Two writers on Substack get money from me, one because I genuinely wish to support them, the other because I find what they write valuable and they abandoned first their print subscriptions and then their website. All the rest, and there are a fair few, probably never will. Obviously, despite their best efforts, I don’t feel like I’m missing anything.

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A friend to whom I had raved about 📖 Cahokia Jazz raved back about Civilisations. Well no, he didn’t rave, because he didn’t want to offer any spoilers. All he said was that it was a great counterfactual. When I asked for at least a bit of an outline, he added only, “well, when the Inca fleet turn...

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The modern digital audio recorder is a thing of wonder. I have a Zoom F3 that is tiny and that records such an insanely wide dynamic range that it doesn’t even have a “Volume” setting. All fixed in post. And yet ... Every so often it completely fails to work as expected. Most likely it is my expectations that are wrong, but that’s no excuse.

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Are we really halfway through the year? Seems impossible. And what do I have to show for it? Certainly not much in the way of concrete achievements, although another 10 podcast episodes count for something. And the finale of the season attracted some satisfying remarks, so all good.

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Quinoa is not a staple at our house. I like it a lot, but I don’t make it that often. If I did, I would probably already have negotiated a way through the ethical maze that confronts me. Should I buy quinoa from its homeland in South America, and if so should it be the morally superior stuff grown by small farmers on the altiplano of Peru and Bolivia, or the industrial stuff grown on the coast by greedy land barons cashing in on the mystique cultivated by the local people they despise?

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