet?

This is one of the great joys of applied curiosity: to blunder into a topic you know nothing about, openly announce your cluelessness, and ask the kind of questions someone with a tarnishable reputation would struggle to voice. It’s a bit intimidating, but in an odd sort of way it’s also a relief, to say “I don’t know” and take a step back.

It also makes it easier to listen to people (I’m with Jonny on this one) - as opposed to shouting at them, which usually has this effect:

(What really makes this for me is the person on the left.)

It’s also really, really fun to assemble all your bits of thinking and see what patterns you can spot between them - say, by writing a newsletter:

So I asked Twitter - what’s the best argument against the 4-day work week?

Some smart people were kind enough to weigh in:

(Alex is the author of Shorter, which is the next stage of my reading on this topic.)

There’s a danger here, however. Ask enough questions and you’ll get mired in alternative ways to string your thoughts together, like a series of dots that could make any animal (or car, or household object, or…) - and you just sit there, surrounded by unreadable scrawled notes containing lots of ringing and underlining, drinking too much coffee and neurologically collapsing in on yourself.

This is the subject of the greatest peer-reviewed academic article ever published:

(Yes, it’s real. Here’s the background of it.)

But generally, asking questions is a great way to learn your way into something you know nothing about. Isn’t it?

Yes. But it’s also something not everyone can do as well as they’d like - and thereby hangs a tale of privilege in action.

In her 2003 book Unequal Childhoods, sociologist Annette Lareau studies the parenting habits of 88 African American and white families over the course of a year (and follows up a decade later for the book’s 2nd edition).

You’ll probably be unsurprised to learn that children from these families took widely diverging paths into adult life, according to all sorts of factors, but particularly along socio-economic lines. Her conclusion: for most working-class or poor families, the parenting style was about instilling respect for authority, while otherwise being hands-off with a child’s free time (when you’re working every hour under the sun just to pay the bills, you just don’t have the bandwidth to structure what your kids are doing out of school).

(As luck would have it, while taking a break from writing this newsletter, I listened to Louis Theroux interviewing Boy George, and at one point the latter was talking about his upbringing: “You find that in the working-class world, there’s amazing tolerence…”)

In contrast, middle-class parents play it a different way:

“Concerted cultivation” creates adults who know how to challenge authority, navigate bureaucracy, and manage time - all skills needed to remain in the middle class.

- The Atlantic

And by “challenge authority,” the writer really means ask questions.

In his book Curious, Ian Leslie documents some of the research around this:

• In 1930, developmental psychologist Dorothea McCarthy studied 140 children in Minneapolis aged between 18 & 54 months, and found the ones from upper social classes asked more questions than those in lower ones.

• A detailed study of 30 girls under 5 years of age by Barbara Tizard & Martin Hughes found a similar pattern: middle-class children asked more questions, but also the type of questions they asked were different. They asked more “how” and “why” questions - and strung questions together to create “passages of intellectual search,” like a series of repeated, related interrogations of Google.

  Some of the middle-class kids asked questions with a confidence that working-class parents might interpet as ‘being cheeky’:

  “Why did you give that window-cleaner money, mummy?”

  “Well - the window-cleaner needs money, doesn’t he?”

  “Why?”

  “To buy clothes for his children and food to eat.”

  “But sometimes window-cleaners don’t have children.”

  (etc.)

• A 1992 study of 40 American families found that parents who asked fewer questions (perhaps because that’s how they’d been brought up?) were more likely to issue prohibitions: “Just do it!” “Don’t answer back!” and the like.

All of this points to the kind of inequality in questioning that’ll be no surprise to the people who suffer the most from this arrangement.

And in the words of Rakshitha Arni Ravishankar, “there’s a fine line between curiosity and microaggression” (especially in questions around social identity).

And how about stress and trauma? As Dr. Bruce Perry, psychiatrist & senior fellow of the Child Trauma Academy in Houston, Texas, notes in this podcast episode:

“Your ability to be curious and explore the world is directly related to your ability to feel safe and settled. So kids that don’t feel safe don’t want to see new things - they want to go back to things that are safe and familiar. People who feel safe get bored with what’s familiar, so they go out and explore the world - so if you come from an environment where there’s been a lot of predictability and…modern challenge…you have a more open cortex that will allow you to take advantage of [curiosity]. But if you’re under threat - people under threat aren’t very curious.”

(Hat-tip to Fiona for pointing me towards that.)

Curiosity can also be unhelpfully self-obsessed, as Sophie noted here:

“Curiosity has to come from a place inside us, that I'm curious, I want to know, I want to learn. And so it puts the focus on me. Whereas for me when I think about being interested - that's all about the other person. It's a very similar definition, isn't it? Still wanting to know or learn about someone or something - but maybe one that feels like there's a different energy there?”

(One possible antidote to this is empathic curiosity, which I’m going to talk more about soon.)

So the assumption that everyone can ask other people the exact same impertinent questions and enjoy the exact same benefits is rife with privilege - the social advantages that some people have compared to others.

This makes some online advice good in intention but really bad in execution, creating huge amounts of FOMO and shame…

I know, none of this is exactly news, but it’s definitely worth thinking about occasionally.

(For example, here’s an interesting question: What is the main reason people give advice? Psychologists seem pretty clear on this: it’s mostly about acquiring power over others. Men in particular are prone to this behaviour - and it didn’t escape my notice that the replies to my question on Twitter were almost entirely from men, although that may say more about own friend-acquiring biases than anything else.)

Yet I still firmly agree with this quote from a 6th-grader in Ian Leslie’s book:

“Just when you think you know all you need to know, you ask another question and discover how much more there is to learn.”

Just ensure you make them fully and completely your questions, asked in your way - because that’s your best shot at getting the answers that fit you best.

Thanks for reading.

ps. GO ENGLAND!!! Update: Oh well.

Images: Jon Tyson, Gary Butterfield, André Filipe, Sandy Millar,

Sometimes it looks at the fascinatingly odd ways our minds seem to work. Sometimes it’ll talk to interesting people. Sometimes it’ll suggest that your day would be best spent by going out and doing something really daft…

(Sound like your kind of thing? Sign up so you don’t miss any of it…)

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But today?

Today we’re driving to a place in the south of New York State where reality appears to be broken.

If you’re ever in Delaware County, be sure to head over to the tiny hamlet of Roscoe. There’s not really anything to see there (unless you’re into fly-fishing: Roscoe calls itself “Trout Town, USA”). But drive past the gas stations and convenience stores and head just a little north, to where an unnamed dirt road meets NY 206.

Stop the car a second, stretch your legs, and look around.

Apart from the two roads meeting and a faint shadow of a knocked-down building at the side of the road, it’s nothing but trees, grass and birdsong round here. But trust me. This is a once-in-a-lifetime experience you’re having right now.

You’re standing in Agloe, Colchester: a place which, simultaneously and without contradiction, does and doesn’t exist.

Our maps are filled with imaginary places - and it’s usually the map-makers that did it.

Go back a hundred years and you’ll find an epidemic of map-copying. Drawing up a map is an expensive business, so naturally there were folk who saw no harm in, let’s say, cutting a few corners: take a competitor’s map, change the colours a little, stick your own logo in one corner and hey, who’d know?

To ward off this kind of skullduggery, cartographers injected a bit of fantasy into their work. An imaginary street here. A non-existent mountain there. Tiny changes, in places unpopulated enough to escape detection, but acting like a hidden signature, undeniable proof that this map came from that map-maker. Enough to win a court case, if the miscreants dug their heels in.

This has been going on for at least a century, so these fictitious placenames are everywhere. BBC Radio 4 comedian Steve Punt found one in 2010 in West Lancashire, England. It’s called Argleton. A place that appeared on the books of estate and letting agents, employment agencies and weather services. A place which appeared in the addresses of local businesses. A place you could easily find on Google Maps, as late as 2009…

A place that actually looks like this:

The village of Aughton is just a hundred metres away: evidence of a cartographic typo? Perhaps. But Punt concluded it’s more likely that Argleton was faked up as a copyright trap to catch map-pirates - and it escaped detection for decades, in the middle of a country so densely populated you can find an average of 440 people crammed into every one of its 130,000 square kilometers.

(Since this was 2009 and the Internet was already a thing, “inhabitants” of Argleton quickly started online petitions, and one built a visitor’s website, filled with entirely nonsensical facts about the place. Ahh. Folk, eh?)

Across the Atlantic, there’s no such mystery about the origins of Agloe, New York State. The clue is in the name - an anagram of the initials of Otto G. Lindberg and Ernest Alpers of General Drafting, one of the “Big Three” main publishers of road maps in the U.S. between 1930 and 1970.

The company doesn’t exist now: it was swallowed up by the American Map Company in 1992 along with its entire state maps catalog.

If you’ve ever worked in a big company, at some point you’ll have been told to do something because well, that’s the way it’s always been done, so just shut up and do it. (My dad told me a lovely example of this from his RAF days: someone spilled paint on a tarmac path at an airbase, and to hide their clumsiness, painted it into a square. When they returned a decade later, they found it’d been faithfully repainted every year since.) So it’s not hard to imagine copyright traps escaping notice, as ownership of maps shift hands and everyone gets too busy to verify historical data.

That’s how Agloe escaped detection as a place that doesn’t exist.

But that doesn’t explain why it also does exist.

Here’s where it gets weirder. At some point in the 1950s, some uniquely enterprising soul looked at this eye-wateringly uneventful intersection at the scrag-end of Nowhere, N.Y., and said to themself, “You know, with a few groceries and a lot of love I could make a real go of this place.” They grabbed an Esso map to get the name right - and so the Agloe General Store was born.

Skip forward a few years. The mapping company Rand McNally (one of the other “Big Three”) releases its own state map. And someone at Esso - the company that had bought General Drafting’s map for commercial use - was checking for copyright theft, and spotted the inclusion of “Agloe” on the RM map. They probably thought “aha! Got you, you thieving *******” - and in came the lawyers.

In their legal defence, Rand McNally said their map designers went to the official map of the county, found the name of the place, and logically concluded it existed. On what grounds? Well, on the grounds that there were actual people there. Specifically, the owners of the Agloe General Store.

