About ten years ago, I became deeply interested in why modern coffee shops were such great places to sit and have interesting ideas.

Back then, I was recently back from a travel blogging conference in Rotterdam, where I’d given a talk on storytelling techniques. It had gone well - but the bit I’d hurriedly squeezed into the final five minutes of my talk really hadn’t. I’d been met with a sea of blank expressions, and one person said, “What - getting paid by your readers? That’ll never work.”

What I’d said in those five minutes was what I’d scribbled on a napkin in a local coffee shop the day before.

I’d recently been looking at how Charles Dickens first released The Pickwick Papers in 1836-37 - not as a book, but as a serialised pamphlet. As a trained journalist, Dickens started the project thinking it was going to be a single volume, for which he’d have to find an agent, etc. and blah blah as was usual for these things (and often still is). But what else was possible here?

Under his brave/reckless steerage, and with the help of a scrappy new publishing house keen to make a name for itself, he went full-on Netflix with it: a new segment of this story self-published to English readers every month. This would go on for nearly two years.

The result? Sales went nuts. And so did piracy! Bootlegs, poorly ripped-off characters, blatantly unofficial merchandising, the full works. But none of that mattered to Dickens, because of the incredible momentum his own approach generated.

The first instalment shifted a healthy 1,000 copies; the last sold about 40,000 (an astonishing number when you consider each was physically printed) - and since Dickens quickly saw the value of bundling the instalments into a single book at the end, he started his next series with that eventual book firmly in mind - while continuing to play on all the strengths of serialization that he'd discovered with the previous story. It was a career-building model.

I loved this so much. Not just because of the promise of this “new” way to write books, but also because it was directly serving and supported by readers. And outside of travel, I was seeing this everywhere - a big shift away from advertisers and corporate PR and top-down gatekeeping towards a more gloriously experimental indie mindset, a true “let’s change the rules” ethos, with one root running all the way back to Dickens.

This all came to me in a coffee shop, so I tacked it onto the end of my talk. I drew a diagram on a blackboard, I mumbled something about my beloved subscription to the comic 2000AD when I was a kid, I implored people to check out a relatively new startup called “Kickstarter” that was doing remarkable things for creators of all kinds - and I completely flubbed the delivery, because it was all off the top of my head. Total lead-balloon of a thing.

(I actually think I gibbered. If you’re giving a talk to people, never gibber. It’s the worst of looks.)

So then I went away discouraged, promptly forgot my own advice and went back to writing my blog.

Meanwhile, just a couple of weeks earlier, across the other side of the world, a tiny subscription-based membership platform for creators called “Patreon” had opened its doors for the first time, conceptually paving the way for Substack’s arrival four years later - and, well, here we are.

But - why a coffee shop? What is it about these places that break you out of your stuck thinking, triggering those unhinged flashes of insight that are probably rubbish but what if they weren’t??? - and letting your thoughts jostle around freely, bumping into all the cognitive furniture in your head until you find your thoughts in a very different state?

I wrote in my blog in 2014:

“[The ambient noise app] Coffitivity links to this research paper, which suggests that moderate ambient noise fosters creativity. Coffee-houses usually have a background noise level of around 70 decibels (dB). The paper’s authors found that a lower volume of noise helped with laser-focused concentration, but also helped strait-jacket the mind into a single way of thinking, one that blocked the abstract creation of new ideas from fragments of old ones.

This goes by the excitingly academic name of “processing disfluency”.

When your thoughts are “fluent,” they are bent solely on the task at hand (a path of least resistance for the mind) and they blot the rest of the world out – including everything else you’re thinking about. What background noise of the 70 dB variety seems to do is tug gently at your arm, like a small child trying to get your attention.

“Hey. Hey. Hey.”

It’s just enough of a distraction that it keeps you from sinking too far into what you’re doing, so you’re bouncing round near the surface of it, within grabbing-distance of other ideas in your head. And since your mind is jittery from all that caffeine and you’re presenting it with more of a challenge, your brain really wakes up . . . and starts to play “Hey, Does This Fit With That?”

I based this on what science writer Steven Johnson (now on Substack) was saying about how good ideas come together, as illustrated in this brilliant RSA Animate:

But there’s a critical assumption here: you’re showing up with the right number and the right quality of idea fragments. In today’s hyper-distracted world, that’s a big ask - because it requires recalling things.

My memory is mostly unreliable. I’m the kind of person who will be amazed when someone tells him what we had for lunch when we met last week. I never remember on what day each of the recycling bins are supposed to go out, I am truly awful at putting names to faces, and every time I’m enjoying my life (which is happening a lot these days, thanks to this newsletter) I worry that I won’t remember it later.

This is also a work problem for me. My job involves weaving rambling science-based stories out of the fragments of interesting ideas I’ve stumbled across and want to learn more about, and if I can’t capture those fragments in some way - ideally in my head - then my stories are going to be rubbish. Simple as that.

My ability to retain and recall things, aka. my “memory”, is increasingly precious to me. And until recently, I’ve never given it more than a moment’s thought. Isn’t it just, you know, there? I was born with it in the state it’s in right now, and I just have to work with what I’ve got?

It’s time to find out how wrong I am for assuming this.

In Season 6 of Everything is Amazing, running alongside the series on islands which I mentioned last time, I’m also running a series just for paid subscribers, on the power of applied memory.

I’ve briefly touched on this topic in this newsletter before, when I looked at Timur Gareyev, blindfolded multi-game chess Grandmaster extraordinaire:

And taking a prompt from that piece, I’ll be looking at practical questions around the science of memory.

I want to find some ways to store things away in my brain in a form I’m much more confident of being able to retrieve later.

I want to know a few tricks for remembering what I want to remember, to curate my memories instead of taking enormous cognitive gulps of what’s around me at the time, like a photograph compared with a detailed sketch. (When I was an archaeologist, we learned to photograph and draw everything, because the latter is more of an argument about what you’re looking at, filtered through your interpretative skill.)

And of course, I want to find stuff that makes my inner child go WOW, all this new science is so cool. I’m tediously predictable like that. You know this, of course.

There are many much-smarter-than-me people to listen to on this topic. One is neuroscientist (and Professor of Experimental Brain Research at Trinity College Dublin) , who writes on Substack at Brain Pizza and just recorded this overview of how memory works for Ireland’s RTÉ radio. There are books and science papers and scientists and professional rememberers galore to consult, it’s going to be great fun throwing myself into all of it, and I’ll be taking lots of notes (mainly because my memory is so rubbish).

I’ll be passing along to all paid subscribers absolutely everything I learn as I learn it, in the hope it’s useful to you too.

Tonight, the week-long discount for all paid subscriptions to Everything Is Amazing will be running out.

Beginning next week, I’ll be on a six-week break. During that time, paid subscribers will get new pieces (some of which will pave the way for the next season’s deep dive into memory), I’ll be starting doing those “curiosity calls” that I mentioned here - and I’ll also be working on the relaunch of my non-fiction storytelling course, which about 50 of you went through last year in its earlier, non-updated form. It’s definitely time to get that out the door.

So if you want to be part of this whole project with a recurring discount, now’s the time to act:

Take out a paid subscription here

But for now, thanks so much for reading and your support and kind words on this crazy journey so far. I’m grateful, I’m exhausted, and I’m off for a truly legendary nap.

See you soon.

- M

Images: Nathan Dumlao; Mike Sowden.

Hello! This is Everything Is Amazing - and that lot right there was what we covered in Season 5. 

In a second, a few details about what’s next for this newsletter.

(Wait - you are subscribed, aren’t you?)

Subscribe now

But first, a weird thing: remember that 98.1% reflective white paint I mentioned in my piece that wrapped up our look at the science of colours? A little later on the same day I published it, the New York Times ran this…

…which contains the following stop-you-dead-in-your-tracks quote:

“He calculated that if materials such as Purdue’s ultra-white paint were to coat between 1 percent and 2 percent of the Earth’s surface, slightly more than half the size of the Sahara, the planet would no longer absorb more heat than it was emitting, and global temperatures would stop rising.”

Um…I certainly have plenty of questions, and this measure seems impractical to say the least (how much paint is that? How many trillions of gallons?), but as a raw indicator of the power of these kinds of new coatings, it’s deeply impressive.

(Hat-tip to Will Dowd for this, author of the completely superb Lunar Dispatch on Substack, the last edition of which was the best thing I’ve read all month.)

Okay! As promised, here’s a wee glimpse at season 6 of this newsletter.

I have a question for you to try to answer off the top of your head: how many people live on all the islands in the world, combined?

Type this into Google, and you’ll get answers ranging from 500 to 750 million. But surely if an island is defined as “a body of land surrounded by water,” as it technically is - well, don’t we all live on islands?

I don’t think I realised until recently how utterly arbitrary the dividing-line between “island” and “continent” is. Why is Australia - surely the most island-like of landmasses - regarded as a continent, while Greenland, with its 2+ million square kilometres, is still called an island? At what point between the sizes of those two places does the label flip over?

(Geology points to a few recurring differences between continents and islands, but even those aren’t hard & fast.)

When even the definition of a thing doesn’t stand scrutiny, you know there’s a lot of fascinating details to discover - which makes it even more baffling that, in the second year of my Archaeology degree, I passed on taking a term-long module about island archaeology. Ten full weeks, nerding out about how prehistoric humans lived on islands. Why, Mike, you bloody fool? Why?

It would have introduced me to the biogeography of them, the ways humans have made homes on even the smallest and most resource-depleted of them, the way some have now disappeared under the waves (like Doggerland!) and new ones are popping up all the time, the way they affect wind and ocean currents and local weather in surprising or downright bizarre ways, the way they affect us, the way that ancient people (and, to be fair, not so ancient ones) used the seas as super-highways, turning islands from their stereotypes as middle-of-nowhere places into the most powerfully connected places on the planet…

I’ve been kicking myself for twenty years now. I’ve always wanted a good excuse to go back and nerd around until I could consider myself educated in the basics.

So that’s what’s happening in season 6. The main theme is the science of islands - and I’m going to pass along to you the highlights of everything I learn along the way.

But it’s also going to be about the experience of them too.

I’m currently living on a stretch of coast with well over a hundred islands, comprising the Inner Hebrides, the Outer Hebrides, the isolated scatter that don’t belong to either, and further afield to the north, the archipelago of Orkney which never stop calling to me - plus some truly bizarre outliers like Ailsa Craig (pictured above) on my horizon here in the Firth of Clyde, or the inaccessible granite fleck of utter nothingness hundreds of miles into the Atlantic called Rockall, which Britain annexed because it was afraid the Russians would build a radar installation on it. (More on that soon.)

This will therefore be a series occasionally written and recorded on location, letting me flex my enfeebled travel-writer muscles a bit as I go. I’ve been looking for a good/flimsy excuse to go island-exploring for a while, so I’m grabbing this one with both hands. If I don’t get sucked down Corryvreckan or savaged to perdition by homicidal seabirds or midges, it should definitely be a fun ride!

(That’s the main theme. But like this just-ended season, I’m running a second season-long theme, just for paid subscribers. More on that next time.)

Here’s something else that’s new for season 6.

This newsletter’s been growing quickly over the last year - there are just under 18,500 of you reading today - and with that growth has come a realisation that strikes a dagger of icy fear into my heart:

Some people will now be thinking I genuinely know stuff.

To be clear, there aren’t that many - and certainly nobody who actually knows me in real life thinks this.

But it’s a natural consequence of having a highly visible online presence to be regarded as "an “authority”, whatever that means - and it holds the door open for imposter syndrome to stroll in, sit down, put its muddy feet up on your kitchen table, light a cigarette and drawl, “okay bud, here’s how crappy you’re going to feel from now on, whether you like it or not.”

But I reckon there’s a way around this, and since I started Everything Is Amazing I’ve been careful to follow it, and share the principle of it with other people as often as I can. I did so in Substack’s weekly Office Hours discussion last week, and on Substack Notes later the same day - and I’m doing it again here, right now:

A tip for battling imposter syndrome:

You know the oft-repeated bit of advice about "writing what you know"? It's wrong - or at least, it's highly misleading, and leads to a lot of misery and paralyzing self-doubt.

What it seems to say (and pretty much everyone reads it this way) is "IF YOU'RE NOT A PROPER EXPERT, WHY ARE YOU EVEN TALKING, STEP AWAY, YOU TIMEWASTING LOUDMOUTH."

This leaves the door wide open to the kind of internal imposter syndrome that can have you staring at a flashing cursor for days - even weeks - as the fear of saying something wrong plays merry havoc with your nervous system.

So here's a better bit of advice: WRITE WHAT YOU WANT TO LEARN.

There's good science on the power of doing this. [That’s by Annie Murphy Paul, who is also on Substack these days.] It will help you learn better, remember things better and be more creatively curious. But it will also protect you from imposter syndrome, because it's admitting that you may get stuff wrong as you go along. Because of course you will. You're a student!

(The trick is to be open to being corrected - which is a great way to build trust and engagement in readers, because if they see you're humble enough to be publicly corrected and own up to your mistakes, they will consider your voice a more credible presence in their Inboxes.)

The other thing about this is - it lets you invite your readers on a journey with you. A journey of learning. You're guiding them, but you're learning alongside them. That is a really compelling value proposition in a newsletter.

So: write what you want to learn, whether it's something you already know something about, or it's something you're learning from scratch. You don't need to be a world authority. No student ever is. You just need to share the excitement of learning something you're both interested in.

Try it!”

I really believe in this approach, and I’m going to continue to bake it into everything I write for Everything Is Amazing - including the times when I get things wrong because my readers are much smarter than I am, and have to display all the egg on my face and ask for forgiveness.

But I also reckon I could be a bit more actively helpful, in the way I was being when I worked as a storytelling consultant. How can I best help you chase your curiosity in a more exciting, excitable way?

One thing I can’t do is any more long-term consultancy work in the way I used to do it, the kind that involved weeks or months of work. Reason being: I’m researching and writing this newsletter! It’s my almost-everything. That’s where my creative focus is, and that’s not changing anytime soon. (And I’m already way behind with a few things.)

But I can do a little more - so here it is. 

When I wrote “Don’t Start A Newsletter” a while back, I hoped there were lots of you with deeply nerdy interests that you’d love to find a way to tap into, in front of an audience or in private. Then I ran the two discussion threads on what you wish other people were more curious about and what your nerdiest year would look like, and they both blew up in a way I wasn’t expecting - and it became clear you’re all way more interesting (and interested) than I’ll ever be.

So - how about you actually go for it? How about putting a little time aside each week, and giving yourself a year to chase the specific subject of your curiosity as hard and as far as you want it to go, with all the joy of an eternal student, just to see where it will take you? 

I’m calling this challenge ‘YOUR CURIOUS YEAR’ - and it starts anytime you want. 

For obvious reasons - and glugging back a certain amount of Kool-Aid here - I can thoroughly recommend starting a Substack newsletter to help you do this. I gather that other newsletter-like platforms are great (as long as they’re not run by Meta or Twitter), but this is the one I know, and it’s entirely free to get started on, so I’m recommending it to you. 

If you accept this potentially life-changing challenge (seriously, it changed my life), then I’ll have a couple of newsletters within the upcoming season 6 of EiA to help you along.

But if you want an extra push in the direction of that curious obsession of yours, here it is:

If you’re an existing or new paid subscriber to Everything Is Amazing, you’ll now get the option of what the marketing folk call a “1-to-1” with me, either as a Zoom or Skype (or phone) call, or a few emails bounced back and forth - tailored to helping you do what you’re doing, or get the word out about it, or whatever would help. You ask me questions, I fling a bunch of ideas at you, you pick one or two that might work for you, and off you go to discover how deep your personal rabbit-hole goes.

I’ll get the first bunch of these 1-to-1s set up after next weekend, and everyone with a paid subscription will get details on how to sign up to them.

Speaking of which: it’s now been two and a half years since I started Everything Is Amazing, with the above newsletter.

Honestly, I had no idea if anyone would care about these kinds of rambling, science-led stories of awe and wonder, written by a well-meaning buffoon like me. I had more than a few moments when I thought this whole thing would just fizzle away. I really didn’t know people would care.

But I certainly knew I cared. Those “woah!” moments when I’m reading someone else’s work - that’s what lights me up as a reader, and during 2019, when I took a year off from writing to try to reawaken my ability to be curious and interested and hopeful again (I told the full story to Valorie Clark here) - well, that’s what pulled me out of a very deep emotional hole, and gave my dreams of being a professional writer the second chance they desperately needed.

So in one sense, everything right now is incredibly welcome, and I’m pinching myself, and taking it as a mandate to show up with my very best work and help as many folk as I can with it. Thanks to just over 400 paid supporters of this project, it’s sustainable. I can now keep going, and it’s my fulltime job, and I am floored about this. I’m grateful, I’m lucky, and I’m ready to give the next season everything I’ve got.

But in another sense - I still need to grow it a little further.

The current scope of Everything Is Amazing is limited by its budget, which is still of the shoestring variety. I’m now able to keep going, but I still can’t do the most adventurous, most out-in-the-world version of the newsletter. The one where I’m travelling around interviewing people, and doing some first-person investigative stuff, and reporting & recording from where the stories actually are. 

A couple of hundred new paid subscribers would get me over that line, and unlock the fullest, most reckless version of this thing.

Would you help me do this? Have you enjoyed this newsletter, and think it’s worth supporting? Is there anything since you signed up where you thought, “you know, I actually look forward to this thing”? Do you want to see the FULL version of it, the one that’s been in my head for years, where I go out and make a TOTAL idiot of myself?

I’d love your help to make this a reality.

This week, until the end of Friday, all paid subscriptions are 20% off - and that’s recurring, for as long as you stay signed up:

Take out a paid subscription here

Thanks so much for making this whole project the most thrilling and rewarding part of my career to date. What a thing it’s becoming.

- Mike

Images: Diego; Andrej Lišakov; Mike Sowden.

Hello! This is Everything Is Amazing, a newsletter about science, curiosity, awe and wonder.

Subscribe now

And somehow, that was almost a year. Eleven months (and 8,000 more of you reading than when season 5 began). Good grief, to all of it.

The extended nature of this season was very much not according to the original plan: previous seasons have been 2-3 months long, and I thought this one would pan out the same way. But life intervened, mostly in good ways - including how I’ve now upgraded my headquarters from a tiny wooden cabin into a proper little flat! (A move of just a few miles into a nearby town, so I can continue to enjoy the natural delights of western Scotland around me. You’d have to drag me away at this point.)

So, yes, here we are. And since things have calmed down again, season 6 will be a much brisker and punchier affair when it arrives in a month or so. More on that in the next newsletter.

But today, here’s what we’ve covered over the last 45-ish weeks in 37 different newsletters - and since that is an unusually enormous amount of stuff for a single season of this thing, two things are different about this roundup:

• it’s the first of a two-parter, with the second half coming over next time, and…

• it’s definitely going to be too big for your email Inbox.

If you’re reading this in your email, somewhere down below, you’ll see it’s clipped off in its prime by your email provider - which means you’ll have to click through to the Web version to read the whole roundup.

(To do that, just click on the title of this newsletter - “Season 5 Is Done! What's Next? [Part One]” - and that Web version should open up in your browser.)

Also, since the main topic this season is the frequently bizarre world of colour, you may want a primer on some basic optical principles - so here’s ‘s Phil Plait laying them out for you from an astronomer’s perspective:

(That whole multi-video course is about astronomy, and it’s really great - and totally free! Watch them in order by starting here.)

OK - here’s what Everything Is Amazing has looked at this year:

Main theme: Colours (for free and paid subscribers)

1. A Hundred Million Ways To See

“ “I always felt like I was living in a very magical world. I know children say that, but for me, it was like everything was hyper-wonderful, hyper-different. I was always exploring into nature, delving and trying to see the intricacies, because I’d see so much more detail in everything. Someone else might look at a leaf or a petal on a flower, but for me, it was like a compulsion to really understand it, really see it, and sometimes spend a lot of time on it. And I just wanted to paint and portray everything that I was seeing.” - artist Concetta Antico, quoted in The Guardian

Through the eyes of non-artists like me - OK, that’s a lovely way of putting it, but come on, get scientific please. Isn’t this just a fancy way of saying “I have a really great creative imagination”? No disrespect, but isn’t rhetoric like this just stringing beautiful words around something too mysterious to define, and - um, well - effing the ineffable?

One of Antico’s students, a neurologist, didn’t think so. They emailed Antico a science paper about a rare eye condition related to the colour-blindness that Antico’s daughter had recently been diagnosed with. Intrigued, the artist contacted the team of scientists that wrote the paper - and shortly after, Antico took a saliva test that confirmed she had a rare genetic mutation in her eyes.”

2. Why Classical Greece Looked Like Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory

“If you walked through the Parthenon in Athens, it would have been, in the words of historian Natalie Haynes, “a riot of colour and glitzy decoration”. Wherever a statue depicted metal, that would be painted gold, or silver, you know, in the really shiny way. Newly cast bronze would have been treated to have the faint look of - how can I say this - brown moulded plastic. 

Everything would have looked, by modern standards, appallingly cheap. Most of us used to the monochromatic grandeur of Westminster Abbey or the White House would be appalled. Horrified. It would look like the most wretched of parodies, utterly lacking in good taste.

What were they thinking?”

3. The Blue Of Distance, Hope - and Mars?

“Scattering explains why our sunsets are red: at that angle, the light has passed through so much atmosphere that all the blue has been scattered out, leaving wavelengths towards the red end of the spectrum.

But on Mars the rules are different. The weak Martian air (95% carbon dioxide, 2.8% molecular nitrogen, a wee pinch of argon) contains a lot of dust particles which are a lot closer in size to the wavelengths of visible light. This leads to a different form of scattering, called Mie, where longer wavelengths (redder ones) tend to scatter equally in all directions, while shorter wavelengths (the blues) scatter at slighter angles. (This effect also happens here on Earth, but it’s swamped by the far more common Rayleigh scattering).

The result is that on Mars, the daytime sky is flooded with ‘lost’ red light. But - what about sunsets? Would the reverse be true?

Ohhhhh yes indeed it would.”

4. How To Invent Your Own Colour

“It’s 2017, and optics research scientist Janelle Shane finds herself at a loose end. What would be both a credible piece of research and a hilariously dumb use of her programming skills?

Ah! Of course. How about teaching her neural network to act like an Elizabethan dressmaker, by inventing a bunch of new colours from scratch?

“For this experiment, I gave the neural network a list of about 7,700 Sherwin-Williams paint colors along with their RGB values. (RGB = red, green, and blue color values.) Could the neural network learn to invent new paint colors and give them attractive names?"

The answer was a fairly emphatic “No”. ”

5. Why Pink Has Absolutely *Everything* To Say

“Madame de Pompadour (1721-1764), a mistress of France’s Louis XV, is widely credited for sending the popularity of pink through the roof. (One echo of this: the influential Sèvres porcelain company created and named a new shade of pink after her.)

At this time, pink didn’t mean “men” or “women” - it meant wealth, status, giddily high fashion and smouldering desirability. And not just in France, of course: across Europe, the influence of French fashion was impossible to ignore, leading to foppish copycats and nationalist backlashes galore - because, you know, people.

However, some time in the 19th Century, things started to shift. For some reason (perhaps the availability of cheap new dyes), men across Europe started going for darker shades.

Nevertheless, as Kassia St Clair notes in her endlessly fascinating essay collection The Secret Life Of Colours, an 1893 article in the New York Times on baby clothing recommends assigning “pink to a boy, and blue to a girl.” A trade publication published 25 years later helpfully elaborates that pink is “the more decided and strong colour,” while blue is “more delicate and dainty.” ”

6. How To See Impossible Colours

“The way it works is simple, and you can do it three times, one for each row (giving your eyes a bit of a break in between doing each one).

First, you stare intently at the cross in the centre of the coloured circle in the column named “fatigue template” - then after maybe 30 seconds, or after as long as you can hold it, you dart your eyes sideways and stare at the cross in the “target field” box.

Okay! All done? How did you get on? And did you notice anything really weird about those colours?”

7. What If We Could Change The Colour Of *Everything*?

“[A]s everyone knows, the chameleon has the ability to change colours to blend into its background, to hide from predators. 

Except, well - everyone’s wrong. From recent research, it seems this isn’t what chameleons are doing. They’re changing colour either to regulate their temperature - because chameleons can’t generate their own body heat, so they turn darker when they’re cold to absorb more heat, or vice versa - or they’re doing it to communicate, mainly to each other.

Just ask anyone who has a chameleon as a pet, and they’ll tell you they can read the chameleon’s emotional state from the pattern of colours it’s wearing that day - and they’d probably be right.”

8. The Green That Poisoned Britain

“It’s 1861, and 19-year-old Matilda Scheueur isn’t feeling well. Not well at all.

She’s working as a florist, and it’s part of her job to go round all the artificial flower headdresses and “fluff them up,” dusting them with powdered Emerald Green paint to brighten up the colour.

(Emerald Green is now the nationally preferred, near-identical alternative to Scheele’s Green, thus continuing the ill-starred scientist’s lifelong curse of never getting lasting credit. Although, considering what happens next, that could be a blessing…)

Now Matilda is getting sicker and sicker. She’s suffering convulsions. She’s vomiting green water from her mouth and nose - and it’s even coming out the corner of her eyes, the whites of which now have a distinctly green tint, as do her fingernails. She’s telling people that everything is starting to look green…

How can this be happening with a safe, everyday green paint that everyone has been using for decades?”

9. Oh, How Our Cities Will Shimmer

“I’ll tell you one thing from experience: walk down a white-painted street in the Greek islands on a blazingly hot day, and your eyes are going to get a battering.

