Stop, start, stop, start. The new year, brings a fresh attempt to share our recommendations of five (plus sometimes a bit more) things to read each week. We’ve run tried different variations on this newsletter, but this is the latest. Get it delivered to your inbox each week by following If You Only on Medium.

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1. Just Write It!

Laura Miller, The New Yorker (2011)

When George RR Martin, the husky hairball behind Game of Thrones, blogged about how he’d missed his latest book deadline, the Westeros fandom went into meltdown (and the media followed). But it’s not the first time Martin’s audience has voiced its impatience: This 2011 portrait explores the delays on his previous book, and details the perilous, hypermodern relationship between authors and superfans.

2. Media jihad: why Isis’s leaders bow to its propagandists

Martin Chulov, The Guardian (2016)

Lots has been written about how Isis skilfully deploys images of barbarity. But this brief, insightful note — which came after a new tranche of videos — explains that it’s not just that Isis considers propaganda: It is driven by it. “One former Isis member told the Guardian late last year that the group’s leadership in Raqqa often deferred to senior members of the media team on operational issues, such as when to carry out executions or to publish threats. ‘They were concerned about the light a few times,’ he said. ‘Can you believe it?’”

3. How The Phonograph Changed Music Forever

Clive Thompson, Smithsonian (2016)

I’m a sucker for histories of technology, because I love understanding the impact that new ideas have, and seeing how change is part of a continuum. And this piece, in which Thompson makes a strong argument for the phonograph as one of the most important cultural inventions ever, did something I didn’t expect: It made me see recorded music in a different way.

4. Desecration phrasebook: A litany for the Anthropocene

Robert Macfarlane, New Scientist (2015)

Lovers of language hunt down and capture dialect and localized words like they’re chasing insects with a butterfly net. Macfarlane, clearly a language addict, tells us briefly of spectacular notions like ammil and zawn — before turning the screw and imagining the fresh vocabulary we need to be constructing. “Is there a word yet for the post-natural rain that falls when a cloud is rocket-seeded with silver iodide? Or an island newly revealed by the melting of sea ice in the North-West Passage? Or the glistening tidemarks left on coastlines by oil spills?”

5. The Lightning Before Death

Morten Høi Jensen, LA Review of Books (2015)

When I grew up I thought Clive James was just a TV personality, but over the years — as I have been introduced to his writing by my wife and others — I came to realize how misinformed I was. This review of his latest flurry of work captures, beautifully, what’s so great: the complexity, the invention, the ability to be intellectual but not elitist, “the textures of life in his prose.” The release of David Bowie’s new album had me wondering whether James was, in his own way, a parallel: an artist who is constantly finding surprising versions of himself and at the same time in constant conversation with all of his past selves.