Fascinating

A random aggregate of things I found fascinating when I read them, or things I want to come back to, or things I think everyone should read, or, or, or… This is my mental curios cabinet. Welcome!

(And yes, in defiance of all consistency and norms, my capitalisation of book titles and articles will be what it is and I will be taking no further questions :P)

THINGS, STUFF, AND POSSIBLY ELEPHANTS

An Ant Reads Ayn Rand

By K. A. Hughes
I think you’re just going to have to trust me on this one. It’s very short. Despite that, it shows incredible dexterity of thought. Leaves you pondering things for a period of time that far outsizes the amount of time you spent reading it. You could practically have read half of it already by now. Go. Trust me. Learn the ways of the ant.

Frame Studies note

By Visakan Veerasamy
A short, succinct, punchy look at how the framing choices in a photograph can influence how we see people, and correlatively, how the way we see people influences the way in which they are framed – both in the narrative, and in the accompanying images. In this instance, Veerasamy is specifically looking at portraits used to accompany articles. In their own words, “Canon got 6 different photographers to shoot portraits of the same guy in the same location. The twist? Each photographer was told a different thing about his background.” This is the kind of thing I used to teach in high-school English, my bread-and-butter as it were, and this one’s a good ‘un (and short!).

Gluten-Free Global Travel

Yes, this is a random one, but if you’re gluten-free for whatever reason, you know the pitfalls that eating in another country can provide – let alone another country that speaks a language that you don’t! This site is SUPER helpful, with articles on commonly visited (by Westerners) countries and cities, and cards you can buy in a tonne of different languages for a very reasonable fee that will make your travel so much easier.

New-to-science spider builds trap that flings ants into the air

This one’s under a paywall at NewScientist, but you can read the study that the article is based on over at the journal Current Biology, and it’s right what it says on the label: new spider uses its silk to create a spring-loaded trap which flings green ants up to 30cm up in the air, into the spider’s main web. Wild. (The Current Biology link even has a lil video showing the ants and the spider!)

Valentyna “Val” Crane

An artist local to me who paints our mutually local scenery in ways that stop my heart. I ADORE her use of light and colour – her work is so vibrant and rich! – and the fact that she has bonus animals in (almost?) all her work 🙂

THE VIBE SHIFT? (We should be so lucky)

How To Declare Your Interdependence

Ex-journalist Anne Helen Petersen over at Culture Study interviews Garrett Bucks on community vibes, and community construction, and how to find/make/build/grow a community in the absence of city walkability and high-profile sporting events. Some really cool, practical advice here that has me side-eyeing an idea I had earlier this year (circa March 2026) for a suburb-wide newsletter, and for an arts-and-craft oriented, low-key, chill catch-up group with my wider circle of friends. I’ll let you know if ever these community-building ideas of mine come to fruition, I guess, but in the meantime, go read the article! 😀

Is It a Vibe Shift… Or Is It The World Cup?

Ex-journalist Anne Helen Petersen over at Culture Study on the change in the air she’s feeling in the last couple of weeks (June 2026); is the vibe in American finally shifting?

The vibe shift is here and it’s not what we expected

By Brigid Delaney
We no longer share the same reality. (Did we ever?) We live adrift in temporal limbo: Is it true that this happened then? (Is it true that this happened?) In the teens, everyone felt richer than they were. Now, we’re catching up on the consequences. Everything we hear is an opinion, not fact. (Ironically a sentence long misattributed to Marcus Aurelius.) But Delaney is optimistic that there will be a backlash to this early-20s vibe; a new vibe shift, or a vibe shift again, where we log off, participate analoguely, maybe throw our slot-machine phones into the sea, at least during non-work hours. Read this article and become someone who is imagining, with steady-handed, clear-eyed optimism, what a better future could be.

FICTION

NON-FICTION

A Brief History & Ethos Of The Digital Garden

By Maggie Appleton
Possibly the original long-form piece on the concept of digital gardening, literally the reason this page right here exists, and a gorgeous, nuanced, optimistic look at what Web 3.0 could be. This website of mine is no longer a static site with hierarchies and schedules and carefully nested links; it’s my online garden, full of collected shinies and half-finished thoughts, coherent if not yet cogent, sometimes perceptive even if not complete, a space where I can plant things and nurture them and watch as the ideas either grow depth and height to eventually bear fruit, or where they can slowly fade away into beautiful compost for ideas better suited for the microclimate. This article of Appleton’s explains the philosophy with pictures and data and it’s just a really lovely, thought-provoking read, go do that immediately, thanks.

Fashion Is Political. Use It.

By Nicole Rudolph
Amazing video essay about fashion, and how even if we all went naked it’s still not a thing we can just choose to opt out of, and how clothing is used to express group belonging, why uniforms and the way we wear them matter, the whole dealio with business suits, fitting in vs standing out, etc. Rudolph is a fashion expert and shares her knowledge generously on her eponymous YouTube channel; this is definitely an excellent place to start that’s broadly applicable to ALL OF US, whether we care about or are interested in fashion or not.

How Our Grandmothers Made Us And Saved Us

By Angela Pelster
A simply gorgeous, heartfelt piece about the ‘grandmother hypothesis’ (essentially that the survival of post-menopausal women is what enabled the most significant developments in our species) and how women are made to feel invisible once they hit about forty, and the questions around a female big-game hunter found in an archaeological dig in Peru that wouldn’t have been asked had the skeleton been male and how, despite decades of being taught to consume her body through the lens of contempt, like most (all?) women are, the discovery of all these things was able to bring Pelster back to her changing body, her identity, her self in a way that is grounding and beautiful and fierce.

The Magic In The Machine

By Ken Liu
A genuinely fascinating exploration of shared/collaborative storytelling in the context of AI – a thoughtful response that is so refreshingly NOT ‘AI once sniffed three words in this manuscript so the author is now the devil’ and ALSO not ‘learn how to churn out saleable novels with AI in three seconds or less!’. Liu is, by self proclamation, “interested in only one thing: what kind of stories can machines tell?” and he explores this topic thoroughly, deftly, intelligently, and with a degree of beauty and optimism that I found very intruiging.