Today, in a career first, I received a press release about a toilet brush.
Not any old toilet brush, mind.
A crowdfunded toilet brush.
This plan to make Oxford Circus a car-free pedestrian piazza absolutely needs to happen.
It’s easy to forget that long before Vox was the site we know now, there was a blogging platform that used to live at vox.com.
Looking back at my post-mortem, I think the word that’s missing from my piece is “Facebook”. The market Vox was trying to reach was consumed by it.
Luca, the new Pixar movie on Disney+, proved a perfect Father’s Day watch with my girls. It’s a simple story, but the richness lies in the relationships and characters, with a surprising amount of subtle shading in their behaviour.
Well worth a watch. 🍿
This is a really, really interesting podcast on how to reverse polarisation in society. Thought-provoking.
This week it has become abundantly clear to me that some tasks are better done on a big screen, and some on a small screen. And figuring out which is which, and switching tech to accommodate that, has a huge impact on productivity.
See you, open rates. It was good while it lasted.
Missed the live WWDC keynote stream, so here’s the plan:
- Read the previews on Apple.com
- Scan the hashtag #WWDC21 on Twitter
- Pour a beer
- Watch the keynote when the replay is available
- Try to ignore my wife’s mocking commentary.
An engaged newsletter audience is better than a big one.
(And I managed to write it without making a “size isn’t everything" joke. Apart from that one, obviously.)
Genomics and pandemics and the avoidable crisis
The latest news from the United Kingdom, which has better genomic surveillance than almost any other country and thus can allow us to disentangle causes of outbreaks better, is not good.
Immensely proud of the fact that my wife, as a medicial genomics lecturer, has played a part in making the central sub-clause of that quote true.
However, the rest of Tufecki’s newsletter is well worth reading, as it challenges those of us in countries with successful and extensive vaccination schemes to start thinking what we can do to aid the rest of the world, before we see a worsening humanitarian catastrophe.
Online culture is now just culture: Dominic Cummings References Spider-Man-Pointing Meme To Parliament