Hello! This is Everything Is Amazing, a newsletter about science, enthusiastically applied curiosity and drunk octopuses wanting a fight.
In a few days, and after a great deal more reading than I was expecting (hence the delay), I’ll be cracking on with this!
But today, two delightful things that make me feel very, very lucky to run this newsletter.
Firstly: if you’ve been reading for a while, you’ll know I’m a huge fan of ’s work. For decades he’s been a tirelessly/recklessly brave writer, filmmaker, artist and creative experimenter who really seems to love having a go at absolutely everything - while also building his own instantly recognisable style, a widely-respected and award-winning body of work, an obsessively engaged readership and a social media following in the hundreds of thousands.
(Achieving both those things simultaneously? I think that’s rare! If you’ve ever felt like you always have to pick one or the other, to niche down or to chase everything that seems interesting to you, Brendan’s here to say you can definitely do both, and also that life is absurd & short so you should probably just do what’s actually fun and let the rest sort itself out along the way, ideally while eating pizza.)
I did a phone interview with him back in 2022, written up here (great fun, but a technical disaster due to the sound quality, which is why it’s a transcript).
Yet I’d never talked to him face to face - so it was a pleasure, an honour and a total blast to do so for an hour over Substack’s Live Video service a couple of days ago, to talk about his new & thoroughly brilliant online writing & storytelling course, which is based on the workshops he’s been running in person for the last 6 years.
You can watch the whole replay at the top of this newsletter - and click below to check out Brendan’s course, and to take the first lesson of it for free:
Secondly: remember that crazy story from the last edition of EiA with the mysterious seismic pulse that could be heard around the whole world?
I put a version of it on Bluesky and Threads - and it completely blew up:
The last time something like this happened, it was on Twitter, as I explained here.
Now I’m no longer using that platform, I’ve been wondering if the same kind of thing could ever happen elsewhere, on any of its successors. Now I know this answer - and since social media’s been my most impactful way to get people interested in this newsletter (this time round, over a thousand of you signed up!), I’m really thrilled. Thrilled. Whew.
But also, I’m glad it was this story, which is about the power of scientific collaboration - 68 scientists from 40 institutions in 15 countries tracking down the answer to this mystery. That’s a good drum to enthusiastically wallop right now, considering everything happening with science funding in the US.
It was also enormously gratifying to see the research paper’s lead author give it a push on Bluesky, reminding me that I can be something of a useful idiot to the folk in the sciences whose research deserves the widest possible audience:
Have I mentioned I love this job? Because I really do.
OK. Back in a few days!
- Mike
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