This week’s Five Things…

1. This teaser has me very excited for Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back film which is coming out next year.

2. This is fun. Blob Opera is a Google machine learning experiment. Hit the little Christmas tree, select a song and you’ll have your very own Blob carol singers!

3. What an amazing little word “got” is. A fascinating episode of the Lexicon Valley podcast (one of my favourites).

4. I’ve just started listening to series one of Mike Duncan’s podcast, Revolutions. If you like your history you’ll like this.

5. The New Wolsey Theatre’s rock n roll pantos are always a Christmas highlight and this year’s show is no exception. You can watch The Snow Queen from the comfort of your own home. Tickets are available here. Act fast as the last showing is on Christmas Eve!

That's all for this week and this year! Have a great Christmas. See you in 2021!

This week’s Five Things…

1. An interesting episode of Politics On The Couch with Rafael Behr on the science behind nostalgia.

2. Adam Buxton interviews Paul McCartney. Really great interview. Who’d have guessed Paul McCartney was a Homes Under The Hammer fan!

3. Taylor Swift has another new album. Track 6, no body, no crime, is particularly good.

4. I have very nearly finished reading The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel. Fascinating book. He’s a great writer.

5. A water powered drum machine — very cool!

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This week’s Five Things…

1. Don’t you just love it when you discover an amazing new band? Black Pumas on NPR’s Tiny Desk.

2. Nils Frahm has a new live album and accompanying concert streaming on MUBI (you can sign up for a free trial to watch the show). As always it’s very good. My favourite Nils Frahm, is live Nils Frahm.

3. 52 things Tom Whitwell learned this year.

4. One of the best things I read this week, Russ Roberts (host of EconTalk) on self image.

5. And another one of the best things I read this week! Really interesting post by Anton Howes on how London became the Goliath we know today. Fun fact: “By 1700, the city [London] was nineteen times the size of second-place Norwich — even though Norwich’s population had more or less tripled.”

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This week’s Five Things…

1. This is all very strange. A mysterious metal monolith was spotted in a desert in Utah. It then disappeared. And now another one has appeared in Romania?

2. A cool illusion.

3. A fascinating episode of the EconTalk podcast with Virginia Postrel on the history of textiles. This really blew my mind: "... take a pair of jeans, which, in the scheme of things is not that much fabric. Pair of jeans, to weave that amount of fabric, takes about six miles of thread ... nowadays, you can spin in a modern spinning plant that amount of thread in a few seconds. But in the pre-Industrial Revolution period, the very fastest, best spinners in the world were in India; and they could spend 100 meters of thread an hour. And, that means that it would take about 13 days, 13 eight-hour days, to spin the amount of thread in a pair of jeans"

4. What a music video!

5. I've been listening to a lot of Julia Holter this week. Her album Have You In My Wilderness is great.

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This week’s Five Things…

1. How to write an AC/DC song in 30 seconds.

2. OverSimplified make fun videos explaining things like the American Civil War and the Russian Revolution. I have no idea how I've only just heard of them! Definitely recommend if you want to brush up your history knowledge.

3. I'm really enjoying the new Assassin's Creed game. It's huge!

4. New music from Dirty Projectors. Sounds like they've had quite a prolific year!

5. This was a good read. Aren't brains amazing?

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