Click & Read, Read & Click

A double-delivery of good stuff.

Hello! This is the science newsletter Everything Is Amazing - and honestly, who knows what it’s really about, but I think the fun is why and everything else is a plus?

I’m late with my next part of our season-long look at the science of islands - because I read far too much. This is an occasional hazard of this newsletter being written by an idiot (hi there) - I end up learning so much fascinating stuff that I make the rookie mistake of trying to squeeze it into one edition, turning that whole newsletter into an impenetrable brick of super-condensed, over-excited blather.

The solution, as always, is to space things out until the story can breathe again - and in this case, turning it into a two-parter (a bit like last time’s romp along the world’s longest mountain range). The first part will be with you shortly.

In the meantime, here are two quick updates about two very excellent things.

This is the latest book by writer, adventurer & filmmaker Brendan Leonard, who writes at Semi-Rad.

Brendan has an enviable gift for writing books that look at first glance like they’re about a particular outdoorsy thing - in this case, endurance sports and ultrarunning - but then some special magic emerges from the way he writes and you suddenly realise he’s actually talking about some part of everyday life you’ve always struggled to understand & have wrestled with for much of your life, and then you find he has somehow provided you (with immense grace and empathy) with a more comfortable way to sit with it and know yourself a little better.

How he does this, I have no idea - which is bloody irritating to me as a writer because it means I haven’t been able to steal it. It’s a specifically Brendan-Leonardy thing. Some people are just selfish like that.

Ultra-Something is no different in this way it’ll get under your skin. Florence Williams, author of The Nature Fix, had this to say about it:

“Winning despite the fact that he’s (never) winning, Brendan Leonard is refreshingly irreverent, emotionally honest, searingly wise, and, always, highly motivated by pizza. This book may not turn you into a nature-loving ultra runner, but it will certainly help you understand how doing very hard things can make us better humans.”

And for the next 24 hours, if you grab a copy of Ultra-Something in any format and let Brendan know, he’ll send you a free ebook copy of his previous book, Have Fun Out There or Not.

The details are here.

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Secondly, here’s something I’ve been eagerly awaiting for years.

If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you may remember a terrific social reading app called Threadable that some of us were using to read things together.

(In essence, it’s like we’re all scribbling our questions & interpretations in the margins of the same book we’re all reading, but without any mess and with all the linky cleverness of a modern online service brought to fruition.)

It was really great - but alas, the version we were using was only available to some iOS and Mac users, which limited the number of us that could get involved.

But since then, the team at Threadable have been hard at work making & launching their brand-new Web version - and I’m delighted to say that it looks gorgeous, runs so beautifully and is available right now.

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If you want to join my reading circle and take a look at the texts we were previously studying, click this link.

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It’s such a great service for curious readers, and I hope you poke around the new interface and check out what else is happening over there - including fellow Substack writer

Antonia Malchik

‘s reading circle on The Commons and Belonging in Science Fiction.

(You’ll also see that I’ve renamed my circle after the Big Amazing Read that I announced a few weeks back - and next week, I’ll have some more details on how we’ll be using Threadable for part of it.)

Hope to see you over there!

- Mike