After some serendipitous channel-hopping, Wendy and I were captivated by Friday’s press conference by Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, stranded on the International Space Station. Suni, especially, seemed remarkably grounded and professional in the midst of what must be an extraordinarily trying circumstance for anyone.

In Ars Technica, Stephen Clark’s invocation of their status of Navy captains who have abandoned ship—or, whose ship has abandoned them—perhaps gives a peek into the professional disappointment that this turn of events must hold for the pair. One wonders whether the safe , unscrewed return of the Starliner compounds or alleviates that heaviness.

I’m reminded, too, of the stories of early astronauts being looked down upon among test pilots based on the view that they were essentially passengers on vehicles that flew themselves. It’s hard not to wonder whether the safe return of Starliner stirs up those emotions in Suni and Butch as well.

There must be a lot on their minds—but you’d never know it to listen to them.

I suspect the fact that I recognise Chiwetel Ejiofor mainly from the British Airways safety video does not reflect well upon me, even as someone who doesn’t watch many films. But now I also know him for Rob Peace, a film for which he wrote the adaptation of the book, directed, and starred in, playing the titular character’s father.

This is a biographical film. Rob Peace is shown to be a precocious child born to a poor, black family in the US in 1980. During his childhood, his father is imprisoned for murder, though his family has doubts about the safety of the conviction. With a lot of hard work, Peace ends up securing a place at Yale. He begins to sell drugs while there to fund his father’s appeal, and the discovery of this plot puts paid to his desire to pursue a doctorate.

He moves onto a real estate career through which he intends to improve the neighbourhood in which he grew up, though his longer-term plans are scuppered by the financial crash. He once again takes to selling drugs in order to refund the money his friends had invested in his venture, though he is shot dead in the process.

Biography is hard, and it seems to me that biography on film must be even harder: how do you cram a life into a couple of hours? This film doesn’t quite crack that nut: it’s tonally uneven, and it does a lot of ‘telling’ rather than ‘showing’, sometimes in quite peculiar ways. For example, we are told that Peace has a particular talent for bringing people together and that a party he has organised has an attendance list drawn from many different social groups, rather than shown this. He has a romantic relationship which we don’t see enough of to be truly invested in, but also shown more than just a ‘hint’ of. Some of the choices struck me as downright odd.

The other issue with this film—and it’s surely one of the challenges of biography—is that I don’t think it gets the balance right between the focus on its subject and the ripples of influence they have. Everything here is focused on Peace: we don’t really get to understand and appreciate his positive impact on others (though his housing project, for example), nor any negative impact (upon the people to whom he sold drugs, for example). This left it feeling a little bit insular, and it felt like this undercut the film’s attempt to meaningfully dive into some of the bigger social challenges the film raises.

But, nevertheless, I enjoyed this. This didn’t completely work for me, but I would like to see more of this sort of thing: it was close to being excellent.

The film was carried by its main star, Jay Will, who is magnetic and completely believable in the role. He must surely have a huge acting career ahead of him. Weirdly, I thought the weakest link among the actors was Ejiofor himself, whose character seemed utterly inconsistent from scene to scene—though perhaps this was more the fault of his writing than his acting.

I think this is worth going to see.

I enjoyed this extract from Oliver Burkeman’s book, Meditations for Mortals, and this imagery in particular:

A pair of images that help clarify things here are those of the kayak and the superyacht. To be human, according to this analogy, is to occupy a little one-person kayak, borne along on the river of time towards your inevitable yet unpredictable death. It’s a thrilling situation, but also an intensely vulnerable one: you’re at the mercy of the current, and all you can really do is to stay alert, steering as best you can, reacting as wisely and gracefully as possible to whatever arises from moment to moment.

That’s how life is. But it isn’t how we want it to be. We’d prefer a much greater sense of control. Rather than paddling by kayak, we’d like to feel ourselves the captain of a superyacht, calm and in charge, programming our desired route into the ship’s computers, then sitting back and watching it all unfold from the plush-leather swivel chair on the serene and silent bridge.

The point Burkeman is making is about knuckling down and actually doing the things one wants to do in life, but I liked this imagery more for its root in stoicism. Life is unpredictable, and the best laid scheme gang aft agley, as Rabbie Burns had it.

But I think there is something in Burkeman’s recognition that there can be ‘wisdom’ and ‘grace’ in the response. I usually associate those qualities with well-laid plans which come off, but Burkeman helped me to remember that it’s demonstrating them in the face of unexpected challenge which is both the most difficult and the most worthy outcome.

And it’s also a reminder that when we look at others and perceive them to be in their own superyachts gliding towards some goal, we are mistaken: in the end, we’re all in kayaks, and we’re all at the mercy of fortune and the unknown.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

Pillar Man, which I showed you a few days ago, isn’t Nicolaus Widerberg’s only sculptural contribution to Northumbria University: he has quite a few scattered around the place.

This 2013 piece is called Collar and Wave.

I have an on-off relationship with physical notebooks. Only last year, I mentioned that I transitioned to using OneNote; yet today, I’m back to using a combination of OneNote and a paper notebook from Papier.

I therefore very much enjoyed this book excerpt by Roland Allen in The Walrus about the history of Moleskine—the notebook manufacturer to whose paper diaries Wendy is especially loyal.