All that reflected light still has to go somewhere, and where it goes is into your face. Simply bouncing the sunlight off would condemn future inhabitants of our cities to the urban equivalent of snow blindness, unless everyone wears the kinds of cool sunglasses that science fiction’s been telling us everyone in the future should be wearing. Nevertheless: doesn’t feel like a complete solution.

So how about less reflective colours that deliberately absorb heat - then process it into an energy source? This seems a very fruitful avenue of research, and I’m sure solar panels are the uppermost tip of the iceberg here.

But it could be that the most useful colour for buildings of the future is - well, all of them, all at the same time.”

Sub-theme: How Geology Affects Modern Life (for paid subscribers, with a few posts unlocked for everyone)

10. How To Build A Rainstorm

“Human beings have understood the relationship between mountains and rain since…well, probably since they became human beings. And it’s been just over a century since the formal study of the atmospheric sciences (mainly for weather prediction) took off in academic settings…

And now, it seems some people are starting to regard mountains as tools. The kind we can build ourselves, to get the results we want.

Okay! Uh. (Yikes?)”

11. To Make A Mountain -1: Why Nobody Has The Time (Paid Subscribers Only)

“It’s one thing to have an inkling that the continents have somewhat moved around since ancient times…

(Most people have heard of Pangea, the super-continent that formed around 300 million years ago, when the first-drafts of our modern continents were smooshed together into one big lump. As a schoolkid, I was transfixed by the way you could see how the edges of modern continents sorta-kinda fit each other like a planet-sized jigsaw puzzle.)

…but it’s another thing to see the world flowing in all directions like the contents of an egg cracked into a frying pan, to watch it all float around seemingly chaotically.

If you think of the crust (ie. all the “land” on Earth) as the foam sitting atop a fresh cappuccino, then every few hundred million years, the whole thing gets a proper stir with a metaphorical spoon. Nothing stays where it is. Everything gets moved along.”

12. To Make A Mountain - 2: The Science Of Feeling It (Paid Subscribers Only)

“As the Second World War draws to a close, a Scottish writer sends her latest manuscript to her friend, the novelist Neil Gunn. What does he think?

She’s struggled with her writing for a while, worrying that her poetry about the landscapes around her is too much a reflection of them - beautiful but ice-cold, compelling but in a glittery, mineral way. In 1931, in the wake of a six-year run during which she produced three well-received novels and one book of poetry, silence struck her with devastating force. She wrote to Gunn: 

“I’ve gone dumb…one reaches (or I do) these dumb places in life. I supposed there’s nothing for it but to go on living. Speech may come. And if it doesn’t I suppose one just has to be content with being dumb. At least not shout for the mere sake of making a noise.”

It’s been a long, hard road to find her voice again. This new draft, only 30,000 words long, is the only major piece of writing she’s produced in this decade after her voice faltered. 

But this book isn’t like anything she’s written before - or like anyone else has, perhaps.

13. Walking The Great Mountain Trail Of Deep Time (Paid Subscribers Only)

“As I wrote about previously, the longest mountain range on Earth is 65,000 km long (40,000 miles), which sounds like a proper adventure until you discover it’s thousands of metres deep at a depth that’d be instantly, messily fatal to an unprotected human being. Not anyone’s idea of a fun day out.

But now I’ve discovered the second-longest, and it’s far more manageable. Nope, it’s not the Himalayas (they’re piddling in comparison). It’s also not the Andes (the third-longest).

This thing is bigger - and, incredibly, it’s on land. You could, in theory, walk along it.

14. Did This Tree Of Fire Break Our World Apart? (Paid Subscribers Only)

“Our world plunges to a mighty depth - and to date, humanity’s only drilled through around 12km of it. That’s over a quarter of the way through the crust, which seems (and is!) a lot - but that’s also a bit less than 0.2% of the whole way down. Under one-five-hundredth. Good grief.

It’s not surprising that this is such a lively field of startling breakthroughs and continent-sized question marks. There is still so much that’s unclear and so much being discovered every year…

And nothing illustrates this better than the science of mantle plumes.”

15. Beware The Thousand Invisible Hands

“Corryvreckan is so frightening not just because the current might pull you under, but because it might hold you under.

For the Channel 4 programme “Equinox: Lethal Seas” (2000), a documentary team from Scottish independent producers Northlight Productions threw a realistically weighted mannequin into the water near the Hag during the flood tide, wearing a life jacket with a depth gauge.

When they recovered it half an hour later, the depth gauge had stopped taking readings beyond 200 metres - with evidence of being dragged along the bottom for a great distance, presumably after the downward current worked like a waterfall to hurl it all the way down to the sea floor before pulling it onwards.”

16. Plastic Rocks & Technofossils: Why New Geology Is Getting Weird (Paid Subscribers Only)

“A recent survey of existing minerals by the Carnegie Institution for Science in the US found that 4% of them - 208, to be exact - showed signs of originating from human activity.

(There are many ways this can happen, from minerals decomposing and leaching into each other as electronic waste rots - or fails to rot - in dumps, from mine shafts exposing subterranean minerals to new humidities and temperatures for the first time, to unnatural deposition patterns dumping things on top of each other in quantities that could never occur naturally. It’s a whole mess of stuff, for the widest, occasionally strangest of reasons - like our ongoing obsession with gold, one of the most chemically uninteresting elements on our planet, which we’ve decided is worth more than almost everything else because - sigh - it’s delightfully shiny.)

Then there are the rocks that geologist Fernanda Avelar Santos found on Trindade Island off the coast of Brazil in 2019. Their striking colour caught her eye - a blue rock base, streaked with threads of a livid bubblegum-green colour. What exciting new mineral could this be?

Alas, not a mineral. The culprit was a local spill of plastic pollution - and a new geological process, where plastic was binding with rock and sand and other detritus to form a new substance nicknamed plastiglomerate.”

17. Why It’s Great News That The Earth Sucks (Paid Subscribers Only)

“Pratt does the calculations - and they’re still wrong. Except now they’re wrong the other way. The discrepancy due to the gravitational attraction of the Himalayan mountain range is smaller than it should have been. They’re exerting less pull on the plumb bob than expected…

It’s almost as if the mountains are hollow.”

Everything Else (for a mix of paid subscribers and everyone)

18. Why We Need More Goats On The Moon (Paid Subscribers Only)

“The first article continued: not only had Herschel used it to discover new planets outside our Solar System, he had also “solved or corrected nearly every leading problem of mathematical astronomy.” (How exciting! Whatever those problems were, it was so reassuring to know they were now solved.)

The following day came another update, again described as a reprint of Grant’s words in Scotland’s leading regional newspaper - and it contained an absolute bombshell.

When Herschel had pointed his colossal instrument at our humble Moon and peered through it, he’d found a living world.”

19. Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast (Paid Subscribers Only)

“Does this turn wonder (and curiosity) into an obnoxiously vague “let’s all just hug it out” attempt to build common ground with things that gets lots of people riled up, allowing people like me to appeal to both sides in a cowardly way on many important issues just so we can get a big audience?

Uh - maybe? I mean, it might be. I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t considered it.

But what if it’s actually something more?

What if a sense of wonder is actually something everyone can agree on, and that everyone needs to thrive? What if, instead of arguing over the validity of often incompatible belief systems as applied to each other, it’s worth considering and respecting the value of triggered, felt wonder as a vital, useful thing in itself, however it’s derived - and consider the effect of it (along with awe and curiosity) in creating meaning, compassion, empathy and understanding between people … including the kind that can create good, positive change in the world?”

20. Look. Look. *Look*.

“The examiner says: “Everton, where’s the London Edition Hotel?”

This question, and the following ones like it, requires him to remember specific locations from London’s roughly 100,000 landmarks. He has to know where these places are - and he has to know how to get there from anywhere else.

“OK - how about Battersea Reach?”

“Uh…that’s on…Juniper Drive?”

“Correct. Now tell me the quickest way from London Edition to Battersea Reach.”

Now Everton has to assemble and recite this route from memory, taking into account everything that might affect the journey along the way. A 5.9 mile section of the roughly 25,000 streets that run across London, rattled off the top of his head without hesitation…

This kind of problem-solving is what the famous London black cab drivers do in their heads, in the time between you telling them your destination, walking round the back of the cab and settling into your seat. That’s the requirement to get the certification that lets them operate a black cab, and it’s been the requirement since 1865. This test was tough to start with, but a century and a half of road-building later, what it’s evolved into is an incredible feat of memory and spatial judgment under pressure.”

21. Antonia Malchik Is Exploring How We Own The Land

“Early on, I remember just really immersing myself in all those wonderful travel writers that I'm sure we both read and love and follow and wish we could be -  and I got to the point where I realised that some of the best travel writing I really like is place-based. And then you see a writer who's kind of stereotyping people, or doing a competent job but it's still characterizations that are ‘other-ising’?

I've seen it happen about Montana so often - they send someone out from a national newspaper because…okay, a real example: there's this great bar in the city where my grandmother used to live, which is over on the more plains and farmland part of the state, not in the mountains. It’s a funky little place. A newspaper, I think it was the New York Times, sent someone out who wrote this story about “life in Montana.” And they wrote stuff about this bar that I’m sure they thought was funny but it was awful. It felt dumb and silly.

When you see the way that they describe a place that you know really well, and the people you know really well and you're like, ohhhh, that's what we do to other places.”

22. ‘Don’t Start A Newsletter’ And Other Advice For Newsletter Writers

“[I]f you don’t want to write about “the news”, you’re allowed to not write about it without feeling bad about it. Seriously. Because I know how easy it is to feel bad in that way. So you really care about ferns, or earthenware teapots, or the poems of Sappho, widely agreed to be one of the greatest poets of Classical Greece, and you absolutely burn to explain to everyone else why they should care like you do. Well, you’re allowed to do that. Even with climate change, the war in Ukraine, governmental corruption, amazing displays of idiocy from people in positions of great power, all these other things in the news - you are allowed to write about your specific nerdy thing. 

Two reasons for this. First: because your nerdy thing has value, and that value can’t be erased by cheap, lazy comparisons to other things. You know this deep down - it’s why you care so much - but the desperate noisy urgency of the rest of the world can easily drown it out.

Social media’s made this much worse: oh look, this really awful loudmouth spouting nonsense is trending, that must mean the world is filled with really-awful-loudmouth-supporting dimwits. Or - they’re trending because everyone’s yelling at them, and in fact nobody gives a toss about them and would much rather talk about teapots, if only someone would start doing that properly.”

23. Behold The White Cliffs Of Megaflood

“But the English Channel? Oh come on. This is the UK. Things have a habit of not happening here (earthquakes, volcanoes, revolutions, tolerable weather, displays of genuine emotion). That’s what it’s famous for! What could possibly happen here that could be labelled High Drama?

Well, one answer to that question could be “everything in our politics since 2016” - but the more considered and relevant scientific response is “everything happens everywhere, if you give it enough time.”

And this is how I learned that around 425,000 years ago, the island of Great Britain was wrenched away from Europe in a fashion more dramatic than the fevered dreams of any hardline Brexiteer, by a single flood so violent that it could part continents.”

24. Three Ways That Kindness Can Save Us All

“This is a science-based story that convinces because it shows what happens when people find a way through some recognisably chaotic times by finding ways to work together. By showing each other kindness, and forging a spirit of cooperation from it.

If For All Mankind has a message, it’s we get there together or not at all. There are no perfect heroes, and no outright villains. People make mistakes for all the richly human reasons a character drama is fuelled with. And when that happens (which it does, to everyone), they’re not alone when they pick up the pieces of the mess they made.

And the end result (spoilers!) is that everything keeps moving forward: imperfectly, contentiously, but unmistakably forwards.”

25. Rare Skies And Turning Tides

“These rare Kelvin-Helmholtz clouds showed up over Wyoming on Tuesday, in as perfect a display of fluid-like atmospheric physics as you could ever hope to see.

They looks like waves breaking because - they’re waves, breaking. Much the same fluid dynamics equations are at work as in our seas, giving a slightly unsettling reminder than we all live at the bottom of an ‘ocean’, except it’s made of air, not water.”

26. Five Weird Ways To Enjoy Witching Week

“This is stolen from adventurer Al Humphreys, and it’s really simple: you take some form of local public transport, but you only buy a one-way ticket, because you’re hoofing it back home.

The joy of this isn’t really the walking (although a walk of any length is certainly a fine thing) - it’s really the perspective-shift it gives you. It turns that distanced, TV-like blur of terrain outside the bus or train or car window of your regular commute into an Actual Place You’re Actually In. You can hear it. You can smell it. It’s an unexpected party for the senses.”

27. Why Space Is Wet (And So Very Far Away)

“There’s no real way to visualise this thing, but here’s one artist’s attempt to at least get the idea of it across in a way that fits into our brains.

The utmost rim of our solar system, more or less everyone agrees, is the point where the Sun’s gravitational pull is negligible compared with that of the other stars in our galactic neighbourhood. And within this boundary should drift an essentially unimaginable amount of fragmented rock and ice, forming billions of comets and trillions of asteroids.

All this stuff drifts around according to the mathematical elegance of the laws of gravitational force. You can see them at work in the image above: an inner “cloud” in the form of a faint torus (or upended infinity-sign, appropriately enough), surrounded by a far larger outer ring in the shape of a scaffolded bubble - or, to my eye, the former Cardassian mining outpost of Deep Space Nine.

It’s called the Oort Cloud, after the Dutch astronomer Jan Oort - and nobody has seen any sign of it yet, even though its existence is not currently in dispute.”

28. Open Thread: What Do You Wish More People Were Curious About?

29. The Curious Idea That Ancient People Weren’t Dimwits

“I don’t personally know if people in general have always been just as smart as they are today, and I’ve barely started doing my reading into the research on it. If I find credible research suggesting that people in the Neolithic were as dumb as the rocks they used to build things, I promise I will report back. After all, science is about following the evidence, and this newsletter is about following the science. 

But starting with this assumption is important. Because: what happens when you value-judge something, when you say “people in history were morons”, or even “people today are morons compared with history”? Well, you rank them. You say “this is better than that” - and in doing so, you put one in a category of being less interesting than the other. This stops curiosity dead. It just kills it. But if you assume people exist on a level playing-field of interestingness, it’s much easier to get curious about what you don’t yet know about them, including their seemingly “weird” behaviour. 

So really, this is about the way we treat difference. Different ideas, different technologies, different beliefs, every difference under the sun. Instead of immediately ranking difference (which is a curiosity-killer), we can respect it. Or at least try to. Value judgements are so deeply hammered into us that this is phenomenally hard. Just read, I dunno, someone’s Substack about music. But we can try, because ultimately it will help us understand difference better. 

And one way we can do this is by assuming that people in history weren’t any stupider than we are.”

30. The Magic Of Everything Everywhere All At Once

“…when, 45 minutes in, the film seems to be saying Hey, what if we're the products of all the wrong possible choices in our lives? - it’s a real gut-punch.

But that’s not what the film ends up saying at all. It’s out to say something trickier, deeper, much kinder and far more hopeful. Something about the corrosive nihilism of measuring ourselves against what-ifs until we’ve lost all sight of what actually is. Something about engineering joy, not just waiting passively for it, or blaming others for its absence. Something about having hot-dogs for fingers. (I know, I know. Just - watch it!)

But it’s also about how exciting it is to step into other versions of yourself, where you can discover different skills, different experiences, and where you see the world differently in so many ways - and, ultimately, it’s about how it’s never too late to do that, including when you’ve spent your entire life not doing it.”

31. Making Them Laugh, Making Them Think

“Almost all the winners are being invited in, to share the joke and poke fun at themselves - while knowing the fun is good-natured and not actually disrespectful, since everyone understands that Actual Science happened here.

And sometimes, that work is really good. In 2000, Sir Andrew Geim was joint-awarded the Ig Nobel for Physics, along with Michael Berry, for their work in levitating a frog using diamagnetism. Ten years later, Geim would joint-win the actual Nobel Prize for Physics for his work with the carbon allotrope Graphene, a material that’s currently making headlines for how it’s unlocking all sorts of new scientific breakthrough.

But the Ig Nobels are also intentionally daft. They make a priority of aiming for a LOL - like how, in the very first Ig Nobel ceremony in 1991, then-US-Vice-President Dan Quayle won in the Education category “for demonstrating, better than anyone else, the need for science education.”

(I also love their description of him: "consumer of time and occupier of space.")

It’s about using humour as a tool for positive change - to shine a light on scientific research that’s quietly doing fascinating things, while also pointing out the deeply hilarious ridiculousness of…well, everything, really?”

32. The Fun Is Why

“This is really about what I call the tyranny of usefulness: where the value of doing a thing, the “sense” bit of “it has to make sense”, goes back to two things.

Firstly, the old economic-based model of productivity that’s been haunting us since the industrial revolution - does it help me produce more widgets and therefore make more money and maybe help me retire a bit earlier? You know: “useful” stuff, not for “fun”.

And secondly: we can quantify the usefulness of it in advance. We’re doing it because we already know what we want to get out of it.

But here’s the thing. As I hope I’ve demonstrated over the last four and a bit seasons of this newsletter, there is great value in discovering things you never knew you didn’t know. It just feels great, and opens your mind in all sorts of ways - including so-called useful ones - to realise the world is filled with more interesting and even more joyful stuff than you ever could have guessed.”

33. This Is How You Create Stuff And Sell Lots Of Books

“Three days ago, a person on Twitter called “bigolas dickolas wolfwood” posted a picture of the book cover along with the words: “read this. DO NOT look up anything about it. just read it. it's only like 200 pages u can download it on audible it's only like four hours. do it right now i'm very extremely serious.”

This tweet, with all its infectious, mystery-driven enthusiasm, went massively viral, as fans of the book leapt in to yell about how great it is, pushing it in front of millions of new readers.

The book rapidly rose to being, late last night [deep breath] the 7th bestselling book of ALL BOOKS ON AMAZON.”

34. Science Fiction Helps Us Ask The Hardest Questions (second half of interview with Antonia Malchik)

“Sometimes you just get really stuck on a huge writing project and my strategy is to go for walks instead of trying to glue myself to my desk. I'll go for a long walk around town thinking, How can I actually demonstrate this idea with an example that helps people feel their way into it? And then something will (hopefully!) come, like, Oh, there was that scene in The Expanse where the Marine from Mars is trying to walk outside on Earth for the first time and she's having such difficulty doing it. You can make it a relatable shortcut. I realized I could play around with that kind of thing–using science fiction to demonstrate some of the more granular biology and mechanics of walking–and see what my editor says, and she didn't seem to mind it. So I kept going. 

There's a lot in that story, The Expanse, that talks about things I'm working on, like the commons and private property and management of resources. In The Expanse it's right front and centre because the people who live in the Belt [the real-life asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter] don't have reliable water sources, and they're dependent on other people for air, and are forced to live in a colonial-type situation in relation to the far more powerful nations Earth and Mars that they didn't choose and don't want…”

35. Why The Sky Smells Great

“Ozone forms when lightning rips the air apart to form oxygen and nitrogen, leading to the formation of nitric oxide, which is important to biological health (Molecule of the Year in 1992!), and conventional oxygen (O₂) - and, every now and again, ozone.

You’re smelling it because of an enormous downdraft of air that comes before a storm, which drags ozone down from higher altitudes. What’s filling your nostrils is the aroma of the atmosphere 20 miles above your head - if it wasn’t so cold up there that your nose would immediate freeze solid, of course.”

36. Open Thread: What Would You Do With Your Nerdiest Year?

37. The (Mostly) Forgotten Battle For American Independence…In Yorkshire.

“Let’s imagine you’re standing here on a September night 244 years ago, looking out to sea.

The cliff behind you booms with distant cannon-fire, as the newly-minted United States of America fights for its independence a couple of miles offshore.

What’s happening out there is heroic, exciting and faintly ridiculous. Thirteen British colonies in North America, 3400 miles away, have decided they’ve had enough of Britain’s outrageous nonsenses, and they’ve declared independence.

That’s not the ridiculous bit, of course. What’s ridiculous is that an American Continental Navy squadron is fighting the British here, off the coast of Yorkshire.”

Back tomorrow with details about where we’re going next! And thanks so much for reading.

- Mike

Main image: Simon Berger

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Before we begin - I’ve been wanting to link to a particular edition of ’s The New Fatherhood newsletter for months now, and I’ve never quite got round to it, but I should have because it’s lovely and quietly profound, so today is that day.

It’s about what a rare and precious thing it is for us to all be here right now, and why it’s worth taking a moment to properly appreciate that fact:

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3 years ago · 68 likes · 14 comments · Kevin Maguire

No, it’s fine, there’s just something in my eye. I’m fine. Let’s move on.

Today we return for the last time to this season’s main topic: the practical science of colours. And if you’re still flinching from the horrors of the last one on Scheele’s Green, I promise this one will be a lot less traumatic. Trust me. You’re in safe hands.

Anyway, let’s begin by setting fire to everything.

In late 2021, a lot of people on social media became convinced that the best protection against forest fires was to coat their homes in tin-foil.

This may seem ludicrous, but there seemed to be proof: a photo from the small community of Phillips, near California’s South Lake Tahoe, taken in the aftermath of the colossal Caldor Fire that burned for over two months and consumed over a thousand buildings - but not the one in the picture being shared everywhere, which seemed to be clad in shiny foil, and stood intact, near the burnt-out shell of its neighbour. (The internet quickly nicknamed it the ‘Baked Potato Cabin’, because of course it did.)

So - could fighting off a fire be that simple?

Answer: um, sort of, ish? It’s true that a silvered surface can reflect a goodly amount of convective and radiative heat, the kinds that make short work of most structures in a big fire. But this wasn’t the aluminium baking foil we Brits use in our kitchens - this was double-layered aluminum-lined fire blankets, enough to protect your home for the five or ten minutes it takes for a wildfire front to roar over, but not much longer than that.

(And this isn’t really news: the US Forestry Service uses similar materials to protect historic cabins and other buildings in hard-to-access places.)

The owner of this surviving cabin, Eric Raymond, had a big advantage over other homeowners - he could silver-clad his home for free, getting permission to use a few unneeded rolls of thick aluminum foil from the Elk Grove vacuum valve manufacturer where he works as an engineering manager.

Over seven frantic hours, he banged around twelve hundred staples into the three most vulnerable sides of his mountain cabin, took some pictures in case that was the last time he’d see it, and left - and was as surprised as anyone when he discovered the firesheet-wrapped cabin had survived.

This isn’t really a practical solution to wildfires. It’ll give your building more of a fighting chance, but if a fire is slower to pass through, it’ll eat up pretty much anything. But it’s a nice reminder of the power of reflecting the infrared parts of the spectrum, which we know as radiated heat.

I started this season’s journey into the science of colour by looking at the blazingly white limewashed walls of the buildings in the Greek islands that make so many hillside villages look absolutely gorgeous:

So it feels fitting to circle back there to finish the season, by asking: hey, putting personal tastes aside, what’s the most useful colour to put on a building?

As I wrote about in October, the ancient Greeks and Romans and Egyptians used to splash colour around in a way we’d find, well, a bit tasteless - and they weren’t the only ancient peoples to do it. Colour for decorative reasons is never going out of fashion - and now we have branding, which is why, for example, KFC stores are that particularly aggressive, or if you like welcoming, shade of red, and so on. 

But there’s an obvious reason that many buildings in the Mediterranean are blazingly white: it helps keep the heat off in a way that’s affordable to everyone.

(Yes, there are more sophisticated methods at a higher price, but if a technique’s only available to the wealthy, how fair is that, and since those wealthy own a small number of all the buildings in the world, how effective is that? Isn’t the aim to reach as many people as possible, to scale up the overall effect as widely as possible? Isn’t this supposed to be about everyone?)  

Generally speaking, the darker the material, the more it absorbs heat. This is already a problem in many cities, and with the world warming up as it’s doing right now, it’s only going to get worse.

For example, roads. Fresh asphalt only reflects around 5% of the sunlight hitting it, so it can get up a shoe-melting 50 degrees hotter than the surrounding air temperature.

Concrete, estimated to be the most widely-used substance on the planet apart from water, is a problem in all sorts of ways, but one is how dull it is, optically speaking. It dominates our cities and it absolutely guzzles heat, helping create what are now called urban heat islands - settlements that are noticeably hotter than the surrounding countryside.

(And to be clear, this isn’t blaming concrete as such - it’s transformed a lot of lives for the better, simply because it’s empowered billions of people to acquire cheap homes for themselves. Concrete is not innately “bad” in this regard - but it certainly causes a lot of environmental problems.)

The wider problem is rising global temperatures, and there’s plenty that should be done about that - you’d best go read Bill McKibben’s newsletter for the details - but in terms of alleviating the symptoms in cities, speaking very broadly, there’s two things in particular that seem to work really well: planting loads of trees, and painting all those concrete surfaces a different colour. 

For example, in 2017 the western Indian city of Ahmedabad ran a pilot scheme where 3,000 rooftops were painted with a mixture of white lime and a reflective coating. This cooled the buildings underneath by between 2 and 5 degrees Celsius. Something similar is happening with New York’s tar roofs, under the CoolRoofs programme - and Los Angeles has coated some of its streets in a light grey paint. It helps, and it works.

But - how white can white get? Not a social question, but a scientific one: what’s the maximum possible reflectivity of white paint? A team at Purdue University in Indiana has been experimenting with different compounds that absorb less UV light than usual paint materials, and in 2021, they created a paint that reflects 98.1% of all the sunlight landing on it - which means it could cool the surfaces it’s painted upon below the ambient temperature, without aircon. Pretty spectacular!

