Hello! This is Everything Is Amazing, a newsletter about using your curiosity to live better, think deeper and behave in ways that will make strangers cross to the other side of the street to avoid you. (More fool them, eh?)
First, a couple of updates to previous newsletters.
When I wrote about why birds don’t go BANG on power-lines and how humans can protect themselves in the same way, Greg Hooper was kind enough to link to the following video in the comments. It’s quite the thing to watch, if your stomach can take it:
Secondly: remember this piece on the lost landscape now hidden under the North Sea?
It now seems that the Mesolithic people wandering the lowlands of Doggerland, facing an environmental catastrophe that would either wipe them out or drive them into what’s now mainland Europe and Britain, were themselves wandering over an ancient disaster-zone!
As reported in Nature Communications this week, back in 2002 petroleum geoscientists discovered the traces of an ancient 2-mile-wide crater 80 miles off the coast of East Yorkshire, surrounded by a wider zone of circular faults. For two decades, scientists have debated the evidence: some preferring a model of “movement of salt rocks at depth,” and others leaning towards an asteroid impact on a massive scale.
Today, it seems the evidence (seismic imaging and the microscopic analysis of “shocked” quartz from the site) now greatly favours the latter. Cue the big dramatic headlines:
It appears that around 43 to 46 million years ago, during a period called the Eocene, a 160-metre-wide chunk of rock fell out the sky and battered a massive hole in the sea floor, throwing up a colossal tsunami along the way.
(This is certainly plenty apocalyptic enough, but it’s always fun to see the stock images that news stories like this use. Blimey, if the asteroid had been THAT big, northern Europe would look very different nowadays.)
Until now, there have been no confirmed impact craters in this corner of Europe, just two speculative candidates: this one, and also an absolute beast of a thing under northwestern Scotland. To get near-as-dammit confirmation of one of these being a real impact is really exciting - and yet another reminder that the UK has indeed had its fair share of Big Geology Happening Quickly (see also: the English Channel Megaflood).
Finally, this motion-activated photo of a bear by wildlife photographer Johanna Turner is…well, just feast your eyes:
(Obligatory PSA: please do not attempt to hug bears in the wild, however much perfectly-timed photography makes you want to.)
Okay!
Let’s start with the extremely topical subject of how great late-night talk shows can be.
In 2008, comedian Louis CK went on Conan O’Brien’s late-night show and launched into a mock-outraged rant about ungrateful modern travellers:
“First, we didn’t board…for 20 minutes. And then we get on the plane and then we sit there, on the runway, for 40 minutes! We had to sit there!”
Oh, really? What happened next? Did you fly through the air, incredibly, like a bird? Did you partake in the miracle of human flight, you non-contributing zero? You are flying! It’s AMAZING. Everybody on every plane should just constantly go, “Oh my goddddd! WOW!” You are flying! You are sitting - in a chair - in the sky!”
The entire bit is a sardonic moan about “the crappiest generations of just spoiled idiots who don’t care” - but mixed into it is a call to arms for curiosity and wonder. Strip out the snark, and there’s something left that’s well worth considering:
“If you wanted money you had to go in the bank - which opened for 3 hours. You stay in line, [write a cheque] like an idiot - and then, when you ran out of money, you just go ‘Uh, well…I can’t do any more things now.’
And! Even if you had a credit card, the guy…would bring out this whole [mimes lugging a big machine onto a table and operating it with a *SHUNK-SHUNK* sound]….and then…he would have to call the President...”
That SHUNK-SHUNK machine was a credit card imprinter (also ZipZap machine, click-clack machine or Knuckle Buster), and I consider myself very lucky that I just missed having to use it regularly: by the time I got my first card, ‘hole in the wall’ cash machines were just becoming a thing.
A lot of the 80s and 90s now feel like this: a giddy, nostalgic glimpse of another world, before Everything Changed Forever OMG WTAF.
I’m sure it’s an illusion. I’m sure that every generation since the dawn of agriculture feels like it’s living the most bizarre and changeful times in world history - and it’s just that ours is so meticulously documented and that we’re here, right now, that makes us feel like we’re so ridiculously special.
(Just imagine reading the diary of someone living through the two decades between 1066 and 1086, or 1664-1668, when the twin horrors of the Black Death and the Great Fire ravaged London in a way that’s barely imaginable today. Imagine social media, if it had been around back then! You think morbid performative doomerism is bad now? Can you imagine what they must have been feeling?)
But look, I’m 54 in a few weeks, and I’m just as susceptible to feeling time-shocked as everyone else. Modern life? What a clown omelet! Completely bonkers! Can someone at least test the brakes on this thing, please?
Oooh, I remember when the Internet was nothing but fields, just acres of people waving and attempting semaphore, bah, you kids with your “Walk-mans” and your low-slung jeans where the rest of us have to endure seeing your fundament every time you sneeze, you don’t know how good you have it because in MY day if you wanted new clothes you had to rob a scarecrow, now don’t get me wrong, I’m not nostalgic, although I certainly used to be! Ah - those were the days.
So despite Louis CK’s reputation taking a dive in recent years, I’ve always loved his Everything Is Amazing And Nobody’s Happy rant - and I even ended up using it as inspiration for the name of a certain newsletter.
(I don’t think he’s a reader of mine, but please, if you know him, don’t tell him, in case he lawyers up and I have to change the name of this newsletter to Everything Was Formerly Amazing.)
Reflecting on the changes in your lifetime, and having a sudden sense of how quickly the future has arrived for you, can be a reassuringly grounding thing. Even an opportunity to feel grateful!
As an asthmatic, would I have wanted to live in an era before Salbutamol inhalers were widely available? Reader, I would absolutely not.
Medical advances, technological leaps forward that create huge boosts to quality of life, our incredible new abilities to hear and understand each other across vast distances (hi there!) - it’s all absolutely incredible.
It’s also a mess! It’s riddled with all sorts of new problems (alongside the old problems given a lick of new paint), and the struggle to make sure everyone benefits equally is absolutely real. That’s progress for you. It isn’t pretty and it’s often maddeningly unfair in a socially lumpy way.
It’s also just so complicated. Seriously, who the hell knows what is happening, on the whole?
I’m grateful to Sam Matey-Coste for teaching me a few new things about how rapidly the future is arriving when we had a great chat about it recently:
These charts alone (source, via Sam) are so startling:
But there are four big changes in particular in my lifetime, arguably far less consequential than anything in those charts but astonishing in their own right, which I will never, ever want to fully get my head around, because of how much they fill me with such gratitude and wonder.
Let’s count these ways together.