It's Week 1 of the Big Amazing Read

So let's all read the Introduction together!

Hello! This is Everything Is Amazing, a newsletter about science and wonder that embraces tonal whiplash by lurching between the cheerful science of applied kindness and the morbidly creepifying biology of human overheating.

In a day or so I’ll be returning to the Inboxes of paid subscribers with a roundup of some of science fiction’s wildest ideas, and next week with the next part of this season’s look at the life-improving science of human memory. (Here’s the first part of it, now unlocked for everyone to read.)

But today, it’s time to formally launch the very first Big Amazing Read!

Here’s my announcement of it from a month ago:

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We’re reading On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes by Alexandra Horowitz - and as of today, the introductory chapter is available for you to read on Threadable, whether you’re a paid or free subscriber of Everything Is Amazing.

What’s Threadable?

It’s a really terrific social reading service, letting us read something together with all the ease of the best of the internet.

It was formerly only available through its iOS & Mac app, but also newly accessible on the Web! (This means you can also use it if you’re on Android, through your phone’s browser - I’ve been happily using it on my Xiaomi Redmi 8 all this week.)

Without Threadable, I’d be asking you to read the whole of On Looking in your own time over the next 3 months, and then we’d meet in the comments of a monthly newsletter (or, for paid subscribers, in extra newsletters and on a Zoom call) to have a discussion about the book.

But with Threadable, we can do some of this much more seamlessly, and in something approaching real-time! As well as reading the whole chapter using their swanky new Web interface (see below), you can also leave comments and respond to other commenters, like we’re all meeting in the margins of a good book:

Important note: you can read the whole of this Introduction without signing up to Threadable - but if you want to comment on it as well, you’ll have to sign up for a free Threadable account, as follows:

1. Go to the Threadable homepage and click on Get Started in the top-right.

2. Set up a new profile using your Google or Apple account or by clicking “Sign up with email”, as below.

3. Join my Reading Circle (see below), where I’ll be posting other excerpts from On Looking and some other related texts during the whole of this Big Amazing Read.

» Click here for a direct link to my Reading Circle «

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I’m so delighted to partner with Threadable on this first read-through: I used the earlier iOS-only version for this newsletter back in 2022, and as I said back then, it was “a bit like scribbling in the margins of a book, but without the mess and with all the extra sideways-linking cleverness of the Web brought to bear.”

Now their Web interface is up and running, it’s far easier to use and a lot more powerful too. Absolute game-changer.

So - it begins! The first month Big Amazing Read is underway, and we begin with Alexandra Horowitz’s realisation that while she thinks her attention-paying skills are pretty good (she’s a Columbia University professor & canine cognition researcher), what she’s missing about the world around her could…well, fill a book.

Read it in her own words here.

- Mike

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Images: Threadable; Sincerely Media.