Pop, scrolls, and a toothbrush debunk.

• I finally got around to watching Vox's What's inside this crater in Madagascar? and I have mixed feelings about it. It's certainly a brilliant piece of journalism, and exactly the sort of video I love: someone notices a strange thing, investigates it doggedly for months, and puts everything together into a well-told story. It's one of the best examples of that form I've ever seen! But I can't help wonder about the unwitting subjects of the documentary. Some folks showed up at their village one day, and showed it off to five million people, without really asking first. This is probably the best version of that story that could happen — respectful, contextualised, and apparently with consent given after the camera team arrive — but I'm not sure how I'd feel if a camera team just arrived in my neighbourhood one day to document it for the world, with all the risks that entails. Being "noticed" by the internet can absolutely ruin places and people. What would have happened if the villagers have said no? Would Vox still have run the story?
   
• Turn-of-the-millennium pop group A*Teens had a 25th anniversary reunion performance as the interval act of the first Melodifestivalen show this week. And they're great! It looks like they're having fun! They'll probably do a tour of Sweden next year. But: this also gives me an excuse to link to one of the greatest effects a music video has ever pulled off. I don't want to spoil the middle eight of the video for Halfway Around the World, but I will say that, one day, I hope to pull off a visual gag even half that good. (If you absolutely must, then just play from 2:25, but in that case you'll also miss the inexplicable, ridiculous cartoon spring "boing" sample that somehow got added a couple of times to each verse.)
   

• This is incredible: ancient scrolls that were buried in the volcanic ash of Vesuvius have been read, thanks to a million-dollar Vesuvius Challenge prize. These scrolls can't be opened without damaging them: but modern CT scanning and AI techniques mean that, for the first time, the words on them have been revealed anyway. It's a stunning achievement, and I'd recommend reading all the way through this article. (And perhaps there's now more hope for that old BBC reel of Morecambe and Wise that was sliced and CT scanned.)
   
• "Wherever you get your podcasts" is a radical statement. This is a great post, particularly as YouTube seems to be trying to redefine the term. YouTube may call their fancy video-interview playlists "podcasts", but until they can be played in any app and offloaded to any other platform, no they're not. Unless, that is, YouTube (and the world) manage to change the definition in people's heads. There's a risk that the word "podcast" is going to change definition: from a method of subscribing to any audio feed, regardless of content or host, to being slang for "long-form rambling interview". I really, really hope that doesn't happen.
   
• A fascinating paper from 2020: laws requiring children to ride in car seats slightly reduce the pregnancy rate... for couples who already have two kids, and thus don't want to have to buy a third car seat. Yes, the researchers seem to have corrected for every confounding factor.
   
• Madeon's Pop Culture live mashup, twelve years old now, took the world by storm. A couple of weeks ago, on TikTok, Madeon talked about how he released it at age 16... then immediately went on holiday for several days, and knew nothing about it until he checked his email in a cybercafé.
   
• Bandle is the best Worldle-alike I've seen for a long while. Can you identify a song just from the drums? Okay, how about from the drums and bass? What if you add the guitars? How many instruments will it take before it clicks and it suddenly seems obvious?

Thanks, as ever, for reading the newsletter and clicking through: this continues to be a really nice medium to work with, and going "hey, here's some good stuff other people are making", outside of algorithmic "for you" pages, feels like a nice way to interact with the internet right now.

And finally: no, three million internet-connected toothbrushes were not hijacked for use in a botnet attack.

All the best,

— Tom