A baffling experiment and a catchy song!

16th June 2025

Hello!

First of all, thanks to everyone who subscribed to this newsletter after the video launching my very uncertain, working-title England project! The usual 'good stuff on the internet' will be after this introduction, but first, a quick update. I have, unsurprisingly, got a lot of suggestions to look through: more than 6,000! Thank you very much to everyone who's sent in an idea, particularly from newsletter readers who got their ideas in early; it's going to take me a long time to sort through everything.

Also, there's a ridiculous thumbnail joke on that video: the original thumbnail just had me waving, with "this video will be deleted in 7 days". Which is true! I made a new thumbnail for each day, so it could count down, along with a script to automatically update the thumbnail in case I'm offline. And then I realised I could update something else too: so I'm lowering my position in that thumbnail frame a little bit every day. It wasn't obvious to start -- but now, I'm low enough that my face is hidden by the text. By Monday lunchtime, it'll just be the top of my head poking up. It's a ridiculous joke and I probably shouldn't keep giggling at it.

Anyway! In this week's Lateral, the Let's Learn Everything crew are back: Ella Hubber, Caroline Roper and Tom Lum face questions about financial fish, biased battles and temperamental temperatures!

Between launching the England project, looking through the replies, and a load of other commitments, I haven't had much time to watch YouTube this week. So as ever, if you do see something online that might fit here, do send it in! Here's the good stuff that I have found:

Reactions proves that static electricity makes no sense. This is confusing, in a good way. It's a documentation of someone trying to understand, bringing the audience along for the ride, and showing that science -- actual science -- is messy and difficult, even when you're dealing with often-abstract things like physics.
The B1M, a construction industry channel, has a video about the Grenfell Tower fire that's one of the best summaries of the disaster that I've seen, including original interviews and a "what happens now".
Thanks to Andreas for sending over this interesting video about the US Army's all-purpose utility pen, which is something I feel like I should have known about before today. It's from a channel called "Knife Story" that mostly talks about, well, knives as weapons -- and I would have dismissed the channel as one of those low-effort, stock-footage-Wikipedia-research-voiceover channels if it weren't for one thing: the shots of the author actually writing with the pen, shot in a way that feels "not stock footage". That's enough effort to put it over the barrier for me, marking this as "human interested in subject" rather than "content farm with ChatGPT".

And around the rest of the web:

Seven Days at the Bin Store (strong language). A portrait of a shop that deals in "reverse logistics": the items that are returned, repaired, refurbished, or just unsold, the splashback from the firehose of capitalism. Bleak, fascinating, and surprisingly personal.
A map visualisation that different brains will interpret as either satisfying or unsettling -- the Steak Bake Spider, displaying the ten closest Greggs bakeries to the map centre. Despite the name I think it's probably safe for arachnophobes, it's a very abstract visualisation, but it certainly feels just a little insectoid as it's scrolled across the map.
Why does Switzerland have so many bunkers?

And finally, on TikTok: "best of luck, and off you go". (Alternate link; warning, incredibly catchy looping song.)

All the best,

— Tom

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