But I’ll tell you one thing from experience: walk down a white-painted street in the Greek islands on a blazingly hot day, and your eyes are going to get a battering.

All that reflected light still has to go somewhere, and where it goes is into your face. Simply bouncing the sunlight off would condemn future inhabitants of our cities to the urban equivalent of snow blindness, unless everyone wears the kinds of cool sunglasses that science fiction’s been telling us everyone in the future should be wearing. Nevertheless: doesn’t feel like a complete solution.

So how about less reflective colours that deliberately absorb heat - then process it into an energy source? This seems a very fruitful avenue of research, and I’m sure solar panels are the uppermost tip of the iceberg here.

But it could be that the most useful colour for buildings of the future is - well, all of them, all at the same time.

You know that gorgeous wash of colour you get on the side of a soap bubble when you’re washing the dishes and you really froth the water up, and then your girlfriend asks you to stop making a mess, but you’re having great fun so you reply defensively that you’re doing a science experiment that’s going in your newsletter…..

You know soap bubbles? That shimmering rainbow on their surface is called iridescence, and it’s a different way of creating colour. Basically, as light enters the side of that bubble, the light impacting it it head-on travels a shorter path through its surface than light entering at a wider angle which creates different wavelengths undergoing constructive and destructive interference, and - uh, some science happens, and so we see all those different colours. That’s how it happens. Yes.

This is called structural colour, because it’s created by the way light interacts with the structure of a surface.

There’s a butterfly in the Amazon called the blue morpho, and when I say blue I mean the most intense and luminous of blues you’ll ever see. Only thing is, blue is an incredibly rare pigment colour in nature, so this butterfly cheats: it actually has dully-pigmented, almost colourless wings that appear blue when the light hits them. This is done via diamond-shaped scales that create a wavelength-specific form of iridescence, which is that piercing blue.

The research team at Lexus recently tried a similar technique to coat a model of car, and they created a luminously blue finish that doesn’t contain any blue pigment, all for the low low low price of $100,000. 

But this matters beyond the shiny toys for wealthy people, because in theory, structural colour could be changed on the fly. Remember when I talked about new technologies for changing the colour of things? I said this about its potential for buildings: 

“This could be an incredibly useful thing for the outsides of buildings for heat regulation. Just imagine it - on a really hot and sunny day, the outside of your home brightens up to reflect more heat away and keep the indoors a bit cooler, like the white-painted walls of homes in the islands of Greece - and on a bitterly cold day, it darkens to absorb as much heat as possible. Maybe even instantly, in response to the sun coming out from behind a cloud. Imagine seeing a whole street doing that, or a city, in response to a sunbeam. Wouldn’t that be trippy?” 

But maybe nobody will want that. And we certainly won’t want urban snow-blindness either. As fun as strange-looking building are, if everyday office blocks started shimmering with iridescence…well, just go and watch the film version of Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation and see how creeped out you feel. (But also, please read the books too, they’re even eerier.)

I reckon there’s a good chance we’ll just want most of our urban infrastructure to remain that reassuringly boring everyday range of colours we’re all used to (the nice ones, anyway). Is it possible to do that and help reduce temperatures inside, or absorb heat for energy-generating purposes? Is it possible for everyone to be happy here?

The answer might be yes, if artificial iridescence fulfils its promise. This new wave of artificial structural colours that can keep surfaces cool - they don’t actually have to be coloured white, or be light colours at all.

For example, there are the coatings that Yuan Yang and his team have developed at New York’s Columbia University, using an iridescent layer to reflect 90% of the infrared light, and another layer over the top of it that’s regular old pigmented paint - so onlookers get the visual benefits of a fashionable colour within our visible spectrum, but outside of those wavelengths, it’s also blocking incoming heat. A black version of this was seen to keep surfaces almost 16 degrees cooler than normal black paint.

So maybe what’s going to happen is - well, not much, at least to our eyes? If so, the colours of the outside of new buildings aren’t going to get a lot weirder, but under the surface (quite literally), structural colour could be keeping things a lot cooler inside our homes. If that can be produced at a big scale, that would be great, considering the energy spent on aircon around the world is already about 10% of global electricity consumption. Putting a meaningful dent in that would have a big effect.

But if you’re a bit disappointed that the future might not look like one of Salvador Dali’s nightmares, here’s a throwaway paragraph from theoretical physicist Michio Kaku’s book The Future Of Humanity, a speculative hard-science look at the next century or so.

In this section he’s talking about graphene, a form of carbon that is incredibly strong - if it’s laid down in a layer one atom thick, it’s over a hundred times stronger than the best steel at that same thickness (making it stronger than diamond). Graphene also conducts electricity, weighs practically nothing, and has some…really weird optical properties, to say the least.

Here’s Michio Kaku:

“Carbon nanotubes are sheets of graphene rolled into long tubes. They are practically unbreakable and nearly invisible. If you built the suspension for the Brooklyn Bridge out of carbon nanotubes, the bridge would look like it was floating in midair.”

If you want to see what this might look like in action, here’s an underwater carbon nanotube “invisibility cloak” being demonstrated in 2011:

What’s happening here isn’t ‘invisibility’ in the Harry Potter sense - it’s a nanotube-induced equivalent of the light-bending heat shimmer you can see above roads on a hot day, or the Fata Morgana mirage I wrote about in season 3.

But however it’d work, there’s certainly a weird thought: practically invisible buildings. Or parts of them, invisibly holding up other parts in a way that makes the whole structure look like it’s about to collapse.

How would we feel about that? I bet influencer thrillseekers would take to them in the same way they’ve eagerly leapt into those glass-bottomed swimming pools hanging off the tops of skyscrapers - but the rest of us? Not so much?

(Maybe they’d end up painted to make them visible, in the same way that digital SLRs or electric vehicles have artificial sounds to add that reassuring shuttery *click* or prevent us from being run over.)

However our cities of the future will look, it seems they’ll be using colour in ways it’s hard to imagine right now, keeping us cool, lowering heat island temperatures and even turning currently-wasted heat into the juice to power our homes - even if the overall effect might not look too different to what we’re used to right now…

Or hey, maybe it will, and we’re in for a lot of eyepopping weirdness!

(I’d like to cast my vote for buildings swiss-cheesed with holes for nesting birds. That feels like a future worth having.)

Next time: Season 5 is a wrap! What’s next?

Further Reading

“How the shimmering secrets of iridescence could keep us cool” - Michael Allen, New Scientist

“How one foil-wrapped home survived the Caldor Fire as everything around it burned” - Michael Cabanatuan, San Francisco Chronicle 

“‘Mirage-effect’ helps researchers hide objects” - EurekAlert!

“The white roofs cooling women’s homes in Indian slums” - Vandana K, BBC Future

Images: Vangelis Kovu; Lucas Zischke; Matt Howard; Erik Škof.

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In the next edition, we’re returning to the fascinating world of colours, to wrap up the whole fifth season of EiA that started almost a year ago.

But today - well, this is a quick one, since it’s the anniversary of one of the most impactful bouts of rethinking and overcoming sunk cost fallacy in modern Western history, as thirteen British colonies decided they’d had enough and lodged what we British called “their extravagant and inadmissable Claim of Independency".

Since 51% of the readers of this newsletter are based in those former colonies turned world superpower, I’m guessing you’d much rather be spending the day burning effigies of King George III, throwing perfectly good tea in your nearest harbour, eating “pan-cakes” and “hot-dogs” and other odd-sounding things, and hopefully not checking your email or spending it on social media like this poor wretch:

But before you go celebrate throwing off our cruel imperialistic yoke - did you know this mostly-forgotten slice of Independence history, which took place off the northern coast of England, of all places?

As you approach the site of one of the most celebrated battles of the American War of Independence, you’ll pass a huge wooden bird.

It’s almost as tall as you are, and it has a furious expression, like it’s about to creak Harryhausen-like into life and headbutt you over the cliff’s edge. In fact this isn’t quite as stupid as it first sounds – you’re entering the nesting territory of one of the UK’s Special Areas of Conservation, where cute sea-birds turn into razor-beaked, enmity-propelled javelins aimed at your head…

Take The Hint, says the wooden guardian silently.

It’s weird to step off the clay of the Holderness coast. This is a soft part of the British Isles, but suddenly you’ll find the ground hard, the path crunching with chalk fragments. This headland is northern England’s only chalk sea cliff, and to the north and the south of it, the coastline is scooped out by some of the fastest rates of erosion in Europe. Nothing endures because nothing has had time to dry: the glacial tills and boulder clays that make the surface of East Yorkshire were laid down just 20,000 year ago.

That’s nothing. That barely registers on normal geological timescales. A wiper-blade of glacial ice sweeps up to the pole, leaving a smear of dirt in its wake…onto which we’ve crammed all our local history.

Now I’m seeing what’s underneath, and it’s so old it has basically been here forever.

Down here on the beach, you hear everything at least twice. The sound clatters off the chalk wall, echoing and multiplying and making the world sound badly produced. But it’s also nearer. The Holderness coast is flat, and sounds travel a long way round here, never quite dying away to nothing – and you only hear that when they’re blocked, absorbed, gone. Down here, there’s the sea on one side and there’s what you did a split-second ago on the other, and that’s it.

That’s all you’re aware of. You just stepped off the modern world, and now you’re standing looking up at layers of rock that used to be alive a hundred million years ago.

You continue to stand and stare, because, how else do you respond to all that?

Let’s imagine you’re standing here on a September night 244 years ago, looking out to sea.

The cliff behind you booms with distant cannon-fire, as the newly-minted United States of America fights for its independence a couple of miles offshore.

What’s happening out there is heroic, exciting and faintly ridiculous. Thirteen British colonies in North America, 3400 miles away, have decided they’ve had enough of Britain’s outrageous nonsenses, and they’ve declared independence.

That’s not the ridiculous bit, of course. What’s ridiculous is that an American Continental Navy squadron is fighting the British here, off the coast of Yorkshire. Formerly anchored in France, it’s been sailing up and down the coast of Britain, attempting to cut British naval supply lines and generally spoiling for a fight.

At Flamborough Head, it finds a prey worthy of attention: a southbound convey of 40 British ships, protected by the 40-gun Serapis and the 20-gun Countess of Scarborough.

What follows, what’s taking place amidst all those thunderous flashes you’re watching right now, is one of the most extraordinarily fierce battles in naval history, as the American captain John Paul Jones turns his battered 40-gun East Indiaman Bonhomme Richard towards an enemy that outguns him almost two to one.

As legend has it, the battle only turns when Jones rams his fatally shot-up ship into the side of Serapis, and one of his seamen has the quick wit to lug a bucket of grenades to the ship’s side so he could toss them into holes or hatches in the British ship’s hull. One lands in the lower deck’s gunpowder stores. The rear half of Serapis blasts apart, killing the bulk of its gun-crew and putting the entire lower gundeck out of action.

Shortly after, the British captain is striking his colours.

You’re further out now. Seaweed and limpets underfoot: you’re going to go over at some point and it’ll hurt, so you stop and watch the jet-skis zipping around the ancient battleground, watch the wind turbines down the coast turn and turn and turn, feel the sun get low enough for the cold wind to cut into your fleece, and suddenly you’ve seen and felt enough and your brain is full…

And then it’s time to clamber up the cliff, out of history, back to the fascinating absurdities of the modern world, where you can remember who you are again.

Directions For Getting To Flamborough Head

Go up the east coast of Yorkshire north of Hull, and keep going until it bulges outwards. You can’t miss it – there’s a bloody great big wooden bird in the way, and lots of chalk (the rock, not the tiny white sticks your teacher used to throw at you for not listening in class…I think I’m projecting, sorry).

The village of Flamborough is sleepy and tiny, and the cliffs at nearby Bempton (pictured) are high and terrifying, so if you want to stock up on proper lunch-supplies and maybe a hard-hat to protect yourself from homicidal sea-birds, go to Bridlington. You’d like it there. It’s grand.

If you find these instructions inadequate, then (1) well, that’s too bad, this is why I’m not a travel writer anymore, and (2) you’ll probably find this guide from the Guardian much more helpful.

Thanks for reading!

- Mike

Images: Thom Holmes; Mike Sowden.

Hello! This is Everything is Amazing, a newsletter about curiosity, attention, awe and wonder. 

And today, instead of delighting/scaring you with tales of arsenic paint and enormous blue holes, I thought I’d try something very different.

At the start of this year, I created a discussion thread where I asked “hey, what do you wish more people were curious about?” And because there were 13,800 of you reading at the time, it went bananas in the most fascinating of ways that proved to me, absolutely conclusively, that you’re all way more interesting than I am, and that the wrong person is probably writing my newsletter.

(But no, you can’t have it. I’m having far too much fun here. Sorry.)

Now we’re halfway through the year and there are over 18,000 of us, I thought I’d have another try at being awed by your horrifyingly boundless knowledge, wisdom and imagination - and it ties in with something I’ll be writing about the act of writing a newsletter, which is coming in a few weeks, just before season 5 wraps up.

I started Everything Is Amazing to reboot my sense of curiosity and wonder after having the wind knocked out of my sails by some stressful times, as I explained to here. And originally, this project had a strict time limit. I’d give myself a year to see what I could learn, and after that year, I’d decide whether it was worth continuing. As it turned out, it changed my life (and my career). But more than that, it was just fun - and that restarted my enthusiasm for learning new things, in exactly the way I hoped it would…

So I have an entirely hypothetical question for you:

If you had the opportunity (adequate finances, the freedom to go anywhere, everything arranged for you that would need to be arranged, etc.) to spend one full year pursuing a single hobby/skill/enthusiasm in a deeply committed way, on your own or within a team, having 🤓SUCH AMAZING NERDY FUN🤓 that you'd be able to feel it all the way down to your boots...

What would you do?

Throw caution to the wind and give me your most recklessly enthusiastic answer in the comments below!

- Mike

(Image: Nathan Dumlao)

One of the downfalls of running a newsletter like this is that you find people want to know more about you. You write like some kind of hypercaffeinated dimwit, so you must be hilarious in real life, they exclaim excitedly. Nothing I can say seems to deter these folk - so today, I’m trying a different tack.

This BBC report from 1973 was filmed in the seaside town that I grew up in - the town that, in essence, made me the man I am today. Please bear that in mind as you watch:

Any questions?

No?

Good stuff. Let’s keep it that way and get back to the science.

And regarding that - hey, a new ‘Blue Hole’ in the ocean floor has just been found!

No, not that one. That’s the arrestingly photogenic marine sinkhole in Belize, nicknamed The Great Blue Hole, which the French oceanographer Jacques Cousteau made famous with his investigations in 1971.

If you don’t feel a thrill of horror at the sight of it, allow me to give you a push: around 90 metres down, there’s a translucent layer of hydrogen sulfide that acts rather like a chemical guillotine, killing much of the marine life that strays into it. This means the night-dark floor of the hole at a depth of 124 metres (407 feet) is a graveyard, mainly for conch - and as the first of those unlucky victims decomposed, they stripped the oxygen out of the water, leaving it anoxic. Even if something survived the trip through that layer of liquid swamp gas, it’d quickly suffocate. A Pixar movie this ain’t.

And if you’re wondering how dangerous this could be for human life, three people have been reported missing around the Great Blue Hole - and in 2018, a team including Cousteau's grandson Fabien Cousteau and National Geographic explorer Erika Bergman found the bodies of two of them laying in the darkness, surrounded by conch shells, a 2-litre Coke bottle and a lost GoPro containing someone’s vacation photos.

So that’s the most famous Blue Hole - but it’s not the deepest. That honour goes to the Yongle Blue Hole (dramatically nicknamed the Dragon Hole) in the South China Sea, which plunges for 300 metres, roughly the same length as the Eiffel Tower. That one also highlights the danger of using the d-word: in July 2016, the Washington Post announced “Researchers just discovered the world's deepest underwater sinkhole in the South China Sea". Um - yes and no? They may have discovered it’s the deepest, but considering it’s believed to be mentioned in the 16th-Century Chinese novel Journey to the West (the inspiration for this delightfully insane TV show that I used to watch as a kid), that headline makes it easy to incorrectly give them credit for being the first to find it at all. Words, they be slippery, they be.

Similarly, the ‘newly-discovered’ Blue Hole in the Western Caribbean is called the Taam ja’ - and the researchers found it’s 274 metres deep, making it the second-deepest after Dragon Hole.

Aside from the sensationalist & morbidly creepifying side of it, why is this interesting? One reason: it’s a glimpse at an unusual environment that may mirror conditions on another world, in the same way the Lost City Hydrothermal Vent in the Atlantic might give clues to how life could survive in the as-yet-unconfirmed abyssal oceans of Jupiter’s moon Europa, as I wrote about here. But also, they’re just poorly understood features. The less that’s known, the more surprises could be waiting to be (truly!) discovered…

Right then. On with today’s fun thing!

Since September of last year, I’ve been investigating my way into the weighty topic of how the geology under our feet directly affects our lives, as part of the “season within a season” for paid subscribers to Everything Is Amazing.

We’ve looked at:

• the impressive, worrying and occasionally ludicrous modern efforts to build artificial mountains (a now-unlocked post that everyone can read)

• the way that deep geological time allowed everything to go everywhere (including how my nearest mountain here in Scotland travelled all the way up from near the South Pole)…

• the emotional impact of a good mountain…

• the enticing immensity of the Great Pangean Mountain Trail, running along both sides of the Atlantic and marking where ancient supercontinents were once wrenched apart…

• the titanic ‘trees of fire’ and enormous blobs - yes, that’s the proper scientific term - that pump energy to the surface of our world…

• the thousand invisible hands of a Scottish maelstrom (a now-unlocked post that everyone can read)…

• …and the way plastics and discarded technology are turning into technofossils and new forms of rock.

But today, I’ll confess I’m an idiot, because I’m ending the series with the biggest effect of all, the one I probably should have started with, especially as reader Jenny indirectly tipped me off about it in the comments at the beginning of the season. (Thanks/sorry, Jenny!)

This one is about how perfectly we fit the world we live upon - and in the manner of many a classic science-adventure story, it starts with scientists on a mountainside, frowning at their instruments.

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Today, we return to this season’s main focus: the unsurprisingly lively science of colours. We’ve already looked at newly invented ones, impossible ones, historical ones, changeable ones and the ones maybe only women can see.

So let’s consider the safest and most reassuring colour in the modern world - a colour that says Hey, everything’s great, trust me. It’s fiiiiine. I mean, what could possibly go wrong here?

What indeed? Let’s take an increasingly horrified look.

It’s 1775, and Swedish-German pharmaceutical chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele has made an astonishing discovery.

This is becoming something of a habit. Scheele is, by any measure, a brilliant scientist with an unquenchable curiosity and a thoroughly reckless fascination for his craft. This has meant a lot of experiments, bucketload of discoveries, and a short but supremely accomplished career that should have made him a household name (including now, hundreds of years later).

But alas. A kinder world might celebrate Scheele’s legacy for what it was. Instead, it affectionately ridicules it.

In one of his roundups of the history of science, the late sci fi author (and Professor of Biochemistry) Isaac Asimov called him “hard-luck Scheele". And in A Short History Of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson has this to say:

“Scheele was both an extraordinary and an extraordinarily luckless fellow. A humble pharmacist with little in the way of advanced apparatus, he discovered eight elements - chlorine, fluorine, manganese, barium, molybdenum, tungsten, nitrogen and oxygen - and got credit for none of them. In every case, his finds were either overlooked or made it into publication after someone else had made the same discovery independently. He also discovered many useful compounds, among them ammonia, glycerin and tannic acid, and was the first to see the commercial potential of chlorine as a bleach - all breakthroughs that made other people extremely wealthy.”

But this new discovery in 1775 has the potential to turn the tide in Scheele’s favour.

To untrained eyes, it might not look like much - a solution of chemicals he’d somehow turned a pea-green colour by heating and stirring them together. But because of his line of work, Scheele knows that finding reliable and plentiful green dyes is a huge problem for so many industries (for example, the few natural-origin dyes that lend themselves to bulk production in the fashion industry tend to fade quickly under bright sunshine). He knows that the hunt is on for synthetical alternatives.

It’s also possible he’s still smarting from his previous colour-based discovery having failed to make an immediate splash, a bright-yellow hue that would later become known as Turner’s Patent Yellow - after the British manufacturer who stole the patent from him. Sigh.

Worse still, the previous year Scheele had discovered a gas that attacked many metals, worked as a bleaching agent, and when combined with soda it formed common salt (sodium chloride). Scheele had discovered chlorine - but thanks to misidentifying it at the time, it would be up to Humphrey Davy to later formally recognise the gas as an element and name it after the Greek word for its color, khloros (“greenish yellow”), thereby taking the credit.

This happened in 1810 - thirty-six years after Scheele’s discovery. Sucks to be you, Carl.

But now, perhaps, an opportunity. Could this rich, almost luminous green be of commercial use? And if so, could he bloody well be credited for discovering it, please?

Behold the glory of Scheele’s Green, adorning the walls of the subject in Georg Friedrich Kersting’s Woman Embroidering (1812).

That’s probably wallpaper on the wall up there - a telling sign of how cheap the colour is to produce by this point. It’s singlehandedly triggered a small revolution in colour design. The Victorian world is obsessed with it - and rightly so, because, what other green so effortlessly mimics the verdant hues found in nature? A proper Goldilocks of a colour: not too much nor too little, neither drab nor a Day-Glo assault on the eyes, with no ugly tints or streaks bleeding through as it eventually fades.

It’s perfect for a post-Industrial-Revolution Britain (and France) that has grown disgruntled at how ugly its cities have become, how visually disconnected from the bright, Eden-like Utopian dreams in the high literature of the day.

The Victorian world is ready to turn everything this beautiful shade of green.

Like the Victorians, we’re increasingly obsessed with green things.

It’s not like green’s popularity ever went away, of course - even after the horror of….well, we’ll get to that in a minute. But according to various industry pundits, the colour green is currently extra-desirable: in home decor (“a recent survey by The Harris Poll found that online searches for “green paint” have more than doubled since 2020”) and in fashion, where Vogue confidently announced “wearing green is the closest you can come to taking a forest bath,” which, erm - no? But anyway: more people are wanting to wear green clothes is the point here.

Then there’s the other use of the word green, the vitally important one, the one where we take responsibility for the health of the thin, fragile, habitable skin of the planet we live upon.

The image above is the Northern Forest, a proposed corridor of trees, 50 million of them, across one of the least-wooded parts of England, surrounding up some of the north’s biggest cities. (Hopefully not just surrounding! As I said in the last newsletter, trees planted in cities cool them in hot weather. We’ll need that effect in the warmer years to come.)

And on another scale entirely, there’s the Great Green Wall, launched in 2007 - an attempt to plant a belt of trees along Africa’s colossal Sahel region, south of the Sahara desert.

This project is designed to unite eleven nations in the service of creating arable land in some of the poorest, driest regions in Africa. It’s certainly not as outlandish as it first sounds, considering that sometime between 5,000 and 14,500 years ago, the Sahara was a mass of grasses, trees, lakes and wetlands - but it’ll still be a colossal undertaking.

When fully underway, it’ll help check the spread of desert, invest in thousands of jobs in sustainable farming and livestock cultivation, and so much more, and it’ll all start with the trees: over 4,700 miles of them, in a 9-mile-wide strip, running right the way across Africa.

(The former travel writer in me is whispering Just imagine walking all that, from end to end. Wouldn’t that be an adventure?)

Green is health and Nature and the way forward. Green means good. Going green is never a bad idea. That’s what green means, right?

It’s 1861, and 19-year-old Matilda Scheurer isn’t feeling well. Not well at all.

She’s working as a florist, and it’s part of her job to go round all the artificial flower headdresses and “fluff them up,” dusting them with powdered Emerald Green paint to brighten up the colour.

(Emerald Green is now the nationally preferred, near-identical alternative to Scheele’s Green, thus continuing the ill-starred scientist’s lifelong curse of never getting lasting credit. Although, considering what happens next, that could be a blessing…)

Now Matilda is getting sicker and sicker. She’s suffering convulsions. She’s vomiting green water from her mouth and nose - and it’s even coming out the corner of her eyes, the whites of which now have a distinctly green tint, as do her fingernails. She’s telling people that everything is starting to look green…

How can this be happening with a safe, everyday green paint that everyone has been using for decades?

But of course it’s happening. Scheele’s Green’s toxicity isn’t news to the doctors that have been tracking its destructive effects for years, trying to raise awareness to no avail. It just wasn’t, you know, news, so there was too little pressure to do anything about it. Plus, this cheap, powerful colour was too important to the fashion industry, to manufacture, to artificial flower making, you name it. What - you expect everyone’s profits to suffer, just because a few lowly workers suffered open sores, organ failure, cancerous growths and an early death? Come now!

At some level, Scheele must have suspected something - certainly at the end of his life, which came in 1786, just eleven years after his discovery of Scheele’s Green. His long habit of testing all the substances he worked with by smelling and tasting them (he’d have got on well with William Buckland) had taken its toll - and he died of kidney failure, brought on by exposure to mercury, lead, hydrofluoric acid, and arsenic. He was 41.

Scheele’s Green (AsCuHO₃) is made by heating sodium carbonate, adding arsenious oxide, stirring until everything is dissolved, then adding a bit of copper sulfate at the end. The result is a lovely, natural-looking shade of green that can make lots of people very happy while slowly killing them from arsenic poisoning.