Sure, Agloe may have once been fake, but now? Now it was real - meaning Agloe had moved from an incriminating copyright trap into unassailable geographical fact, and therefore according to the law, no infringement had taken place.

It appears Rand McNally won the day.

(Image: Scottish storms rolling in over Miketown.)

Is that all it takes to make a settlement geographically “real”? Could I take my bivvy-tent down to the beach here in Scotland and establish Miketown (pop. 1; principal exports: weekly newsletters)?

Not so much, of course: from what little I learned of it as an archaeologist, the creation of placenames on maps is a staggering complex thing. In the UK, it’s even more confused by the way some medieval names have been blurred by time in a Telephone/‘Chinese-Whispers’ sort of way, or in some cases, toned down to render them printable.

(An example of this: any street in the UK called “Grape Lane”. Please don’t click this Wikipedia explanation if you are of a sensitive disposition.)

For a while, it looked like Agloe’s short life as an Actual Place was over. Facing the economic reality of running a grocery store in a spot so out-the-way that it was a suitable location for a copyright trap, the owner of the Agloe General Store closed its doors at some point - and since it’s no longer there, the building must have been demolished and stripped for materials.

But then along came novelist John Green (him of The Fault in Our Stars, yes). In his 2008 novel Paper Towns (and later its film adaptation), the protagonist is desperately seeking his childhood sweetheart - and from a clue on a piece of paper, realises she’s retreated from the real world into one of these fictitious places. His investigations lead him to New York State, and eventually to…

You guessed it.

From Green’s website:

"It is through this that he eventually finds Agloe, a town that was fake but then made real by virtue of having been put on a map, and in doing so finds Margo. Basically, I wanted a different definition of 'paper towns' for each section of the book, each representing a different way of his imagining Margo."

A year after the United States Geological Survey labelled Agloe as “Not Official,” the campaign to put it back on the map roared into action…

Well, sort of.

When John Green first arrived in what he thought was Agloe, he found a field and a barn - so that’s what he put in his story:

"The strangest part of it to me is that this place that was imagined, and then real, and then disappeared, and then imagined again through my story — has kind of, in a way, become real again," Green says. "Because people have started to go there again and to associate that field and that barn with the idea of Agloe. And that's certainly something that I never, ever imagined when I was writing the book."

- NPR

Except, when this writer had done his own exploring, the barn he’d been told about was nowhere near where Agloe was marked on the map.

Despite a huge amount of media coverage for the “paper town” (ie. copyright trap) phenomenon thanks to Green’s book, it looks like there’s still nothing at Agloe. It’s still abandoned. It’s perhaps telling that this BuzzFeed article about it is now broken, with missing images, presumably due to lack of traffic.

But there’s one tantalizing detail to keep the dream alive. The Wikipedia entry for Agloe has this line: “Agloe has a population of one, as of 2020.”

It’s not referenced - and hey, Wikipedia is frequently a whole bag of what-the-hell at the best of times. I’m not sure it’s trustworthy, and I haven’t found anything else to back that population statistic up…

But it’s a nice thought: some borderline-deranged fan of the idea of Agloe, living in a homemade cabin in those trees over there, just across from where you’ve parked. Maybe, like Japanese soldier Hiroo Onoda, this lone soul refuses to believe the battle is over. Maybe they believe all the maps are wrong - because hey, they were totally wrong before, so why not now? Maybe they’re plotting something amazing that will prove beyond all doubt that their beloved home is real…

Maybe you should carefully edge your way back to the car? Aye. Best do that.

In a place like this, you never know what’ll happen next.

More from Everything Is Amazing on map-related fakery here and here.

Further Reading:

• “An imaginary town becomes real, then not. True story.” - Robert Krulwich, NPR

• “Welcome to Argleton, the town that doesn’t exist” - Leo Hickman, Guardian

• “With ‘Paper Towns’,” Author John Green Reopens Search For Agloe, N.Y.” - NPR

Images: Small-town hero/Wikimedia, Adam Wilson, Foto Phanatic, Mike Sowden

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Without further adieu: a chat with a bloke who knows all the right questions.

I first met Jonny Miller in a blizzard.

After years of talking by email (beginning when I worked at an online magazine that covered the startup he co-founded, Maptia), we decided to finally cross paths in Durham, in the dead of winter.

In normal circumstances, the view of Durham from the railway station is a superb argument for arriving by train. This time, it seemed to say, “stay seated, you soft fool, you wouldn’t survive ten minutes out there.” Through weather as savage as any I’ve seen in the north of England, I fought my way off the platform and down into the city centre, dodging flurries of stinging snow and falling tankles - that’s Durham-speak for “icicles” - and found the cafe we’d arranged to meet at.

Jonny was sat by a window, staring out of it with a bemused expression (I don’t think he’d seen weather like it either). As I squinted at him through snow-spattered spectacles, I said to myself, yep, he’s pretty much as I imagined. Then he stood up. I hadn’t realised he was sat on a bar stool. Jonny Miller is an oak of a man, and I felt like Bilbo greeting Gandalf.

Since he’s also one of the most thoughtful and curious people I’ve ever met, the next few hours raced by. It’s a sign of a good conversation when you walk away feeling like you barely got started - and that’s the pattern of every chat I’ve had with Jonny since then.

In the UK startup world, he’s worked as an emotional resilience coach for company founders and executives (here’s Jonny talking about his research into burnout), and is a former facilitator of Escape The City’s startup accelerator. He currently teaches breathwork with writer Conni Biesalski, runs a podcast where he interviews ridiculously interesting people, publishes this newsletter every time his brain gets too full with all the fascinating things he’s learned, and also seems to read all the books. All of them.

As a hugely well-read person, he’s always been great at recommending other people’s advice when I’m struggling with something: for example, it was Jonny who suggested I try Julia Cameron’s “morning pages” technique for getting myself writing again, a technique much loved by Elizabeth Gilbert. (Worked a treat for me.)

Jonny is also to blame for Everything Is Amazing. He described me publicly as “one of the most curious people I know,” at a time when I felt the exactly opposite due to creative exhaustion - and it made me think, “yeah, I’m not, but I want to be. OK. So how do I do it?” I began reading about the mechanics of curiosity - and here we are.

For this reason, if I’ve ever written something in this newsletter that you find insulting, tedious or just plain rubbish, please send your complaint to Jonny at his website. He’ll happily explain what the hell I was playing at.

When I spoke to Jonny over Zoom, he was getting ready to move to Bali with his wife, so he appeared against an impressive backdrop of boxes and suitcases. Thanks for making the time, sir!

(This interview was edited for clarity.)

Mike: So - you’re a busy man! I see you on Twitter, I see you online, and you are interested in everything. You are just, How can I bring this into what I do? So - how do you? How do you stop yourself being distracted by all the shiny objects of social media? For example, I'm presuming your wife brings to you a whole bunch of new interesting things to learn about through her own work. How do you focus? 

Jonny: I guess that I'm quite - or I try to be - intentional about curating the information feeds that come at me. And so in practical terms, that looks like limiting time I spend on Twitter, trying not to check any kind of social media in the mornings, saving that time for some form of output, whether it's writing - or reading books. I've been trying to get back into just reading more books recently. That feels like where the real depth and the juicy ideas come from, and less from the 140- or 280-character soundbites that we get online. So for me - yes, I still like to snack on Twitter every once in a while. And it's definitely fun to spend time there, with a great community. But I've been trying to be more intentional about reading and listening to more books. 

Mike: Right. And books help you not just sit with a question, as you would say, but sit with an argument, a sustained viewpoint on a certain topic. Including fiction, the classic way of presenting ideas in a way which really lands, without many people being aware they’re being influenced.

Jonny: That makes me think of Aldous Huxley's book The Island, which is fiction, but also his way of presenting his philosophies on the world. The trickster-vehicle fiction story.

Mike: Yeah. And fiction for a long time was seen as an acceptable way of presenting a political treatise. Like how [former British Prime Minister] Benjamin Disraeli wrote fiction. Yet I've seen writers of all kinds get in trouble writing about politics, a pushback, you know, get back in your lane, we read you for travel or whatever, we don't read you for politics. Yet curiosity is the “get out of your lane” skill…

Jonny: That's so true. And - having a podcast, having an outlet to share things - if there's an author whose work I'm interested in recently, I've just been fortunate enough to email some people and they're like, yeah, sure, let's have a conversation. And that gives me like a week to go really deeply into their work, and then ask the questions that I'm interested in. It’s a great forcing function to go into their work and try and extract the nuggets. What are the things that I'm really interested in? So I think that's been really helpful as well. 

Mike: Your interviews have been terrific. They always make me think you've spent the last week doing a lot of reading. And you just spoke to Bill Plotkin?

Jonny: Yeah. And the last one was really interesting, with Jamie Wheal yesterday. I can't even tell you, I was picking up my brain off of the carpet. 

Mike: What are you reading right now? 

Jonny: Currently an upcoming book called Enlightened Sleep by a guy called Rod Stryker, a book from the yoga world but with a lot of evidence-based scientific research which is really interesting. And I'm still re-reading Jamie Wheal’s book Recapture The Rapture, and integrating the conversation that we had, because to me it feels like a really important piece of work. And there's another book that I have, quite dense but really interesting, called Education In A Time Between Worlds by Zachary Stein - he’s arguing how to reinvent the entire education system, and how the education system is a foundational building block for culture and society. And if we want to make it through the next century, we're going to have to completely rethink it. He has a chapter called “social miracles,” which made me feel hopeful for humanity for the first time in a while.

Mike: Have you heard of Kim Stanley Robinson, the science fiction author? His latest, The Ministry Of The Future, is a work of fiction, but it's also a major work of essentially how we get from here to a survivable climate-changed future. He generally writes science fiction of the complex future-history kind, filled with fascinating ideas, but it’s compellingly hopeful, in a realistically messy way. A scientific view of us as a problem-solving species. I feel happier about the world after reading his work.

Jonny: I will definitely investigate for the long flights ahead of me this week.

