So much is happening in my life, work and brain this week that I’m unable to even begin to express it all here. Suffice to say that uncertainty and change are the two biggest forces operating in my universe right now, though hopefully for a limited timeframe.
I’ve picked out some interesting reads this week that have helped me examine the world, learn new things, or just laugh – give them a look.
And also: a book recommendation. I was a big fan of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time (a must for any sci-fi fans) and someone at work recommended his more recent Service Model, which I just finished.
The book is about a robot manservant who accidentally kills his master, and his struggle to override his internal programming and internal logic systems in order to express some form of free will. It’s funny, clever, thought-provoking, and worryingly plausible. Give it a read.
Reading this week
1. You can make an app for that (David Pierce, The Verge)
“The rise of AI coding tools like Claude Code — and OpenAI’s Codex, and GitHub Copilot, and Cursor, and Lovable, and Replit, and a thousand others — is already changing the way software developers work. They’re also giving way to an entirely new kind of software: the software we make just for ourselves. Not to raise venture capital for, not to eventually sell to Google. The era of personal software is upon us, and it is changing our relationship with technology forever. It has certainly already changed mine.”
This is fascinating to me. I learned to code in the late 90s when I wanted to make my own website and there were free services providing webspace if you could be bothered to learn to code HTML. Now, the bar to entry is even lower: if there’s some specific, niche need you have for an app, website or tool: you can just build it.
2. Keir Starmer, stripped bare: neither charisma nor political acumen (Ian Dunt, El Pais)
“The argument for Keir Starmer was never romantic. It was pragmatic. No one ever claimed that he was a charisma powerhouse. He came across, at best, like a barrister from North London and, at worst, like a bank manager in a medium-sized provincial town. Nor was he a great storyteller. He avoided sweeping narratives or big soaring rhetoric. That story turned out to be a work of speculative fiction.”
This is all over the news this week and it’s depressing in its predictable way: we seem to expect individual leaders to hold all the answers and solve all the problems, and when they inevitably don’t, we swap them out for another doomed chancer to have a go. I’m bored and frustrated waiting to see who pops up next to take their shot.
3. What Adults Lose When They Put Down Children’s Books (Anna Holmes, The Atlantic)
“Reading children’s literature in adulthood isn’t just a nostalgia impulse or an exercise to undertake in the context of sharing stories with kids. Incorporating these books into a literary diet—whether or not a person has children—can help anyone to see and hear with fresh eyes and ears, to find or rediscover wonder in the large (mountain ranges, the moon) and the small (a hummingbird, a smile, a square). In my home office, surrounding myself with kids’ books puts me in a state of mind that complicates and enriches my thinking.”
I’ve loved books since childhood and I have an English degree and more books on my to-read list than I can finish in my lifetime. But it’s only since parenthood that I feel like I really understood books and reading: finding myself in tears as I read the final pages of Narnia; selecting books based on how much fun I’ll have “performing” them to the kids; rediscovering the magic and power of being ever-so-slightly afraid of an uncanny character, spooky plotline or captivating illustration. Children’s books are the source of all magic in the world.
Fun and miscellany this week
1. From the “hobbies” section of Will Wright’s Wikipedia article (depths of wikipedia)
“I’m uncollecting. I buy collections on eBay, and I disperse them out to people again. I have to be like an entropic force to collectors, otherwise all of this stuff will get sorted.”
Will Wright is the creator of The Sims and I absolutely love the chaotic energy of this approach to life. I might buy some rare Pokémon cards and start randomly giving them to my son’s classmates (I won’t).
2. Dads learning to style daughters’ hair in the pub (BBC)
“Daniel Zakis is one of the dads who has come along to the first “Plaits and Pints” event at the Ale Rooms in Knowle. One of skills the dads are being taught is the French plait, and Daniel said it was not a “total disaster, it’s better than I thought”. The workshop is being run by Sophia Gough, a mobile hairdresser from Deco Hairdressing in Solihull.”
Dads get mocked for things like this – unfairly, I think (as a biased dad who struggles to plait his daughter’s hair). We don’t laugh at mums being unable to teach their teenage sons how to shave, right? I applaud the hairdressers leading these classes and we should normalise men admitting they can’t do something but getting together to learn.
3. Imberbus: providing a classic bus service across the Salisbury Plain to the lost village of Imber (r/london post on reddit)
In 2009, a group of bus industry professionals achieved a long standing ambition to run a vintage bus service from Warminster in Wiltshire, to the abandoned village of Imber on the Salisbury Plain. It proved to be so popular that it has now become an annual event, with most journeys continuing across the Plain to parts of Wiltshire rarely seen by ordinary public transport users.
The village in question is now a military training base and under a longstanding agreement, it remains open to the public on just a handful of days per year. These folks organise vintage bus trips for people to exercise their right to visit the secretive location in style.