Reading time: 6.14 1,482 words Read this email in your browser Hey Reader, One technology, two futures — and how we’re letting the wrong one win… Imagine putting your head into a box which has six speakers in it. From each speaker comes a different noise: several conversations, music, cutlery clinking, traffic sounds, laughter, footsteps, a dog barking, a child crying. All at full volume. Someone taps you on the shoulder and you turn to listen. You can see their mouth moving but they could be...
1 day ago • 6 min read
Reading time: 2.05 492 words Read this email in your browser Hey Reader, I look at my smart watch, calves burning. No, not burning; on the verge of popping. Red hot, bulging, glowing like a cartoon police light and threatening to burst all over the track, leaving a sticky trail of goo in my wake. My calves are now, in my imagination, the most sculpted muscular appendages on the face of the Earth. Michaelangelo would have gladly created a statue of them in marble to sit alongside David. In...
2 days ago • 2 min read
Reading time: 4.48 1,140 words Read this email in your browser Hey Reader, “What will 85-year-old me say about what I’m doing now?” Tamu Thomas’s question to us yesterday, at Laura Brunton’s Ignited Woman event. So I picture myself: grey hair, still in space buns. More wrinkles that get really deep when I smile, and I smile a lot, I hope. Still wearing bright orange sneakers, leopard-print jeans, and a mustard-yellow jumper. Still standing and shouting about using your voice. Especially if...
6 days ago • 5 min read
Reading time: 1.38 385 words Read this email in your browser Hey Reader, Emperor Nero might have had a point. Look, yes, he might have been the very first inspiration for the antichrist. And, yes, he was probably one of the worst people to ever be in charge of anything at all given his penchant for cruelty, suffering, murdering the women in his life and according to primary sources and a pretty famous statue, he did in fact have a neckbeard. Stick with me though because the thing most people...
7 days ago • 2 min read
Reading time: 1.39 389 words Read this email in your browser Hey Reader, Increase your surface area. That’s what I saw someone say the other day on Threads. It stopped me cold for a moment because the only idea that squatted in my skull was standing by the fridge and eating thinking cheese until I expand by 17 shirt sizes. And then I got stuck on why. Until I read on. “The best thing you can do for yourself is to actively increase your surface area for luck to hit you. Go outside, travel...
8 days ago • 2 min read
Reading time: 0.58 229 words Read this email in your browser Hey Reader, Forbes 30 under 30? Meh. No shade, but energy is easier to come by when your joints don’t sound like the Titanic hitting the iceberg. That’s a lot of pressure for younger folks and can feel like a kick in the teeth for the creakies, which is why when Margo Aaron posted this thread in Threads my heart leapt and kept dancing the fandango and still is. “Can we get a thread on authors who found success after 40?” Oh yes...
9 days ago • 1 min read
Reading time: 2.29 588 words Read this email in your browser Hey Reader, The gremlins in my head are absolutely diabolical. Dome-estic terrorists. (Geddit? My brain is my dome, they are causing terror in it?) Every time I think about writing an article, or just before I go onstage to do stand-up comedy, or whenever I talk about my books, up they ooze to whisper to me about how nobody is interested, how I don’t have anything useful or interesting to say, and how everybody hates my dirty...
10 days ago • 3 min read
Reading time: 7.05 1,683 words Read this email in your browser Hey Reader, “I’m not sure I’m comfortable with ex-convicts cutting keys,” said my elderly neighbour after I told him why I love Timpsons. Timpsons, if didn’t know, is a cobblers, dry-cleaners, key-cutting business based in the UK. It specialises in finding employment for ex-offenders and other marginalised groups. “Why?” I asked him. “Well, because a criminal will have my house key and all my personal details,” he said. We had a...
13 days ago • 7 min read
Reading time: 9.11 2,184 words Read this email in your browser Hey Reader, We all love a good slogan and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s famous line “well-behaved women seldom make history” is just perfect for a cute pink tee or a morning coffee mug. It’s become an inspirational quote; a rousing battle cry to disrupt and rebel and be seen. But when Ulrich wrote that line, she was studying diaries and church records, noticing that the daily lives of “ordinary” women — those who complied and behaved...
14 days ago • 9 min read