Mike: So in terms of your focus on curiosity, it sounds like you’re most interested in what’s usually labelled the third type, empathic curiosity, which is that realisation - you know, what's the word where you discover other people have as rich an internal life as you are? [It’s this one.] And you suddenly realise it, and it's Oh my god, maybe I'm not the ‘hero’ of this story. So - how do you find that the consulting work you're doing helps you with the empathic curiosity about other people? And what kind of revelations have you had recently out of your work? Where you've realised Oh, those people are struggling with this, and nobody's talking about it, and I need to get involved?

Jonny: That's a really beautiful question. What first comes to mind for me is - I think we need to apply that empathic curiosity to our own lived experience. And by that I mean, really getting curious about how we're really feeling, as opposed to just living in our intellectualised stories of what is going on. In my experience, it's only by fully feeling whatever is going on for ourselves, the emotional sensations in the body - we have to process these and live through them. And that sharpens this sword for our own empathic capacity for other people. Once we've felt and truly understood our own anger, our own frustration, or grief, it gives us a greater capacity to notice it and to empathise with other people. And if we can accept it in ourselves, then when other people express those so-called “negative emotions,” then we can sit with them to form the right kind of open-hearted place, without judging them. And that allows for the real kind of healing to take place. 

And then the other thing that comes to mind is also - I suppose storytelling, for crossing what's what very often called the the empathy gap, both through geography and free time. This is one of the biggest challenges for humanity right now: how can we really put ourselves in the shoes of future generations, say, two generations from now, or with people on the other side of the world in completely different circumstances? The most efficient vehicle for that, I think, is great storytelling that tries to feel what they might feel. 

There's a really powerful question that my wife and I have been using sometimes, which is like, What is this like for you? What’s your experience of this moment, this sensation? And then you sit with that, try to stop yourself needing to have an answer right away, but just patiently allowing the question to unfold and work its magic on you. I love that.

Mike: I've always loved the phrase “sitting with a question,” which I think I first learned from you. That emphasis on inserting the time that usually we don't give ourselves, to really think it through.

[Related: see Sophie Stephenson’s advice on carving out thinking-time here.]

It's like we don't ask ourselves, Do I need to answer this now? Is it worth investing more time to get a better answer?  I realised that from listening to your work as well, because you're very good at staying with the question when you're interviewing people. But there’s the constant pressure, especially online, to form an opinion, so you can be heard. You're a person who does a lot of his work online, and a lot of people listen to you on social media. Do you feel there's a tension there?

Jonny: I think there certainly can be. For me, it's more fun to unpack the implicit assumptions and premises made by someone asserting an opinion than it is to make a counter-opinion. Which sometimes can be unhelpful, because there are times where we need to plant a flag in the ground and say, This is what I believe, this is what I stand for. There is a time and a place for that. And my tendency is to stray away from it. But I think my approach is more than to use social media for asking questions to break or tease apart these kinds of very firm opinions.  

Mike: Right. Sometimes I see people say they're doing that, but they're using the process of being the devil's advocate, which is not really exploring, it's just choosing the opposite. And sometimes that's the opposite of thinking.

Jonny: Yeah. I think I learned a lot from Buster Benson on this topic - he's written a book called Why Are We Yelling? The Art Of Productive Disagreement. It's a fantastic book. And I think - that in order to make genuine progress in the divided world we live in, we have to show up with genuine curiosity for how the other person came to this conclusion. What is their truth here? What’s underlying this opinion that they're asserting? And I think almost always, there is something new to learn there. 

I've had some interesting conversations with believers: how that set of beliefs give them a sense of meaning and purpose, and help justify their beliefs that the big companies and government don't have their best interests at heart. And you can see how these beliefs are holding up their sense of identity about who they are, and giving them a sense of purpose and mission that they haven't felt previously. These truths underneath the surface of the seemingly outrageous opinions that we see. And so it is interesting to ask, How did this person get to hold this particular perspective? It’s reverse-engineering detective work. 

Mike: But that's a slow process. And I guess that, again, it goes back to education, to teaching critical thinking, and maybe teaching, I’ve only been thinking about this for an hour, so why am I forming an opinion here?

Jonny: Yeah.

Mike: So - what are you most curious about in terms of things that are absolutely outside your ballpark at the moment, where you're just trying to process whether they're a distraction or something that you should spend time on? 

Jonny: I've recently been listening to some of the stories told by Wade Davis, an explorer at National Geographic, a very well known anthropologist and ethnobotanist. I’ve listened to him talk about some of his earlier adventures, discovering psychedelic substances in South America, and the adventures he went on to discover the origins of these plants and the ceremonial context in which they used. 

I'm interested in the potential for both these kinds of psychedelic substances, these entheogens, like Michael Pollan talks about, and breathwork as well, which is something that I've been doing a deep dive into both in terms of, like, how do we have greater control over our nervous systems?How do we process trauma? And what is the overlap between them? There is a lot of just-emerging scientific research and a really trendy interest in these things. 

So I’m exploring these spaces, and also how indigenous cultures throughout the millennia have used these sacraments in a ceremonial context. And the perspective that they have on the world. Davis talks a lot about this - it's kind of one of his core theses: when we lose a indigenous tribal culture, we lose their perspective on the world. We in the West have the rationalist, materialist perspective on what the world is, but his point is that there are thousands of different ways to view this human experience. It's important to at least appreciate and consider these other perspectives on what might be going on in these meat-suits we wear. 

Mike: Absolutely. One of the great revelations of studying archaeology for me was the point I realised, really for the first time, that looking at people who lived thousands of years ago - it’s easy to think, Well, they were in a kind of primal state, not like us nowadays - but all human history is essentially about people who are just as smart in any age, just using different mental models and different technologies. “Sophisticated” is this pedestal that we put ourselves on. And when we look backwards - even the word “backwards” has all this baggage on it now! - we don't realise that people's inner lives back then were just as complicated and intricate as ours now.

Jonny: Yeah, I actually love that. And maybe to kind of rephrase what I just shared, I think part of it is appreciating the different technologies that a lot of these cultures have. They have psychotechnologies, they understand the technologies of plants and Amazonian medicines that we're only just beginning to understand. And if you look at the Tibetans, for example, historically they have an incredible understanding and vocabulary of human consciousness, and the different stages of conscious experience that can be accessed through meditation and so on, that we just really have very little appreciation for in the West. But just because we're now able to create electricity and send rockets into space, we assume that we are somehow far more advanced than these other ways of being. 

Mike: And from a historical record, that does seem a tendency for humanity in any age, to think they're the enlightened ones.

Jonny: That they're the centre of the universe. Absolutely. 

Mike: But maybe that’s a kind of prejudice against curiosity itself - this reducing into, We are the height of everything worth learning, so what's the point in learning other things?

Jonny: Yep.

Mike: So, as usual with my conversations with you, I now have a new load of books I have to bloody well go and read. That happens every time. It’s a problem.

Jonny: I think you’d definitely appreciate Recapture The Rapture by Jamie Wheal, if I had to stick to one recommendation. 

Mike: You mentioned something I'm very interested in at the moment, which is rereading. When I think about what rereading gives me, it's the “sitting with the question” thing again. You reread to sit with somebody else's book for a longer time - and sometimes rereading at a different period of your life is sitting with their ideas in a different context.

Jonny: Yeah. When you’re a different person. You're probably not the same person that you were when you first read the book, so the same questions will resonate differently. The best example for me is reading someone like Alan Watts, where the first time I read it, I was like, I don’t get this at all. None of it landed, But I've read The Wisdom Of Insecurity four or five times now, and each time there are new layers to me. And to give another example, Kelly is rereading the Harry Potter series right now. And so reading it now compared to when she was in her teenage years, I think it'll be a very different experience as well.

Mike: I had that experience with Robert Persig’s Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance, which I fought my way through in my mid-teens, and I didn't know what the hell it was about. And then about the age of 30 I reread it again, and it all started clicking. So - my challenge to you is: was there a book that either you really loved or really hated at a very early age? Which you haven't read since then?

Jonny: Hmm. I imagine it will probably be a fiction book of some sort. That's mostly what I read when I was young. Potentially, the Northern Lights series by Phillip Pullman. The other thing is- maybe the Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling. 

Mike: Wonderful. Thanks, Jonny, this was an absolute pleasure as always.

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Images: Jonny Miller, Rebe Pascual, Revieshan, Mike Sowden.

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And if either of these doesn’t help, just look at the pictures instead. (It could make you feel seven years younger.)

Today, three curious things. Let’s start with the biggest, reddest one.

1) The Curious 10%

Last weekend I lost myself for a few hours in a National Geographic documentary about NASA’s Spirit Mars Exploration Rover. It’s an incredible story, and I couldn’t believe I didn’t know the details (some space-nerd I am, it turns out).

The rover’s mission plan was to survive for 3 months: no small feat in a place with an average temperature of -60 Celsius, with the nearest mechanic 34 million miles away. Anything achieved beyond those 90 days was a bonus - and that’s how the scientists tackled every single day of the mission. In the words of one of the scientists, they treated each day “as if it was their last.”

All very impressive and meme-worthy. But this strategy paid off to an incredible degree. The 90-day deadline came, but Spirit kept rolling onwards.

And then a hundred days passed.

Then two hundred.

Then they’d quadrupled the lifetime of the rover.

By this time, mechanical issues were creeping in at last. Specifically, the effect of Martian dust. It’s fine enough to be dangerous to humans (a 2002 study found it’s so reactive in contact with water that it may ravage the lungs of astronauts in the same way silicosis plagues miners) - but it’s absolutely fatal to rovers, which rely on solar energy to keep rolling. By day 400, a thick layer of dust had built up on Spirit’s solar panels, throttling their ability to suck up enough power to keep the rover moving and working.

Then this happened:

It’s a Martian dust-devil - and either this one, or one like it, swept over Spirit on the night of March 9th, 2005, blowing the dust off its solar panels and rocketing their efficiency back up to 93%. This “unexpected cleaning event,” as NASA puts it, increased the rover’s lifespan by at least another 300 days.

