Curiosity Pill Awards Season Part 1
The best articles, videos and podcasts for the year of 2020
After the well deserved holiday break, what better to think about than what were the highlights of sending the Curiosity Pill newsletter in the last half of year.
I want to send a personal thank you to each subscriber, without you this newsletter would not be possible and I hope you will have a wonderful 2021 and keep on reading!
The inaugural edition of the Curiosity Pill Awards Season will be split in 4 parts:
1st Part: Best Article Section #10-8; Best Video Pills #10-9; Best Podcast Pills
2nd Part: Best Article Section #7-6; Best Video Pills #8-6; Best Design Pills; released on 7th January
3rd Part: Best Article Section #5-3; Best Video Pills #5-4; Best Poetic Pills; released on 10th January
4th Part: Best Article Section #2-1; Best Video Pills #3-1; Best Underground Pills, released on 14th January
Best Articles of 2020
#10 'A way of learning from everything': the rise of the city critic
What is a city critic? It cannot be just an architecture critique, or an urban planner, it must live and walk, take the bus, visit the coffee house, listen to the people. Iain Sinclair, for example, has enriched his books with authenticity thanks to his lifelong walks in London.”Indeed, city critics should write about everything: their subject is a nexus of subjects. Ada Louise Huxtable concerned herself with not just her official beat of architecture at the New York Times and later the Wall Street Journal, but also development economics and the policy of land use and transportation; the ultra-opinionated Ian Nairn savaged postwar Britain’s uninspired buildings and even less inspired city planning; the New Yorker’s architecture critic Mumford wrote about highways, housing and planning, but also literature, technology and politics. And longtime writer on the built environment Karrie Jacobs points out that most writers on cities currently “either focus on urban problems or urban pleasures,” whereas “in truth, the problems and the pleasures have a symbiotic relationship,” which any critic worthy of the title understands.”
#9 Our computers are limited by their rock-based architecture
What is a computer, but a complex mixture of minerals animated by electricity and language. Also, the fact that it’s components cannot go smaller and its parts require materials that are rare means we have to look somewhere else for advancement in computing, consider nature as an architect and inspect mould as a replacement for minerals.”The research folders on my very rock-based computer are crammed with papers on plant leaf computing; computing driven by the billiard ball-like collisions of droplets and marbles; the problem-solving algorithms of lettuce seedlings; computing systems built around the behavior of blue soldier crabs, rushing between shade and sunshine on a beach.”
https://massivesci.com/articles/slime-computers/
#8 The Flat Heaven Above You
A beautiful article about the phenomenon called multiple discovery, with an example related to the Pythagoraean theorem, parts of which were known in parts of India and China 2700 years earlier. Did you also know that the Zhou dynasty brought to the world the idea of moral superiority and linked leadership with virtue? "The ancient Chinese derived a geometric truth because they believed they had to keep despots off the throne, and in order to keep despots off the throne they had to maintain heaven’s favor, and in order to maintain heaven’s favor they had to prove the earth was a square and heaven a circle. Which is to say that even the most enthusiastically wrongheaded folks can, in the attempt to justify their own moral superiority, make some useful discoveries"
https://stevebryant.substack.com/p/the-flat-heaven-above-you
Best Video Pills of 2020
#10 Go Review - A video 4,000 years in the making
#9 Is Vine Cinema? Brows Held High
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This week I want to feature a fellow Internet randomness enthusiast, David, and his most curious newsletter ‘The Land of Random’. Some features included in the latest editions: the awkward return of Myspace, wearing digital clothes, a selfie museum and the rise of glassmorphism. If any of these topics sparked your interest, I highly recommend subscribing to The Land of Random, and become a fellow citizen.
https://thelandofrandom.substack.com/subscribe
Best Podcast Pills of the Year
#4 The Newsletters We Always Open...and Perhaps Too Many Thoughts on Ironing - Rerun!, Podcast:A thing or two
A suite of great newsletter recommendations from Claire and Erica, and a chat about ironing.
#3 Taking the Biscuit: How a long-life ration became the quintessential British comfort food, Podcast: The Food Programme
But there is more to the humble biscuit than comfort. This is a food that helped shape wartime rations, that was front and centre of Britain's factory revolution, that formed the basis for an industry that employed thousands and shaped neighbourhoods
#2 Joe Sacco’s Journalistic Comics, Podcast: Working
Isaac Butler talks with journalist and cartoonist Joe Sacco. Sacco is a Maltese-American cartoonist and journalist best known for his comics journalism. His books Palestine and Footnotes in Gaza have been critically praised and have won him several awards, including the American Book Award. His most recent book is Paying the Land.
https://player.fm/series/series-2355372/joe-saccos-journalistic-comics
#1 Board games: The politics of play, podcast: The Cultural Frontline
How do board games encourage players to explore ideas, politics and morals? We meet Matt Leacock, designer of the game Pandemic, which has been used at medical schools to encourage co-operation, communication and strategy for trainees. Reiner Knizia, designer of 700 board games, talks about how making a game out of tasks can change players' behaviour in daily life.
https://player.fm/series/the-cultural-frontline-1301471/board-games-the-politics-of-play
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