It seems the appalling death of Matilda Scheurer was something of a turning point. For mainland Europe, that is - it appears Britain was much slower to react to the pressure from the Press, from women’s clubs and from the medical professions. It would be 1890 (!) before the last brand of wallpaper using Scheele’s Green would cease production.

(This is why, if you’re buying a house in Britain that’s over 130 years old, it’s probably an excellent idea to strip off the existing wallpaper to check there isn’t a flash of green underneath.)

A particularly bloodcurdling offshoot of this story: the Scottish shipbuilding town of Greenock, which is around 40 miles from where I’m currently writing this newsletter, had at this time an unusual passion for the colour green. (The town’s name is unrelated - it’s probably derived from the Gaelic Grianáig, meaning “sandy place”.)

In and around Greenock, Scheele’s Green was used not just for wallpaper, but also in the paper lining people’s groceries, and even (*deep breath*) as a food colourant, in sweets/candy, cakes and icing. One variety of edible cake decoration, which was advertised as “for the bairnies” (‘kids’), was found to contain seven times the fatal adult dose of arsenic.

The fallout of all this - which must have been truly grim - seems to be a national aversion to green-tinted sweet food. In 1954, the Professor of Forensic Medicine at Glasgow University noted that "fewer green sweets are sold in Scotland than in any other country," adding: "It is astonishing why the idea of green colour in confections should suggest the stupid impression that arsenic is present".

Taking a step back for a second, it’s fascinating how quickly and powerfully the word “green” has come to mean so much more than “the colour green”. Apart from blue meaning gently miserable, I can’t think of another colour being used in this way in the English language. (Please correct me if you can think of another example - even better, if it’s in another language!)

While that’s mainly a good thing, for raising awareness about all sorts of environmental issues, it’s also a super-bad thing. My very first writing gig back in 2009 was for an online eco-friendly magazine based in San Francisco (alongside and other folk I’m still good friends with), and that was my first introduction to the blight of greenwashing, the ecological equivalent of the way pink has been used to cynically bamboozle women into thinking less about their consumer choices.

Greenwashing promotes a lot of really dumb thinking - the kind I associate with the most knuckleheaded kind of videogaming (I’m a gamer here, I’m not dunking on games, but - you know that behaviour when you see it/do it).

For example:

• “If we plant all THESE trees, that means we can cut down an equal number of THESE trees! Simple math!”

• “It’s okay if we do this massively ecologically befouling thing as long as we offset it - then it basically never happened!”

• “We can save the planet if we just plant enough new trees!”

In fact:

• “To achieve “net zero” by 2050 using “land-based” carbon removal methods – a category that includes tree-planting, reforestation projects and land management techniques that help lock more carbon in soil – “would require at least 1.6bn hectares of new forests, equivalent to five times the size of India or more than all the farmland on the planet”, a recent analysis by Oxfam found.” - Maanvi Singh, The Guardian

• Cutting down old growth forest is catastrophically damaging, and more of a step backwards than new growth projects can hope to offset in the near future. As the World Wildlife Fund says: “Planting trees is good. Saving existing forests is better. Protecting people and nature is best.”

• Some big companies have been lying for decades to protect their profits. Not just by omission, but via well-documented efforts to spend huge amounts of money promoting counternarratives that their own researchers had found to be untrue. Considering the very real human impact of the latter, if you were looking for a definition of the term ‘monstrously evil’, I’d say that gets pretty close?

Both the Northern Forest and the Great Green Wall are terrific, smart and hopeful initiatives. I hope they rally people to their cause like few projects in human history.

At the same time, regarding the former, sustainability professional Andrew Heald pointed out to me on Twitter that despite grand promises from its current government, the UK is continually missing its tree-planting targets year upon year - with a more recent report concluding that it’s set to fall short on many other environmental targets as well…

This isn’t really my specific turf - go follow for an infinitely wiser voice on all this - but as I understand it in a general sense, greenwashing is about preventing people asking questions. The word “green” has become an immensely motivating commercial force as much as a scientific one - and while the best science encourages questions, the worst businesses try to prevent them. They want you to think, Oh, it says it’s “green”, that must mean I’m helping the planet, it must, because why would they be allowed to lie like that? and then push your trolley to the next aisle while wondering what’s on telly tonight.

This gives the colour green a unique role in our modern world. It’s a colour with a message. It yells “yes, let’s revel in positivity and hope for the best - but let’s also make sure we’re not kidding ourselves or being tricked”. It’s the colour of respecting credible scientific caution and resisting bullshit as much as it’s about a worldwide celebration of, and investment in, Earth’s natural beauty.

It says, “No, let’s ask more questions here, not less. THAT is the way.”

(Perhaps questions like, hey, is painting arsenic on the walls of my house really that great of an idea? Really? Are you sure?)

So yes, green is indeed good - but it holds its opinions lightly and it asks all the right questions. I hope that message continues to get through.

Images: Hannelore Gärtner/Wikimedia; Woodland Trust; engin akyurt; jeonsango.

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Regarding that last point - when I wrote this piece on the Great British Scone Debate a few weeks back, I never suspected the following two things would happen:

1. It’s now the most popular piece I’ve written for this newsletter. (A piece on scones. In a newsletter about science. But hey, fine, it’s not like I was trying to build credibility for myself or anything. *stares out window for a while*)

2. It has crossed the Atlantic and is now wreaking havoc in New York as well.

I can’t (and also refuse to) take any credit/blame for the latter. It’s all down to , author of CAFÉ ANNE. We got talking in the comments to my scones piece, and in a moment of madness I said:

“I propose…we find a new, third pronunciation of "scone". Any ideas? I was thinking of how you pronounce the word "one", ie. "WON", and just adding "sc" at the front to make "SKWON". That should cause a healthy amount of chaos if used liberally in a public setting.”

Anne, who has a professional history of embracing this sort of bedlam, immediately went out into the streets of New York in search of people to bewilder.

A sample exchange:

Saturday, 11:45 am, Blank Street Coffee, Brooklyn Heights

Anne: “Hi, um, do you have a cranberry skwon?”

Barista: “No, we don’t.”

Anne: “No? Okay. Thank you.”

Barista: “Have a good day.”

Anne: “You too!”

Barista (To his coworker, as I’m leaving): “What’s a skwon?”

While privately I may have laughed like an absolute drain at all this, I cannot publicly condone this sort of behaviour. That would be irresponsible - as would be pointing you towards Anne’s hilarious writeup, perhaps by using an enormous embedded link, like this:

CAFÉ ANNE

Calling a Scone a Skwon!

Hello everyone, Welcome to Issue #73 of CAFÉ ANNE! I was delighted after running last week’s feature, Lost Pets of New York, to hear from reader Laura Kelly, who lives in Bulgaria and has published an entire book of lost pet posters. How cool is that? She also suggested starting a Lost Pet Posters Collectors Society. I’m in! Rule #1: Do NOT talk about th…

Read more

3 years ago · 58 likes · 113 comments · Anne Kadet

So I definitely won’t be doing that. It’d only encourage her.

Anyway, it’s been a bit of a week, so how about some sky science?

A few days ago, after a far-too-long session in front of my laptop that left me feeling particularly dull and empty, I shoved everything into a rucksack and went in search of some fresh air.

My new flat is in the middle of town - but in this corner of Scotland (above), that phrase means something like “a gathering of more than ten houses, occupied or abandoned, containing or not containing sheep” so it’s never that difficult to find a quiet spot.

I found a metal bench overlooking the sea, pulled out my water bottle and my electronic notebook thingy, and took a few huge gulps of the fresh sea air.

I immediately felt better. Not just ‘better,’ in fact, but a wholesale banishing of that feeling of having my limbs and my head full of concrete, of all my thoughts gridlocked between neurons, and a vanishing of that sense of being a cheap, “Similar To As Seen On TV” version of myself.

Five more minutes of that, and I was ready to work again. I wrote and wrote for an hour, enjoyed a few good “aha!” moments, and generally blazed through the work I’d struggled all morning to piece together in a coherent and meaningful way.

I know, I know. Getting some fresh air always helps. On one level, this is obvious. It’s not even clever obvious, like: “If nobody comes from the future to stop you doing it, then how bad of a decision can it really be?” (Thanks, science fiction.)

No. Everyone knows that fresh air is good for you, and immensely enjoyable to experience as well. Duh.

But in the spirit of not trusting “obvious” things because of their proven ability to stop you thinking about them and maybe learning something new for a change, I got to wondering: why do we enjoy fresh air so much?

Off the bat, I see two avenues of inquiry here. Maybe it’s about the way we breathe and the benefits of improving it - in which case, I’d turn to my friend Jonny, who I interviewed back in season 2, and who currently runs the Nervous System Mastery course, to the delight of all his students.

But today I want to look outside the body, at the air itself. This makes it the kind of question about the natural world that Heather Wall would do a great job of answering, or maybe Melanie Newfield at The Turnstone (although she’s looking at water at the moment).

Back in the first season I looked at why it’s possible to love the smell of coffee and hate drinking the stuff, which is down to the absolutely bizarre way our senses of smell and taste interact with each other. Could I find something that weird going on here as well?

The answer is a tentative but enthusiastic HELL YES.

Every now and again, the nerve cells connected to your nose go a little haywire.

It’s known as “spontaneous olfactory discharge” - and you don’t notice it because the other neurons in charge of processing the sensory information we call odours compare with the other smell-related data they’re receiving, flag these rogue inputs up as glitches, and override them.

However, if something’s awry with the way you perceive smells - for example, the blunting of the sensations of smell and/or taste arising from a disease like COVID-19 - then there’s less of a fact-checking bulwark against these random nerve firings. There’s less reason for your brain to consider them suspicious. Sometimes, it gives them a green light.

In those moments, your nervous system starts telling you about things that aren’t really there, filling in the blanks in a similar way to the visual hallucinations that occur when you exhaust the neurons in your retinas by staring at your own reflection, as I wrote about previously.

The olfactory version is known as phantosmia - and as Helen Thomson reported for BBC Future in 2015, it struck software engineer Max Livesey (a pseudonym) in his hotel room on holiday: a vile pong of burning leaves, turning it into the illusory effect called cacosmia, which means you smell something as bad as…yes, that.

In Livesey’s case, the cause was no mystery: he had Parkinson’s disease, which often comes with an impaired sense of smell. But something else was going on:

“Livesey had started to notice something even more peculiar: his hallucinations would get worse just before a storm. Two to three hours before clouds gather, his phantosmia intensifies and persist throughout a storm. Sometimes, he says, he can predict a storm coming up to ten hours before it starts.”

It’s a well-documented fact that our bodies can be affected by the weather, as those will attest who suffer headaches and joint & muscle pains as foul skies approach. (In my late teens I broke my arm while riding a BMX over a home-made ramp - and to this day, it throbs with discomfort when the weather is changing.)

But according to Alan Hirsch of the Smell and Taste Treatment and Research Foundation in Chicago, Livesey’s case was the first to formally tie phantosmia with weather. One particular explanation seemed likely:

Less well-known is the fact that our sense of smell is also known to decrease with a drop in air pressure, says Hirsch. Since a drop in barometric pressure that precedes a thunderstorm would reduce Livesey’s olfactory ability even further, it may serve to further increase his phantosmia.

Of course, Livesey’s phantom smells may simply be a case of recall bias, where a selective memory may lead him to notice the times that his phantosmia gets worse before a storm than when it fluctuates at other times. Or it could be that he’s already been primed by a weather forecast beforehand. Livesey doesn’t believe this is the case – on many occasions he has not seen a forecast, yet was still able to predict the onset of bad weather.

So it could be that the “goodness” of a good, clean fresh-air smell is an olfactory mirage. After all, air itself is just air, which doesn’t really smell of anything - and there’s also the double-whammy of our noses being less sensitive to smells when they’re colder (which fresh air usually is), while odour molecules buoyed aloft by the wind have less energy (heat being energy and all that) and therefore don’t jostle their way up our noses quite as vigorously. All very sensible-sounding.

But of course we can smell changes in the weather. It’s not an illusion.

If you’ve ever gone for a walk as a thunderstorm approaches, you might have noticed a coppery, vaguely bleach-like smell in the air. That’ll be ozone (O_3),the same stuff that forms a layer in the stratosphere that protects us from cancer-triggering ultraviolet light, and now should continue to do so after one of the most successful environmental campaigns in human history.

Ozone forms when lightning rips the air apart to form oxygen and nitrogen, leading to the formation of nitric oxide, which is important to biological health (Molecule of the Year in 1992!), and conventional oxygen (O₂) - and, every now and again, ozone.

You’re smelling it because of an enormous downdraft of air that comes before a storm, which drags ozone down from higher altitudes. What’s filling your nostrils is the aroma of the atmosphere 20 miles above your head - if it wasn’t so cold up there that your nose would immediate freeze solid, of course.

Other weather effects are even smellier. Tornadoes, according to professional storm chasers, reek of rotting vegetation, burnt wood and even sewage - although that could just be due to the devastation they’re wreaking at ground level. And when there’s a temperature inversion - the kind that causes the spectacular fata morgana optical illusion - pollutants can build up and linger in this slow-moving layer of cold air hugging the ground, making the air smell like whatever the nearest factory is belching from its chimneys.

Then there’s what is wafting up - which can have a huge effect on our sense of wellbeing.

In her endlessly fascinating book The Nature Fix, Florence Williams looked at the role of trees in providing us with really great-smelling air to hike through.

In a study conducted by Dr. Qing Li, medical doctor at Tokyo’s Nippon Medical School and founding member of the Japanese Society of Forest Therapy, a bunch of middle-aged Tokyo businessmen were taken for a hike in the woods, after which they had their bloods taken. Dr. Qing found that in every case, the test subject’s NK cells (effector lymphocytes associated with controlling tumours and fighting microbial infections) had increased by 40% - and a month later, they remained 15% higher than the individual’s everyday level.

Qing’s working hypothesis: the “aromatic volatile substances” in the air (aka. essential oils from the leaves of the trees, that delicious forest smell that our artificial air-fresheners unsuccessfully try to reproduce) were triggering this response.

To test it further, Dr. Qing placed 13 test subjects in hotel rooms for 3 nights: one half enjoying the effects of a humidifier loaded with oil from Hinoki cypress trees (a common sight in Japan), the other half without. Afterwards, the humidifier-breathing subjects saw a 20% boost in their NK cell levels, and reported getting a better night’s sleep than their null-smelling counterparts.

Then there’s the smell of the wet earth after rain, called petrichor - which you probably already know, because it’s that made-for-social-media combination of a gorgeous-sounding term for a gorgeous-sounding effect. It’s a similar kind of thing: oils hanging in the air after being splattered skywards into an aerosol by falling raindrops. In particular, one organic compound called geosmin, a type of alcohol formed from bacteria processing organic matter. It seems our noses are unusually attuned to this substance - able to detect a few parts per million.

Okay, fine, say the scientists. Yes, planted in the right places, forests are great, trees are great, and they make our air smell terrific - as well as cooling all our cities for free, so maybe cutting them down is a really bloody terrible idea, Sheffield City Council? Anyway. No arguments there.

But - why? Why are we humans responding in this way, with a lifting of the spirits mirrored by a boosted immune system? How much of this response is illusory (or even just a psychological glitch of some kind, working like a placebo) and how much is fulfilling some biological purpose, evolved deep into us over who-knows-how-long?

As far as I understand it, this is where the work’s currently being done. It’s all currently rather…up in the air. (I’M SORRY I’m sorry. You can unsubscribe at the bottom of this email.)

But as this piece by Daisy Yuhas at Scientific American notes, maybe we modern folk have got the importance of smells all wrong. Maybe it’s a messaging system, working in all sorts of surprising directions, that we’ve mostly forgotten how to tune into:

Anthropologist Diana Young at the University of Queensland has studied the traditions of aboriginal people in Australia's Western Desert. There, the first rains before wet wintry and summer months are an important event, mingling the sweet odors of damp gum leaf oils, eucalyptus, animal waste and dust. The rains bring game such as kangaroo and emu, quench thirst and transform the red desert into a verdant landscape. Young says that to these people the smell of rain is linked to the color green, a connection she calls "cultural synesthesia." In fact, many of these Aboriginal peoples manufacture their own perfume with plant and animal fats and rub it onto their bodies, a symbolic connection of body and landscape. The odor is believed to be protective and cleansing, linking present generations to their ancestors.

Psychologist Pamela Dalton, a member of the Monell Chemical Senses Center observes that, although humans don't appear to have innate responses to these odors, we do learn to associate them with our experiences. Flooding may forever scar us with moist, mildewy memories, but for many the smell of rain is cleansing and refreshing—relief from the relentless summer heat.

Much to learn here, I feel. I’ll keep digging.

But if you’re looking for a practical takeaway to end this newsletter - well, you already knew what it is, but you won’t remember it while you’re indoors. That’s how this stuff seems to work.

Get outside, take a few good lungfuls, then it’ll come to you.

Trust me on this.

Images: Ethan Dow; Raychel Sanner; Daniel Thürler.

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In today’s edition: the second half of my interview with the extraordinary Antonia Malchik, author of On the Commons (the first half is here) - where we nerd out about why the best science fiction is a great way to talk about really tough things.

It’s dizzying to realise that we’re currently living in the future. Yes, we don’t quite have flying cars yet (the original Blade Runner, above, was set in 2019) - but how about everything else?

Maybe you’ve thought about this before - how folk in previous decades and centuries had no idea that all this was coming. I’m gesturing wildly in all directions, because it’s always fun to look for the inventions that have become so ingrained into our everyday lives that we barely see them. Because, they’ve “always” been there, surely? We can’t imagine a world without them.

Here’s one, courtesy of Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994).

In Star Trek lore, it’s called a PADD - short for Personal Access Display Device. Watch old episodes of Next Gen and you’ll see them everywhere, right from the first season.

None of them actually worked, of course. They were all mockups, little more than coloured plastic strips glued to pieces of what I presume was silver-painted wood. (Ars Technica has a great piece on them here.)

If you’re under the age of thirty-five and you’re thinking, “huh, why didn’t they just use actual tablets?” then rejoice, Child Of The Now-Future! You’re about to learn how quickly things are moving.

In 1987, perhaps the closest you had to a tablet was the truly gorgeous, outrageously expensive Cambridge Z88, which I used to gaze at lustfully on the pages of home computing magazines when I came home from school. But it would be two more decades before tablets really took off: from 2 million sold worldwide in 2009 to 20 million in 2010, to their utter domination of the marketplace today. In this regard, the future arrived a lot quicker than anyone expected.

This is the side of science fiction that everyone understands: the speculative (and occasionally goofy-looking) tech, some of which our world has now caught up with. But good sci fi is also about how our messy, baffling, contentious human world will work when things get even more complicated - the politics, the sociological challenges, the forms that capitalism (or its successor) will have to take as non-renewable resources disappear, and the new ways we’ll have to find energy, grow food, raise children…

In other words, it’s about today - only in a highly exaggerated, what-if form.

You may be familiar with two particular forms of speculative fiction: utopian: “everything will be great, hooray!” (which Elle Griffin is studying right now) - and dystopian: “everything will be dreadful, hooray!”. (And in terms of entertainment value, the latter really is “hooray” - post-apocalypse storytelling is just as popular as it’s always been, presumably for much the same reason audiences never tire of going to see horror movies that scare them witless.)

But from this fascinatingly hopeful conversation between authors Michelle Cook and Manda Scott, found via Antonia, I learned about a new subgenre: thrutopian fiction, which seems a little related to the more established hopepunk (here’s a Vox explainer). The idea behind it is: yes, it’s going to be a mess before it all gets better, but let’s actually talk about that process, instead of skipping over it. Let’s think about how we get there, instead of obsessing over “there”.

I used to read science fiction for the spaceships. Now I read it for ideas like this.

That’s why I love Antonia’s take on speculative fiction: not just as a source of fun and wonder, but as a toolkit of potential solutions to the modern world’s biggest problems, and a glimpse of better ways of living alongside each other with dignity and mutual respect & making the most of what we all share.

So, as usually happens when we chat, the second half of my interview with Antonia collapsed into a total nerdfest - and all that’s below, followed by a list of the books we mention.

ps. Antonia is currently running a Threadable reading circle around sci fi short stories, titled The Commons & Belonging in Science Fiction & Fantasy. (I’ve been using Threadable since last year - it’s really great.)

If you want to join Antonia’s reading circle (it’s free), click this link.

Note: you’ll need an iPad or iPhone running iOS 12.4 onwards, or macOS 11.0 (apologies, Android & Windows users, Threadable is still in building mode there!)

Mike: Hi again Antonia!

On the Commons explores ideas of property, ownership and power, and you write so beautifully about them - but you also bring in so many different and surprising themes and tie them in. Which brings me to your love of science fiction - where does that come from? Because that's not, as far as I can tell, a standard interest of outdoor/nature/travel/land-ownership writers. Or is it? Please challenge me on this!

Antonia: That's actually a really good question. I can't remember how I first started bringing sci fi in. When you're writing for an outlet like The Atlantic or Aeon, it's not really something that’s acceptable to do. But I've always been a science fiction fan. We didn't have television service for much of my childhood (we had a TV; my mother worked sometimes at a friend's video rental store and we often rented a VCR and movies from there). But when I was 10, we moved to a place where we got service, and that's when I started watching Star Trek, the original series, after school with my little sister on this tiny black-and-white TV. And I guess my parents were into it, because they took us to a pizza parlour that was doing a big-screen premiere when Star Trek: The Next Generation came out, the very first episode. So we went and watched that–I became devoted to Star Trek for a long time. 

But then I didn't read science fiction for years–at least a decade? I want to say maybe longer. I read Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein and all those guys when I was a teenager, a lot of the sci fi classics. And then I remember reading the Foundation series–I think it was on the third or fourth one in the series when this happened–and I was like, really, this is how women are portrayed? It turned me off of science fiction, which I'd loved, for a long time. And later, when I did a Master's in Creative Writing, you weren't really allowed to do genre writing. I think that might be more accepted now, but at the time it was common that MFA programs really looked down on genre writing. You weren't allowed to write mystery or sci fi or fantasy, which seemed silly to me even then.

M: Yes! Because they're not just throw-away “escapism”. It's a format where the writers are just playing with ideas and what-ifs, taking something happening in the real world and cranking it up to an extreme. The Handmaid's Tale, for example.

A: When I started reading Harry Potter sometime after the fourth book came out, I was talking with my older sister about it. We were wondering what it was about Harry Potter that we found so riveting. We talked about how so much 20th-century American literature, or literature in the English language, just didn't seem to have enough story in it. You can go back and read Jane Austen or Charles Dickens or Elizabeth Gaskell, and it's absorbing, immediately. The stories draw you in. But then you get to the 20th century and–I don't have enough literary criticism vocabulary to know what's so unsatisfying to me about a lot of well-known popular literature, but “unsatisfied” is the word for my reaction–and that's when I realized why I gravitated to mystery novels and fantasy. That's where the good stories were. We talked about how it seemed young adult literature felt like it had the best stories. And challenging! I don't want to go on about Harry Potter too much but unlike say, books I love like The Hobbit or Lord of the Rings, where there's a strong element of fate and destiny to it (which you find in a lot of fantasy), Harry Potter was different in making it clear that it was about personal choice–whether or not Harry pursued and fought Voldemort. Yes, there was a prophecy and all that, but Dumbledore kept making the point that it didn’t mean that it was something he was automatically predestined to do–he could still choose to walk away, even if Voldemort forced him to fight eventually.

Having that reality of strong moral choices presented like that, my sister and I both felt we hadn't seen that in fiction in a really long time. I wish J.K. Rowling had taken that lesson fully out into the world we live in, especially when accepting people's full humanity was such an undercurrent in those books. You can make the choice not to spend your legacy denying people’s humanity.

And then a few years back, one of the local bookstore clerks recommended N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy to me. That pulled me straight back into science fiction and fantasy. I realised that wow, there had been so many new developments in the genres that I didn't know about, because I just hadn't been paying attention. This new crop of authors are grappling with some really big stuff, and the world-building is incredible. I just finished A Memory Called Empire, by Arkady Martine. Holy cow. And The Expanse series–when I was writing the walking book, I think at the time I was watching the TV adaptation of The Expanse, and also Humans, which unfortunately has been cancelled. I don't know if you've ever watched that?

M: No! I heard good stuff though.

A: I liked that show, it was a bummer to see it go. 

So, sometimes you just get really stuck on a huge writing project and my strategy is to go for walks instead of trying to glue myself to my desk. I'll go for a long walk around town thinking, How can I actually demonstrate this idea with an example that helps people feel their way into it? And then something will (hopefully!) come, like, Oh, there was that scene in The Expanse where the Marine from Mars is trying to walk outside on Earth for the first time and she's having such difficulty doing it. You can make it a relatable shortcut. I realized I could play around with that kind of thing–using science fiction to demonstrate some of the more granular biology and mechanics of walking–and see what my editor says, and she didn't seem to mind it. So I kept going. 

There's a lot in that story, The Expanse, that talks about things I'm working on, like the commons and private property and management of resources. In The Expanse it's right front and centre because the people who live in the Belt [the real-life asteroid belt between Mars and Jupter] don't have reliable water sources, and they're dependent on other people for air, and are forced to live in a colonial-type situation in relation to the far more powerful nations Earth and Mars that they didn't choose and don't want.