So the Spirit team did what many folk have done when they’re given a new lease of life: they went and climbed a mountain.

This is the view from Husband Hill, 350ft above the surrounding plains. Not much of a mountain by Mars standards (the biggest on the planet is 2.5x the height of Everest and as wide as France). For Spirit, though, this was a formidable challenge - which it overcame on day 582, after surviving more than six times longer than planned.

And then - Spirit just kept going. Day after day.

On March 22nd, 2010, after further adventures, mishaps and “cleaning events,” Spirit went silent at last. The rover’s 90-day mission had lasted more than 6 years - and like any great adventure, it happened because the people in charge said “hey, I’m curious - let’s do a bit more, and see what happens.”

(It’s certainly telling what NASA’s latest rover programme is called.)

‘Do A Bit More’ is an excellent way to motivate yourself. Take the above chart, from Brendan Leonard’s I Hate Running And You Can Too.

But it’s also great for your curiosity too, making it a double-whammy. Somewhat counter-intuitively, we’re most curious about the things we already know something about. Perhaps this is down to your brain’s obsession with the same thing Spirit depended on: conserving energy. If you already know something about a thing, some of that work is already done - and your mind, always looking for smart ways to invest its reserves of energy, yells “Woah, go back - yes. THAT. You should pay attention to that. Here’s a flood of dopamine to convince you I’m right.”

In this way, you could call it the “Curious 10%” - that incremental bit of progress that is most likely to get a green light from both your mind and your body. It’s also the most irresistible thing to you when you’re actually out there, doing the thing, approaching 100% done. What if I kept going - just for a bit longer?

At this point, the next bend in the road or the next hilltop become irresistibly interesting. Your daydreams back home prior to arrival may have latched onto bigger things, the call of the radically novel and the lifechangingly huge - but in the moment, that extra bit in front of you is everything - and is what will haunt you longest, if you back out now.

But if you don’t back out, if you accept this small, doable challenge, it’s guaranteed to keep you moving forward, even through fear and self-doubt, the killers of much bigger dreams…

It seems you can even use it to climb a mountain on another planet.

(If, like me, all this makes you curious about why nobody has invented self-cleaning solar panels - hey presto.)

(And staying with dazzlingly clever space-science, researchers have now identified the 1,715 stars from which curious aliens would have their best chance of spotting the Earth.)

2) “The Only Good Idea I Had Was To Hang On”

Yesterday, I finally learned the answer to a question that had bugged me every time I watched one of my favourite popcorn films, Raiders Of The Lost Ark:

“After Indy clambers onto the U-boat, why didn’t the bloody thing submerge and drown him?”

The answer is in this Twitter thread - and there’s even related footage that didn’t make it into the final film.

(It’s an interesting point that in real life, U-boats stayed on the surface: their speed and range were severely curtailed underwater while running on battery power. That’d be enough of an explanation to satisfy anyone - except the dialogue of the U-boat crew in the previous scene, spoken in German, included the line "dive the submarine!" Oh well.)

In learning all this, I quickly realised this explanation was pretty well-known. I’d been torturing myself unnecessarily, and could have Google-searched for an answer at any time. But I realised that every time I watched Raiders, I’d fallen into a pattern of behaviour:

i) Ugh. THIS AGAIN. It’s so STUPID. WHYYYYY.

ii) *Enjoys the remainder of the film so much that the memory of being irritated is completely driven out my mind*

What I should have done is immediately write it down somewhere, in large, angry letters. Then I could have returned to it later and had a proper think, or do what we all do these days, type it into Google. And that got me wondering what other momentarily irritating questions I’m not bothering to find the answers to, because I’m in too much of a hurry, the question seems stupid, or I’m just being lazy.

No longer:

(It’s small enough to fit into any pocket, so from now on, it’s going everywhere I go.)

I reckon this is another of those rules of curiosity: if a question’s interesting enough to bug you, it’s interesting enough to write down and find an answer to - no matter how foolish, inconsequential or fascinating-only-to-you the question seems.

If you’re as annoyable as I am, feel free to copy my example and join me here at the fringes of acceptable society.

(And if you’re a writer of any kind, keeping a notebook like this to capture your curiosity is vital, for all the reasons Britany Robinson lays out here.)

3) Keep ‘Em Coming

I recently asked you to send in a paragraph or two about a special nerdy thing you’d love to teach anyone who reads this newsletter. HUGE thanks to everyone who has done that (it’s nice to have confirmation that you’re all much nerdier than I gave you credit for). I’ll be publishing the first batch of these soon.

But if you haven’t sent anything in yet, give it a go! Here’s how it works:

“I’m giving you the opportunity to use my newsletter to teach, explain, enthuse wildly, geek out shamelessly about something. I’m giving you the mic - or more accurately, a brilliantly passionate couple of paragraph in an upcoming newsletter, sometime soon.

The aim here isn’t for you to provide me some vast, expertly detached overview of your chosen subject that tries to be the last word on the matter. Don’t do that. Don’t sum it all up. That’s what Wikipedia is for. No - the aim is to make everyone curious enough to want to know more. Give them the tiniest corner of it, but make it irresistibly tasty.

You could talk about what you do for a living, or a creative hobby, if you like. Feel free to self-promote, link included. But please, don’t do “an advert.” Adverts are usually very dull things. Adverts rarely make anyone curious. If it seems advert-like, you’re not making the reader feel it. Instead, make them feel it. Tell them a story, or paint a tiny picture with words, or make them laugh or drop their jaws to the ground in amazement…

Teach them not just what it means, but also how it feels.

You could submit something in the following ways:

• send me 2-3 paragraphs about your thing by email, to hunter.sowden@gmail.com

• leave a comment on the Web version of this post

• have a short chat with me about it, using one of the calls I’ve been doing for the newsletter recently (which is how I know some of you are so ridiculously interesting)

• put it in an Instagram post or Twitter thread, tagging me in each case (I’m here on Twitter, and here on the Insta)

• do something I haven’t yet thought of. Semaphore? Interpretive dance? A Banksy-style mural? A drawn map? Surprise and confuse me. (It’s not hard, tbh.)

In the next issue of Everything is Amazing, I talk to the writer whose throwaway comment annoyed me so much that I started this whole newsletter to deal with it.

Thanks for reading!

- Mike

Images: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell Univ., NASA/JPL-Caltech/USGS, Wokandapix

It’s also about trying to see the things hidden from you in full view, and about discovering what truly matters by randomly stumbling over it. There’s a lot going on here, maybe not all of it good. I hope that’s you warned.

(Hey, are you subscribed? You wouldn’t want to miss anything really horrible, would you?)

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Okay. Today, a story about sleeping in the snow - and about the world’s most recently undiscovered island.

January 2015: Somewhere in Northern England

“The map ends here.”

That’s what the sign seems to be saying to me. A shrug made of wood. “Hell, *I* don’t know. Use your eyes, man.”

That’s poor advice for a gloomy late January day like this. Low cloud is descending (or is the light fading?) and the horizon creeps nearer every minute. A line of trees marks the edge of the known world: gunmetal-grey, looking even less hospitable than the featureless moorland all around. There’s snow on the ground, snow in the air, snow on the trees. Not the light, fluffy, kickabout kind. This is the deep-frozen, crystalline variety that forms a jagged crust and slices through the fingers of your gloves. The kind that hurts.

But it’s not like we should be worried. Our car is parked just half an hour behind us. The nearest town is a short drive beyond that. There’s no signal for either of our phones, but we have actual maps (OS Explorer OL26 North York Moors, Western area) and we roughly know where we are on them. Nothing about this should feel unnerving - but my hackles are still up.

“Probably best if we pitch up somewhere in those trees,” says Al confidently.

He knows what he’s doing, I tell myself. It’s his Landrover that got us here. He chose the spot. He’s an outdoorsy, seasoned field archaeologist with a bookcase of Cicerone guides and notebooks stuffed with accounts of previous outdoorsy adventures, many of them using the UK’s extensive network of remote bothies. If Al says this is safe, it’s safe. I mean, he wouldn’t be doing this if he didn’t know exactly…

“Ho ho ho. I’m not sure about this, Mike! Oh well. Guess we’re here now.”

Oh god.

It is impossible to walk off the map in Britain.

Yes, you can certainly get lost - as many unwary day-trippers discover each year. With the winning combination of poor conditions and reckless complacency, you can get into trouble anywhere, not just in the mountains (although in those especially, yes). But it’s all on the map, all of it. You may not know where you are, but hey, that’s your business, don’t go blaming Ordnance Survey for your failings as a navigator.

Or maybe you’d prefer to blame Google. (Or Bing.) Well, you’re on firmer ground there. They get their digital mapping data from over 7,300 satellites orbiting the planet, most owned by third parties who sell their images & scans to the big tech companies. The overlapping composite of all those photos is what gets uploaded to our phones - and big tech would love for us to assume it’s infallible. I mean, a satellite photo is a photo of what’s actually there. How could it lie?

Try telling that to the crew of the Australian research ship R/V Southern Surveyor, which in November 2012 sailed past the South Pacific island of Sandy Island - first recorded in 1774 by Captain James Cook - and, finding nothing but ocean over a kilometre deep, officially undiscovered it. 

They weren’t the first to do so: the French Naval and Oceanographic Service removed the island on its nautical charts in 1974, and in April 2000, a group of amateur radio enthusiasts on a DX-pedition (a radio-mapping journey to a remote place - “DX” is telegraphic shorthand for "distant") found absolutely nothing at its alleged location.

Despite their agitation for an official undiscovery, Google didn’t listen. Their Maps service continued showing a rounded shadow 15 miles long and 3 miles wide as a patch of dry land, and since recorded sightings of the island went back hundreds of years, there should be something there. Surely?

In 2012, a group of scientists set sail to investigate further:

“We all had a good giggle at Google as we sailed through the island, then we started compiling information about the seafloor, which we will send to the relevant authorities so that we can change the world map.”

- The Register

“Australia's Hydrographic Service, which produces the country's nautical charts, says [Sandy Island’s] appearance on some scientific maps and Google Earth could just be the result of human error, repeated down the years.

