In this newsletter: the surprising fact that this newsletter exists; I wrote a book!; the high cost of dumb conspiracy theories; fun things to read and do

It's me, hi

OK so here is what happened, in rough chronological order:

Note: this email was originally sent on January 27, 2021. The date at the top of this archive page is from when it got moved over to a new email provider.

This week I have been mostly reading about cholera! Because I certainly know how to switch off and relax in the middle of a pandemic.

Here’s a fun (??) cholera story I hadn’t heard before: the “Day of the Straws” in Ireland, which was not actually a day but a week-long mass hysteria event triggered by an appearance of Our Lady in Cork during the Europe-wide outbreak of 1832. The Mother of God suggested that cholera could be cured by taking ashes from beneath her feet and distributing them to four houses, and then for those four households to spread the blessing to another four houses each, and so on. The bug/feature of this approach was that houses which had already been visited were apparently ineligible for further visits, leading to people searching far and wide for houses which had yet to recieve their cure – thus creating a vast pandemic-avoidance pyramid scheme which, three days after Mary’s original apparition, had spread almost the full length of the island.

Excellent stuff.

Note: this email was originally sent on January 20, 2021. The date at the top of this archive page is from when it got moved over to a new email provider.

Today, around 5pm UK time, Donald Trump stops being the president. This is obviously a Big Deal for many reasons, but what I’m slightly obsessed by right now is the cumulative effect of the sheer psychic weight of his chaos aura being lifted from so many people at once.

Now, it’s likely that this will be felt more keenly by the minority of us who, for professional or personal reasons, struggle to detatch ourselves from the news firehose – for me, there’s certainly a residual effect of having been in the UK newsroom of a US media company, which for timezone reasons naturally meant that we were on Early Morning Trump Tweet duty for several years. (A former colleague told me last week, speaking of the time I greeted the first ragetweet of the day with the words “Daddy’s awake”, that it “chills me to the marrow every time I think about it”.)

But still, the Twitter ban last week was an interesting preview of what it might feel like: I wasn’t prepared for the subtle but undeniable shift in mood that came with suddenly not waking up in the morning thinking “oh god I wonder what he tweeted overnight”. I know I wasn’t the only one, and that effect will only be magnified when it’s not just tweets but executive orders that we no longer need to fret about. So I find myself pondering this unquantifiable, intangible, edge-of-perception shift that’s about to happen to the world’s anxiety levels. What does a global sigh of relief sound like? How does that ripple out into the world?