M: And yes, it's people, plural. There are characters in The Expanse that you feel very strongly for, sometimes characters who end up on the wrong side for a while. There is no one “hero”. And that's a thing from early science fiction that I found so exhausting. In Foundation, there's Hari Seldon holding the whole thing up, but within each sub-story, there was always a lone hero who saved the day. Yet in Harry Potter, there's no question that Harry would have fallen short at so many points without Hermione and Ron and the Weasley brothers …

So I feel like our shared love of certain stories, it's the ideas, but it's also that collective effort, the ensemble. Not this lone exceptional superhero type, without whom the world is doomed. I feel because we always read ourselves into characters in stories in some way–and if the protagonist is presented as the only person who has all the answers in the whole world, then what's that doing to our humility and sense of self?

A: I used to love Xena: Warrior Princess, and the reason I loved watching that show so much is because Xena was flawed. Flawed heroes always need help, and she needed a lot of help.

But I'm excited about the newer writers of science fiction. I have this big pile of short story collections that I'm reading through for my Threadable reading circle on science fiction, the commons, and belonging, and it's SO much fun. I asked in a couple of places for women and non-binary people of color who write fantasy and sci fi and got so many suggestions it might take me the rest of the year to read them, or longer. I love Rebecca Roanhorse and Hao Jingfang and Cherie Dimaline and Martha Wells and Nnedi Okorafor. I love the different ways they're able to envision worlds and how people live together, or not, what relationships can look like among people, even who is considered “people”, like in the Murderbot books. I wish my imagination worked like that. I recently read Catherynne M. Valente's story “The Difference Between Love and Time” on Tor, and I have no idea how to describe it but it's just delightful. Valente was a writer one of my subscribers recommended to me and she’s fantastic.

But we've also talked about Kim Stanley Robinson–I haven't read the Mars trilogy, which I know you love. The first of his that I read was Aurora. 

M: Oh yeah. That book got me emotional–the part where they're heading home, and the ship is faithfully, even lovingly, looking after them, for centuries. The other side of Artificial Intelligence–what if it's actually kinder and more loyal than any of us are capable of being?

A: What caught my attention was the relationship of the evolved human body with the planet we live on. [In Aurora, hopeful colonists travel to our nearest seemingly habitable planet around another star, only to find its biology is fatal to human beings, forcing them to attempt a desperate, hazardous retreat home.] Which is something I went back to when I was reading about walking, something that most of us don't appreciate and don't even fully understand: We evolved on this specific planet with its specific biology, gravity, life. Thinking about that dazzles me sometimes. Astronauts have a lot of physical problems after a long time in space, like loss of proprioception and bone density. In Aurora, it was so cool and unsettling that they went to this planet, and no matter how many scans they ran, there was just one thing they couldn't detect that the human body could not adapt to, and it had the ability to kill everyone. And that's important. Imagination is a great thing but what happens when we meet our hard limits?

Even the Three-Body Problem trilogy, which actually I didn't love because the characters are paper thin–nice plot, but who are these characters? And it's SO sexist. But there, Liu Cixin writes about the dark forest theory: You're in a dark forest. You hear movement. There are other creatures, other people. They might be hostile. And you won't know if they're dangerous or friendly until it's too late. His point is: what if that's what space is like? What if every species kills every other new one on sight because they can’t take the risk? Not that I necessarily think there are alien civilizations waiting to smash us the second we poke our heads out but . . . that's why science fiction is so interesting.

At its best, it poses challenging questions about what we think “progress” is, and how people will actually live together in the future, and asks us to think more carefully about what we want life to look like a few generations down the line. About responsibility. Technology is fun, world-building is fun, but it's those deeply human questions that keep me coming back. I really love that about the modern wave of sci fi. I'm not keeping up–I won't even pretend that I'm keeping up. I'm probably a decade behind. But it's just so nice to see all these different ideas creeping in …

M: Right! It's why sci fi can feel so relevant–it's allowing us to speak about the sometimes unspeakable-feeling things, the things that immediately polarize conversations. So you present them in a fantastical context, under the guise of entertainment, and it will get people talking because it's not about today, but it is about today. You just smuggled it in. Like the new Battlestar Galactica–well, I should say “newer” because its finale was nearly 15 years ago now–but there's stuff that they did with the plotlines, like how the first episode “33” [probably my favourite 45 minutes of television] was absolutely about 9/11 but as a Brit I only realized this from an interview with [showrunner] Ron Moore. And also they had an episode where a progressive, pro-choice president, a woman, was faced with legislating abortion in a situation when your civilization is just 30,000 people and dwindling by the day. Really difficult questions, and they often tackled them head-on. 

[The same can be seen with Ron Moore's new show, For All Mankind on Apple+, which I previously raved about here.]

So if you're on, say, Twitter or Facebook, asking people to discuss these things can get super-heated really quickly, because it's real and often deeply personal to them. But if you can do so in a fictional context? Not real–but still relatable. That's the great power of fiction.

A: Battlestar Galactica asks directly, “What is life, what is a person, who has a right to exist?” And conversely: how do you exist in a world with people who don't actually believe in your right to exist, or think you should only be allowed to exist within a certain framework? That's enormously relevant! Other fiction does that, too. I just feel like much of it has been trapped for a long time by a certain model and expectation of what's considered “literary”, which is unfortunate. There are some writers, like Margaret Atwood, who can break through that barrier. But it feels like very few other writers are really allowed to get that speculative.

M: Right, exactly. And it's easy to sound apologetic, “Oh, you'll like Battlestar Galactica, it's not really science fiction, it's more like a political war drama.” No, it is scifi, Mike, stop it. Yeah, it's this … withdrawing from the reality of what it is? People who say they have no interest in any of it probably could understand better: it's just such a wide-ranging thing. Not just the Boys Own Adventures stuff, men in space with blasters going pew-pew, perhaps ironically called the Golden Age of sci fi, but Ursula Le Guin and Octavia Butler and–you know, there's just so much. I would guarantee that anyone wading in and looking for something that will grab their curiosity, and written in a way that really resonates with them, well, they'll find it.

A: Yeah. Maybe it's like someone saying I don't like soup.

M: *laughs* 

A: On the other hand–as we've talked about before–I have plenty of friends who don't read. One of my close friends feels bad because she doesn't read books. And, well, who cares? Don't feel bad! I know that sounds awful coming from a writer and someone who loves books and thinks they're valuable and important, but I feel very strongly that the story is what's important, and however you engage with a story is how you're going to walk through the world with that story. I talked with an undergraduate class last fall and this kept coming up, this question of “How can I write/think/whatever if I don't like reading books very much?” Probably the most important book I've ever read is Svetlana Alexeivich's The Unwomanly Face of War. And yes, it's in book format and I read it, but it's an oral history of real people's experiences. Stories come in all forms. 

I love Jane Austen. I'm a huge Jane Austen fan. And I get that same kind of response from people about her as I do about science fiction and fantasy: ugh, romance stories. What makes those books timeless are her observations of human nature and her wit. But do you have to read Jane Austen? No. And if you're not enjoying it, why subject yourself to that? Try one of the movies or TV shows. Her stories make great television! I think she would have been a TV writer if she lived now. Same for Dickens.

M: Absolutely. Also–one of the things I've been thinking about in terms of curiosity and discovering something new is finding a new relationship to a book later in life, a book you think you've “read”. Like, going back as an adult and reading a book you loved as a kid, to find the story transformed. To see what the author was trying to plant in my mind and it just didn't happen the first time I read it, because I was looking for something else. But re-reading is difficult to justify these days because there are so many books. So I'm interested: how often do you re-read things?

A: It depends on the book. I have actually worked hard at giving away a lot of books that I'm pretty sure I'm not going to reread in the future, which has helped. But when I was eight, my older sister introduced me to The Hobbit and then The Lord of the Rings, and I read those every year growing up, right after school got out, and it was utterly my escape. I just loved being in that world, and it was a treat as soon as I finished school. I would spend however many days completely immersed in that world, crying at all the same parts. I still read them and love them. That will probably never change. But it's a really good question. I re-read classics a lot. Jane Austen, Dostoevsky. I wish someone would come out with new translations of his work, because of what you just said about having a different experience. I was reading them a few years ago, and Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls again, and I was thinking they read very much like 19th-century British fiction, which I bet is partly to do with the style of translation from the original Russian. That's just a guess, but I have wondered.

I read a lot of books for research and I go back to those more than I thought I ever would. But I don't reread them as such–it's just following the Post-It notes I've made. I mark those books up pretty thoroughly and that becomes my own way back into them. 

M: That sounds far better than my process right now–I usually make far too many notes, and then I throw away a lot of them at the end until I'm left with what feels like the story. I just wish I was a lot quicker at it!

Anyway–there was something you said earlier about using sci fi to tackle hard things. One being: the unknown, that source of so much wonder, but also dread. A thing I really loved about the original Alien (1979)--that feeling of these people stumbling across something they didn't understand and weren't prepared for. And only one of them got away. And at the end, she still didn't understand what the hell she stumbled across, and neither do we. A real sense of humanity poking a toe into the wider sea of the universe, and finding it weirder and more dangerous than anything we'd expected. I wish Ridley Scott had just left it there, with that sense of the immensity of what we don't yet know we don't know. And generally, I love good sci fi for that feeling.

A: Yes. Just thinking about that . . . I always do crave knowing “that thing”, the explanation of what they've seen, and–I don't want to spoil The Expanse books for others, but it has to do with the protomolecule, which you know because you've read them. They don't answer it in the TV show. They finish one plotline pretty well [Amazon's The Expanse only covers the first six books of the nine-book series], but they don't answer that ultimate plot arc of what the protomolecule is and who created it and why it's such a threat to humanity. But it's interesting how powerful that craving is to know what's in a totally fictional world. The answer could be anything, since it's fiction and therefore totally made up, but I still want to know what it is! And I'll accept pretty much any answer as long as it feels generally satisfying.

M: Right. And that information gap is so addictive, between what I've just learned and what it might mean. Like the scene in Breaking Bad where it's a flashforward in time of Walter White taking a big machine-gun out of the trunk of his car. You now suspect terrible things are going to happen but don't know what form they'll take. That kind of storytelling always drags us onwards and fires our imaginations, especially in sci fi - just look at fan theories online. But also: obsession, which has such a bad reputation as a word, but aptly describes renowned scientists like Richard Feynman, latching onto ideas because they're so interested and so in love with possibility. Do you have that same reaction? 

A: Yes! I did a mathematics degree as an undergrad, and that gets back to what I loved about it. I remember doing Group Algebra, and the wonder of going through this one set of problems and this whole process to figure this thing out–it's what astronomers use when they're measuring the wavelength of light from a pulsar, I think? It’s been a long time–and I remember thinking, wow, how did we even get there, from the math to a practical application? I'm pretty passionate about math and how it describes the patterns and relationships of the world around us. Someone once described it to me as a human vocabulary for those, which I thought was pretty accurate. How math is taught makes me sad, but that's another subject.

M: So what healthy obsessions are you feeding into your newsletter–and where do you want to take them?

A: So, it's about the commons: land, water, air, data–the shared world that we live in and how we relate to it, how we use it, how we live together, all of which is really, really hard. And how we live together fairly, which seems to be even more difficult. But the core of that is the idea of ownership. Some people get kind of glazed over when I say that, but it's about private property versus the idea of the commons. What we own, and how we own things–property rights, for example, like a right to pollute versus your right to breathe. 

I had a book proposal on all this, and when it got turned down by all the publishers, I started working on it as a Substack newsletter. The idea would not let me go–it's maybe more than a year and a half since the proposal was rejected, and the idea won't leave me alone. Thanks to your encouragement, I decided to publish the actual book on Substack as I write it (which I’m starting to do now) rather than just write about it generally. The chapters are on land, water, seeds, data, people, the way that people are still owned all over the world, the human story, and about what kind of history we're allowed to teach…

And just this concept of owning: a totally human creation. A story that has tremendous force in our lives. It's what the legal system is based around.

I was reading one of Willa Cather's books, Shadow on the Rocks. You probably don't know her. She was an early-1900s American writer. The book itself was set in the 1500s, in an early colonial town in what’s currently called Canada. One of the main characters was explaining something to his daughter, and he said in essence, Because the law thinks so much on property, property is all that the law protects. And this saturates everything in our lives to the point that many people don't even really notice it. One of the questions I've been stuck on quite a bit is why trespass laws are so vigorously enforced in the U.S.–you can't set foot on land owned by someone else–but pollution, basically a property right, the right to pollute, is allowed to trespass into our bodies as well as into the commons. (I really should have called the whole thing Trespassing, but a little late now.) The laws around those, around all property rights, are reflective of the stories and values that dominate a society at a specific time. And I think it's time for them to change, for us to start questioning ownership's roots and justifications.

M: Thanks so much, Antonia!

Find Antonia at On the Commons, and sign up to her Threadable science fiction circle here.

Mentioned Reading (with links to Bookshop.org)

• Svetlana Alexievich - The Unwomanly Face Of War

• Isaac Asimov - Foundation (currently being very loosely-adapted on Apple+)

• Margaret Atwood - The Handmaid’s Tale

• James. A. Corey - Leviathan Wakes (The Expanse: book 1)

• Liu Cixin - The Three-Body Problem (Remembrance Of Earth’s Past: book 1)

• N. K. Jemisin - The Fifth Season (Broken Earth: book 1)

• Arkady Martine - A Memory Called Empire (review at Vox)

• Kim Stanley Robinson - Aurora (review at The Guardian)

• Martha Wells - All Systems Red (Murderbot Diaries: book 1)

First: writer, adventurer & filmmaker Brendan Leonard (you may remember I interviewed him last year) is just about to launch this:

Sign up to it here.

I urge you to sign up to this thing.

No, really, you absolutely should. He’s so great at this stuff.

Oh go on.

Here’s the link again.

(Great job.)

Secondly, here’s an incredibly lovely example of how social media - and the internet in general - really should work. And it’s all down to cunningly engineered curiosity.

1) In 2019, author Amal El-Mohtar wrote an amazing book with Max Gladstone, called “This is How You Lose the Time War”.

2) Amongst other things, it won the Nebula Award for Best Novella of 2019, and the Hugo Award for Best Novella in 2020. (And, presumably, sold quite steadily.)

3) Three days ago, a person on Twitter called “bigolas dickolas wolfwood” posted a picture of the book cover along with the words: “read this. DO NOT look up anything about it. just read it. it's only like 200 pages u can download it on audible it's only like four hours. do it right now i'm very extremely serious.”

4) This tweet, with all its infectious, mystery-driven enthusiasm, went massively viral, as fans of the book leapt in to yell about how great it is, pushing it in front of millions of new readers.

5) The book rapidly rose to being, late last night [deep breath] the 7th bestselling book of ALL BOOKS ON AMAZON.

6) El-Mohtar is basically laid face-down on the couch right now screaming what’s going on in the absolute nicest of ways (blog post here):

And the lesson is:

• positive recommendations and wildly expressed enthusiasm on the internet can be mindbogglingly powerful

• if you make people genuinely curious, you can sell a lot of Art

• you should read This Is How You Lose The Time War. It’s really great. (And 50% discounted, right now.)

Just the loveliest, all of this.

Okay! Back in a few days. (And here’s that link to Brendan’s thing again. DO IT.)

- Mike

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Today’s edition - on the subject of actually going out and doing stuff - even has an audio version below, read by yours truly!

So for both our sakes, let’s get this over with as quickly as possible.

TRANSCRIPT:

On March 1st of this year, Sarah Merker, a marketing executive from London, ate a scone.

If you don’t know what a scone is, allow me to light up your world forever: it’s an utterly delicious baked lump of wheat or oatmeal mixed with butter and sugar and baking powder, which rises when it’s cooked in the oven, but not too much, so it’s still somewhat dense and hefty - you know, I can easily imagine a thrown stale scone knocking someone off a bike.

And if you don’t know what a scone is because I’ve pronounced it wrong, what I mean is scone.

There are very few things that will genuinely cause an actual argument in Britain - even the question of whether the milk or the hot water go into a cup of tea first will usually generate little more than good-natured bickering, but for some reason, we’re all willing to fight over how you pronounce the word derived from the letters s, c, o, n and e, when employed verbally in that exact order.

If you’re interested in the geographical breakdown, perhaps because you’re British and you want to know where your enemies are, a YouGov poll a decade ago showed a 51% bias towards scone [rhyming with “gone”], 42% preferring scone, and presumably the other 7% screaming oh for pity’s sake just stop this madness all of you, with their veins on their foreheads bulging.

As for regional breakdowns: us noble, salt of the earth Northerners prefer scones [rhyming with “gone”], as do our friends in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales - while the soft, corrupt Southerners with their irrational and foppishly Continental ways prefer scones [rhyming with “cone”].

Obviously it’s important for this newsletter that I don’t show any bias on this matter. And I certainly don’t want to cause any offence, because I’m a coward. So for the rest of this piece, I’ll refer to scones and scones interchangeably, which should hopefully upset everyone.

Sarah Merker, being from London, probably pronounces scones in a manner that some people would regard as monstrously incorrect. But nevertheless here she is, tucking into a scone. She’s in Northern Ireland, near the basalt columns of the Giant’s Causeway - and it’s taken her ten years to get here.

In August 2013, Sarah and her husband became members of the National Trust - the conservation charity that’s been looking after a lot of the stately homes, castles and famous landmarks across England, Wales and Northern Ireland for well over a century. Annual membership is around £70, which gets you free access to Britain’s more than 500 National Trust sites, and Sarah and her husband thought, “well, if we’re doing this, we’re going to get our money’s worth.”

So they started eating scones. One at every National Trust property that served food. All two hundred and forty four of them. 

That’s why it’s taken ten years - and presumably thousands of pounds in membership fees, travel and accommodation - to complete this national baked goods treasure hunt.

But sadly, Sarah’s husband isn’t here. He died in 2018. Sarah chose this last property in his honour, because they’d previously visited it together.

“It didn’t even occur to me to give up, it gave me something to get out and about for,” she’ll later tell the Washington Post. “Everywhere I went, I was looking at it through his eyes.”    

This is a heartwarming story. If you’re not feeling your heart warmed, I suggest checking your pulse. It’s lovely, if a little bittersweet. Everyone should be able to agree on this. And it should definitely make you want to eat a warm scone, right this second, heaped with clotted cream and fresh strawberry jam, maybe accompanied by a cup of Yorkshire tea. Again with the pulse thing. 

But beyond this, opinions can quickly differ. Do you find this story inspiring? Does it make you think oooh, that sounds like a fun thing to do, I wish I’d done it? Or does it make you think - well, that’s nice, but it’s not exactly productive, is it? I mean, ten years! She could have written a book in that time, or started a business or changed the world or whatever. 

We’ll return to this difference in a minute, but - well, actually, she did write a book. It’s called The National Trust Book of Scones: 50 delicious recipes and some curious crumbs of history, It came out in 2017, four years after they started sconning their way around the UK (no, that’s not a word), and it has nearly a thousand reviews on Amazon, so presumably it’s been selling steadily all this time. Great job. 

And if you’re curious: their favourite of them all was the Christmas pudding scone topped with brandy butter in the Treasurer’s House in York, my old home. (I mean - York was my home, not - the Treasurer’s House.) 

Anyway. Sarah’s ten year scone odyssey ended in March, and now she’s feeling at a bit of a loose end. She wants to keep yelling about the importance of scones, so she may try doing the National Trust properties here in Scotland, because it’s an entirely separate system. Or she may try a new challenge, as she’s grown interested in the difference between British scones and American biscuits, and she’s keen to start trying the latter. And I hear there are quite a few varieties, so this might take some time. 

What Sarah found is the joy of being on a quest - and the great thing about quests is that they don’t have to make sense. 

If you reacted to Sarah’s story with a shrug, and in the back of your mind a voice yelled but what was the point of it??!, then there’s something really interesting happening in your brain right now. You’ve heard a story of someone doing something for fun - really committing to it, in a way that takes a significant chunk of their life and a not inconsiderable amount of money - and you’ve tried to turn it into something it isn’t.

Because - what is the point? Will a quality-graded map of the National Trust’s scone output directly help anyone achieve their best life? Unlikely. Will it undo the economic ravages of political incompetence, or help rewild the UK, or usher in a golden future for humanity in general? Not directly, I suspect.

This is really about what I call the tyranny of usefulness: where the value of doing a thing, the “sense” bit of “it has to make sense”, goes back to two things.

Firstly, the old economic-based model of productivity that’s been haunting us since the industrial revolution - does it help me produce more widgets and therefore make more money and maybe help me retire a bit earlier? You know: “useful” stuff, not for “fun”.

And secondly: we can quantify the usefulness of it in advance. We’re doing it because we already know what we want to get out of it.

But here’s the thing. As I hope I’ve demonstrated over the last four and a bit seasons of this newsletter, there is great value in discovering things you never knew you didn’t know. It just feels great, and opens your mind in all sorts of ways - including so-called useful ones - to realise the world is filled with more interesting and even more joyful stuff than you ever could have guessed. 

But it’s really hard to stumble across something you never knew existed. Hardest thing in the world. This is presumably part of why we’ve adopted all these behavioural traits we call “curiosity” - they help us get out of our normal lanes, just a bit, to help us adapt to changing conditions, or maybe just to be aware of them? Who knows.

But it seems that as well as giving us a lot of joy - that rush of endorphins from a good “wow!” that is always fun to experience and that is, let’s face it, my entire business model with this newsletter - as well as that, it seems that being curious and open to new ideas has all sorts of benefits, including emotional ones.

And if you’re happier and more hopeful, you have the stamina and the mental resilience to keep going - which is absolutely everything, in usefulness terms.

So way back in season 1 of Everything Is Amazing, I coined what absolutely nobody is calling Sowden’s First Law Of Curiosity, which is: “You just have to try lots of different stuff for no damn reason.”

And I reckon nothing quite fits that bill like a quest which, when you try to explain it to other people, sounds kind of stupid.

I feel very lucky that I come from a country that seems unusually obsessed with amateurism: you know, the dogged pursuit of an objectively useless pastime that you’re highly unlikely to ever get paid to do, perhaps wearing gear that an Olympic standard professional would see as instant career suicide. Really, this kind of committed amateurism can be found everywhere in the world, but the British are quite loud about theirs. We’re really proud of how we’re basically a bit crap at all this but we’re doing it anyway - and we have great fun in watching people’s expressions when we explain what they’re doing, and seeing them think But…but what’s the point? We live for those moments.

The useful word here is “hobby” - the thing that made a huge comeback during the pandemic lockdowns, when suddenly everyone seemed to discover how fun it was to just fart around doing not terribly useful things. A spiritual mass-rebellion against productivity, because if the world has gone completely mad, I might as well fulfill my lifelong dream of doing a full handstand, reading…uh, a book, learning to bake sourdough bread, or watching all 871 episodes of Doctor Who. 

About the last one: well, you can’t. Sorry. Back when BBC TV shows were stored on rolls of film, sometimes the film was seen as more valuable than the stuff recorded on it, and so the BBC taped over at least nine episodes of Doctor Who. They’re gone.

(Or are they? Maybe you just discovered your quest for the next decade. Geronimo, Allons-y, off you pop and all that.)

The only requirement for a quest is that it’s fun. That’s its entire, self-contained reason for being. You can bolt other stuff onto the sides of it if you want, like Oooh, this would be a great way to discover if I could do this for a living, or I just want to do something madly different for a change that gets me out the house or I bought all these Doctor Who DVDs in a car boot sale for five quid so I can’t just throw them out, that would feel wrong.

Or maybe - and this is important - maybe you don’t know why.

Maybe you can’t justify it at all. I reckon that is the best-case scenario, because now it’s a total leap into the unknown, you don’t even know why this thing is calling to you so much, and you’re brave and smart enough to say, I don’t need to know right now, I just need to go find out.

But you probably want to have it make a bit of sense to you. Take writer Jacob Ready, who is trying to visit every bookstore in New York City because then he’d know where all the best books are: now you should now stop reading me, perhaps forever, because you’re going over to read ’s Substack newsletter about this story, and then every other edition of that newsletter because it’s a joy:

CAFÉ ANNE

Book Quest Impossible: Visiting Every Bookstore in NYC

Hello everyone, Welcome to Issue #67 of CAFÉ ANNE! Happy spring, and thanks for all the sweet birthday wishes that came in over the break. I enjoyed a lovely week off here in Brooklyn. So! Let’s get down to business of peeling fruits and vegetables. As you may recall, my…

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3 years ago · 123 likes · 131 comments · Anne Kadet

And has this gem on the value of a good quest:

The Art of Noticing

Every Single [X]

Via DALL-E 2…

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3 years ago · 92 likes · 51 comments · Rob Walker

Or maybe you want to learn to cook, so you pick up a copy of the legendary Larousse Gastronomique or something by Jamie Oliver, and vow to cook absolutely everything in it. (I have a friend who did that in her WordPress blog, it took her a year, and she absolutely loved the whole experience.)

Or you could do this entertainingly horrifying thing that Brendan Leonard did:

Or you could make every single salad in ’s newsletter - what an injection of raw joy into your diet that would be:

The Department of Salad: Official Bulletin

Step into our salad laboratory. We got your leafy greens, your grains, your veg, and protein. Plus: salady guests, salady books & recipes, recipes, recipes 🥗

By emily nunn

Or you could familiarise yourself with your surroundings by, say, visiting every bus-stop or Underground station - there are people who do this in London every year, and it’s even a Guinness World Record - the record is around 15 hours to visit every single station.

And that’s another thing: Guinness World Records, which are little more than legitimised excuses to go attempt some fairly useless and sometimes breathtakingly idiotic undertakings. Yes, it’s also about trying to become a minor celebrity, but it’s also just an excuse to have some fun doing a thing that you’d struggle to justify to yourself or anyone else in any other way. Like the world record for stacking M&Ms on top of each other. (Yes, this is a thing, I wrote about it here in 2021.) 

