A beautiful invention and a typing game.
9th February 2026
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Hello!
If there's a theme for this week's newsletter, it's that
production standards on YouTube are so unbelievably high these days. I look at some of these videos and wonder why they don't have more views -- and I think the answer is that there are now just so many people with both physical craft and videography skills that the market may actually be saturated. Maybe creators are now caught in a zero-sum game, and there just aren't enough views to go around.
Which is to say, in short: there's some really good stuff in the newsletter this week!
But before we get to those recommendations, here's what I've been up to this week! First of all, in this week's Lateral, we have three new players who all know each other and -- for the first time ever -- all wrote their own questions! From the "Here's What You Do" quiz podcast, James Smales, Jonny Robins and John Cantrell take on questions about partial puzzles, soccer secrets and menacing metal. (I also have a cameo at the start of their latest episode, setting up the themes for the week's quizzes!)
But before we get to those recommendations, here's what I've been up to this week! First of all, in this week's Lateral, we have three new players who all know each other and -- for the first time ever -- all wrote their own questions! From the "Here's What You Do" quiz podcast, James Smales, Jonny Robins and John Cantrell take on questions about partial puzzles, soccer secrets and menacing metal. (I also have a cameo at the start of their latest episode, setting up the themes for the week's quizzes!)
And now, good stuff on YouTube!
- Ancient makes a digital iris. No narration -- and days of effort skimmed over with impressive match-cut visual montages. The final results, with animated bokeh, designs in the deep-focus blur, are like nothing I've seen before. (Thanks Orson for the suggestion.)
- Alex Cisse's video, "China made me question who I am", feels almost like audio-visual poetry. An artistic, cinematic effect, produced by careful, thoughtful colour-grading and editing, along with a very personal narrative.
- Howtown continues to make really interesting, exceptionally well-produced explainer videos, and this deep-dive into the science of lie detectors (occasional adult themes) goes above-and-beyond. It's a masterclass in modern
YouTube documentary production: setting up multiple questions and resolving them all in interesting ways. And there's even a little song.
And around the rest of the web:
- London Centric is some of the best on-the-ground reporting
about the city, and this article, confessions of a London fake news TikToker, is well worth your time. This is a story about malice, greed, and how platforms with unguarded, automated algorithms reward hate. See also: Evan Edinger's video "why the Internet is terrified of London". (Occasional strong language.)
- Thank you to all the Estonians who emailed me this week to say that an official ice road is open for the first time in many years! While I won't be going over to see it myself, there
are more details in this article, and stock Reuters news videos and interviews available.
- Titivillus Teaches Typning [sic] is a lovely little in-browser typing game that's themed to look like an illustrated manuscript. It has a lovely twist: if you hit the wrong keys, the demon of typos will store your incorrect letters in its shame bag and add them to later words. This is a combination of joyful, stressful, and beautiful.
And finally: February.
All the best,
— Tom
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