Mid-Week Links: 20 Nov 2024

change is gonna come...or is it?

Welcome to my mid-week link round up!

How are we feeling today? The end of the calendar year is fast approaching, and I’m one month away from clocking off for a whole ten days - might switch my phone off and everything (though the majority of my personal relationships are mediating by the small screen 😭). This is why I keep flirting with the idea of getting a second phone…

As a reminder, this link round-up will go behind a paywall in the new year (inshallah). Plenty of time to subscribe - but of course, the Sunday newsletter will remain available for all. Right, let’s get into it!

Read:

• My must read for this week: Carole Cadwalladr on how to survive the broligarchy: 20 lessons for the post-truth world. Including ‘Protect Your Private Life’ (time to move to Signal!!), ‘Listen to Women of Colour’ (ahem) and ‘When someone tells you who they are, believe them’.

• Gorgeous piece on horse and man: “Working with the horse awakened Schiller to other aspects of his own character. Old habits, like an inclination to talk at people instead of to people, started to fall away. “It’s from horses where I learned to listen,” he says. “Listening instead of telling.” What followed was a period of self-discovery that continues even now. Tons of reading. Ice baths. A men’s emotional retreat. Therapy, traditional and otherwise.”

• Have you moved over from Twitter to BlueSky recently? If you have, you’re not alone - over a million users moved in the wake of the US election. But this piece wonders whether something else has ended along the way. I haven’t quit Twitter yet… and this made me wonder if maybe I shouldn’t? I don’t know.

  • “Platforms come and go, but this feels different: the final death of the idea that social media could ever be the internet’s town square, a global meeting place for ideas that would broaden all our horizons. Now, the future of social media looks increasingly segregated for users’ safety, like rival fans at football. X for the rightwing and the raging; centrists and policy nerds on Bluesky; people who hate politics on Threads or Instagram; Gen Z on TikTok; boomers on Facebook.”

• Platformer talking about how AI companies are hitting a scaling wall, but that may not matter as much as we might think. TL; DR: Large Language Models might not be the way we get to ‘super intelligence’ - but frankly, I think everyone is solving for the wrong problems anyway, so…

• I revisited this piece recently and loved it as much as the first time I came across it: Seven Things Hilary Mantel Taught Me About Writing and Life. Lessons include ‘Greatness and gentleness are possible’, and ‘Know how your story ends and write towards it’. Mantel continues to teach from beyond the grave, subhanallah.

• This piece didn’t resonate with me, but did deeply with my friend

  Alexander Leon
  so I thought I would highlight and ask what you all think! Featuring the idea of ‘collapse’ and the grief of dealing with what I would consider a western notion that ‘progress is guaranteed’ and is just around the corner:

  • “What I’m writing about here is the hazy idea of collapse… It’s a nagging sense that has hung over modern life since 2020, or 2016, or 2008, or 2001 — pick your start date — that things are not working anymore. And that waiting for them to get better after the next Most Important Election of Our Lives, or another war to end, or a new economic recovery cycle doesn’t seem to be having the desired effects.”

On Sudan:

• We know this, but researchers are now officially describing how the death toll in Sudan is likely much higher than recorded. Starvation and disease are now the highest cause of death. How utterly tragic.

• Aljazeera put together a series of visualisations to better understand the scale of the war.

Watch: Maori Haka in NZ parliament

You may have seen this video already, as it’s gone viral viral (anything that I see on LinkedIn more than once is considered viral viral in my book). But watch the clip below, which includes the before and after, the condescension from the Speaker, the hostile context in which the ceremonial challenge was declared.

More about the backstory here. What I didn’t know was that this situation has arisen, in part, because there are differences between the English and Māori versions of the treaty texts which led to conflict between the British Crown and Māori over ‘how much authority the chiefs would retain and how much the governor would have’. Watch this space.

Listen: Sudanese Excellence

Let’s give it up for Elmiene, Sudanese-British crooner who recently appeared on NPR’s very famous Tiny Desk. Man’s like, 22, 23? So much talent, mashallah. May Allah protect him and all his loved ones, inshallah. More about his story here.

Also, a shout out to Linkin Park’s new album. I never thought we’d get another record after the passing of lead singer Chester Bennington, but Emily Armstrong - while not a replacement - seems a worthy successor. She doesn’t sound like Chester, but she does sound like Linkin Park.

Have you listened to the album? What do you think?

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Thanks to all the wonderful folks who have upgraded to a paid subscription in the past few weeks - I see you, and I appreciate you! Shout out Louie, Jody, Janet, Jack, Jasmine and Jerry!

See you on Sunday, inshallah!
Yassmin

i’m now screenshottng tweets instead of embedding, but you can click through. hilarious throwback here.