WARREN ELLIS LTD Posts

^{Hugo Canoilas}

I’ve been reading newsletters. Lots of different kinds. I did that awful thing last night where I disappeared into my phone for four hours, just reading and studying and appraising. I’ve been having to rejig my own newsletter a bit this month, due to a dose of Best Laid Plans being laughed at by the universe. Because the universe is mostly dark matter.

I have a feeling I’ve seen a few people comment that there is more writing out in the world than at any time in human history. And, of course, print literature now has to jostle for money with paid Substacks and the like, just as broadcast TV now has to wrestle with streamers for every eyeball. Lots of launches, lots of decaying orbits. Space is weird right now and I’m wondering what it looks like and what’s next.

TODAY:

• Asteroid 2024 YR4 has a 4% chance of hitting the moon. Astronomers who never saw SPACE 1999 or read SEVENEVES are very excited about this because they could look at real-time collision effects, moonquakes, maybe recover chunks of rock and absolutely not witness the moon knocked out of its orbit.
• “Did you know Charles Babbage hosted soirées most Saturday nights during the London “season” from the early 1830s until the early 1850s? That’s where Ada Lovelace first saw the difference engine when she was just 17. The guest list included people you’ve definitely heard of: Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, Michael Faraday and Felix Mendelsohn for instance, and people who were as famous at the time, like Caroline Norton, the author and political lobbyist who secured divorced women the right to custody of their own children, and later copyright of their own writing. Or Mary Somerset, the famed mathematician. Harriet Martineau, arguably Britain’s first sociologist, and Monsieur Sismondi, the Swiss economist who coined the term proletariat. Actors, sculptors, politicians, aristocrats and inventors all came to these events.” No, I did not!
• Apparently the Milky Way is embedded in an impossibly large sheet of dark matter tens of millions of light-years across. I doubt the attached image explains anything, but I find it pleasingly trippy:

I did a show about dark matter once and all that still fascinates me.

Accessions:

I have a feeling I briefly met Aleks Krotoski in Brighton once, when having coffee with Ben Hammersley? Anyway, this book seems to tie into some work I’m doing right now (which I am dreadfully late on).

What was once a wild west of experimentation has wormed its way into Washington’s corridors of power. Award-winning broadcaster and academic Aleks Krotoski journeys from cult fringes to the heartlands of government to meet the moguls, effective altruists, geroscientists and entrepreneurs who are disrupting death. Along the way she encounters radical life extensionists transfusing their teenage son’s blood, transhumanists who want to upload consciousness to the cloud, biohackers flogging AI-powered wellness apps and billionaire kingmakers building brand-new nations.

THE IMMORTALISTS: THE DEATH OF DEATH AND THE RACE FOR ETERNAL LIFE, Aleks Krotoski (UK) (US+)

OPERATIONS: yesterday was a clusterfuck so today I am all in until midnight
STATUS: I am well aware that I am behind on a hundred emails
READING: SPIES: THE EPIC INTELLIGENCE WAR BETWEEN EAST AND WEST, Calder Walton (UK) (US+)
LISTENING:

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.

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