So if you want to become more curious about the world around you but you’re not sure how, invent a quest for yourself. Give it a simple, easy to follow framework, like “make or visit all the x in y” or “achieve as much z by this date or with this much time”. Make it sufficiently dumb in both senses: in the sense that it’s a bit (or a lot) eccentric and really tricky to justify to strangers, and dumb in the sense that it’s always clear what you need to do next.

That’s it. Hopefully it’ll work as a fun engine for creating all sorts of experiences you never dreamed could happen to you. Or maybe it’ll be horrible! Who knows! Not me, that’s for sure, which is why nothing in this newsletter is legally binding in any way, don’t even try it.

But of course - there’s a line. And it’s always fun to peer over that line, at the people on the other side, in the hope that they’re that really special brand of lunatic that you can have great fun telling your friends about.

So we turn to The Very Reverend William Buckland, born 12th March 1784, died 14th August 1856, after a much-celebrated career as a theologian, geologist and paleontologist - and after spending most of his life trying to eat every living creature on Earth. Not by volume, but by variety. Just one or two of each of absolutely everything that ran, flew, scuttled, slithered, swam, buzzed or oozed through the natural world at that time.

Sounds horrifying! Is, indeed, horrifying! But these were Victorian times, where the term “naturalist” could mean a rather more invasive and aggressive form of investigating Nature, the kind where, for example, it regularly ends up on your plate.

As Fraser Lewry noted in The Guardian:

“No living creature was safe from Buckland's mania. Mice on toast were a regular feature of his no-doubt popular soirées, while other animals to guest at these events included the porpoise, puppy and panther ... and that's just the 'P's. Once, when visiting a cathedral, he was told of a local legend claiming that fresh saints' blood was to be found on the floor. Buckland, never one to turn down the opportunity to try a new flavour, licked the flagstones and was able to disprove the myth, immediately identifying the mystery liquid as bat urine.

Probably the most extraordinary of the great man's exploits came on a visit to Lord Harcourt, the Archbishop of York, at Nuneham Courtenay, just outside Oxford. Shown what was claimed to be the heart of Louis XVI, preserved in a silver casket (Harcourt was a collector of esoterica), Buckland immediately gobbled the fleshy artifact down, unable to resist the opportunity to chow down on the heart of a king.”    

And if you’re looking for a more modern example to alarm you in much the same way, look no further than Michel Lotito, nicknamed “Monsieur Mangetout,” who spent the years 1978 to 1980 eating an entire Cessna light aircraft. I am not making this up.

So while I hope that the earlier part of this newsletter has given you a few ideas, I hope this part has given you exactly none, except that maybe that the point of hearing cautionary tales is that they help us avoid becoming one.

Thanks for listening.

- M

Images: BigThink/bezzleford; Sarah Kilian; Nadjib BR; Pexels/9143; Samuel Cousins/Wikimedia.

First up, please click this link - and if you spend the time scrolling through its delightful depiction of our atmosphere that you would have spent reading this newsletter, I’m pretty okay with that:

(Hat-tip to finder-of-great-things Brendan Leonard, who featured it in his recent Friday Inspiration roundup, after spotting it at Kottke.)

Secondly, a startling thing I learned recently: it seems no observed tropical storm has ever crossed the equator.

In theory one could, if it grew big enough to overcome….well, whatever is stopping such storms from crossing the equatorial boundary. Atmospheric scientists seem to still be chewing this over, but the Coriolis Effect might be a big factor? If you know more on this than I do, please correct me!

(They also don’t seem to form within 5 degrees of latitude of it. So, if you suffer from Lilapsophobia - that’s a fear of hurricanes and tornadoes - then moving to somewhere smack on the equator and never straying 5 degrees of latitude in either direction might be worth a try? Here are some countries you can pick from.)

And lastly, an update on a previous newsletter. Remember I wrote last season about the 20,000+ underwater mountains that were discovered a decade ago (which Bad Astronomy’s covered for Slate here)?

Thanks to the latest edition of Jodi Ettenberg’s Curious About Everything, I just learned about this newly-mapped monster:

It’s called the Pao Pao Seamount, it’s in the South Pacific Ocean - and it’s 4,776 metres tall (around the height of Mont Blanc), making it one of the tallest fully-underwater mountains ever discovered. It’s part of a collection of sea mounts recently mapped by radar and newly catalogued by researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

But what’s so staggering is not just the presence of one-off wonders like this - it’s the sheer number of these things. The catalogue has recorded 19,000 new mountains, added to the 20,000+ mapped in previous surveys - and it’s estimated that the “vast majority” still wait to be discovered.

(As I said last season, it’s truly awe-inspiring how little we know about the 71% of our planet currently hidden under water.)

Anyway!

In today’s edition, we’re looking at the other part of our planet logically named Ocean Earth.

Continuing the season-within-a-season on the ways geology affects every single part of our lives (right down to the amount of rain that lands on our heads), let’s look at one aspect that’s staring us right in the face every single day.

Wherever you’re reading this newsletter right now, you’re probably doing a fairly bizarre, possibly uniquely human thing with your surroundings.

Perhaps you’re indoors, sat on your favourite chair, your legs curled under you - or you’re at the breakfast table, or in bed, because pretty much the first thing you did this morning was grab your phone and check your email, where this newsletter was waiting for you. (Yeah. I do that too. So we both have a problem here.)

Maybe the sun is shining, or maybe the rain is belting against the window. Whatever’s going on, you’re comforted by - or maybe slightly annoyed by, if it’s sunny - your awareness that you’re currently inside.

Have you ever considered what a strange human invention “inside” is? That poorly defined place where we pass over some kind of threshold - usually a door, perhaps a window during emergencies - where Public is transformed into Private, and Everyone’s becomes Yours, and the illusion of predictable, vaguely law-enforced safety descends comfortingly around you.

I’ve written elsewhere about how tents trick us with the fairly ludicrous illusion of inside-ness, but it’s the buildings within which we make our homes that do a much more credible job of it. They’re sturdy, for starters. Get through THAT, yells the average wall. Doors are meant to keep stuff out. Windows are for seeing the outside through, or for pulling the curtain or blind over to banish it completely.

Psychologically, when we’re indoors, we feel like we’re in some profound form of Elsewhere - when a coldly rational part of our minds know we’re actually just inside some kind of box by the side of a busy street (which is also lined with other boxes containing other people).

That’s pretty weird, if you think about it long enough. Open up Google Maps and check out your current location. Look: you’re there. Now try to tally that up with how your surroundings actually feel right now. Are you fully aware of what’s beyond those walls on all sides? What’s your sense of connection with everything actually surrounding you right now, based on a satellite’s bird’s-eye view?

(How far is it to your nearest neighbour that you’ve never said hello to? If it’s shockingly close, try doing challenge number five here, just to see how much you can freak yourself out.)

There are many varieties of Inside that we occupy - like public transport, or our car, or that bus shelter you’re hiding from the rain under, where you’re suddenly oddly resentful of the arrival of a stranger (“hey, get your own!”)…

But nothing feels more Inside than the inner spaces of our home. It’s our most intimate, most familiar, most emotionally comfortable place in our lives, where we can fully let our guard down, and where we feel confident of being masters and owners of our terrain.

For this reason, nobody knows our homes like we do.

Except - are you really sure about that?

Okay. Let’s test this out.

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One of the worst things about writing a newsletter is everything you’ve previously done with it.

Newsletters aren’t like books. They don’t sit jauntily on bookcases, teasing you with their spines and silently whispering Remember the last time you read me and how good that felt and how rapt you were? How about we take another whirl? Oh go on. Take…

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It’s been a while. Please forgive me! Reason being: I’m unexpectedly moving house - I’m leaving behind this wooden cabin I’ve been occupying in this corner of Scotland since I started this newsletter back in January 2021, and I’m moving into a thoroughly lovely little rented flat a couple of miles away.

It all feels like…well, I might not quite be rejoining society, but I will once again be within hollering distance of it? All very strange. Kinda makes me want to sleep on the beach again. Stay tuned for my inevitable meltdown.

But while I’ve been in rucksack-lugging limbo, I had the chance to try Substack’s new thing, which launched last week.

It’s called Notes, and while it looks more than a little like Twitter at first glance, so far it has a very tiny amount of the negativity, cynicism and performative cruelty of that platform on one of its bad days (which have been occurring more frequently in recent months, as I said here).

Update: okay, maybe more than a very tiny amount. Definitely some toxic-user-behaviour bugs that need ironing out before it’s ready for everyone, I’d say.

Substack Notes hasn’t really been properly put through the social media wringer yet (but see above update), in terms of the meanest folk trying to do the nastiest things with it, but so far I’m cautiously hopeful. And the tone so far is lovely: Delia Cai at Vanity Fair described is as “so freaking genteel”.

I’ve started experimenting with a few threads of notes in the style I was using on Twitter, like this one:

Anyway, it’s available on both the Substack app (iOS & Android) and the Web/browser version - all the details are here. Give it a go, if that looks like your kind of thing.

Okay! Today, we’re taking a look at an important scientific question that will probably end what I laughingly call my career: what is it with lawyers, and what can be done about it?

It’s the middle of 2022, and MIT scientists Edward Gibson and Eric Martinez, with the help of visiting researcher Francis Mollica, believe they have at last scientifically proved something that the rest of us have known all along: that saying rude things about lawyers is entirely justified.

Or rather, one specific aspect of their working lives: the way they write.

Of course, that’s judgemental criticism from the perspective of the rest of us, not necessarily from people working in law, whom through years of dedicated training have learned to endure the way many legal documents are written, and perhaps even enjoy it - which is incredibly impressive if you think about it, which you probably shouldn’t for very long.

You don’t have to look far to see popular criticism of “legalese,” the written language of the law. Merriam-Webster calls it: “the language used by lawyers that is difficult for most people to understand; legal jargon.”

And if that wasn’t damning enough, The Oxford Guide to Plain English pulls none of its punches:

“Fog in the law and legal writing is often blamed on the complex topics being tackled. Yet when legal texts are closely examined, their complexity seems to arise far less from this than from unusual language, tortuous sentence construction, and disorder in the arrangement of points. So the complexity is largely linguistic and structural smoke created by poor writing practices.

Legalese is one of the few social evils that can be eradicated by careful thought and disciplined use of a pen. It is doubly demeaning: first it demeans its writers, who seem to be either deliberately exploiting its power to dominate or are at best careless of its effects; and second it demeans its readers by making them feel powerless and stupid.”

Yikes.

But wait - this is the law. Surely it’s not meant to be “accessible” - it’s meant to be precise? It’s the written equivalent of machine code, where a single misplaced digit can render the whole thing useless, potentially toppling the mightiest of court cases with tiny fragment of ambiguous grammar that lets the hero or villain walk free, accompanied by loudly clicking cameras, out-thrust microphones and a swell of triumphant or ominous music? (Note to self: watching Daredevil & She-Hulk is not credible research for writing a newsletter like this.)

And this certainly seems true. I should check with an actual lawyer next time, but - yeah? Surely legalese is there primarily to be functional.

So the question becomes: is its apparent near-incomprehensibility to us laypeople an unavoidable consequence of extreme functionality in communication, or - well, is the Oxford Guide to Plain English actually onto something here?

Gibson, Martinez and Mollica decided to blunder in and find out.

Martinez was a Harvard Law student at the time, and in Gibson’s words: “We immediately connected because I have been fascinated by the complexity of legal language, but I don't know anything about law."

To begin with, the researchers analysed thousands of legal documents comprising millions of words, using text analysis tools to hunt for recurring patterns. By comparing with non-legal literature, they concluded the following were unique features of legalese:

• unnecessary jargon

• offputtingly passive sentence structures (“the moon was jumped over by the cow,” to cite a hopefully fictitious example)

• super-weird CAPITALIZATION of various provisions for no apparent reason than to MAKE THEM STAND OUT like they’re someone’s UNCLE on FACEBOOK trying to make themselves UNDERSTOOD

So far, so predictable. But then they asked the important question: do these features actually get in the way of comprehension?

"There are attempts to simplify legal language going back to the 1970s, which single out the passive voice, but we found it doesn't affect comprehension," said Gibson. "Before replacing 'legalese' with something comprehensible, we first need to figure out what actually makes it difficult to read."

Their main takeaway was that the jargon and the passive voice and the ALL CAPS indeed had a part to play - but the major obfuscating factor was the way that lawyers tend to bundle their clauses in the middle of sentences.

For example, from their study: “In the event that any payment or benefit by the Company (all such payments and benefits, including the payments and benefits under Section 3(a) hereof, being hereinafter referred to as the ‘Total Payments’), would be subject to excise tax, then the cash severance payments shall be reduced.”

Gibson notes:

"When lawyers want to add conditions to a contract, they tend to pile them up at the center of a sentence, creating a very long sentence. That's horrible for all humans to understand. It's a memory problem — you have these long-distance connections within one sentence that should be several separate sentences. It's much harder for both production and comprehension."

Martinez adds: "We found that even lawyers have a hard time reading these sentences."

So by lifting the clauses out and rendering them into accompanying sentences, you’d get:

“In the event that any payment or benefit by the Company would be subject to excise tax, then the cash severance payments shall be reduced. All payments and benefits by the Company shall hereinafter be referred to as the ‘Total Payments.’ This includes the payments and benefits under Section 3(a) hereof.”

In their summary in the published study in the journal Cognition, the researchers (while admitting they still had much to learn about the reasons lawyers might choose to write that way) concluded that it seemed possible to not write that way and yet still retain the necessary precision in that writing to allow it to efficiently perform its intended role in the legal system.

Or putting it less wordily:

LEGALESE IS UNNECESSARILY DIFFICULT TO READ.

Now, this may make you shriek oh, super job, everyone. High fives all round. What an excellent use of everyone’s time, including mine, after having sat through a thousand words about this already bleedin’ obvious thing. What next? Shall we study whether water is wet?

(And I’d answer: hey, woah, yes, that would make a great study! But I’d say it silently, in my head, to avoid getting punched.)

Mollica told the website RollOnFriday:

"We are not interested in casting shade on people. Most of the lawyers we talk to are sympathetic and want to effectively communicate to people and we appreciate their help with our investigations". he said, adding that he didn't know if similar issues plagued the UK's legal documents, "but I wouldn't be surprised".

"Now, we’ll build on this to see why legal text is written this way and what kind of interventions could improve people’s interactions with legal writing."

And for their painstaking efforts and pioneering spirit, Gibson, Martinez and Mollica were later invited to Harvard, where in a glittering ceremony streamed worldwide, a Nobel prize winner awarded them the 2022 Ig Nobel Prize for Literature - along with a 10 Trillion Zimbabwean Dollar bill and a special 'build your own knowledge container,' which the rest of us would recognise as a paper bin.

On the face of it, this may look disrespectful. You pour your heart and soul into your super-specific research, and the scientific world laughs in your face this hard?

(Fun related fact: in Russia, the term “British Scientist says” is the start of a popular internet meme mocking allegedly pointless research. I wonder how they feel about the Ig Nobels?)

But for me, the joy of these particular awards, and what makes them so special, is that it’s not cruel ridicule - it’s affectionate ridicule.

Everyone involved in the ceremony gets that every entrant works in a valuable and interesting niche of scientific study - including the work of Gibson, Martinez and Mollica. After all, they’re more or less following in the footsteps of work like The Complete Plain Words by Sir Ernest Gowers, a beautiful, much-reprinted book designed to teach British civil servants how to write as clearly as possible. Clarity and efficiency in communication is incredibly important, and surely especially so in law?

But it’s also, at the same time, poking fun at them - because “Prize-winning research proves lawyers write real bad” is a headline that should make everyone laugh (and in doing so, drive a huge amount of publicity to the study and everything it actually stands for).

The Ig Nobels aren’t as well-known as other satirical award ceremonies. You’ve probably heard of the Darwin Awards, which “recognizes individuals who have supposedly contributed to human evolution by selecting themselves out of the gene pool”. And yes, some of its ‘honourable mention’ entries have made me laugh, where someone did something mindbogglingly daft and somehow lived to tell the tale. But there’s an inherent cruelty in the Darwins that’s never sat easy with me - and if you take a closer look, and remember these were actual human beings, every one of its stories seems to be the visible end of a genuine tragedy which you’re being encouraged to mock. I’d - rather not?

But the Ig Nobels are different. Almost all the winners are being invited in, to share the joke and poke fun at themselves - while knowing the fun is good-natured and not actually disrespectful, since everyone understands that Actual Science happened here.

And sometimes, that work is really good. In 2000, Sir Andrew Geim was joint-awarded the Ig Nobel for Physics, along with Michael Berry, for their work in levitating a frog using diamagnetism. Ten years later, Geim would joint-win the actual Nobel Prize for Physics for his work with the carbon allotrope Graphene, a material that’s currently making headlines for how it’s unlocking all sorts of new scientific breakthrough.

But the Ig Nobels are also intentionally daft. They make a priority of aiming for a LOL - like how, in the very first Ig Nobel ceremony in 1991, then-US-Vice-President Dan Quayle won in the Education category “for demonstrating, better than anyone else, the need for science education.”

(I also love their description of him: "consumer of time and occupier of space.")

It’s about using humour as a tool for positive change - to shine a light on scientific research that’s quietly doing fascinating things, while also pointing out the deeply hilarious ridiculousness of…well, everything, really?

The best thing you could do with the next half-hour is to stop reading this newsletter, go to the detailed list of Ig Nobel former winners, and read all the entries. (Please make sure you’re not drinking tea - you’ll just end up spitting it everywhere.)

But in case you lack the relentless dynamism in the face of obscurity of an Ig Nobel nominee and just can’t be bothered to click through, here are a few that really tickled me:

• Economics (1994) – Presented to Juan Pablo Dávila of Chile, tireless trader of financial futures and former employee of the state-owned company Codelco, for instructing his computer to "buy" when he meant "sell". He subsequently attempted to recoup his losses by making increasingly unprofitable trades that ultimately lost 0.5 percent of Chile's gross national product. Davila's relentless achievement inspired his countrymen to coin a new verb, "davilar", meaning "to botch things up royally".

• Chemistry (1996) – Presented to George Goble of Purdue University, for his blistering world record time for igniting a barbecue grill: three seconds, using charcoal and liquid oxygen. (Poor-quality video of this lunacy here.)

• Physics (1996) - Presented to Robert Matthews of Aston University, England, for his studies of Murphy's Law, and especially for demonstrating that toast often falls on the buttered side.

• Literature (1999) – Presented to the British Standards Institution for its six-page specification (BS 6008, now ISO 3103) of the proper way to make a cup of tea. (This has been a long-time favourite of mine. On the one hand: of course they need to create a standard for experiment purposes, and on the other, what the actual eff is this thing.)

• Peace (1999) – Presented to Charl Fourie and Michelle Wong of Johannesburg, South Africa, for inventing the Blaster, a foot-pedal activated flamethrower that motorists can use against carjackers.

• Chemistry (2000) – Presented to Donatella Marazziti, Alessandra Rossi, and Giovanni B. Cassano of the University of Pisa, Italy, and Hagop S. Akiskal of the University of California, San Diego, for their discovery that, biochemically, romantic love may be indistinguishable from having severe obsessive-compulsive disorder. (The research into this is ongoing.)

• Literature (2003) – Presented to John Trinkaus of the Zicklin School of Business, New York City, for meticulously collecting data and publishing more than 80 detailed academic reports about things that annoyed him, such as:

  • What percentage of young people wear baseball caps with the peak facing to the rear rather than to the front;

  • What percentage of pedestrians wear sport shoes that are white rather than some other colour;

  • What percentage of swimmers swim laps in the shallow end of a pool rather than the deep end;

  • What percentage of automobile drivers almost, but not completely, come to a stop at one particular stop-sign;

  • What percentage of commuters carry attache cases;

  • What percentage of shoppers exceed the number of items permitted in a supermarket's express checkout lane;

  • What percentage of students dislike the taste of Brussels sprouts.

(But seriously, go read the rest. So much to enjoy. Including, last year, the science of knobs.)

When the Igs return in September, I’ll do a special edition of Everything Is Amazing to celebrate them - unless I’m a winner in the “Education” category, that is.

Images: Tingey Injury Law Firm; ThePrint/Improbable.

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Today, a coda to last season’s exploration of the nearly three-quarters of the surface of our planet we tend to overlook, with its 65,000km-long mountain range and its underwater ‘lost cities’ and ancient flooded landscapes and all sorts of stuff…

You can read the whole thing here, if you like.

But right now, an answer to the extremely alarming question: what do you do if you’re taking a dive, and all your air bubbles start to go downwards?

Deep breath, please. This one gets…a bit creepy.

It’s 2000, and professional wreck diver and author Rod Macdonald is about to feel the pull of the abyss.

He’s currently stood on top of an underwater mountain, 30 metres below the surface of the narrow strait between the Scottish islands of Jura and Scarba - and the tide’s about to turn:

“It was an odd feeling to see all six of us there, and I imagined how it must have looked if you could somehow have stripped away the water. Six tiny specks of humanity, standing on the 100 feet wide table top, of a 200-metre (650 feet) high pinnacle.

As we collected on the plateau, I noticed a perceptible change in the direction of the current – it felt as if someone had thrown a big switch. One minute the tide was dropping off gently in the one direction. The next minute you could feel it starting to pick up rapidly in the other direction. There are titanic forces at work here.”

- from The Darkness Below

We live on a liquid world. Not just in the sense that 71% of it is underwater, but also in the way that everything is moving. Everything’s on the move, powered by horrifying amounts of energy that our minds just slide off.

Partly this is because it’s easy to ignore: for example, the sky is usually too insubstantial to do much more than tug at your jacket or blast some rain up your nostrils. But when it’s someone’s job to really know what’s going on, their reaction tells a story - which is why this clip of WTVA meteorologist Matt Laubhan tracking the tornado that ripped through the north of Amory (Mississippi) last Friday is so chilling:

And water is no different. Most of the time, well, it’s just there, sitting in or upon the land in a way we tend to assume is broadly unchanging and mostly predictable. The seas and rivers, creeks and inlets, races and cataracts - and the half-forgotten words for them that Robert Macfarlane recently unearthed (or whatever the aquatic equivalent of “unearthed” is) for his celebratory Landmarks:

• tolg (“to sputter, vomit, as a mountain torrent - Gaelic”)

• speat

• cartage

• gulsh (“to tear up with violence, as a stream when swollen with floods - Northamptonshire”)

• cymer

• ffrwd

• aker

• land-shut (“flood - Herefordshire”)

• …and the magnificently emphatic burraghlas (“torrent of brutal rage - Gaelic”).

The power of these lost words - the meaning of them, and just the raw sounds of them - are great reminders of what water’s really capable of.

Frankly, many of us need reminding. I consider myself stupider than average when it comes to understand natural waterways (what little I’ve learned is via the superb How To Read Water, by Tristan Gooley) - but even I know to beware the most obvious warning signs, like those flattened, oily-looking patches on the ocean that suggest where the current is fast enough to defy the surface push of the wind...

And if you’re out there without mechanical assistance, it really doesn’t take much - as surfer Matthew Bryce discovered in 2017 when he was dragged away from the Scottish coastline and spent 32 hours clinging to his board in the Irish Sea, before being rescued off the north Antrim coast.

As much as I love swimming and messing about in boats, I have…what I hope is a sufficiently healthy respect for offshore currents and fast waterways, knowing that every litre of that water weighs around a kilogram - and since I live in a part of the world covered in rock that was scooped away like ice-cream during the Last Glacial Maximum, I only have to look around for reminders of what it can do to even the hardiest materials. In whatever form it takes, when water moves laterally with its full force, it’s a blood-curdling thing to behold.

But that’s nothing compared to the water that pulls you down.

“I looked down at the rock I was resting on and sure enough, as if on cue, the one or two small crabs around my feet just made their way into little crevices, braced out their claws and seemingly disappeared. In fact, all life seemed to disappear from the pinnacle simultaneously. The all too brief moment of calm had passed and the residents of the pinnacle were preparing themselves for the next six hours in the maelstrom.

If the locals were getting worried, I thought, our team of six divers should be getting out of there.“

Between Jura and Scarba, the waters of the Scottish Atlantic are squeezed - by the narrowing width of the Strait, and from below, as the sea floor rises to that pinnacle (really more like a buttress) just 30 metres short of the surface, before plunging down towards a deep hole on the other side.

What happens in these conditions is that during the racing tide, a huge line of standing waves emerge, up to 9 metres tall and foaming continuously in place - and, a little further out, a roaring, thundering, terror-inspiring monster the Greeks called Charybdis, and which the rest of us call a maelstrom.

The whirlpool of Corryvreckan is the third largest in the world, behind the ones at Saltstraumen near Bodø, Norway, and at Moskstraumen sea near Norway’s Lofoten Islands.

It’s entirely delightful that they have such big, dramatic names, proper mouthfuls containing all the appropriate face-noises. If it doesn’t sound like it could be performed by Metallica, it’s not a proper whirlpool, I reckon. Just imagine if they had names like “the whirlpool of Milton Peevly” or “the maelstrom of Wetwang*”. I know, I digress, but these things are important.

Also, it’s something of a misnomer to say “whirlpool,” because that suggests permanence and the presence of just the one - but there are many, and they appear and vanish again with the tides in an unpredictable, chaotic way. That’s the nature of whirlpools in the real world.

