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Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. I had a whole plan for the newsletter this year! It blew up in my face as soon as the year turned! I’m an idiot! So, while I reconfigure things a bit and curse 2026 for obviously being the year we’re all doomed, here’s a list of things I found this week that I think are worth sharing.

• 4,500 years ago in ancient Mesopotamia, gender-diverse people held important roles in society with professional titles. “These included the cultic attendants of the major deity Ištar, called assinnu, and high-ranking royal courtiers called ša rēši. What the ancient evidence tells us is that these people held positions of power because of their gender ambiguity, not despite it.”

• Cultists enticed children out of Roblox into a Discord where “they told them that the game’s geometric symbol had real-world power and could connect them to a “higher state”. Entry to the group’s inner circle required proof of loyalty. Children were asked to film themselves performing a series of tasks. At first the challenges seemed harmless. Over time they became more intrusive, with some children pushed into carving the symbol into their skin.”

• This year is about eliminating as many UPFs from the house as I can. Hence, I’m doing some re-reading, including The NOMA Guide To Fermentation, and am currently drinking a cold ginger tea I made a few days ago. This is easy: take three or four inches of ginger, chop it up, juice a lemon, throw it all in a jug, pour a pint of boiling water over it, wait fifteen minutes, stir a couple of teaspoons of honey into it, strain, cool and jar. I have a blood orange orangeade in the fridge next to it - same process, but with the juice and zest of three blood oranges instead of the ginger, and a teaspoon of dark Seville marmalade and a teaspoon of your sweetener of choice (I used date syrup) instead of the honey.

• Because this is the year of doom and we’ve all been very good little witches and wizards, there’s a new Sunn O))) record in April. Go to that link and you can stream the final track on the album, “Glory Black.” (The opening of which reminded me of a massively slowed down version of Xinlisupreme’s “Zouave’s Blue,” a glorious piece of music that seems to be largely scrubbed from the internet now)

• The US government spent eight figures on buying a pulsed radio wave device that they suspect of causing “Havana Syndrome.”

• At The Paris Review, Lucy Ives writes down Ten Writing Prompts. They are good.

• A new edition of Angela Winter’s radio show ANTI-AUTHORITARIAN ASMR is up. I love this music show. It’s a deep drop into ambient, electroacoustic, field recordings and alien signals It’s not available as a podcast, but there’s a newsletter that will let you know when a new one is released.

• The Identity Industrialists. What a useful phrase. There’s a podcast operation currently flooding the world with thousands of AI generated niche podcasts with artificial hosts. And now the ‘synthetic actors’ are here. And we asked for it. “The Kardashians showed the world that identity could be designed and monetized at scale. AI simply removes the one resource they still require: the human body.”

• "Running Condition.” I watched a documentary about how Mike Leigh works with actors, and one of the things that came up was Leigh’s concept of “the running condition” - through improvisation, discussion and iteration, the actor and director land on a set of underlying behaviors that persist throughout the piece, tying together the work. There’s a bit where Sam Kelly is playing someone outwardly gregarious and full of bonhomie, but his physical attributes are of someone who is always quietly angry, he even ties his shoes furiously. Paying attention to the running condition is an interesting way to approach and anchor any kind of story work. Losing track of a character’s development and status during a story? Fall back to their running condition and see where that puts you.

• The 47 best pens for 2026 according to Jet Pens.

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