A spokesman from the service told Australian newspapers that while some map makers intentionally include phantom streets to prevent copyright infringements, that was was not usually the case with nautical charts because it would reduce confidence in them.

A spokesman for Google said they consult a variety of authoritative sources when making their maps.

"The world is a constantly changing place,” the Google spokesman told AFP, "and keeping on top of these changes is a never-ending endeavour'.”

- BBC News

So there you have it. Google’s official definition of “constantly changing” in this instance means “it’s entirely possible that despite this thing being on all our digital maps, it doesn’t actually exist - and it never did.”

(It’s probably going to get worse in the future. The myth of Sandy Island likely endured because of human error. Imagine what havoc the intentional use of deepfake technology could wreak, as this alarming example shows. Could future authoritarian rulers with full control of insular versions of the internet quite literally wipe their enemies off the map, and claim anything contradicting them is ‘fake news’? Not impossible to imagine.)

Here’s what our map is telling Al and I, as we trudge into the growing darkness. 

I’m sure there are plenty of clues here for the mapreading detective: traces of ancient lime burning, with the limestone quarries to the west. Or the moorland to the south, with everything it'll have to say about prehistoric folk chopping down trees. Or the way the paths lie, and what they string together. Or how “Grouse Butts” probably isn’t as demeaning to grouse as it first appears. And so on.

Once we get among the trees, the stillness presses in. What I took to be silence out on the open moorland was clearly a rich, noisy silence with lots of body to it. This? It’s intimate, stifling and deadly. You emit a sound, and a few feet away it drops into the snow and dies. Musicians pay good money to kill sounds like this.

I’d give anything to hear a bird sing.

With darkness racing in, Al and I step up the pace. Ahead, wan light spills down from a ragged opening in the treeline, revealing a steep drop. This is not territory to go stumbling around in at nightfall. But then we find a path, and quickly decide we’re not straying from it. Not once. We will live and die on this path. We will be known as Mike And Al Of This Path.

Now it’s time to search for a nice spot to lay our bivvy bags. Sadly, there isn’t one, so we settle for the least horrible alternative: a small clearing. There’s a metal bench in one corner. I’ve rarely seen anything look more out of place. It’s like finding a parking-meter in the middle of Mordor.

And on top of it:

Um. Stay calm.

Al sets up his tiny wood-burning stove (twig-burning, really), while I go in search of either fuel for the stove or a quick death at the hands of Wildlings, White Walkers or the Blair Witch, whichever comes first.

What I like about small, terrifying adventures like this is they can be had anywhere, even safe-looking places on your maps.

To the inexperienced eye, modern maps are soothing, undramatic and almost maddeningly benign. It’s easy to get complacent if you haven’t learned through joyous or uncomfortable experience what you’re actually looking at.

Contour lines are a common trap for the inexperienced or clueless. I once terrified my friend Charlotte when we were driving from the top of the Moors down into Whitby, by suggesting we turn off down a sideroad that skirted the town centre. On the map I was reading, the route looked uneventful - a single contour line crossing the road, no sweat, even for a wee car like Charlotte’s. Unfortunately I’d missed that it was actually half a dozen lines sandwiched together, which I tried to explain to her as we plunged down a 1 in 3 (33%) gradient on loose gravel, both of us displaying a range of facial expressions you see on viral rollercoaster videos.

(It may just be a coincidence, but I haven’t been asked to do any map-reading for her since.)

But maps don’t tell you what the place will feel like. They don’t tell you the difference between, say, a sunlit clearing raucous with birdsong in an English wood on a baking summer’s day, and that exact same clearing in the dead of winter, your breath freezing into your eyebrows, the cold making your ears sing and your lungs ache, and a silence so profound that you can hear a soft crunch-crunch approaching from a hundred yards away, which is either your friend returning with his own handful of twigs, or, or…oh fuuukay ahh good. Hi Al. Yeah, I’m doing great, man. Fantastic.

What maps don’t tell you is your experience of a place. (And fair enough, because that’s not their job.)

They’ll fool you if you let them, there in your warm living room with the map spread out on the floor, your freshly-made cup of tea going cold because you can’t stop…reading it? Picturing it? Whatever is it you’re doing, anyway. But poring over that same map will feel very different when you’re there, in the place itself. It’s not because the map was wrong. It just wasn’t the full story. Not even close.

In this sense, all maps are lying to us. Digital maps, paper maps, travel blogs, travel writing, Tripadvisor reviews, all of it. They’re all lying if we are daft enough to presume they’re telling the exact truth of what we’ll find there, and turn up expecting to find it, which we never do. We all see and experience the world a bit differently - and remake it, for ourselves and others.

In The Un-Discovered Islands, Malachy Tallack considers the aftermath of Sandy Island’s removal from online maps:

“Zoom in to the right place on Google Earth, between Australia and New Caledonia, and the island’s yellow outline can still be seen: an empty shape on the ocean’s surface. For a time, fantastical photographs appeared inside that shape, added by the programme’s users. Green valleys, harbours, waterfalls, forests, a beach resort, even an atomic explosion: the space that Sandy Island once inhabited was filled with the imaginings of people the world over. The photographs were meant to be funny, of course, but they also express a kind of delight that such a space could still exist in the world.”

It’s happened here, too, in this frozen edge of the North York Moors. When Al and I emerge shivering from our sleeping bags next morning, it’s light enough to examine the bench properly.

Under the line of sacrificial toy victims (there, I said it) is a series of six multicoloured waterproof pages of handwriting, telling a rambling yarn, a children’s story, about where we are.

It ignores what our maps say. According to Ordnance Survey we are in Clain Wood – but this story transforms our surroundings into “echo echo Echo Wood.” (Not so aptly named in all this sound-murdering snow.)

Other places nearby have other unofficial names, all of them sounding like they belong in a Narnia or Harry Potter tale: imaginative, descriptive, somewhat daft, and extremely English.

We have no idea who made this story. We have no idea how to find out - which I guess is exactly what the writer intended. It’s not someone’s attempt to become the next JK Rowling. It’s there as a work of playful creativity: a whimsical reinterpretation of this landscape for anyone passing by. A single story, released into the wild, making a home for itself.

Your map says there’s nothing here? Oh, how little maps know about the world, my friend! Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin…

Maps are wonderful - especially the fake ones, in my opinion. But they don’t actually take you very far on their own. They should never be treated as anything more than a prompt for your curiosity, the beginnings of a fine (or even ludicrous) excuse to explore somewhere new.

New to you, I mean. Arguably the only definition of “new” that has any tangible meaning to us in the long run. Of course other people have been there and done that, long before you did. That’s always the way: pure originality is as much of a myth as Sandy Island. But you haven’t been, and that always matters. Until you’re on the map too, some mysteries will remain hidden to you. Sometimes you have to turn up in person, scrape off the snow, and see what’s what.

There’s always a new story for you to find out there.

Images: Mike Sowden, Microsoft/Ordnance Survey.

Welcome to another handful of Everything Is Amazing challenges - as explained in more detail here.

They work in the following way:

• You pick one (or more) of these challenges and take a crack at it/them over the coming week.

• If you complete any, you will enjoy the unusual phenomenon of Having Done An Odd Thing For Reasons That May Only Become Clear Later. I explain why that’s a surprisingly good thing here.

• Still haven’t had a go at anything? Marvellous! That means you have the entire first season of ‘em to pick from, plus these new ones. Shedloads, that is.

And since the UK is slowly unlocking right now, these five new challenges are a little more outgoing than previously, and I’ve included a non-lockdown challenge, just in case you have the freedom to get out and about wherever you are in the world. (If not, please ignore for now.)

Whatever you decide to do, nail your colours to the mast. Leave a comment by clicking the button below, explaining what you’re doing this week and why:

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This week’s challenges are as follows:

1) Find Your Nearest Ruin

When I was a teen living on the east coast of England, there was a ruined building just up the road, filled with dead people.

No, really. I was convinced of it. Behind a once-huge crumbling farmhouse now overgrown with nettles and brambles that savaged the legs of anyone idiotic enough go exploring wearing badminton shorts (hi), there was a wartime pillbox, mirroring the one at the other side of town near the deserted village. It was concreted shut, but you could shine a torch through the embrasures and see it was filled with water. Then the not-so-good smell would hit you at the exact same moment you saw…things, bobbing around. Bodies, obviously! Let’s forget logic, or the basic rules of decomposition. They were bodies. Fight me on this if you must.

Most ruins aren’t so dramatic - but they certainly are poignant, evocative and filled with reminders about how forgiving, resilient and filled with non-human purpose the natural world is. If you read it, this absolutely stunning book will make abandoned places irresistible to you for years to come. You don’t have to read it to do this challenge, but it’ll certainly help.

Here, then, is your task:

1) Find your nearest ruin - a building formerly occupied by human beings, now by birds and other adventurous wildlife.

2) Then find that ruin’s name.

I mean, it wasn’t always called “The Ruin”. For example, that wreck of a place around the corner from my East Yorkshire home was called Trinity House (which is why, when it was razed a few years later and turned into a housing development, the street that replaced it is called Trinity Road, and the surrounding area the Trinity Fields residential estate). Knowing that name makes me want to learn more. Why “Trinity”? Who lived there? Who owned it when it was in ruins? And so on.

Find it. Learn its name. And then see if you want to dig deeper. That’s your job here.

2) Create A To-Do Map

A huge chunk of the internet exists just to squabble over the question “What’s the best way to create a To-Do List?” And now it’s time to fight back.

Not against the people squabbling, obviously. You can’t win against them. There’s too many of them, they’ve got, like, facts and stuff, and they spend all day arguing so they’re really damn good at it.

No. This is about finding a gentler, more fun way of getting control of that list of things you want to do with your week.

I hate To Do lists, and I write them all the time. There’s no contradiction there. Stuff has to get organised in advance, or it won’t get done. And what better way except a kind of aspirational shopping-list of future triumphs presented in a dull, mechanical format? And hey, what worse way?

So nuts to that approach. Let’s get things done AND have some fun, by staying with this season’s theme of fake maps.

