ten good things

Hi!

January was 10,000 years long; 50% future shock, 50% mental cul-de-sac.

Venezuala was four weeks ago. I changed my mind about the singularity at least twice in the last 72 hours.

In a bookstore window, I saw a title about the Gamestop short squeeze five years ago. Remember that? The book may as well have been Middlemarch.

Shit got fast.

Every newsletter you get today will be an incredible deep dive into what OpenClaw means or an exceptional personal essay. Rest your eyes with ten things that made me happy in January; it's a bonus so many are by brilliant friends.

1) Sari at Sublime asked me and a lot of other people I like what moved us in 2025. I wrote about Sinners.

2) Sifted asked me to nominate someone in European tech to watch; I chose Selim who leads AI software at Nothing because 2026 won't be about bigger models but better systems. The next day Claude Cowork came out, then Google's Universal Commerce protocol (folks are sleeping on this..) then OpenClaw. BETTER SYSTEMS!

3) Writing helps you think. Vignette is a cool communal writing experiment; every Sunday and Thursday you get a prompt, write while the timed window is open, anonymous so it removes the performance pressure. When the window closes, every submission is revealed.

4) Alex's book Lazarus, on David Bowie's wildly unfashionable 80s and 90s, came out.

5) "Funny how honest communication can feel like a fucking exorcism"'; INDUSTRY is funny and nasty and profound. Nothing conveys Brits + their weirdness on wealth, class, race, gender better.

6) Restless Egg is Sylvan and Will's incubator for artist-founders. Went to Berlin to Sybil HQ to hang out with their latest cohort who are doing technology companies very differently. I like.

7) Ifeoma's film My NDA will premiere at SXSW. In a past life, I was a proud funder of Ifeoma's work to push through the Silenced No More Act in California which enables tech workers previously shackled by NDAs to go on the record. Massive tech companies aren't getting any less powerful; we need more checks and balances; important hers and others sacrifices get told.

8) Spacetalk in Barbican, London. The retro-futurist listening bar of my dreams (no phones allowed).

9) Carmen ran a hackathon with the theme of teaching robots how to dance. Everyone else is doing cage fighting but let's be lovers not fighters.

10) my son came back from school extremely excited to tell me about this song he'd just heard.

Reader, it was the Macarena. 

If you live long enough, you can both be the indie snob teen who refuses to learn the moves and the mum dancing around the kitchen island perfecting them.

Worth surviving January for.

✌️