A festive selection box
The final Newsletter of (Not Quite) Everything of 2023.
So, how’s everybody doing? Sick of the family? Looking for a reason to stare at your phone for an hour to break up the monotony? Then boy, do I have the newsletter for you.
No new writing this week, I’m afraid – I am writing a few days before Christmas (on the Metropolitan Line, as it goes), and am probably, as you read this, asleep under a dog. But below you’ll find some interesting bits of internet I’ve spotted over the last week or two, as well as a self-indulgent list of my favourite things on the newsletter this year. I’ll be back with a full serve early in the new year. Enjoy.
Here
Some of the things I most enjoyed writing myself:
A new way of thinking about history.
Some notes on common ancestors.
Some notes on talking animals.
Where do the shipping forecast regions get their names?
Gladstone, Homer and the “wine dark sea”: or, when was an orange not coloured orange?
The fifteen colour problem: on the limits of metro maps.
Nick Timothy’s London and the anecdotal fallacy.
The many Heinrichs of Reuss: some thoughts on the Holy Roman Empire.
“No no we really need that derelict petrol station”: A field guide to the NIMBYs of the British Isles.
There
This year, I started running extracts from friends’ books, on the assumption that this might be good for their sales, my circulation and your entertainment all at once. If you missed any of them, here they are:
How do we know what 21 degrees C means? From James Vincent’s Beyond Measure: The Hidden History of Measurement.
When poor people occupy land without paying, it’s squatting. When the rich do it, it’s parking. From Daniel Knowles’ Carmageddon.
Some notes on flying ant day, and other such swarms. From Lev Parikian’s Taking Flight: The Evolutionary Story of Life on the Wing.
Some notes on the limits and pleasures of machine translation. From Keith Kahn-Harris’s The Babel Message: A Love Letter to Language.
Other the summer, while I was mired in grief, my wonderful friend Frankie Goodway worked with my editor Jasper Jackson to line up a bunch of people to keep this newsletter running while I could not:
My sometime co-author Tom Phillips, who later this year was kind enough to host Henry Scampi and I at his home in Cornwall for a week, wrote about the Tory tailspin, and a short history of battles that never really were.
Former CityMetric regular Ed Jefferson offered an incomplete history of finding things, plus notes on the new game of “bus stop Scrabble”.
Nicky Woolf wrote about the utopianism of the garden city movement. (His podcasts are annoyingly good, by the way.)
Schools Week’s Freddie Whitaker wrote about how shrinking pupil numbers could actually be an opportunity for schools.
Lastly, In September, TV writer Ian Martin – The Thick of It, Veep and so on – was kind enough to write about Keir Starmer, history and metro maps in a single edition, thus showing he’d really grasped the tone of this newsletter.1
I love and am grateful to them all.
Everywhere
Lastly, some links to elsewhere.
The Tories have had a rubbish year. But at least, like the government, it’s nearly over. My last New Statesman column of the year.
I was on the panel for The Bunker’s weirdest moments in politics in 2023 podcast, alongside Jacob Jarvis, Andrew Harrison, and the internet’s own Marie Le Conte.
Do any of your friends love you enough to give you a home made tube map hoodie for Christmas?
An upsettingly convincing argument, courtesy of James O’Malley, that the real ending of The Snowman is an enormous nuclear war.
Never mind that now, though, here’s some Christmas joy for you: NBC News on the Washington DC woman who is using dating app Bumble to get men who took part in the Capitol insurrection on 6 January 2021 convicted.
The business genius who brought Twitter to its knees has done it again. Elon Musk’s Hyperloop One is shutting down by the end of this year. (The people who said stuff like this made it a waste of money to build new rail should probably shut up.) Full report from The Verge here.
The Faroe Islands (pop: 55,000) just opened an 11km tunnel to connect two of their islands. It’s not even the longest one. Meanwhile, Manchester Piccadilly still awaits its two new through platforms. More on the plan in this BBC piece from 2020.
Sigrid the cat has a new job on the Northern line.
“A Christmas Carol” Gives Kids Unrealistic Expectations That Rich Assholes Will Change Their Ways. Absolutely loved this furious piece by Dan Kozuh in The Hard Times.
Talking of which: I read this every year at Christmas, like it’s my own personal Christmas Carol: Felix Salmon’s magisterial 2012 column in which he tells the rich they’re doing philanthropy wrong. (”You kid yourself that your mere presence on the board, or your “celebrity endorsement”, is valuable. It’s your money that’s valuable.”)
And finally, the story of Little Rick, the racoon who came to stay.
Oh – and in case you hadn’t realised (I’ve been keeping it quiet) my new book, A History of the World in 47 Borders, comes out in April. Two people received early proofs for Christmas: a friend’s 12 year old, who enjoyed my other books and who appeared, in the picture I was sent, absolutely over the moon with his present; and my mother, who also received a copy.
Anyway: if you want to read it, you can, and should, pre-order your own copy here.
I hope you’ve had a lovely Christmas, and that 2024 brings nice things for us all.
I, shamefully, forgot to include Ian in the email version of this newsletter, but was so horrified I added him into the web one after the fact. Sorry. x
Looking forward to the book, and happy new year!
In 2024 are you likely to be launching an investigation into the destruction of the 2023 Gavle Goat by jackdaws as part of your role as official UK Gavle Goat Correspondent? In particular whether an enterprising local trained the jackdaws to steal all the straw on order to outwit the heavy duty security guards now hired to guard the goat?