1. On sampling

Well, hello everyone.

I’m a little shocked at how quick the take-up to this email thing has been. Watching the subscriptions come in over the past 48 hours has been fascinating and I’m perhaps a little too well aware of who is going to be reading this! Friends from all walks of life have come out of the woodwork - many of whom have given up on the once utopian promise of ‘connected social networking services’ as we used to quaintly call them. Try ‘surveillance capitalism’ instead now. Anyway, I’m trying not to let that get in the way of the original intention of this format - to be able to write in a more freeform, looser way, and about a range of topics that might seem, at first, unconnected. That, and liberal use of Oxford commas.

I’m experimenting with only text and not embedding videos or images. I encourage you to click the hyperlinks rather than skip past them as everyone usually does. I’m old enough to still feel there is life left in the notion of hypertext.