The non-standard dimensions, a couple of centimetres narrower than the familiar A5, let you slip the notebook into a jacket pocket, and the rounded corners—which add considerably to the production cost—help with this. They also stop your pages from getting dog-eared and, together with the elastic strap and unusually heavy cover boards, confirm that the notebook is ready for travel. The edges of the board sit flush with the page block, ensuring that your Moleskine can never be mistaken for a printed book. In use, it lies obediently open and flat, and the pocket glued into the back cover board invites you to hide souvenirs—photos, tickets stubs, the phone numbers of beautiful strangers. Two hundred pages suggest that you have plenty to write about; the paper itself, tinted to a classy ivory shade and unusually smooth to the touch, implies that your ideas deserve nothing but the best, and the ribbon marker helps you navigate your musings. Discreetly minimal it may seem, but the whole package is as shot through with brand messaging as anything labelled Nike, Mercedes, or Apple—and, like the best cues, the messaging works on a subconscious level.

My Papier notebook, I note, does not exhibit all of those features, and would be better if it did. I particularly liked the article’s take on the little leaflet that’s tucked inside Moleskine notebooks:

The leaflet opened with a lie (the new Moleskines were not “exact reproductions of the old”) then immediately veered toward gibberish, but that didn’t matter. Pound for pound, those seventy-five words proved themselves among the most effective pieces of commercial copywriting of all time, briskly connecting the product’s intangible qualities—usefulness and emotion—to its material specification, thereby selling both the sizzle and the steak. Sebregondi and Franceschi picked an astutely international selection of names to drop: an Englishman, an American, and a Frenchman encouraged cosmopolitan aspirations. “Made in China,” on the other hand, did not, so they left that bit out.

It’s one of those articles which is packed with insights and titbits I’ve never thought to wonder about, and I’d highly recommend giving it a few minutes of your time.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

This is Hoop-La (2014), a sculpture by the American sculptor Alice Aycock in the Princess Estelle Sculpture Park in Djurgården, Stockholm. It was, in fact, the first piece acquired for the park.

I found it intriguing: it combined scale with real detail and finesse. The whole form seemed to change as I puzzled my way around it. I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it at first, but found it intriguing. And, in the end, perhaps to be intriguing is perhaps the point of the work.

When I walked past this, I imagined that the bank once financed shipping, as I linked the ‘marine’ mention with the big boat. However, as you may know, ‘ultramarino’ means ‘overseas’ in Portuguese rather than anything connected directly to shipping.

Founded in Lisbon in 1864, Banco Nacional Ultramarino was once responsible for the issue of banknotes in Portuguese overseas territories. One of these was Macau. Although now part of China, Macau continues to use the Macanese pataca, still issued by BNU, which is now part of another Portuguese bank based in Lisbon: Caixa Geral de Depósitos.

It’s been years since I left Twitter. In the end, it was a simple observation about the effect that opening the app had on my mood that made me quit:

I’d felt relaxed before I opened Twitter; now I was mildly stressed.

Since then, the arguments against what’s now called X have only mounted, and perhaps become so widely understood that they’re no longer worth rehearsing. I don’t regret deleting my account, and sometimes wonder what I ever saw in the service in the first place.

Helpfully, John Elledge’s recent New Stateman column was a good reminder of what used to be valuable about the platform. It helped me remember the excitement I used to feel back when the service felt new and fresh. I remember the excitement of posting my one and only truly viral tweet about—of all things—Opal Fruits. Elledge’s column also reminded me of James O’Malley’s essay from last December, which discussed the app’s contribution to social mobility.

I remember attending a course some years ago during which Twitter was used for discussion during the presentations. It was enormously helpful and engaging; it felt like the future. It’s impossible to imagine that happening in a constructive way nowadays, without the chat becoming hijacked by non-attendees or descending into incivility. The moment has passed.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

A few weeks ago, I showed you Tom Grimsey’s artwork marking the Lort Burn, one of Newcastle’s ‘hidden burns’. Above is Nicolaus Widerberg’s contribution to the same project: this 6.4m tall bronze sculpture and its meandering granite plinth mark the path of part of Pandon Burn which has been culverted for hundreds of years.

When the artwork was installed in 2004, it was in front of a big white wall which was part of an extension to the University’s gallery. The setting has changed considerably since then: the less stark background and the planting around it make it feel a more natural part of the landscape.

In a subway in Lisbon, there’s a 2024 cork artwork by Sagmeister & Walsh that spells out a sentence, repeated on a nearby plaque for much easier reading:

If a newspaper would only come out every fifty years, it would report how life expectancy rose by twenty years.

I scoffed to Wendy that this couldn’t possibly be true. In the UK, life expectancy has increased by about a decade since the 1970s and is now in decline. Surely Portugal couldn’t be so different?

With her usual sagacious wisdom, Wendy suggested that it was probably not meant to be taken literally. We were probably supposed to contemplate the negativity bias in the news and note how poorly it reflects the long-term improvements that I talk about regularly in a professional context.

But I couldn’t let it drop, so I did the research. Astonishingly, the artwork is reasonably accurate.

In the fifty-year period between 1970—when, of course, Portugal had yet to return to democracy—and 2020, life expectancy grew from 63 years for men and 71 years for women to 78 years and 83 years, respectively. It’s not quite a twenty-year increase, but it’s in the ballpark.

In 1920, the average life expectancy in Portugal was about 40 years, so the increase from there to the 1970s exceeded the artwork’s claim.

In 1870, the average life expectancy was around 29 years. The fifty-year span to 1920, therefore, delivers less than a twenty-year increase, but again, it’s in the right ballpark—and proportionately, it is astonishing. An extension of the average lifespan by a third in fifty years.

Exactly as the artwork (and Wendy) tried to tell me, it’s easy to underestimate gradual changes.