You’re going to take the things you want to do, and you’re going to turn them into an imaginary map, in the style of Anna Brones and Paula Flach (and a dash of the Golden Age of Piracy).

How exactly you do this is up to you. You could make every day its own island - or assemble them by topic (Tedious Chores Island, Morning Routine Inside Passage etc.) What would be most fun? Let your imagination sail in all directions.

The main thing here is to make this week’s Pile O’Stuff to feel like something fresh and new. To fall in love with the idea of it. (When was the last time that happened with a To-Do List? Ayup.) To maybe feel like it’s a kind of adventure! A proper adventure, filled with moments of self-doubt, peril and misery as well as victory over adversity!

If you map it, it’ll feel much more real (and you’ll get more curious about what you could get done).

There be treasure there, me hearties. Go plunder it. Arr.

3) Look Upwards

In the ninth essay in her book Findings, Kathleen Jamie, walking through an elegant part of Edinburgh, looks up and sees a comet:

“I can’t recall what I was doing there, having no business with lawyers or insurance companies, but from [Charlotte Square]’s wide pavements I happened to look up and, between chimney stacks and cupolas, saw this beautiful brass comet, a shining ball towing a deeply forked tail.”

This sparks her curiosity about what else she’s missed:

“If I said I knew Edinburgh, I meant its cthonic parts, the wynds and stairs that deliver you quickly to where you’re going. Before the comet, I’d never wondered what the city raises upwards: what its domes and spires offer to the winds….

So the comet got me wondering and, one bright and windless day when the weather had passed, I took myself up Calton Hill to see what else I’d missed.”

What follows is one of my favourite pieces of curiosity-driven writing, and a revelation if you live in Edinburgh. I’m going to spoil exactly none of it, in the hope that you go read Findings and allow it to work its generous, electrifying magic upon you. (Incredible book.)

So. How often do we look upwards as we walk? Whatever the average is, it’s diminishing thanks to “text neck,” the downward pull of our gaze towards our phones and all the cervical and shoulder disorders that result. Downwards is also where nearby objects are, so our eyes stay focused on what’s in front of us, increasing the risk of asthenopia (eye-strain). Looking up usually means looking further, relaxing our eyes and resetting our neck posture - and if it’s brighter up there or the breeze gets to your face, you’re more likely to blink, which is a good thing in the long run.

Plus, it’s just fun. What haven’t you noticed as you walk your usual walk to work every day, or walk the dog, or pop to the shops for groceries? What was there all along and you never knew, because you never lifted your head to see it?

This week is posture correction week. You’re going to aim for a more level gaze, fighting the urge to bend your head, and occasionally stopping to crane your neck back and see what’s overhead. You’re going to do this in all the places you already think you know - and maybe, just maybe, you’re going to get a glimpse of a new town or city hidden right over your head.

Eyes sharp.

4) Uncover The Story Of A Treasured Thing

If you’re not British, the name Antiques Roadshow might not mean much to you.

Or…hm, wait, maybe it will: I just checked, and it seems that Australia, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands and the United States have their own versions now. Well, there goes my intro.

Okay. So maybe you’re aware of how every Sunday night (is it still on Sundays, outside of the UK?), families gather round the telly to watch some really lovely people discover they’re the unwitting owners of a masterpiece worth millions, or some really obnoxious idiots realise their prized possession they’re bragging about so pompously is, in fact, a worthless piece of shit. It’s a delight for all ages.

Well, that’s what brings viewers in. But what keeps them there are the stories, expertly and flamboyantly spun by the show’s specialists:

“…oh, this is exactly the kind of thing I love to see - and I thought I never would again. But here it is. What a treat. This, I feel fairly confident in saying, is now the last of its kind…”

“…and presumably that sea voyage, which is hard to imagine these days, it must have been in appalling conditions, absolutely frightful - well, we can only speculate that the sailor who smuggled it to Europe in his belongings, and it has to be a sailor of course, because look at these markings…”

“…so let me ask you, this duck has been on Lake Windermere for the best part of a hundred years or more, is that right?”

This historical detective-work is what attracted me to Archaeology. While studying it at Uni, I found myself in the first of two camps: the worshippers of Stories & Ideas, as opposed to the worshippers of Things & Stuff.

(This is a disgraceful oversimplification, of course: there were the worshippers of Cider, the worshippers of Dead Things & That Special Freezer You Buy To Keep Them In, and so on. Archaeology students defy simple labelling and are impossible to pin down, especially the week before a seminar when you’re bloody well supposed to be doing a joint-presentation with them*.)

For story-lovers, the history of treasured things - that’s not “treasure,” but stuff that has emotional and informational value - has endless appeal. I’ve wondered for years why nobody was doing a regular column on it somewhere prominent. In fact, someone was. She’s called Monica, and she was doing it at the much-missed Hairpin. (Ah, alas. Sniffle.)

But then I learned she moved it into a Substack newsletter called Dearest. Hooray! (Extra points awarded for her introduction to new readers: “I’m an enthusiastic dingus.”)

So, your turn. Take inspiration from Monica’s archives and wander around your own home in search of an interesting object that looks like it might have a story (or ask to explore an elderly relative’s home, if you’ve been hitting IKEA a bit too hard in recent years).

Choose a thing, and spend a week researching it, from the absolute basics of a Google Image Search to hunting down an enthusiast or two and giving them a call.

Imagine you’re an expert on Antiques Roadshow or Time Team, and that at the end of the week you’ll have to give a five-minute summary to the cameras of everything you’ve learned. Imagine you’ll need to be entertaining, or else you won’t be asked back for the next episode - but also factual, for exactly the same reason.

One week. The best story you can find. Go.

*Moi aussi, j’accuse. Two weeks before a seminar was due, I fled to Belgium to see a girl I liked. My self-righteous tone here is pure guilt.

5) (Non-Lockdowny) Discover Who Lives Within 100 Metres Of Your Home

Within a tenth of a kilometre from where you sleep, there are dozens, maybe more than a hundred human beings. You will spend more time in their proximity than with many of your most treasured friends and loved ones. A family of strangers, united by geography…

And yet you probably don’t know who most of them are.

It's a weird thing, to live so close to someone and have no clue about them. It's probably a modern thing, too. We walk up the road or drive off in our cars every morning, we walk or drive back, we close the front door - and the rest of the street's day remains a mystery to us. 

Ever been surprised to learn that something happened to someone just a few houses up? "Oh, that's such a shame / that's SO AMAZING. I can't believe I never knew!" 

It shouldn't be a surprise. Not-knowing is the norm these days, in our villages, towns and cities.

And this week, you're going to be maybe the only person within that 100-metre radius to do something about it.

First Steps

• Map out those 100 metres. Go here, and find where you live. Now go up to the top of the page, click “Draw a circle”, and click on your house. Drag the circle wider until it’s 100 metres in width - and now estimate the number of homes within it. (I got 30 semi-detached houses within 100m of the place I’m currently staying, a suburb in western Scotland.)

• The really hard part. Whew. So, how on earth are you going to break the ice with all these strangers - especially considering everything that’s been going on for the last year? Knock on doors and pretend to be doing a survey? Terrible idea right now, yes? (And think about how affectionate you felt towards the last person who hammered on your front door asking to survey you.)

  I guess you could pull the old "I have a dinner party tonight and I just ran out of instant coffee" line that worked for the Gold Blend couple in the 1980s (yes, that’s Giles out of Buffy) - except it's 2021, and nobody would serve instant coffee at a dinner party, you total freak.

  If you’re willing to look a bit of a pillock in the best, nicest way, then why not firmly embrace the awkwardness and go for the Random Act Of Kindness approach? Knock on their door, facemask & all:

  “Hi. Uh, this is weird, but I realised I live nearby and have done for years and I have no idea who you are. And since it’s been a really crap year and we all deserve a bit of a break, I thought I’d randomly say hi with some nice biscuits. Here…are those biscuits. Uh. Okay! Hurrm. Right then.” *runs away like the clappers*

  I know you can think of a better approach than this. It can’t be hard, surely. But however you do it, I’m challenging you to do it once. Just once. One neighbour. You can stop there if you like (but it’d be great if you didn’t).

  Go do it this week.

Reminder - improve your chances and hold yourself accountable by leaving a comment:

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Images: Nicholas Van Leekwijck; Adam Wilson; Aly Ko; Anna Brones; Mike Sowden.

Fun fact: being English, I was initially reluctant to use the word “Amazing” until a friend explained that getting non-Brits to subscribe to something called Everything Is Mostly OK would be an uphill battle. Forgive me, UK readers - I’m not normally this emphatic.

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Okay. Following on from last week’s dive into fake maps, I started looking at a different kind of hoax-riddled realm: the place that has the answers to everything.

It’s December 2012, and someone’s just noticed something is wrong on the Internet.

Wikipedia editor ShelfSkewed (happily that’s a pseudonym) has been clicking links in an article about an obscure 17th-Century war that raged between the Portuguese rulers of Goa, western India, and the neighbouring Maratha Empire. It was called the Bicholim Conflict, after the North Goa district it mostly took place in.

Haven’t you heard of the Bicholim Conflict? ShelfSkewed certainly hadn’t. He wanted to know more - and started investigating the extensive sources listed at the bottom of the article.

But then he found many of the links led him straight to one article: the one he was editing. A perfect loop.

Ruh-roh.

A few days later, he was ready to report in:

“After careful consideration and some research, I have come to the conclusion that this article is a hoax—a clever and elaborate hoax, but a hoax nonetheless. An online search for "Bicholim conflict" or for many of the article's purported sources produces only results that can be traced back to the article itself. Take, for example, one of the article's major sources: Thompson, Mark, Mistrust between states, Oxford University Press, London 1996. No record at WorldCat. No mention at the OUP site. No used listings at Alibris or ABE. I can find no evidence anywhere that this book exists. Not being able to find any trace of an OUP book published within, say, the past 40 years? Ridiculous. If this book exists, then the original author of this WP article owns the only copy.”

A prank, then. An absurdly elaborate one, since this 4,500-word (!) article was absolutely convincing at first glance. The work of a master-forger.

