Hello! This is Everything Is Amazing, a newsletter about science, curiosity and wonder.
I hope you are well, I hope your extremities are warm, and I suggest you immediately pop the kettle on - you’re going to need a hot drink inside you for the cold and increasingly grim second half of this newsletter…
But before that, a few cheerier things.
Every year at this time, Brendan at Semi-Rad.com republishes a particular essay he wrote in 2012. It’s about the power of enthusiasm - the infectiously fun kind, the kind kind, that hard-to-pin-down, easy-to-identify emotion that’s the source of so much mad joy in this world, and the endlessly renewable stamina we need to do all the absurd things we know, deep down, that we’re here to do.
Without getting Brendan’s permission in any way (apologies & maybe see you in court, Brendan!) I’m going to repost part of the intro here:
“I have put a lot of thought into it, as it must be the most widely-read piece of work I’ve ever put out there, and it was now more than a decade ago. Sometimes I feel like Mariah Carey probably feels about her No. 1 bestselling song of all time, “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” which everyone in the U.S. has probably heard at least a hundred times since it first came out in 1994, and it continues to pop back up every holiday season, like a musical Pumpkin Spice Latte, or the McRib, or the UConn women’s basketball team.
You might think the person who wrote this piece is constantly whooping and high-fiving people when they’re out in the world. Sometimes I wonder if I should be doing those things, especially when I read this piece again. I am actually much more chill in person, despite my medically inappropriate consumption of coffee. But I do espouse the idea of Practicing Maximum Enthusiasm. I am generally trying to look for the bright side. and happy for you when things you want to happen happen, even if I’m personally not that excited about new skate skis or adopting cats or whatever. I’m just happy you’re happy.
I’ve written a lot of words over the years, and sometimes I go back and read them and realize I don’t 100% believe something I wrote in 2015 anymore. But I’m still pretty OK with everything in this piece.”
Every year, many thousands of Brendan’s readers are pretty OK with it too - so I hope you’ll join them by clicking here, reading it, and then enthusiastically living it for the rest of 2024.
Also, a quick shout-out to my friend
who is tirelessly enthusiastic about finding great things to read on the internet, and just published her latest roundup:(Every month I’ve been helping Jodi format the links, since she’s mostly assembling these newsletters on her phone while laid flat due to an ongoing cerebrospinal fluid leak - she explained things to CNN here - but as yet, Substack’s mobile app doesn’t have a newsletter writing/editing option that allows for easy link editing, so it’s all a bit tricky for someone with limited standing-up time. Would love this functionality, Substack!)
Secondly, if you’re as fascinated as I am by Northern Europe’s ‘lost world’ and the recent mapping of Zealandia - now it’s Australia’s turn!
In a study just published in Quaternary Science Reviews, a team headed by archaeologist Kasih Norman from Griffith University (Brisbane) has reconstructed the ancient topography of the continental shelf surrounding Australia - and found that between 27,000 and 17,000 years ago, when the sea was low enough to connect Australia to modern New Guinea, there was a vast shelf of land extending off the continent’s current north-western edge (now under the Indian Ocean), and it contained both an inland sea and a huge freshwater lake:
Perfect for habitation? The modelling suggests so - and the team believes this 400,000-square-kilometre landmass could have been home for anything up to half a million people until the sea reclaimed it around 14,000 years ago. (In comparison, the maximum population of Doggerland has been estimated to be not much more than 10,000.)
In Norman’s words, quoted in New Scientist:
“This massive landscape that is not there now would have been unlike anything that we have in Australia today… To have a freshwater lake of that size next to an inland sea is just incredible and people would have been living across it. This is a lost landscape that people were using.”
And thirdly, I was recently reminded of this glorious telekinetic hoax in a coffee-shop in New York, set up to promote the remake of Carrie (2013) - and every time I watch it, I love it just a little more.
What a great job they did with this prank - and how close we assuredly all are, all of us, to believing that such a thing can exist under conditions as convincing as this:
Okay!
This month, I’m opening up my curiosity calls again.
As I said at the end of July, I’m offering these to paid subscribers of this newsletter to help them with their own curiosity-driven enthusiasms - not because I have any firm answers on anything (I hope that’s super-clear from this whole newsletter), but because I love the process of chucking ideas around, which was the best part of when I worked as a story consultant.
Plus - I want to know who you are. I often suspect I’m the least interesting person associated with this newsletter, and this is an excellent way of discovering it.
The details of those are at the end of this email - but first, in tribute to the below-zero temperatures currently setting the UK crunchy and aglitter right now, I’m bringing back one of the most horrible things I’ve ever written.
It’s hopefully not horrible as in “unreadably bad” (I wouldn’t inflict any of the worst of my past writing on anyone except myself after a stuff drink or two) - but horrible as in “instilling a sense of immense Yikes upon the reader”.
While doing a piece of travel writing for a magazine about some idiot getting lost on the North York Moors (yes, that idiot was me), I got interested in the limits of the human body in cold conditions. I knew of friends who had endured temperatures of up to -30 Celsius in some of the bleakest places in the world - and of people who had died of hypothermia in more or less their own back yards. My ghoulish curiosity kicked in. What actually happens when you freeze to death? What was the science of this awful, awful thing?
So I did my reading, and wrote it up on my personal blog - and thanks to a now-defunct website called Stumbleupon, it proceeded to go mildly viral and freak out upwards of a hundred thousand people.
Here’s the updated 2024 version. I hope it makes you appreciate the next warm thing you wrap your arms around.