Friday Reading S03E12

Friday Reading is a weekly series of recommended reads from journalist and designer Martin Belam, covering journalism, media and technology. And frequently Doctor Who. And 80’s music. And computer games and football and politics too. Martin is Social & New Formats Editor for the Guardian in London.

This is a stunning, and frustrating, long read that is worth every one of the 14 minutes it takes to get through it all: “I’ve Had a Cyberstalker Since I Was 12. After 14 years I finally reported him. In the eyes of the law, my biggest mistake was not fearing him more.”

“You learn that most of what appears online goes unread. Nobody cares. Nobody will read you. The only way to make them care is to keep doing it, day after day. Write 1,000 words a day. Don’t stop.”

I can’t say I agree with everything in this article but I found it enjoyable as I disagreed with it: “What happens when you write 11,000 blog posts?” — John Biggs

Snapchat users watch eight billion videos per day but sure it’s really important spending a gazillion dollars building your own player on your own website and making video that isn’t vertical. And this is how one MTV producer works on their Snapchat channel and hoo boy it made my head hurt and my job seem easy.

I’m definitely not trying to turn Friday Reading into a long list of links about the Guardian just because I’ve gone back to working there, but this is very clear from Sarah Schmalbach about what the Guardian mobile innovation lab in the US is up to, and what they are planning to focus on. And how they claim that…

[This is a joke that you will not get unless you click-through and read the article]

Breaking up with Slack thinkpieces are the new “I’m quitting Twitter” thinkpieces are the new “I’m Leaving London” thinkpieces but this one by Samuel Hulick was pretty darn good.

Facebook is apparently planning to open up Messenger to publishers. Presumably allowing you to point the audience at Instant Articles hosted on facebook dot com.

“The man who seduced me as a teenager wasn’t talented or intelligent, or even a capable adult. He had dropped out of several degree programmes, lost several girlfriends and had alienated various batches of friends before he met me. A grown man doesn’t usually have a teenage girlfriend unless he needs to feel good about himself, unless he is fresh out of people to be impressed by him. He had no TV, so the first time I visited his house he showed me a box of photographs from his travels in Asia. No woman his own age would have tolerated such a poor excuse for a date, which is the exact reason no woman was. I was there instead, thinking: God. Someone who has been to Asia also fancies ME.”

“On the sad inevitability of the grown man and the teenage girl” — Caroline O’Donoghue

“Across the world sex workers organise to resist abuse, exploitation, and trafficking. For two weeks we will air their voices.” — An OpenDemocracy project

“He could be a blend of Hitler and Hirohito. That’s why I would vote for him.”

All sorts of amazing in this set of anonymous emails sent to the Guardian by secret Donald Trump supporters

This is a lovely piece about the wonderfully gifted Laurie Cunningham — former player for Leyton Orient, WBA and Real Madrid: “Laurie Cunningham: the dancing footballer with eternal youth”

There is also a campaign to crowd-fund a biography of Laurie, whose career was sadly curtailed by injury, and who then died in a car crash aged just 33.

I enjoyed reading about this doomed and futile task…

“I embarked on a mission to uncover the not-quite-secrets of the electric grid, the system through which electricity is supplied to us. I wanted to see if I could trace the route electricity takes to get from its source to my Brooklyn apartment. What I found was that the answer was just as complicated as it might seem.”

“I Tried, and Failed, to Find Out Where My Electricity Comes From” — Mimi Onuoha for How We Get To Next

From the same series about power: “A Coal Miner’s Daughter & the End of Fossil Fuels”

“In a certain light, fossil fuels are a true marvel. They gave us so much. But it took a pub quiz for me to realize that while we still live in a world built by one kind of energy, it’s high time that we’re bound for another.”

I wrote about how the driverless cars of the future could help us transform urban design, which I don’t expect I’ll live to see but it still really interests and excites me and over 1,000 people commented on the piece and I only spotted two calling me an idiot. *high-five emoji*

Then the cyclists discovered it on Twitter and started abusing me about it but hey-ho…

I wish Joel Golby wouldn’t write these pieces so well…

“Is there a greater anthropological study of The North than this video? Consider that the pissing man is shakingly, visibly drunk. Consider that it is a Morrisons, the most northern of all the supermarket chains. Consider this narration: ‘He’s pissing in the freezer. Pissing in the freezer! He’s pissing in the freezer. He is.’ This is the new benchmark for northerness. A landscape even Turner couldn’t capture. A man in a T-shirt and jeans pissing into a Morrisons freezer.”

Nifty round-up of famous albums rendered as paperback book covers.

This quote, in an article about the ridiculous way runners obsess over shoes, made me laugh:

“But the faith in barefoot running runs deeper: several of the participants commented that humans were designed to run without shoes. Assuming these individuals were not hardcore creationists, it really ought to have occurred to them that humans evolved brains big enough to let them develop a preference for wearing shoes that protect their feet from hard, pointy surfaces.”

Obviously, laughing along with the pain of my fractured ankle which is preventing me from running. Hahahaha idiot.

Matt Michael has foolishly set himself the task of ranking every classic Doctor Who story from 1963 to 1989 in precise order of merit and this is his top ten, which includes all of the usual suspects and a couple of massive surprises. (Here’s the ones he rated lowest of all time as well for good measure)