Why is the sky blue?
And: The Orality Theory of Everything (#564)
This is David, your decidedly human web crawler, and you're reading the Weekly Filet, the newsletter for curious minds who love when something makes them go «Huh, I never thought of it this way!».
Before we get to this week's recommendations: I've spent the past two weeks giving the archive a little glow-up. So if you haven't been on the Weekly Filet website in a while, now's a good time.
1. Why is the sky blue?
One of the humbling and beautiful aspects of parenthood is that you constantly get asked questions you thought you knew the answer to. And down the rabbit hole we go.
2. Non-Hegemony
Dispatch from a fragmenting world order. «Unlike its twentieth-century predecessor, this Second Cold War is not defined by bloc-based rivalry or territorial containment, but by state-led struggles to control the strategic networks of global capitalism.»
Ilias Alami
3. I am a 15-year-old girl. Let me show you the vile misogyny that confronts me on social media every day
The «manosphere» and its radicalising influence over boys and young men have gotten a lot more attention lately, and rightly so. But rarely do we see this dynamic from the other perspective: from the teenage girls exposed to hate from red-pilled boys. This is a shocking read.
Anonymous
4. Hold on to Your Hardware
You are reading this on a device with computing power. What if this era is coming to an end, and computing power will only be for corporations and huge data centers, and all you can do is rent it? And what implications does this have? Interesting essay.
5. The Orality Theory of Everything
An interesting conversation on how we have re-entered an age of orality and how this explains, to be precise, not everything, but 99 percent of everything.
Derek Thompson
If you like theories of everything, here's another good one: The housing theory of everything.
Dataguessr of the week
Update your knowledge of the world. One quiz at a time. This week:
What else?
Instant-gratification links that make you go wow! or aha! the moment you click.
- Two books to look forward to (and make for a nice pairing): The Art of Fighting (Priya Parker) | Don't Call It Art (Austin Kleon).
- Have you ever seen an albino humpback whale? 2026 World Nature Photography Awards.
- A site full of no-nonsense titles on Donald Trump: isdonaldtrumpalive.com
- More than 140 years after construction began, the Sagrada Familia has reached full height. (It's not quite finished, of course)
- New word I learned this week: the «molly guard».
- One more book to look forward to (for a little longer): Life Beyond Measure: A Celebration of Nature’s Wonders at Every Scale, by Ed Yong.
Books for curious minds
Some new ones as I read them, some older ones that continue to inform how I look at the world and myself.
A book on the fascinating and scary complexities of the modern supply chain. The author follows the journey of a single product, which turns the vast topic into a compelling story. Buy it here.
A gem from the archive
David Bauer
The Weekly Filet archive offers more than 2800 hand-picked links since 2011, like this one. You can search by interests, explore collections or shuffle for a gem.
That's it for this week. Thanks for reading. I wish you a nice weekend and hope to see you again next Friday!
— David