You can see an explanation of how the buttress (locally nicknamed "the Hag”) creates the conditions for whirlpools in this video, which seems to be based on sea-floor scans taken by the Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS) in 2012:

And when a tide floods the channel with its waters rushing west to east, racing over the Hag and towards that distant abyss at the 219-metre lowest point of the whole Corryvreckan channel, that tidal water goes downwards.

“Dave and I however couldn’t resist the temptation to fin over to the edge of the pinnacle and look over the side, down into the 200-metre deep abyss. Of course, in the limited visibility we could only see about 25 metres down the side – deeper than that was just an ominous uniform black. The bottom was well out of sight.

As we held onto rocks and peered over the side of the pinnacle I became aware that my exhaled bubbles had stopped rising upwards – as they had done throughout the whole of my diving career. For a second or two, some bubbles were held motionless in front of my face. With my next exhaled breath the bubbles started to slowly sink downwards over the side of the pinnacle. As I continued to breathe out my bubbles started going downward more and more vigorously.

It was a very surreal experience and it was certainly time to get out of this dangerous place.”

Not far from my family home in Yorkshire is a stretch of water that’s regularly described as one of the most dangerous waterways in the world.

You certainly wouldn’t think so, seeing it on a sunny day like this:

But if you jump across the gap for a lark, you’re probably risking death. (Probably. There are a lot of legends and tall tales that swirl around this place - but the science is pretty clear: it’s horrifically dangerous.)

It’s called the Bolton Strid, and it’s a short section of the Wharfe, a broad, mostly lazy river that winds its way out of the Yorkshire Dales and runs for 65 miles before it’s swallowed up by the Ouse. Only - this isn’t what the Wharfe usually looks like. At the start of the Strid, the river’s around 90 feet wide. Just a short distance away, here, it narrows to less than 6 feet.

And yet the same amount of water is travelling through each section.

The river deals with this by more or less turning itself sideways. That volume of water is compressed and speeded up, and currents form - chaotic, turbulent, but with a corkscrewing, downwards tendency. This is supremely bad news if you go in, because at the sides of the Strid, the water has ground away ledges and pockets, so the base of the river is raggedly wider than it is at the top.

This means if you tumble in, you’ll be battered around for a while, against all sorts of rocky protusions, and when all the fight has left you, the current will take you down and hook you under the rock.

*Brrrrrr.*

At least, that’s the theory. The Strid myths are thick in those parts, and everyone knows a man who talked to someone at the pub who once heard about someone who saw, with his own eyes, a man pulled right under - along with his horse! They’re probably still down there!!! And so on.

But the New York Times covered it here, and so did Atlas Obscura. And YouTuber ‘Jack a Snacks’ (I’m hoping that’s a pseudonym) caused a stir in 2021 when he tested the depth of the Strid with a sonar device and concluded it went down a whopping 65 metres - which is twenty metres taller than London’s Tower Bridge.

(He’s recently been in communication with people who claim to have dived the Strid in the 1970s, and they’re claiming it’s no deeper than 10-12 metres - so, plenty of unresolved question marks about the whole thing. But I don’t think it matters at what depth you’re pinned under an underwater rock in a rushing torrent. It’s all a terminal nope.)

Similarly, Corryvreckan is so frightening not just because the current might pull you under, but because it might hold you under.

For the Channel 4 programme “Equinox: Lethal Seas” (2000), a documentary team from Scottish independent producers Northlight Productions threw a realistically weighted mannequin into the water near the Hag during the flood tide, wearing a life jacket with a depth gauge. When they recovered it half an hour later, the depth gauge had stopped taking readings beyond 200 metres - with evidence of being dragged along the bottom for a great distance, presumably after the downward current worked like a waterfall to hurl it all the way down to the sea floor before pulling it onwards…

So when a highly experienced diver like Rod Macdonald says he’s getting nervous, you can certainly understand why.

“We had been warned that the first 10 metres of the ascent would be difficult, and right enough, as I stepped off the top of the pinnacle it was as though a thousand invisible hands were clutching at my legs and trying to pull me down. It was quite an unsettling feeling and initially I had to fin hard to make any headway upwards.

The task of managing the ascent however soon absorbed me as I kicked my legs and simultaneously wound in the slack on my reel, essentially winching myself up towards the surface.”

Rather you than me, Rod.

- M

* A real place! I have cycled through it many times. (Without stopping.)

Rod Macdonald’s “The Darkness Below” is available here, or from the usual places (eg. Kindle.)

Images: StockSnap/27551; reddit/Pamart.org; Wikimedia/Walter Baxter; ilya montdryk; Wikimedia/Tony Page.

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And this season, it’s mainly about the bottomless weirdness of colours: how they work, what ways we use them, and how they sometimes get our minds in a right old tangle. We’ve looked at:

• the visual superpower that might let you see a hundred times more colours than the rest of us…

• the way that Ye Olde Times were, in fact, a riot of colour, including as far back as the ancient Greeks & Romans…

• why Martian sunsets are blue, not red…

• the tricky and absurd business of inventing your own colour…

• why pink means a lot more than just “for women”…

• …and how impossible colours can break your brain in some really delightful ways.

In a moment, I’ll be explaining why this colourful yet mind-flayingly ghastly image of the future is unlikely to materialise:

Yes, kids under the age of forty - that’s James Bond. Or rather it isn’t, because I doubt the Broccoli estate would have signed off on this particular look.

Anyway, all that horror will be explained in a minute, as narrated in person by yours truly.

But first - over on Threadable, thanks to a chapter on Helen Gordon’s terrific Notes From Deep Time, I just learned about plastiglomerates - the rocks that might come to define our era, and perhaps destined to be a popular building material of the future - and I’m more than a little obsessed.

If you’re on iPad or iPhone running iOS 12.4 onwards, or macOS 11.0, click the button below to join my reading circle (it’s totally free to do so)…

Download Threadable & Join My Circle

Apologies, Android & Windows users - Threadable’s not available for you yet!

…after which it should automatically take you to “Active Geology with Mike Sowden”. (If it doesn’t, trying signing in, going to “Home,” finding “All Circles” and swiping sideways until you find it.)

(And for everyone without an Apple device: I’ll be writing about plastic rocks soon, so I promise you won’t miss anything.)

So! Glass of wine at the ready, please, just in case I spring any more photos like that one on you. Here’s the question I’m going to try to answer today:

Hey, modern science - why can’t we change the colours of all our things yet?

Transcript:

One of the most fun things about watching old science fiction movies and TV shows is seeing what imaginative, bizarre, or just flat-out bloody awful clothes that the actors had to wear for the role. 

Because, once the Hollywood of the Twenties and Thirties stopped assuming that people in the future will be wearing three-piece suits, below the knee dresses and golf knickers, it became a riot of racy speculation: lots of outrageously figure-hugging stuff in metallic-looking fabrics, with oversized utility belts and collars…really just an excuse for some fairly unhinged fashion experiments, in the same way scifi is a popular ‘what-if’ playground for sociologists, economists and so on.

And of course there’s the way scifi fashions broadly followed military uniforms, until Star Trek came along and stylishly blew all that out the water - although it’s interesting how the recent shows, particularly Star Trek: Enterprise, circled back to a more boiler-suit-worn-on-submarine look. 

And then you have the Sixties and Seventies, where the raciness gets turned up to eleven: think Jenny Agutter’s multipurpose not-quite-a-dress in Logan’s Run, or just about everyone in Barbarella, or - whatever the hell Sean Connery was wearing in Zardoz (pictured above), which is sort of a full-body red nappy-like thong. And that was filmed in Ireland, which is not the warmest place in the world. Dear lord.

And then you have William Gibson’s kind of cyberpunk arriving in the Eighties, with that everything-mashed-together-as-jarringly-as-possible look, and then there’s the post-apocalyptic dystopian look where people are dressed in much the way I did in the Eighties - not because I was a visionary, just because I had no money or fashion sense. And so on. 

But - I think it’s fair to say that while people in the future may wear less clothes, they will still be wearing clothes, Sean. (Dear god.) So part of science fiction entertainment is speculating about that - within reason, because, you know, asking actors to do their work in the equivalent of Sam Smith’s inflatable Brit Awards suit is a big ask, you’re probably not going to win an Oscar if nobody’s quite sure if you’re the right way up or not, or where you’re speaking out of. There are limits.

(Or maybe there aren’t, since this just cleared up at the Oscars? In which case, hooray, to hell with limits!)

But, like everything else, the fashions of the future are probably going to be pretty weird by today’s standards. For example, a recent collaboration between Imperial College London and the Royal College of Art resulted in the invention of something called Fabrican. It’s exactly what it sounds like: it’s spray-on clothing, or at least fabric. You spray yourself with a layer of these wet fibres, and as they dry they bond together, making a single piece of flexible, shaped fabric. Pretty amazing implications - not just for making clothes, but for mending them too.

And no doubt you’re going to have something akin to 3D printing of fashion on the go, where you can program your fashion for the day and it’s made for you in a sustainably disposable way - and a way that perfectly fits every contour of your body that day, so the rich people with their expensively sculpted physiques can show off every nook and crevice of themselves in the perhaps misplaced belief that it makes them interesting. Or maybe it’ll go the other way, and artfully shapeless, body-hiding clothing will become premium fashion. Who knows? I still dress like the penniless student I used to be, so I’m not really qualified to weigh in here.

But one thing’s been bugging me. What about the programmable nail polish?

You know, the type you can see in Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall in 1990, where someone changes the colour of her fingernails by tapping them with some kind of hi-tech wand.

I saw this at the cinema, and I remember it got that special kind of laugh, that “LOL-but-also-wow-that-would-be-cool” mass snork of a sound that must be immensely satisfying if you’re the one who wrote it into the script. Because - wouldn’t that be cool? To change the colour not just of your fingernails, but other stuff as well? Of your clothes, of your car, everything? 

So with all the incredible advances of the last thirty years, you’d think this would be a thing by now, especially considering how popular it would clearly be. So why isn’t it a thing?

In scifi terms what we’re talking about here is, more or less, stealth tech: anything that lets you change the apparent colours of a thing to allow it to fit in with its surroundings. Nature’s got this nailed already: as everyone knows, the chameleon has the ability to change colours to blend into its background, to hide from predators. 

Except, well - everyone’s wrong.

From recent research, it seems this isn’t what chameleons are doing. They’re changing colour either to regulate their temperature - because chameleons can’t generate their own body heat, so they turn darker when they’re cold to absorb more heat, or vice versa - or they’re doing it to communicate, mainly to each other. Just ask anyone who has a chameleon as a pet, and they’ll tell you they can read the chameleon’s emotional state from the pattern of colours it’s wearing that day - and they’d probably be right. 

But that’s not the only misunderstanding we’ve all had about chameleons. For a long time it was assumed that they used exactly the same colour-changing mechanisms as the octopus or the squid, namely: pigments under the skin that moved around according to the wearer’s desire. This is the classic model for changing colours: you basically paint a surface a different shade from just underneath, as quickly as possible. Nice and simple.

But there’s another way to change colour - by manipulating light itself. Reflected light. After all, what we perceive as colour is just the wavelengths of light that are reaching us that are either emitted or bouncing off an object. That’s why that thing looks that colour in that moment in time. The multicoloured sheen of a pearl, like the rainbow shimmer on the surface of a soap bubble, happens because the light is interacting with the intensely compressed layers of mineral platelets and organic material that’s lumped under the term “nacre” - acting like tiny prisms, and creating that pearlescent effect.

That’s this other kind of colour being produced. The same is true with the wings of some blue butterflies - shine a light directly through them from behind and you see they’re brown, but when normal sunlight hits them from above, the surface of the butterfly’s wing drastically alters the wavelength of the reflected light - and it appears an amazingly luminous blue.

This National Geographic Explorer video explains what’s going on:

That’s partly how chameleons do the chameleon thing. (They also use pigments, so they’ve got both avenues covered.)

Their skin has at least two layers: an upper transparent polymer, and a lower lattice of nanocrystals called iridophores. Normally they reflect one dominant colour, according to the wavelengths best reflected by the current shape of that lattice - but when these cells stretch and broaden, which is what a chameleon’s skin does when, say, it sees a rival of its own species, the colour that’s most reflected by these cells is changed, towards longer wavelengths, towards the red end of the visible spectrum…

And therefore, it looks like the chameleon changes colour.

Neat trick. But one that has huge implications for us.

Changing the colour of surfaces using pigments is pretty hard - how do you get them moving around? How do you move them fast enough? What happens if it springs a leak? As a long-term technological solution, it’s probably the hard way to do things. This is why we currently use a much more energy-wasteful method: changing a surface’s colour by making it emit light instead of reflecting it, which requires an input of power, like coloured LEDs.

But changing the colour of a surface just by deforming it slightly? Much easier.

In theory! Obviously this is all still insanely hard to calibrate and get working in a practical manner. But relatively speaking, the chameleon’s method seems a lot more wearable to us than anything else.

In 2019, the University of Cambridge created a way of doing this, using tiny particles of gold coated in a polymer shell, and then squeezed into microdroplets of water in oil. When heat was applied to them, these polymer coatings instantly squeezed all the water out of themselves and bunched inwards into tight clusters, taking these gold nanoparticles with them. The result: a differently-spaced lattice primarily reflecting a different wavelength of light, same way as a chameleon’s skin. And when it was cooled, the reverse happened - the water squirted inwards, the lattice expanded outwards - another colour was made. Just two colours for now, but with huge potential. 

And when I say heat, I could also mean light. Sunlight. As soon as sunlight hits it, it changes colour in response to the intensity of the heat of that light. This could be an incredibly useful thing for the outsides of buildings for heat regulation. Just imagine it - on a really hot and sunny day, the outside of your home brightens up to reflect more heat away and keep the indoors a bit cooler, like the white-painted walls of homes in the islands of Greece - and on a bitterly cold day, it darkens to absorb as much heat as possible. Maybe even instantly, in response to the sun coming out from behind a cloud. Imagine seeing a whole street doing that, or a city, in response to a sunbeam. Wouldn’t that be trippy? Maybe too trippy?

(Here’s another way buildings might do it.)

And there’s clothing, too. Imagine outdoor gear that brightens or darkens automatically to help keep you warm, or a kind where you can just dial up the warming darkness a bit when you get a shiver down your spine. 

But there’s research going on into both types of colour changing tech - the optical effect type and the pigment-based type. MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory has developed something they call PhotoChromeleon - a mixture of photochromatic dyes that can be painted or sprayed on, then activated with UV light, in a totally reversible way that can be done again and again, like a screen being refreshed.

In their words:

“After coating an object using the solution, the user simply places the object inside a box with a projector and UV light. The UV light saturates the colors from transparent to full saturation, and the projector desaturates the colors as needed. Once the light has activated the colors, the new pattern appears. But if you aren’t satisfied with the design, all you have to do is use the UV light to erase it, and you can start over.”

So maybe - going back to those sprayable fibres in a can - in the future you can get your “clothes” sprayed onto you in the morning, maybe as you step out the shower, and those “clothes” take the form of initially transparent or monochrome layers of these fibres, then you step into some kind of UV-flooded wardrobe with a screen at the back of it, which you use to scroll through all the possible looks you might want to adopt for the day, and press a button to get that painted onto you  - in much the same way you dress your avatar in a videogame. This is already looking possible in a technical sense. Isn’t that wild?

But maybe we won’t do this at all, because it just feels wrong. Humans like wearing clothes that feel like, you know, clothes.. Or maybe it’ll just take a few generations. Or maybe we’ll all end up wearing thonged red nappies like Sean Connery in Zardoz. (Dear god.) 

But that revolution in fashion will be nothing compared to what happens when science learns to alter human pigmentation.

The reason your skin is the colour it is is down to an amino-acid-derived polymer called melanin - primarily eumelanin, which comes in two distinct varieties, brown and black. These are responsible for the colour of your eyes, your hair and your skin. The more brown & black melanin you have working together, the darker-tinted you’ll be - and a lack of brown and an absence of black is what creates blonde hair. 

The other important type of melanin gives flesh its pinkish tint - called pheomelanin. And it’s the combination of pheomelanin and eumelanin that creates all the colours of your skin all over your body, distributed via cells in your skin called melanocytes.

When those cells get clustered together instead of evenly distributed, you end up with clumps of colour - which we call freckles.

And when those cells get damaged, they can locally darken your skin. When I was in Greece a couple of decades ago I got a bout of the worst sunburn of my life on my face, and the result was patches of hyperpigmentation on my cheeks, essentially really big freckles, which I plan to get lasered off at some point, because it looks like I got into a brawl at the pub the night before, maybe not the best look for professional purposes and this is undoubtedly why I haven’t won a Pulitzer Prize yet. Literally can’t think of any other reason.

But - what if melanin was reprogrammable, like PhotoChromeleon paint? What if as part of your morning routine you also got to choose what skin colour you were wearing that day?

😬

From a purely scientific sense, this is thankfully well outside the limits of current biotechnology, but it’s not hard to imagine if you extrapolate forwards a little wildly. And regarding keeping your skin safe from the sun, more melanin is a benefit…

But of course it wouldn’t be just a scientific issue. Not even close. Because, good grief, can you imagine how that would go down? Infinite yikes. Socially monstrous in all the dystopian ways. (Especially if it was too expensive to be affordable to anyone but the ultra-rich?)

And really, this is a window into what’s going on all along. Humans never use colours in purely cosmetic ways - or rather they do, but those cosmetics have deep meanings for all of us, even when those meanings were invented by us from scratch. It’s never going to be as simple as “just” changing the appearance of everything around us, and even ourselves. Our use of colour is tangled up with our negotiated identities in all sorts of fascinating ways - which is wonderful, because wouldn’t it be supremely boring if every colour meant the same thing everywhere, and therefore no colour really meant anything?

There’s no way of knowing what will actually happen until it does. But the visions of the future that depict everything in unchanging monochrome like a modern Apple store, perhaps unwittingly harking back to their famous dystopian advert from 1984, seem unlikely.

But then, look at how we’ve come to associate unpainted white stone with ancient grandeur, even though it’s largely a myth we’ve recently invented. Maybe that will continue, and bleed all the colour out of everything of high status? Except: for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction, and this is as true in fashion as it is in physics. So I can’t see it happening.

So the future will be exactly what the past has been: a constantly shifting mess of colours, and we’ll keep arguing over what those colours actually mean, because that’s how we’ll continue to make sense of them…

And hopefully none of it will be quite as strange as what we used to think the future might look like.

See you next time.

- M

BONUS: this wonderful bit of magical trickery with a colour-related twist at the end, found via Lev Parikian’s superb Six Things newsletter:

Images: Ante Hamersmit; Womanizer Toys; TwinCitiesGeek.

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And today, it’s mainly about me yelling OH WOW, THEY ACTUALLY DID IT.

Last Sunday I stayed up all night, giving my mirror neurons an enormously joyful workout by watching things like this:

(The way that Ariana DeBose chokes up as she reads his name out? Ghagghh make these feelings stop, I’m British, THIS IS NOT HOW WE DO.)

In so many ways, this film made history. Like, this way…

…and also this (thoroughly bizarre) way:

So, I just hung out on Twitter most of Sunday night and Monday morning, jubilantly retweeting things and drinking up all that rejoicing, and I regret nothing. (In fact, the memory of it kept me going for the rest of the week, which was an exhausting whirlwind of non-work-related shenanigans - which is why I’m late with this newsletter. Apologies.)

You know I’m a fan of EEAAO because of this partly-paywalled newsletter - so, to celebrate this historic win in the widest way possible, I’ve now removed the rest of that paywall so absolutely everyone can read it, in the hope it makes you curious enough to go see this anarchic, heartfelt splatter of cinematic sorcery:

Everything Is Amazing

The Magic Of Everything Everywhere All At Once

Hello! This is Everything Is Amazing, a newsletter about science, attention, wonder, curiosity and highly unlikely cities at the bottom of the sea… And around this time last week, for the first time in my life, I saw the Northern Lights (Aurora Borealis…

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3 years ago · 58 likes · 23 comments · Mike Sowden

(And - paid subscribers: I’m making it up to you by doubling up, starting with a piece next week that attempts to answer the question Hey, What’s The Most Horrifying Way To Fall Off An Underwater Mountain?)

Secondly: over 50 (!) of you took me up on my offer to go through the old version of my non-fiction storytelling course, the one I ran between 2014-2018 when I was mainly a travel writer and copywriter:

It’s the one I’m reworking to make it less about blogging and more about newslettering, since newsletters (and enthusiasmletters) are more or less the new blogs - and I’ll be relaunching it later this year. Yet the old version was just sitting there, stopping me closing my Mailchimp account for good.

So last week I offered it up to any existing or new paid subscribers wanting to give it a punt before I shut those doors and delete the whole thing - and I’m glad to say it’s already causing some friendly havoc:

But since I’m running late with everything like the blithering idiot I am, I didn’t follow up to give anyone a final chance to sign up.

So let’s do that today.

LAST CHANCE/FIRE SALE: BLITHERING IDIOT EDITION

If you’re an existing paid subscriber (at any tier) to Everything Is Amazing, or if you become one before the end of this weekend, reply to this email and let me know you want to go through the old version of the course, and which email address you’d like to use for it - and I’ll get you added to the lesson queue.

After that, you’ll get the whole thing for free, in an series of emails delivered in an accelerated form, across the following two-and-a-bit weeks.

Okay. Job done. That’s the last you’ll hear of it until the new version’s ready.

Thirdly, here’s a sentence nobody should ever need to write: please don’t eat plutonium.

This is the gentleman that did it - and not only did he survive the experience, he went on to live a full, rich life.

(No doubt this has everything to do with how quickly he & his colleagues reacted to the accident, and nothing to do with how good plutonium is for living tissue, because it profoundly and emphatically isn’t.)

But if despite every possible rational argument you’re wondering if this might make a hilarious new challenge that will blow your TikTok through the roof, please note that the entire world’s supply of ²⁴⁴Pu only comes to around 20 grams. Around a fifth of an apple, by weight.

Absolutely not worth it, mate. Stick to pickles in a blanket.

And lastly, I’ve shared it before and I’m sharing it again: this table.

It’s the work of master carver David Robinson, shared by his son Callum on Twitter. Here’s another view:

Just….how. Howwww.

And on that mindblown note, I’m off. See you next time!

- M

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And around this time last week, for the first time in my life, I saw the Northern Lights (Aurora Borealis). But then, a lot of people in the UK did. They were visible from just about everywhere, cloud-cover permitting:

That’s an unusual thing for the UK (usually, it’s only folk in the north of Scotland who get to see them) - but rarer still was the colour, which you can just see in the Stonehenge pic: an upper layer of glowing pink-red. (An explanation is here.)

Alas, in my case, I was too near the street lights and too late in catapulting myself out the door - but I did get to see a residual grey-green band of pulsing light a little above the horizon.

However, the best view of the night must have been from the window of this EasyJet flight from Iceland to England:

So: whew. I hope you agree that the real world is amazing.

But in the interests of curiosity and wonder, let’s take a look far beyond it.

There’s a moment about forty-five minutes into the film Everything Everywhere All At Once that seems like it’s summing up human existence in a really bleak way.

Evelyn Quan Wang (Michelle Yeoh) has just sent the villain of the story flying headfirst through a wall, using martial arts skills she never knew she had. Her confusion is understandable, because she genuinely never had them, and technically still doesn’t. She’s not a wuxia action film star - she’s a stressed-to-the eyeballs laundromat owner on the verge of bankruptcy.

But Evelyn has just discovered her connection to the multiverse, an endless expanse of alternate realities sitting alongside this one (representing a genuine branch of scientific inquiry)- and she has just learned to “download”, Matrix-style, the skills of one of her multiversal alter-egos…who just so happens to be a successful, glamorous martial arts action film star not unlike Michelle Yeoh in real life.

Just for a second, Evelyn looks out of the eyes of that Other Evelyn, as she attends some star-studded film premiere that looks an awful lot like a screening at the Oscars - and then, with a thump, she returns to her body in the here & now.

She starts crying.

Her husband (Ke Huy Quan) asks her what’s wrong - and she turns and looks at him, without really seeing him:

“I saw my life…without you. I wish you could have seen it. It was beautiful. I wish I had listened to my father and not gone with you, all those years ago.”

We get to see the full impact of that statement land on his face. It devastates him. It’s so honest, so cruel - and in fact so incorrect, as the rest of the film will explain. But for one exquisitely awful second, you really feel it. It’s everyone’s nightmare, the thing we hope never to hear from someone we love.

Less than five seconds later, all the film’s mad energy gets turned back up to eleven, and both characters are sprinting down a stairwell towards their next fight scene.

Tonally, this absolutely shouldn’t work, as it happens again and again through the film - you know that thing where, in the middle of an action scene, everything conveniently grinds to a near-silent halt to give the protagonists their Big Emotional Moment? Everything Everywhere All At Once does this all the damn time, except with such flair and craft and kinetic intelligence that you don’t notice, and even if you did notice you wouldn’t care.

But then, none of the normal rules seem to apply here. This film is fantastically, mesmerizingly bonkers. I hope you’ve seen it, not just because it’s brilliant, not just because it’s the most insane piece of filmmaking you’ll see this year, but because it could be about to bend reality into its own story and sweep the board at the real Oscars, giving that glittering-premiere scene with Other Evelyn an extra level of surreality.

I mean, just look at Michelle Yeoh’s reaction to winning a Screen Actors Guild Award last week for her performance - it could be a scene from the film itself:

Equally delightful: this was the film that attracted Ke Huy Quan back into acting after a twenty-year hiatus - before which he played Short Round in Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom and "Data" Wang in The Goonies - and not only did he also win a SAG Award, he’s also hot-tipped for an Oscar. (He’ll also be in season 2 of Loki. Can’t wait. Also: watch this six-minute interview featuring him and co-star Jamie Lee Curtis and I dare you to not get emotional. I dare you. Can’t be done.)

