Observations

It ain’t half hot, Mum.

Disconcertingly warm, isn’t it? Again. We wandered off to a local beach in Still Sunny Devon the other week, and well, it worried me. As nice as it is not quite needing a coat, blazing sunshine and the weatherperson’s calm assertion that it’s 22 degrees and the clocks go back soon isn’t good, is it?

Who the Fuck’s That?: The Return of Strictly Come Dancing

Emma Willis is as beautiful as she is sharp as a tack, isn’t she? Well played, under-fire BBC mandarins. For us, Tess Daly was always oddly stilted, for some reason. Long have we known this to be true. Josh Widdicombe is chirpy, small and seemingly made of a weird mix of positivity and jangling nervous energy. Johannes Radebe is incredible at dancing, raising the tone of proceedings and being uniquely, irresistibly himself. He’s always been a star. Potentially, this whole sequin-covered charabanc of a show could be held together by a collective will for it to be the uplifting tonic the chattering classes need it to be, then.

If that doesn’t work, Nigella has just oozed her way into the Bake Off tent. Good lord. But the contestants? Couldn’t give a shit, mate. Traitors starts next week, too, promising all sorts of alternatives for the nation’s eyeballs. No Stephen Fry, though, sadly.

The Maddening Grand Prix

We love high-speed millionaire playboys with no common sense at AAT, so the arrival of F1’s circus at the new Madring (sounds like a beer, is actually a street circuit in Spain’s capital) was something to look forward to. Except it wasn’t. Horrible carousel-style stadium section, precisely Geoff-all overtaking, which only served to highlight how the new rules have produced racing based on deployment, rather than ballsy driving. Didn’t like it. Don’t enjoy the sound of Crofty trying to get the phrase ‘wheel-to-wheel’ into every third sentence, now that doing so is ordinarily as hard as putting on a hat. Something is wrong when you are left unmoved by cars doing ridiculous things repeatedly, but that’s where we are.

Three places on the internet

Aeon

The internet occasionally remembers what it was invented for. Aeon is one of those occasions. Long, thoughtful essays about science, philosophy, psychology, history and the strange business of being human, written by people who actually know what they’re talking about. There are no frantic hot takes, no desperate attempt to sell you a mattress halfway through paragraph four, and remarkably little shouting. You go there to read one article and emerge an hour later having developed strong opinions about Cicero, black holes and the nature of consciousness. Which seems a perfectly reasonable use of an afternoon. Visit Aeon ↗

Works in Progress

A magazine for people who look at the world and think: surely we could do this better. Works in Progress writes about cities, energy, transport, science, technology, medicine and the wonderfully broad subject of human beings trying to improve things. The good bit is that it tends to avoid both techno-utopian nonsense and the equally tedious conviction that everything was better in 1973. Instead, it asks practical questions. Why are Japanese trains so good? Why can’t we build enough houses? Why does some infrastructure work brilliantly while other infrastructure costs £11 billion and requires seventeen consultations before anyone is allowed near a shovel? Dangerous stuff, obviously. Visit Works in Progress ↗

The Long Now

Most websites want your attention for the next six seconds. The Long Now Foundation would like us to think about the next ten thousand years, which is an excellent way to make a Thursday afternoon’s inbox feel a little less important. Its site holds talks and essays about civilisation, memory, language and the future, alongside projects such as a clock designed to keep time for ten millennia. Brian Eno is among its founders, which perhaps explains why even the name feels like an unusually good album title. The idea is pleasingly awkward: what would we build, protect or stop doing if we remembered that someone else has to live with the result? Visit The Long Now ↗