And for that reason, nobody had spotted it for five years.

If you’re a freelance writer or a college student, feel free to break out in a sweat here. How many times, when deadlines are threatening your sanity, have you failed to heed the excellent advice that Wikipedia should only be used as the starting-point for your research? (Yep. It me.)

Other Wikipedians weighed in:

The editor who created the article has not done a lot of editing outside of that article and has not edited since 2007.

The likely suspect, pseudonymed A-b-a-a-a-a-a-a-b-a, had the additional cheek to nominate the article for the highly prestigious “Featured” status. It didn’t get it, because of an “overreliance on weak sources” (but still convincing enough to fool the site’s editors).

Yet it still managed to get tagged as “Good,” an honour bestowed on just 1% of all the pages on Wikipedia.

The whole thing is ludicrous - and far from unusual.

You’re probably aware of the modern phenomenon of the Funny Wikipedia Edit, which Wikipedia itself defines as “Vandalism” even if the intention is mischief rather than malevolence.

Take this addition, now corrected:

As you might imagine, many unverified edits are political in nature…

…or take amiable pot-shots at celebrities:

Some air personal grievances about recent events:

Some have…other axes to grind:

And some are straightforward cries for help:

If you like your humour metatextual, check out the running battles over Wikipedia canon, known as edit wars. If that’s your thing, go here:

This page documents our lamest examples. It isn't comprehensive or authoritative, but it serves as a showcase of situations where people lose sight of the big picture and obsessively expend huge amounts of energy fighting over something that, in the end, isn't really so important.

But alongside the funnies (& the far-less-funnies) are the spoofs and hoaxes that were good enough to go undetected.

Compared to the 6 million articles on Wikipedia, they’re the tiniest percentage - but it’s still an alarmingly big list. The 32 that managed to escape detection for more than ten years (!) include a fictitious British slapstick TV gameshow, a fake sheik, a spurious variety of Norwegian associated football, a bogus medieval torture device, an imaginary HBO miniseries (“Sheer Perfection”), a nonexistent French actor & opera singer - and an American punk rock band that was as real as Spinal Tap.

How many others have slipped through the net?

This isn’t saying Wikipedia is untrustworthy, though. I recently started reading the digital archives of National Geographic Magazine from 1910 onwards (yet more evidence of how fun I am at parties), and what most struck me were the encyclopedia adverts:

The Wikipedia of its day? Not really, since beyond the obvious fact that once it was published no further edits were possible (unless you buy next year’s updated set, go’orn, discounted if you preorder, what say you sir, eh?), it was also the work of a highly…undiverse editorial team. No doubt rigorous within their own fact-checking bounds, but constrained by a single worldview: white, Western, upper-middle-class, wealthy enough to fork out cash for a set of encyclopedias, and so on.

And for you young folk with your long hair & flared trousers (or whatever), here’s what my generation was reading before the internet:

Ahh, Encarta 1994 Edition, you beauty. (I particularly loved the map-like “trees” of articles that you could pick your way through, which felt like a free education from the University Of Life. At one point, I set myself the challenge of reading all 50,000 articles! Yeah. Again with the parties thing.)

But Encarta was yet another “encyclopedia,” in the old style. A small group of people decided what went in and what was left out - and then the results were frozen in time, at the point the software was burned onto CD-ROM.

(Later internet-era editions of Encarta also allowed for downloadable updates of new articles - an early form of software patching, for those willing to fork out for the required subscription package).

In comparison, Wikipedia’s vast, messy fluidity and all those raging arguments between editors (two hundred thousand of them!) feel pretty reassuring to me. I reckon that’s a lot closer to what landscapes of public learning should look like.

In summary: the architecture of human knowledge may look rather more chaotic these days - less reassuringly certain & self-assured, and seemingly prone to more hoaxes, abuse and fakery. But I reckon that’s a good thing. It was always this biased, and always this unreliable. It’s just that we’re seeing it now.

(Sorry, Encarta. I still think you’re brilliant.)

If you find this whole topic existentially upsetting, hey, please read this Wikipedia article about the reliability of Wikipedia! No…don’t think too hard about that. Don’t. It’s an internet thing. Thanks.

Images: Wikimedia Commons; Mashable; BoredPanda; toxi85 at Pixabay; Sam 🐷 on Unsplash

We’ve just started season 2, and part of it is going to be about fake maps - and here’s a summary of what the first season covered. Want more? Sign up below:

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Okay. Today, we respectfully pose the disrespectful question “Why aren’t neuroscientists more curious and what exactly have they been playing at all these years?” (No offence.)

(via, of course, xkcd)

1) What Do You Mean “You Didn’t Think To Look There”?

This week, researchers from the Netherlands Institute of Neuroscience announced they might have found the headquarters of curiosity in the brain - in maybe the first place anyone should have looked.

As reported by Science Daily (hat-tip to Anna), the area in question is a strip of gray matter in the subthalamus, just under the area that works as a kind of neurological Grand Central, furiously shuttling messages back and forth from both sides of our brains.

It’s an unusually well-connected region. Parts of it thread their way to the cerebral cortex (the region where we seem to do most of our conscious thinking) and down into the spinal column. Yet until now, nobody’s had much of a clue what it’s for. Upon discovering it in 1877, Swiss neuroanatomist Auguste Forel called it “a region of which nothing certain can be said” - and named it zona incerta.

I don’t know about you, but if I was an up-and-coming neuroscientist looking to break new ground with my PhD and make a name for myself, picking something that’s called “The Uncertain Zone” in Latin would be…well, a no-brainer? You’d think?

Yet 130 years and countless desperate-sounding postgraduate dissertations later, a 2007 paper in the journal Neuron noted that “zona incerta is among the least studied regions of the brain; its name does not even appear in the index of many textbooks.”

Until now, that is. Displaying a spirit of inquiry that many of their peers have arguably lacked, the NIN researchers looked at the zona incerta of mice brains, and found that when it was induced into working harder, “interaction with conspecifics and novel objects compared to familiar objects and food increased.” Conversely, “when we inactivated the cells in this region, depth and duration of investigation decreased.”

If human brains work in roughly the same ways as mice brains (which is normally the case), then when this part of your brain lights up, you get hungrier for novelty in your life. You get more curious.

The word “hungrier” could be particularly appropriate here. Who hasn’t felt curiosity as a compulsion that’s difficult to resist, like the burning desire to turn the next page in a gripping novel (“I simply must know what happens next”)? It’s exciting that the relatively paltry existing research on the zona incerta cautiously links it to the mechanisms of “binge-like eating” and sexual arousal. Perhaps the popular description of curiosity as a “lust for knowledge” is rather more literal than anyone previously thought?

It’s smart to be wary of these findings. All the usual caveats apply with breaking scientific research: it’s very early days, reliable science is what’s left over after scientists have enthusiastically shredded each other’s work for decades, the functions of the brain rarely turn out to be compartmentalised in a pleasantly neat way (all that “you’re left-brained or right-brained” stuff is mostly nonsense, for example), and so on…

But could this eventually lead to curiosity being somewhat controllable?

Speculating wildly here, could the jittery, restless urge to always be chasing something new be dialled down to manageable levels - with interesting implications for social media addiction? And could artificially stimulated curiosity someday be part of a therapist’s treatment of the miserable, joy-deadened anhedonia that comes with depression?

It’s exciting to imagine.

2) Why It’s Definitely My Turn

When I started this newsletter, I had a pretty clear idea about what I’d do to get the word out about it. There were all these challenges, see. All designed to put into practice my First Law Of Curiosity - “You just have to try lots of different stuff for no damn reason.”

So as well as asking readers to undertake my challenges, I’d do them myself in a puiblic-facing way. Going all over the place, meeting all sorts of folk, and doing all sorts of random-looking undeniably daft things, hoping that I could inspire readers to follow in my footsteps - or perhaps laugh at me while wincing (the more common response to my travel writing over the last ten years).

That was the plan I made. But just a few months after making it, I learned what “pandemic lockdown” meant. (And “Zoom”. Who knew was Zoom was before March 2020? Not me.)

When I launched Everything Is Amazing at the end of January, the corner of Scotland that’s been my lockdown home was still in Tier 3 restrictions: no travelling, no mingling, no bouts of roaming idiocy in the name of whatever-this-newsletter-is. But as of a few weeks ago, things have eased - so last week, I went and did this:

It’s a combination of the Explore Your Nearest Mile and the Sleep In Your Garden challenges from season 1: a night in my new tent on the beach that’s at the bottom of my road, with the isle of Arran on the horizon.

The tent, the Alpkit Elan, is an evolved (or if you prefer, less terrifyingly exposed) version of the bivvy-bag I’ve been using to sleep in some fairly ill-advised places around Britain. The curved hoops at the head of it are made from snap-together aluminium poles, and when the pegs are tightened and it’s all zipped up around you, it’s a wonderful mixture of the sense of “being undeniably Outside” that I struggle to feel in a full-size tent, but with the huge benefit of zip-up mesh windows that protect you from midges.

(The midges in Scotland are no laughing matter, as Alex Nail shows below.)

As things open up further, I’ll be taking more of my own medicine and throwing myself into as many challenges as I can. (Seems fair, if I’m asking you to do them too - and equally fair that I go first to show you what it’s like, just in case you want to avoid them altogether.)

This will be dependent on a mixture of regional restrictions and my vaccination status - my first jab is next week - but hopefully I can get moving very soon. Stay tuned.

3) Hey, What Do You Know?

During my reading about curiosity, I again encountered the power of that old Latin saying docendo discimus, “by teaching, we learn” - now better known as the Protege Effect.

This is important for curiosity because, as a teacher, it both stokes your enthusiasm for a topic and clarifies it into something you can communicate to others - and as a student, it’s a great way to get a bite-sized introduction to something that you previously knew nothing about. (Contrary to what you might think, zero knowledge is usually the death of curiosity - if we know something about a thing, it’s usually enough to reel us in closer).