A reviewer at the New York Times had this to say about the film: “while the hectic action sequences and flights of science-fiction mumbo-jumbo are a big part of the fun (and the marketing), they aren't really the point. [It is] a bittersweet domestic drama, a marital comedy, a story of immigrant striving and a hurt-filled ballad of mother-daughter love."

But it’s also about choices. Amidst the universe-hopping, fanny pack kung-fu and sidesplittingly funny talking stone monologues (oh, just watch it), it’s also about the ability to choose. And when, 45 minutes in, the film seems to be saying Hey, what if we're the products of all the wrong possible choices in our lives? - it’s a real gut-punch.

But that’s not what the film ends up saying at all. It’s out to say something trickier, deeper, much kinder and far more hopeful. Something about the corrosive nihilism of measuring ourselves against what-ifs until we’ve lost all sight of what actually is. Something about engineering joy, not just waiting passively for it, or blaming others for its absence. Something about having hot-dogs for fingers. (I know, I know. Just - watch it!)

But it’s also about how exciting it is to step into other versions of yourself, where you can discover different skills, different experiences, and where you see the world differently in so many ways - and, ultimately, it’s about how it’s never too late to do that, including when you’ve spent your entire life not doing it.

So what exactly is this film's ultimate message, and how might it make you a bit more curious in a thoroughly weird way? Let's leap in.

1. You can predict the weather.

2. You’re a police detective.

3. You know everything about rocks and all the things they’re made into.

4. You are 100 feet tall.

5. You’re an Accent Coach.

(Don’t worry, this list will make sense in a minute.)

(Or hey, more sense, anyway.)

“OK, I’ve let it all go. What’s next?”

I’m always fascinated at how quickly characters in scifi films adjust, and how credible that feels. You know: the protagonist discovers that time travel is a thing, or that an alien species walks among us, or that everything is a simulation designed to keep humans docile enough to not ask troublesome questions. But then the veil is lifted, and the writer is presented with a problem: how can I portray their journey from denial to realisation without it seeming unrealistic, but also quick enough to keep the plot galloping along nicely?

In Everything Everywhere All At Once, it doesn’t take Evelyn long to become a believer. Because - of course it doesn’t. As the film opens, she’s desperate and miserable: facing a gruelling IRS audit, fighting with her daughter, trying to manage her judgemental father, unaware her husband wants a divorce, and so blindly convinced that harder work and her own juggernaut forcefulness will fix everything that she never, ever stops to rethink anything. The title of the movie applies to her. That’s how she’s trying to live her life - and it’s how she’s ruining it.

On some level, she already knows all this. She may blame everyone around her, but she’s smart enough to know she’s the common denominator, even though she’d never acknowledge it publicly. So - she’s miserable, and desperate, and wants to escape. A multi-dimensional war involving all her alternate selves, fighting a villain that makes people explode into glitter? Hey, why not! It can’t be any crazier than normal life, surely?

In economic theory, there’s a thing called sunk cost fallacy. It’s where you’ve invested so much of yourself (usually in the form of unrecoverable money) that you feel like you can’t back out now, or it’ll all be wasted - even if backing out and doing something different is clearly the smartest, most logical and even most profitable thing to do. It’s the mantra “if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it” collapsing into “throwing good money after bad” and taking everything and everyone with it.

It’s partly why BlackBerry was virtually wiped off the smartphone market in half a decade (in 2009, it accounted for nearly half the market share in the United States; by 2014, less than 1%), because it refused to respond to the growing popularity of touchscreens. It’s why General Motors, once wildly success, slid into bankruptcy. It’s - yeah. I’m sure you can think of more examples, perhaps in workplaces you were very happy to leave. In business, it’s not a rare thing.

But it also applies to personalities too. And it’s simultaneously why Evelyn is stuck, and why she’s so quick to adapt to her new, insane multiverse reality. In one sense, she’s ready to take that leap of faith anytime, to leave her grinding, anxiety-riddled status quo - but in the other, she’s too deeply invested in ideas of just powering forwards blindly, by doing the same stuff she’s been doing for years, even though it’s led her to a deeply unhappy place.

But now she discovers that what she really needs is an excuse to become someone else for a while - even though that Other Person is, in fact, still her.

6. You’re an animal trainer.

7. You’re a dog.

8. You’re a Mystery Shopper.

9. You can see how places used to look a hundred years ago.

10. You can read body language like people’s thoughts are subtitled.

“The less sense it makes, the better.”

Sometimes, sunk cost fallacy isn’t actually a fallacy - it’s a decision made for entirely sensible reasons. For example, we don’t celebrate the final day of our fire insurance cover by burning our homes to the ground, just to ensure we’re getting our money’s worth.

But a lot of the time, we’re too deeply haunted by our previous investments - all that time, all that money forked out, all those years - to feel comfortable trying something completely new, even when it’s super-obviously the right move. (Sometimes, those actions even become an identity, like how “I haven’t gone for a run for years” becomes “I guess I’m not the running type”.)

It’s relatively difficult to think yourself out of sunk cost fallacy, and studies have shown that sitting down and trying to reason your way through it like astronaut Mark Watney in The Martian has all sorts of pitfalls:

“We found that experience or stocks of knowledge (so called “crystallized intelligence”), rather than raw computational power (“fluid intelligence”), enable one to avoid falling prey to the effect: in other words, being wise may count more than being smart.”

Sometimes, what works best is an interruption.

In real life, these are usually deeply unpleasant events. They’re ‘The Thing That Happened That Made You Reassess Everything’ - and there should be no romanticizing the worst of these things, or pretending they’re a welcome presence in our lives. Let’s profoundly not.

But Everything Everywhere All At Once leans into the other kinds of interruptions: the absurd ones, where you’re half-laughing, half-yelling OMG WTF just happened/did you just do???!

The way that the film’s multiverse-hopping heroes and villains step into alternate versions of themselves is by doing something so staggeringly unlikely - ie. staggeringly weird - that it disconnects them enough from this universe that they can step into another one. It’s one of the most fun things about the whole film.

And also the most disgusting.

A few examples:

• scraping someone else’s discarded gum off the underside of a desk and chewing it

• eating half a tube of lip balm

• snorting a fly up one of your nostrils

• loudly and sincerely professing love to someone who is currently trying to kill you

• giving yourself a certain number of paper cuts with the exact same sheet of paper

• taking a corporate trophy that’s shaped vaguely like a butt-plug, and…oh god.

The more “random” the act, the better it works to kick them out of their existential lanes and into different-universe versions of themselves elsewhere.

As a technique for improving your curiosity and discovering what you don’t yet know you don’t know, this is - um, well, feel free if you like? But I’m not advocating it here, and neither is my lawyer. Thanks. A bit over the line, tbh.

Nevertheless, in the film, it works. It gets Evelyn away from Here, and over to her infinity of Theres.

Unfortunately, almost all of the other universes seem at first glance like they’re better. They make her feel like her existence, the “real” one, is the least interesting, and she’s the most boring and unsuccessful version of herself that has ever lived. That’s the easy conclusion to draw when life is giving you a kicking. I reckon we’ve all been there to some degree.

But as I said earlier, the film ultimately ends up saying something very different.

11. You’re a cultural anthropologist.

12. You’re an acoustic engineer in search of the quietest place in the world.

13. You can sleep anywhere outside. (This is one way.)

14. You’re an expert at getting around without using the floor.

15. You’re two years old.

“Just be a rock.”

In her 2013 book On Looking: Eleven Walks With Expert Eyes, canine cognition specialist Alexandra Horowitz goes on a quest to reappreciate her New York city block.

I’ve mentioned this book in the newsletter a few times before, so I hope you’re way ahead of me here (seriously, it’ll make you more curious about the world around you than my writing ever could) - but if you haven’t had the pleasure yet, here’s part of one walk she goes on:

“What was the first sound heard?

The Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer, who wrote about the natural soundscape, answered his own question: It was the caress of the waters. As a species, our ancestors rose from the seas. We developed ears even earlier than we developed the ability to breathe on land. As individuals, the first sound heard by each one of us was watery again: we all began hearing the world filtered through the splashes of amniotic fluids. A fetus twenty weeks grown in her mother’s belly has only enough sensory equipment to hear relatively low-frequency sounds, around 500 Hz or below.

It is speculated that the developing ear, with its first few nerve fibers grown, can fire only up to a few hundred impulses per second, so that defines what the growing baby hears (not a lot). Still, it is enough to capture her mother’s voice, important for her survival and development, as well as the sounds of the placenta, the gurgle of intestines, and the coursing of Mama’s blood around the womb. Later in the fetus’s development, more nerve cells will begin to fire together at rates representing a wide variety of frequencies, from 20 to 20,000 Hz. Before birth, as well as after, these young ears will hear sounds from speech to birdsong, from the rumble of distant thunder to the high hum of fluorescent lights.

As I headed out onto the street with Scott Lehrer, a sound designer for theater and a sound engineer for everything from vocal recordings to museum installations, the first sound heard was a bus idling loudly by the curb. This was not entirely unexpected. We were in the city, after all, and any urban dweller grows accustomed to being barraged by an unwelcome clamor. In this case, the sound seemed designed for our consideration. Which is not to say well designed. The engine made a bubbling, roiling sound—noisy, slightly interfering with sidewalk conversation. We would be happy when it, or we, moved away: the cumulative effect of the sound was to make me feel increasingly uneasy. I wondered aloud if anyone could think of a way to like that sound.

Lehrer could.

“If you were just listening to it for itself, it could be a soothing sound, I think: it’s a steady-state sound. And actually, if I recorded that sound and brought it into the studio, dropping down the pitch four octaves, you’d end up having this deep low repetitive sound, like a kettle drum.” The idle was just percussion, Lehrer was suggesting; just rhythm. Without knowing the sound came from a tourist bus; without seeing the bus’s girth, overly large for a city street; without smelling the bus’s diesel spewings, the bus sound was just a waveform moving through the air. At a “steady state,” meaning the shape of the wave is somewhat predictable, constant—and made up of low frequencies, below 500 Hz.

In other words, it was hitting us with tennis-ball-sized packages of air pressure at a rate of a couple of hundred a second.”

I bet you know someone as interesting as Scott Lehrer. We all know someone! They see the world through a very specific lens - perhaps a passionate hobby that they’ve invested decades into, or their day-job that they’ve can’t help spilling over into their free time because it’s just so interesting (and they can’t wait to tell you about it) - and for that reason, going for a walk with them, and letting them point things out to you is a tickertape parade of surprises. Who knew that [some boring thing] could be so interesting? They did, and you didn’t - until now, that is.

So go down that bullet-pointed list that keeps intruding in to this newsletter, and choose one item, and see if it makes you think of someone you know.

Or go down it again, interpreting each point as loosely as possible, seeing if anyone else springs to mind.

Or ignore the list completely and try to think of the most wildly entertaining person you know! Who is that? What’s their thing, the topic they never shut up about in such an infectiously enthusiastic way? And how could you go for a walk with them (or “go for a walk" with them,” if you can think up some technology-assisted virtual equivalent that would be equally fun)?

If you’re doing this in person, my tip is to buy them lunch or dinner as a thank-you. They won’t expect it, because hey, who does something that nice in these times? - and you’ll help avoid them feeling like you’re ‘picking their brains’, ie. getting the equivalent of an expert consultation that’s normally changed by the hour, for nothing. Let them dictate terms and let them set the agenda. That’s the very best way to be surprised by what they’ll show you.

But the other way is to just go full-on Evelyn, and fully embrace the ultimate message of Everything Everywhere All At Once.

16. You’re an astrobiologist.

17. You’re Banksy. (Note: defacing public property tends to get frowned upon. So, you, know, you’re pretending to be Banksy, in your head.)

18. You can control your own heartbeat.

19. You’re an airline pilot.

20. You have an insane idea for a story that might one day win an Oscar.

“The only thing I do know is that we have to be kind….especially when we don't know what's going on.”

By the end of the film (mild spoilers here), Evelyn has discovered two profoundly meaningful things about the multiverse.

First: every version of herself is struggling. Comparisons are ultimately pointless because everyone (and everyone of everyone) has more or less the same weight of shit to deal with in life, even if it’s always a different combination of varieties of shit in each case. Anxiety is a constant. Pain is a constant. Everyone’s struggling and everything feels chaotic, because that’s just what being a person is. As the saying goes: the thing about travel is that everywhere you go, there you are.

Secondly: nothing matters except where we are right now. Comparisons and escapism are a distraction from the only place where anything actually gets done: the here and now.

This moment.

And that one too.

Quoting writer Annie Dillard:

“What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order — willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later still living.”

This, now, is the only place we will ever live, the only place we can ever truly feel anything, and the only place we can work to change things for the better.

It’s also the only place we can be kind, and demonstrate enough intelligent, fierce empathy towards others that not only does it make their lives better in this same moment we’re sharing, it also helps fix our own problems along the way, from the ground upwards.

(The film demonstrates this with cinematic history’s only empathy-driven martial arts battle, where Evelyn wins the day by fighting using kindness. It’s exactly as wonderful and pants-off insane as you’d expect. I laughed so much. What were they thinking, and hey, how can I think like that too?)

So, to hell with multiverse envy. To hell with sunk cost anxiety. This Here, this moment, is the real “Everything Everywhere All At Once,” because it contains all the power we’ll ever have to do whatever we want to do - starting now, going forward, in a way that’s totally sustainable for the remainder of our lives.

So here’s my challenge to you.

The full-on Evelyn approach is to choose an alternate-universe version of yourself, learn what that entails to the best of your ability, and then pretend to be that person - bringing that experience here, into the Now.

In one sense, people do this all the time. They say, “hey, I’m going to run a marathon,” or “well, it’s high time I learned Portuguese", or “you know that utterly deranged story idea I had for a multiverse-hopping laundromat owner? I should have a go at writing that!” In that sense, you’re doing nothing new. People try to break their universes all the damn time.

But then, a lot of people fail at breaking them, often because they do it in the most boring way possible - and when you’re bored, everything difficult suddenly feels insurmountable.

So, well, don’t make it boring!

Make it so weird that you don’t even have the emotional bandwidth to be bored. Weird yourself into action. LOL-WTF your way forward.

(OK, you don’t need to chew discarded gum or use a buttplug-shaped trophy to...oh god…but to break normal life’s concrete-like hold upon your mind, you definitely need to interrupt yourself somehow.)

I also recommend you document your journey in some way. You’re making order out of chaos, creating a new universe from a froth of possibilities. So give it four walls and a roof. Give it limits, or it’ll escape from you in all directions.

A personal example: sometime in 2018, I thought to myself, “wow, I’m pretty miserable and depressed. But - what if I wasn’t? What if I was a version of myself who was actually interested in everything again? And also, a person who knew about science (because science is cool)?” Eventually these thoughts turned into the newsletter you’re reading, written by this version of me that Everything Is Amazing has turned me into.

(You could do this too, by taking your oddball journey and building a Substack around it! I know I’m heavily biased, especially to this platform, but - writing a newsletter around a curious enthusiasm can be such a grand thing, for you and for anyone reading it. Just a thought? Ponder it some, if you like.)

But however you do it, try going out for occasional walks alongside this New You in your mind. Ask them questions. Try to answer those questions, playing the role of Them, and making a note of the ones you can’t answer so you can do some research on them later. Test yourself in every way that feels fun.

And maybe, bit by bit, you might start to see the world change into a far more interesting one that you never knew existed, seen through these brand new eyes (or new third googly-eye in the centre of your forehead)...

Welcome to the multiverse of Here. Now the story can really begin.

Now, it would be cowardly for me to suggest all this and not do it myself. And while I am certainly not above such cowardice, in this instance I’m climbing into the trenches right alongside you. I’m doing this too, in as weird a way as I can, and writing about it here, for paid subscribers only, in the hope you’ll look at my efforts and yell, “THAT’S PATHETIC, I COULD DO IT FAR BETTER THAN THAT,” and then act upon it. Please do that. Ridicule and trounce me loudly! I’m absolutely here for it in all the ways.

Images: A24 Films.

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Okay. Let’s bend your mind until it breaks.

Warning: if trying the following makes you feel genuinely uncomfortable - say, the sudden urge to puke, or perhaps track me down and kick me in the unmentionables - then please stop doing it! I promise you won’t miss anything, since I’m going to explain the whole thing as I go along.

Do you remember those “Magic Eye” (autostereogram) images that were all the rage in the late 1990s? The following works in a similar way.

Pick one of the two horizontal pairs of coloured squares in the image above, and fix your gaze on the white cross in the centre of one of them. Now let your eyes relax and unfocus, and gently try to cross them, as if you’re focusing on the tip of your own nose, except you’re still trying to keep that white cross in view while you do it.

Do this until you find a way to superimpose both the white crosses in each of the two squares over each other - bright red square snugly over bright green square, or darker red over darker green - and then try to keep them there.

(If you have any of the red/green colour visual deficiencies we called “colour blindness,” try this alternative with blue and yellow.)

If you’re like me, you’ll see the colour of that superimposed square flick from red to green (or blue to yellow) and back again, again and again, confusedly, as if your eyes can’t make their mind up or are panicking like a startled cat.

This is happening because you have presented your poor mind with an impossible challenge. It’s currently trying to blend those two colours together until you’re only seeing one image, in much the way our binocular vision has been helping us perceive depth since we were around 4 months old.

Except…

…red and green aren’t next to each other in the visible spectrum. There are two primary colours, yellow and orange, in the way - plus a vast array of different shades of each, representing hundreds of nanometres of different wavelengths of light.

On top of this, red and green are opponent hues - the colours which will form as afterimages against a white background if you stare at the other colour long enough. So your visual system just doesn’t know how to blend all of that together and “display the average” of the two opponent extremes of that scale: red and green.

So, naturally, it’s freaking out.

Be sure to enjoy this! Give it a few more seconds. Let it claw at the walls of your sanity. People consume all sorts of expensive recreational substances to have experiences as perception-jarring as this.

If you’re most people, your mind will continue to chaotically flop about, switching from one colour to the other without settling properly on either, for as long as you perform this self-experiment. (In my case, I think I’m starting to see a sort of ‘brownish-but-also-not-really’ colour before it flips one way or the other - which is interesting, since brown is what results if you mix red and green paint.)

It’s a hard limit of your visual system that you’ll probably never be able to go beyond. Congratulations: the fail-safes in your nervous system are working perfectly! How reassuring.

But it’s possible that you’re one of a very small number of people who will see…something else. For whatever reason, your mind may have the ability to look beyond that perceptual event horizon, beyond the apparent limits of human optical architecture - and see something that cannot possibly exist in the real world.

Welcome to the strange, strange world of redgreen. (Or yellowblue.)

It’s a colour you’ll never be able to explain to anyone else, since no language has developed words that can capture it adequately. Like Concetta Antico and her alleged tetrachromatic vision, it seems you’re perceiving colours almost nobody else can see - although, as with Antico, modern science has yet to reach consensus about whether this is really happening in a measurable sense, or if you just have an unusually vivid imagination.

In an elegant experiment in 1983, engineers used an eye tracker to fix the subject’s gaze onto the centre of a series of vertical red and green strips. The tracker used mirrors that responded to the tiny involuntary eye movements called saccades that stop our vision from becoming so stimulus-exhausted that we start hallucinating, as I previously wrote about here. No matter how their eyes moved, they still saw precisely the same image - counteracting the ‘screen-refresh’ (or, if we’re reading a book, ‘carriage return’) effect of a saccade.

For a few people taking the test, the view appeared to be absolutely wild:

“Some observers indicated that although they were aware that what they were viewing was a color (that is, the field was not achromatic), they were unable to name or describe the color. One of these observers was an artist with large color vocabulary. Other observers of the novel hues described the first stimulus as a reddish-green.”

Reddish-green, of course, doesn’t make much sense as a description - unless you mean yellow or orange, which you don’t, because you would have said “yellow” or “orange”. It’s a weird thing to think about, let alone see, and I really hope that if such people really exist, you’re one of the lucky ones.

(Fun fact: I’m one of around 5% of people in the world with something called Voluntary Nystagmus - a benign version of a very unpleasant eye condition - where I have the ability to make my eyes move independently of each other, if I so choose. I’ve been horrifying family members with it for the last 30 years - “do that bloody awful thing with your eyes, Mike! Jack hasn’t seen it yet!” - and I’ve never found a potential use for it until now. So instead of crossing my eyes inwards on each of those coloured squares, I tried moving one outwards, so I was simultaneously looking in two directions. By fixing each eye on one coloured square, each separated by a much larger gap than in the above image, I thought I could trick my brain into doing something amazing! Alas. What I saw was two images oscillating between each other, which eventually resolved into a Costa barista asking me if I was OK. Experiment over.)

OK. So you probably didn’t just see an impossible colour. I’m sorry, and I hear you: it’s very annoying when impossible things refuse to exist.

So here’s a better way for you, and just about everyone, to see not just one impossible colour, but three of them.

The way it works is simple, and you can do it three times, one for each row (giving your eyes a bit of a break in between doing each one).

First, you stare intently at the cross in the centre of the coloured circle in the column named “fatigue template” - then after maybe 30 seconds, or after as long as you can hold it, you dart your eyes sideways and stare at the cross in the “target field” box.

Have a go!

…

…

Okay! All done? How did you get on? And did you notice anything really weird about those colours?

Let’s take the first line: the apparent dark blue circle superimposed on the black background of the target field. Did you notice how it somehow looks darker than the black background, and yet it’s blue? But black is the absence of colour - it’s where colours go to die. You can’t darken black and end up with a colour. Beyond blackness is, well, just more black.

In the real world, this category of none more black includes the incredible Vantablack, a coating made of carbon nanotubes that’s capable of absorbing up to 99.965% of visible light, making it look like a hole in the world that’s so deep that not even a laser can reach the bottom of it:

But somehow, you saw a colour darker than black. It’s called Stygian Blue (from the mythical river Styx, with its waters darker than darkness itself) - and you certainly saw it, even though it’s not really there.

When you tried the second row, imposing the afterimage of that green circle upon that white background, you should have seen the exact opposite effect - a glowing pale red that seemed even brighter than its white backdrop. Which, again, is nonsense: white’s an infinity of colour, where optical colours go to die in the other way, being drowned out of existence by the sheer amount of mixed colours present.

In terms of optics, you can’t go beyond white and find a dominant colour other than “even whiter super-white”. In the physical world, that honour probably goes to this new paint that reflects 95.5% of sunlight, with exciting potential for keeping buildings cool without turning on the aircon.

Except - there are indeed real-world things that appear brighter than perfectly white surfaces! For example, we light our homes, our streets and our cities with one type of them. Anything that emits light has the potential to outshine a reflective surface - and that’s what seems to be happening here with this oddly brighter-than-white red circle.

For this reason, it’s a form of impossible colour called Self-Luminous - even though it technically isn’t, it only seems luminous.

The third row is the weirdest of the lot. The afterimage of that cyan-coloured circle, according to Opponent Process Theory (more on that another time, because it has delightfully absurd implications for how we see the world), is orange. But when you project that afterimage on that already fully orange square to the right, your brain is presented with a dilemma: hey, what’s even more orange than Totally Orange?

The answer is what you can see (or rather, think you can see): the gloriously named Hyperbolic Orange.

It’s like a colour version of the amplifier belonging to Spın̈al Tap’s Nigel Tufnel, with the dials that go up to eleven:

It’s complete twaddle (like Tufnel’s explanation), but it’s twaddle that temporarily fools you into thinking it’s ‘one more orange’.

The collective name for these three hues is Chimerical, from the word meaning “impossible to achieve,” because - yes, that. (Sort of).

Almost everyone should be able to see chimerical colours - unless the photoreceptors in their eyes are used to doing things a little different from the norm - and they’re another glimpse of the borders of our visual comprehension, where we abandon the science and give way to the realm of dream, hallucination, fiction and fantasy…

“The Neathbow is the collective term for seven colors which cannot be seen on the Surface…

The seven colors of the Neathbow are irrigo [“the unremembered color, the light of absence”], violant [“the color of troublesome but necessary connections”], cosmogone [“the color of remembered sunlight”], peligin [“the hue of the waters of the Unterzee and those of the land of the dead”], apocyan [“the color of coral and memory”], viric [“the green of shallow sleep”], and gant [“more beige than one might expect”].”

- The Fifth City, the unofficial wiki of Fallen London

“I put on the cloak... the hue fuligin, which is darker than black, admirably erases all folds, bunchings and gatherings so far as the eye is concerned, showing only a featureless dark.”

- The Shadow Of The Torturer by Gene Wolfe

“It was octarine, the colour of magic. It was alive and glowing and vibrant and it was the undisputed pigment of the imagination, because wherever it appeared it was a sign that mere matter was a servant of the powers of the magical mind. It was enchantment itself.

But Rincewind always thought it looked a sort of greenish-purple.”

- The Colour Of Magic by Terry Pratchett

(In real life, “octarine” was a proposed name for one of four new elements discovered and confirmed by the International Union of Applied Chemistry in 2016, and the subject of a widely publicised campaign - alas, an unsuccessful one. Next time, fans of the late Sir Terry...)

Further Reading:

- ““Impossible Colours”: See Hues That Don’t Exist” - Vincent A. Billock & Brian H. Tsou, Scientific American

Images: Zowie/Wikimedia; ISFDB; A Pilgrim In Narnia; Spooky/JPxG/Wikimedia; Uriel.