I can’t read this label without hearing Boycie’s voice in my head.

🪟🦭

🎶 After listening again to Rufus Wainwright’s cover of the whole album at the weekend, this week, as I left the office, I put on Judy Garland’s concert at Carnegie Hall. By the time I’d made it to the train station I’d been moved to tears twice. It’s that amazing. Serendipitously, I just found out it was recorded 65 years ago today.

All of these people saying that Formula 1 is now like Mario Kart. I don’t think they played the original on the SNES; that was proper racing. There was none of this ‘blue shell’ malarkey and artificially being faster just because you’re at the back. I think we need to get more specific with the metaphor. “Formula 1 is like Mario Kart on the Nintendo 64” is the proper form of insult.

🎶 Came across this wonderful video from 1969 with Stevie Wonder and Diana Ross. The performances of the songs are superb, and there is such a lovely warmth between the two of them.

📚 Finished reading Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman. A good collection of positive reflections on human nature, debunking many negative apocryphal stories about how people tend to behave in specific situations.

Having a proud dad moment. On Friday, our eldest son broke his college’s mile record, and later that day ran the 10th best time in school history in the 800m.

Adding email links to the bottom of each blog post is paying off. Someone emailed me with information about a problem with my indoor cycling trainer. With permission, I’ve updated the post so that anyone searching for the same issue can benefit.

📰 I love that The Guardian has this as their main story on their homepage. There are so many newsletters that I would pay to subscribe to, if they weren’t hosted on Substack. The intent of the USA’s Section 230 was to allow them to refuse to host content like this. It’s a choice.

🎙️ Pocket Casts’ AI-generated transcript of the Quiet Riot podcast thinks that Ryan just needs to shush.

🎬 Just been to a preview of the new Jeff Buckley documentary, It’s Never Over (2025), followed by a Q&A with director Amy Berg. It’s a beautiful film and it was a wonderful evening. Berg asked who remembered being around when Buckley passed and called us old-timers. How has it been 30 years?

Buying something from the Decathlon website and reached the checkout stage. My inside voice reads this as completely sarcastic.

Interesting to see this in the notes for the FT’s News Briefing podcast. Is 2026 the year where we start to see messages like this everywhere?

📷 Niche. Spotted on my walk to the office this morning.

Just booked our slot for the annual Scouts Christmas tree recycling collection. Feels weird as we don’t even have a tree yet.

Added an ‘/ai’ page to my site to disclose my use of generative AI, inspired by Damola Morenikeji’s /ai ‘manifesto’.

Gave my About page a long-overdue update. I’ve also added a /now page to the site too.

A small software change that delights: holding down a key on my iPad keyboard now brings up a menu of accented variations of that letter. This is a massive improvement over having to bring up the on-screen keyboard and doing a similar thing on the screen.