Happy new year, my dear friends. This is the 60th issue of this newsletter!! Here’s some cosy links for this frosty January.

Wikipedia is the best website

• There’s a Glory Hole Park in Aspen, Colorado, apparently only notable for a mining incident and uh, nothing else.

• The Chewbacca defence is a legal strategy where defence lawyers try to confuse and distract the jury instead of actually refuting a case.

  • See also: Matrix defence, in which a defendant claims that they committed a crime because they believed that they were in a simulation.

• In (American) architecture, a witch window is placed at around a 45º angle on the gable of a roof. It is named after a folk belief that witches cannot fly their broomsticks through them.

• Museum fatigue is a documented state of exhaustion caused by walking around in exhibitions, often due to a combination of mental overwhelm by many exhibits, and physical tiredness experienced by tourists walking around a city.

• Les UX is a group of urban explorers who dug up and illegally restored underground tunnels under Paris — eventually building a cinema in caves, or repairing a clock in the Panthéon which had been out of order for 40 years.

Current status

Mildly interesting

• It’s not really a surprise but experts say that just chilling with your friends and family is very good for you. “Unstructured” hanging out is on the decline, but being together without having a specific thing or plan to do is great for your mental health!

• A great piece on Wikipedia's governance model and how it achieves a largely neutral point of view — and how it has now become a target for fascists and billionaires who view its commitment to facts as a threat to their preferred narratives.

• On Chinese social media, more and more single mothers are trying to find other single parents to share a home and child-rearing responsibilities.

• Self-reflect with this piece to find out in what specific way you’re annoying. (”Of course, some people are just annoying to their core by nature (shout out to you guys), but that’s not what I’m talking about.”)

• “An in-depth evidence review of whether X causes Y”, an interesting meta-critique of social science methodology that shows how confident claims about causal relationships are often built on shaky empirical foundations.

• Did you know that the caps on fountain pens don’t work by sealing in moisture, but through a suction effect that draws ink back to the nib when you remove the cap?

Everything is depressing

• I was really swayed by the simple argument of the essay Against Thermochauvinism. It says a lot of people look down on super-hot cities, like in Arizona (but also more generally near the equator), because people there need AC everywhere for these places to be habitable during the very hot summers. But the author makes the case that’s not different from all the infrastructure required to make cities in colder climates habitable during the winter months. (And in fact, it’s provably more efficient with solar energy). People simply shift seasonal habits like in a different hemisphere: enjoying life outside in the winter as temperatures are more comfortable, and prioritising staying indoors in the summer. This simple mindset shift never really occurred to me (as someone mainly living in the cold) but it’s one to take forward as the climate crisis changes our cities.

• A study finds glitches in video calls can trigger feelings of uncanniness, which can unconsciously harm important life outcomes like medical consultations, job interviews or parole release, and this is particularly true for disadvantaged groups who tend to have access to lower-quality internet connections.

• In the last 30 years, the world has made huge strides in progress against extreme poverty, but for the first time this trend looks like it’s slowing down or even reversing if poorer economies can’t grow.

• A *chef’s kiss* substantiated rant to complain about American tourists in Rome.

Good to look at

• IKEA has an archive of its catalogues going back to 1951! Some really strong aesthetics across the ages.

• Doomsday Scoreboard is a running ledger of end-of-the-world predictions across history. (Then again, they only have to be right once.)

• Auntie Bulletin argues the “nuclear family” structure is a failed experiment that fails most parents and kids—it's time to revive kinship networks and community care.

• Most people don’t plan for death, but here’s 10 simple questions to answer before you die to make it easier for your loved ones.

• If you’re on an iPhone: WalletWallet is a great little tool to create custom Apple Wallet passes from any barcode or QR code that doesn’t have a pass (shout out to my local library)!

• Connector identification online is an excellent website to help you… well, do what it says on the tin. (And also learn about fun cable types you never knew existed!)

Work! Design! Tech!

• To get better at technical writing and communication, lower your expectations by taking into account limited attention spans and understanding what writing can’t do.

• Pardon me for mentioning AI just once, but here’s a correct observation that most organisations seem to ignore evidence-based management practices in favour of control and stock prices, which explains the rush to AI.

• There’s a common conception that large tech companies are bloated — many engineers see a popular service and say “I could do that in a weekend!”. But Dan Luu notes that the details that separate small from large companies (optimisation, features, internationalisation, security) are here because it gains them more than it costs them; they’d simply be leaving money on the table otherwise. (This doesn’t mean they’re not inefficient.)

Worm regards,

Victor