One of the joys of the London Review of Books is coming across a piece of writing about an esoteric subject which is so well put together as to be arresting. Emily’s Berry’s piece on the LRB Blog about using a lumber extension machine is exactly that. It’s short, funny, intriguing, memorable, and well worth a few minutes of your time.

The picture at the top of this post is an AI-generated image created by OpenAI’s DALL-E 2.