This season I’ll be spending a lot of time banging on about my own interests: early in the week it’ll be unreliable maps, and midweek it’ll be the science of curiosity, attention and awareness (and everything related to them, like learning how to remember stuff, or the sensory mechanics of drinking coffee). There will be more interviews. And an experiment or two. And of course, I’ll be posting more challenges for you to have a go at.

However, I’d also like to hand things over to you.

Yes, you. You sat there reading this on your phone or tablet or laptop, with the sun shining or the rain belting down outside. I really do mean you.

I could pretend there are tens of thousands of you reading this. There’s a pressure when doing things online to big up your efforts, and sound like you’re speaking to audiences measured in Wembley Stadiums rather than town halls. That’s excellent practical advice in some contexts - and in others, it’s tedious narcissism.

To avoid any danger of the latter, here’s where we are after just under four months: there are just under 500 of you signed up to this newsletter. And not only am I grateful to every single one of you, I’m also aware that you all know something amazing. Something that would blow my mind, and everyone else’s, if we only knew.

You know what this is. It’s your special nerdy thing. The whole topic, or random (but mindblowing) specialty or fact, that makes you so enthusiastic that you could talk it for hours without taking a breath. Something you’re endlessly curious about - and you just know that everyone else would be too, if they could just see it through your eyes. Just for a moment.

Okay. So, how about we actually do that?

I’m giving you the opportunity to use my newsletter to teach, explain, enthuse wildly, geek out shamelessly about something. I’m giving you the mic - or more accurately, a brilliantly passionate couple of paragraph in an upcoming newsletter, sometime soon.

The aim here isn’t for you to provide me some vast, expertly detached overview of your chosen subject that tries to be the last word on the matter. Don’t do that. Don’t sum it all up. That’s what Wikipedia is for. No - the aim is to make everyone curious enough to want to know more. Give them the tiniest corner of it, but make it irresistibly tasty.

You could talk about what you do for a living, or a creative hobby, if you like. Feel free to self-promote, link included. But please, don’t do “an advert.” Adverts are usually very dull things. Adverts rarely make anyone curious. If it seems advert-like, you’re not making the reader feel it. Instead, make them feel it. Tell them a story, or paint a tiny picture with words, or make them laugh or drop their jaws to the ground in amazement…

Teach them not just what it means, but also how it feels.

You could submit something in the following ways:

• send me 2-3 paragraphs about your thing by email, to hunter.sowden@gmail.com

• leave a comment on the Web version of this post

• have a short chat with me about it, using one of the calls I’ve been doing for the newsletter recently (which is how I know some of you are so ridiculously interesting)

• put it in an Instagram post or Twitter thread, tagging me in each case (I’m here on Twitter, and here on the Insta)

• do something I haven’t yet thought of. Semaphore? Interpretive dance? A Banksy-style mural? A drawn map? Surprise and confuse me. (It’s not hard, tbh.)

Once I’ve picked a few, I’ll run a special newsletter (or two) around them - and you’ll have your shot at making hundreds of other people feel the same way about that thing you love so hard.

Sound good? Grand. I can’t wait.

- M

Images: Mike Sowden, xkcd, Mark de Jong

Welcome to the start of season 2 of Everything Is Amazing, a newsletter about using curiosity to live better, think deeper and behave in ways that will make strangers cross to the other side of the street to avoid you. (More fool them, eh?)

If you’ve recently joined - perhaps via Twitter, where a thread I posted went viral recently - then welcome, & thanks for signing up. And if not, please…

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Ta.

This is what went down in the first season, and this is a rough guide to how it all works, which I’m immediately going to contradict somewhat. See below for the details.

But first, here’s the story of one of the most outrageous travel articles in British publishing history.

This is the sight facing you if you opened the pages of The Guardian in early April, 1977.

Alongside details of a breakdown in negotiations between the Soviet Union and the United States, and a warning about British pubs overcharging anyone having the wretched indecency to order a soft drink instead of a beer, this map headed a special travel feature about the world’s least-known newly independent island republic, San Serriffe.

Never heard of it? Most Guardian readers hadn’t either. This tiny nation, “grouped roughly in the shape of a semicolon,” was a remarkable scoop, and judging from the size of the feature (7 pages!), the newspaper clearly knew it.

Then there was the advertising:

For the careful reader, further surprises awaited - like how ‘extreme tides’ were pushing San Serriffe towards the northwest:

“… the islands will accelerate at first gently and then more rapidly as they approach Sri Lanka. Simple calculations suggest that the island group will hit the coast of Sri Lanka at a velocity of 940 km an hour on January 3, 2011.”

Um.

“…[enjoy] the many beaches from which terrorism has been virtually eliminated…”

Wait, is all this just a massive…?

Aha. Okay then.

The great San Serriffe hoax of April 1st, 1977 wouldn’t have fooled many folk today. You don’t have to be a web designer to spot the typeface names (but if you are, you might also see that the name “San Seriffe” is written in - yep, you guessed it).

If they tried this in 2021, Twitter would be awash with LOLs within minutes. But in 1977? And with all that convincing-looking advertising? It was the perfect April Fool - partly because at that time, no major newspaper had ever done something so breathtakingly ridiculous.

To spoil the joke entirely, here’s a full list of the typographic puns, courtesy of Doug Wilson’s writeup:

• Island Name: San Serif typeface (without serifs)

• Island Shape: Semi-colon, Upper Caisse & Lower Caisse

• Pie Island: When you drop letterpress type on the ground

• Port Elrod: A hot-metal strip-casting machine

• Typefaces: Port Clarendon, Bodoni, Erbar, Perpetua, Umbra, Garamondo, Gill Sands, Gill Cameo, Monte Tempo, Montallegro

• Ova Mata: Type that does not fit in a column (also called “over set”)

• Woj of Tipe: “Wodge of Type” A bulk quantity of type

• Printing Terms: Villa Pica, Pearl Island, Cap Em, Thirty Point

• Flong: A curved papier-mâché matrix which helped create stereotype plates for rotary press printing

And the cleverest bit of this: it was originally going to be a single page. But then its perpetrators realized a bigger (equally faked) feature would generate a lot more money for the newspaper by weaving themed advertising into it - if the real advertisers were brave enough to play along.

They were.

It worked magnificently:

According to Guardian Deputy Editor David McKie: "The impact of the seven-page survey was quite astonishing. The office all day was bedlam as people pestered the switchboard with requests for more information...[they] simply refused to believe that the islands did not exist."

It’s an amazing story with timeless appeal (when I posted all this on Twitter, it went nuts - although I’m far from the first to post it on there).

To me, this seems a huge opportunity for someone creative enough to craft a modern take. Someone brave/reckless enough to rope in some big advertisers. Maybe?

But nowadays we’re all on high alert on April 1st. Modern audiences are much less easy to fool - so kudos to Ordnance Survey for this gem from 2018, claiming it was newly arisen west of Ireland after being “lost to the sea for centuries”:

(Here’s how they made it - and here’s the “real” mythical island they were referencing.)

I love all this because it’s how I entered travel writing: via a side door marked “shameless parody.” It’s why I love Tom Gleisner and Rob Sitch’s gleefully tactless Molvania: A Land Untouched By Modern Dentistry, and W.E. Bowman’s The Ascent Of Rum Doodle. Exploring the world is great and all that, but poking fun at the world? Oh hell yes.

My love of fake geography started early. Here’s a map that hung on my wall when I was a kid:

As a teenage nerd growing up in Norfolk, Middle Earth often felt more real to me than the world outside my bedroom window (especially the mountain chains, since my part of England looked like it was designed with a spirit-level).

This feeling intensified almost painfully when I bought a copy of Barbara Strachey’s brilliant, meticulously researched Journeys Of Frodo:

(Wish I’d kept my copy. The 1998 reprints are expensive and hard to find, so who knows what the first editions are worth now? Ghagh.)

Maybe at this point a well-adjusted traveller (or person, generally) would say something like “…and then I discovered real maps, and the rest is history.” Well, not quite so much in my case.

I did fall in love with cartography in a big way, thanks to the colossal fold-out charts that came with my dad’s copies of National Geographic Magazine…

And when I learned basic navigation as part of my Duke Of Edinburgh award, via the British RAF Air Cadets, I was smitten.

(This was back when maps were mostly made of paper - and there’s an important point here. Yes, modern digital maps are immensely useful, but we need the foldable kind as well. In particular, we need them for their ability to not immediately tell us where we’re going and how to get there, so we have to search through them and learn how they work, stumbling across all sorts of interesting things along the way. Paper maps are curiosity engines - so it’s worrying that we might be forgetting how to read them.)

But while I now love real maps, I think I love stupid, fake maps slightly more.

And I’m certainly not alone:

(Courtesy of the massively-followed TerribleMaps Twitter account.)

It’s thanks to a map of hilarious stupidities that I recently discovered a ludicrous and irresponsible prank on an epic scale from Alaska, where in 1974 a World War II veteran successfully faked a volcanic eruption. That full story is here.

I’m also reading Malachy Tallack’s Un-Discovered Islands: An Archipelago of Myths and Mysteries, Phantoms and Fakes (2016), which is living up to the Scotsman On Sunday’s review of it as a “swashbucking romp”:

There’s so much. And it’s all so daft.

Here, then, is what I’m curious about right now: the midpoint between the wholly fictional Tolkien-style maps I grew up with, and the detailed, real-world OS maps I can never seem to fold up the correct way.

This middle terrain, perhaps marked Terra Ineptias (“nonsense-land”), is like the barely-controlled anarchy of a Terry Gilliam film, covering hoaxes, scams, superstitions, propaganda, devious rebellions, weaponised idiocy, vainglorious quests for fame and fortune, the restless science of psychogeography, and all sorts of stuff that makes you wonder how we can be sure of anything on the maps we read.

So that’s my pet obsession over the next 8 weeks. I’m hijacking my own Idiot Question Mondays and turning them into map-related idiot questions, and sharing with you what I learn along the way. Hope you’re up for that.

As for what’ll be happening in the rest of the newsletter, more on that in a few days.

Thanks for reading.

Images: Barbara Strachey; The Guardian; Ordnance Survey; Doug Wilson; Mike Sowden.