How to learn a bird call
hello,
This is late, apologies. It should have come last Sunday but we were away. Back in London the sun has come out, very slightly taking the edge off the global chaos and pollen bombs.
Here are 5 things.
The best photos I’ve seen in a long time. Imagine what this might look like…
“These ladies are the ‘Climbing Cholitas’ or ‘Cholitas Escaladoras Bolivianas’. A group of Aymara indigenous women who are breaking stereotypes and shifting perceptions. In January of 2019 they summited the 22,841ft peak of Mt Aconcagua. The highest mountain outside of Asia. And did so eschewing traditional climbing clothing in favour of their traditional, vibrant , billowing dresses, and using their traditional shawls to carry equipment rather than backpacks."
Then click on the link. Even better, right?
From a recent New Yorker piece about gossip:
“In Jane Austen’s novel “Persuasion,” the sober heroine, Anne Elliot, pays a visit to Mrs. Smith, a former classmate who is now a penniless widow, confined to her home by illness. In spite of these misfortunes, Mrs. Smith is remarkably sunny, owing, in part, to a nurse who supplements her medical ministrations with news of the outside world. “Call it gossip, if you will, but when Nurse Rooke has half an hour’s leisure to bestow on me, she is sure to have something to relate that is entertaining and profitable: something that makes one know one’s species better,” Mrs. Smith says. Anne looks for a moral; this Rooke must be bolstering her friend with examples of “heroism, fortitude, patience, resignation,” and so on. But Mrs. Smith wants to hear about “the latest modes of being trifling and silly.” She doesn’t like gossip because it improves her. She likes it because it is fun.”
The latest modes of being trifling and silly are now our major industries and I’m here for it.
One of the things I struggle to explain to people when talking about PowerPoint is the importance of structure in setting expectations. Because you can’t tell from looking at a the first slide of a presentation how much of it there’s going to be. Joel Morris has a good analogy for that:
“I sometimes describe our sense of the shape of story as ‘the weight of the rest of the book in your right hand’. You know roughly how long a story is likely to be, and how much further there is to go, all without quite knowing how you know. It’s a vague narrative proprioception, caused by a sense of the weight of data to come. Our brains sense roughly where we are – at the start, or the middle, or the end – and what sort of information is likely to be coming in. And that enables the storyteller to deliver as expected, or surprise us. It’s why sitting through an unexpectedly long, meandering film can feel so much less satisfying (or comforting) than sitting through three crisp episodes of a TV show back to back, with their fixed lengths, episode breaks and regular narrative rise and fall. The length of time on the sofa is the same, but the shape of our expectations is completely different.”Matthew McConaughey “tries to see every scene from his character’s point of view. A killer is not thinking, “I’m a killer.” He’s thinking, “I’m here to restore order.”
Is it alarming that I’m also often thinking ‘I’m here to restore order’?
I enjoyed this set tremendously. Especially the onscreen graphic that told you the temperature of the selected vinyl.
PROMOTIONAL NEWS
Fancy something else like this from me? Only typewritten. And on paper. And disconcertingly like a bill. Of course you do.
There’s a new Haudoo! It’s magical. How to learn a bird call.
Podcasts: me rabbiting on about cafes. Me chatting to Flora about advertising and that.
Only about 30 tickets left for Interesting 2025
I’ll give you back your day.
russell
(There are 986 of you. Keokradong may be 986 metres high and it may be the highest point in Bangladesh. It is undoubtedly cloudy.)