What a flake. I restarted this newsletter after a year-long gap, wrote four issues, then disappeared for a month. My loyal fan (not a typo; thanks T) was outraged. I’m sorry!
I alluded to this last month, and now I can be clearer: my employer announced a large restructure and layoffs in mid-May, and I spent the rest of the month uncertain if my role would be affected. Having already danced this particular tango just 18 months ago, I was keen to avoid it again.
I found out a couple of weeks ago that my role is safe, but plenty of my talented colleagues didn’t have the same luck, and dealing with the fallout and anxiety has been tough. We’re in the process of buying a new house and the risk that the entire thing could collapse (not the house, I hope) was a real source of stress and discomfort for me.
We’re doing well now and work is even starting to feel normal again, but May wasn’t much fun. But I have high hopes for the rest of the year: a new home, a new phase in our lives, and I might even buy a new vacuum cleaner. Expect a dedicated newsletter about my hopes and dreams for the Henry model I’ll inevitably buy.
In the news today: the UK lost another prime minister. We’re beginning to look careless.
My only hope for Keir Starmer’s replacement is that they live in the real world. No mainstream party is going to win an 170+ seat majority ever again. And Labour will not win a second term unless Andy Burnham has a time machine, a trillion dollars, and can join the England team and score the winning goal for the World Cup victory.
But what he could do is defend our system and society from the absolute avalanche of shit that’s poised to collapse all over it: reform our electoral system and introduce proportional representation, for example. All the old arguments against it (“it’ll fragment politics”, “it’ll allow the far right a voice”) feel silly and irrelevant in the populist context of 2026. Burnham could tighten up the constitution and put in meaningful, painful checks and balances to avoid Farage and friends copying the Boris Johnson playbook, let alone the Trump one. Burnham could insulate our system against the invasion of far right populism.
But I suspect it’ll just be another attempt to pretend the glory days of Blair are still worth chasing, and we’ll get bored after 18 months and demand a new leader, handing the country to the racists, the fascists and the people with all the easy answers and none of the hard graft. Let’s not make it easy for them.
Reading this week
1. Henrietta Lacks: the first immortalized human cell line (Wikipedia)
“Lacks was the unwitting source of cells [taken] from a tumor biopsied during her treatment for cervical cancer in 1951. These cells were then cultured by George Otto Gey, who created the cell line known as HeLa, which is still used for medical research. As was then the practice, no consent was required to culture the cells obtained from Lacks’s treatment. Neither she nor her family were compensated for the extraction or use of the HeLa cells.”
I heard about this remarkable story via an interview with Adam Curtis, who made a whole film about Henrietta which I’ve yet to watch. I found myself falling down multiple rabbit holes about cell division, medical ethics and 1950s science. A tragic human story mixed with an incredible, sci-fi background.
2. The Day the Dinosaurs Died (Douglas Preston, the New Yorker)
“If, on a certain evening about sixty-six million years ago, you had stood somewhere in North America and looked up at the sky, you would have soon made out what appeared to be a star. If you watched for an hour or two, the star would have seemed to grow in brightness, although it barely moved. That’s because it was not a star but an asteroid, and it was headed directly for Earth at about forty-five thousand miles an hour.”
This longread did the rounds years ago when it was first published in 2019, but after watching the recent Netflix dinosaurs show—narrated by Morgan Freeman—I found myself itching to read it again. It’s a blow-by-blow account of the extinction event that killed the dinosaurs, but with an incredible modern discovery. I loved the detail about the asteroid impact sending Earth-based microbial matter all the way to some of Saturn and Jupiter’s moons.
3. Forms don’t love you back (Rachel Coldicutt, Just Enough Internet)
“On the one hand, it is (sort-of) great that technology allows me to live two lives in one day and pack everything in, finishing important domestic tasks while standing up on the train in the morning or under the duvet late at night, but it is also exhausting and quite lonely. […] My “village” is a set of forms I fill out on my phone and none of them will notice if I look tired today, if deliveries pile up on the doorstep, or wonder what’s happened to Dolly if we cancel the cat food.”
This is a great article about online forms. I’ve sweated blood designing these things for government services in a previous job and there’s nothing better to cure you of your techbro-influenced misguided takes than watching an unexpected audience use the form you built and completely fail to understand it. Ask me for my opinions about date input fields! But seriously, read Rachel’s piece and ponder.
Fun and miscellany this week
1. The Madonna Interview (Mel Ottenberg, Interview Magazine)
“I go on Instagram for more than 10 minutes, I get depressed, and I don’t want to go there. Why am I giving this nonexistent entity power over my soul, my brain, my vision of myself, my vision of the world? Time is precious, and that’s something I’ve known all my life. Time’s precious. What can I get done? What can I do?”
Whatever you think of her music, image, brand and artistry, Madonna is always provocative good value. This interview is fun because the interviewer’s ego is almost as bold as Madonna’s herself, and it’s a great illustration of how mere text alone can convey so much about someone’s tone, persona and body language. And I like her insights on social media.
2. Angine de Poitrine - Sarniezz | Later… with Jools Holland (BBC)
Come on, you already love the Canadian art/whatever weirdos with their funny costumes and instruments. But you’ll watch this song all over again for the brief snatches of Shania Twain in the background, beaming with joy as they break everything into bits.
3. Study: Majority Of Middle-Aged Men Lack Support Network They’ll Need To Handle Neil Young’s Death (The Onion)
“NEW YORK—Warning that millions of men aged 35 and older would be left utterly adrift following the traumatic loss, researchers at Columbia University published a study Monday that revealed the majority of middle-aged men in the United States lacked the support network they would need to handle singer-songwriter Neil Young’s death. “It’s deeply concerning that the average 45-year-old male does not have a single friend or relative willing to text their favorite track from Harvest Moon with the caption ‘GOAT’ typed underneath,” said lead researcher Shannon Bailey.
I laughed at this but the truth is that when Paul McCartney finally shuffles off to play Hey Jude for the angels, I’ll be a broken man.