Open tabs #1

Cultural recommendations and links

Dec 09, 2025

Here is your first installment of open tabs, my new series of cultural recommendations. We shall dive into essays, books, films, content creators, podcasts (etc) and, I hope, talk about them in the comments.

I listened to James Marriott’s interview on The Story twice. It’s one of those conversations so full of insight that you want to make sure you’ve absorbed every word. He asserts that we’re drifting into a post-literate society (also explored in his brilliant Substack essay). He isn’t simply mourning the decline of reading; he’s tracing a deeper cultural shift, from a world built on words to one shaped by our smartphones. Deep reading — the kind that stretches your attention and teaches you to sit with complexity — is being replaced by something faster, shallower, more reactive. He’s describing a transformation already well underway, and he makes you feel the weight of what’s at stake: not just the loss of books, but of the mental habits books can teach us — memory, reflection — and what that means for reason and knowledge.

Related: The Times and Sunday Times are embarking on a campaign to get the country reading. Have a look at their website — there are lots of ways to be involved. I love the pledge they’re encouraging people to make: to read for pleasure for 10 minutes everyday. “Decades of research shows that reading for fun can transform lives. It boosts children’s and adults’ mental health and has been found to be more important for a child’s cognitive development between the ages of 10 and 16 than their parents’ level of education.” I, for one, pledge to read to myself and read to my baby. It’s an easy one to make, despite how much time I waste clicking onto apps seemingly at random on my phone. Books make life feel more manageable.

This story by Harriet Armstrong — author of To Rest Our Minds and Bodies — is short and brilliant. It’s hard to categorize. I feel like she could have plucked it from my brain (and I wish I had/could have written it). It’s about wanting to connect, to ask for comfort.

Amy & Fox: a Youtube channel with an abundance of simple cosiness. Amy lives in a caravan on the Isle of Skye with her little dog and her husband. She is from the north east and has that very particular north easterly charm of managing to be sincere without too much sickly sincerity. A few years ago they simplified their life and went after financial freedom (certainly as much as one can hope for in our capitalist dystopia), more time outside, and the introvert’s dream: the Scottish Highlands. I find myself seeking out Youtube content from people who have very purposefully chosen to change their life in search of freedom. I guess that’s what I want to do, and I need some inspiration and focus to do it.

Race Across the World is one of T and my favourite shows to curl up in front of on a rainy weeknight. We look forward to Thursdays as if they hold the key to our contentment. And maybe they do. The current series, the celebrity edition, is every bit as heartwarming and awe-inspiring as the normies. As someone with an acute fear of flying, I may well never see the countries they visit beyond my television screen. Which I suppose makes the show’s intimacy all the more special. You’re not just shown glossy highlights or an old town through a historian’s lens (don’t get me wrong, I also like those shows) — you’re with them on 24-hour bus rides, sharing home-cooked meals with families in rural Panama, seeing the world from the backpackers-eye-view. And — at the risk of using the biggest cliché of all — their journey isn’t only physical. By the end, you can see something shift in them: they know themselves better, they feel stronger, more capable, more open. It’s a beautiful thing to witness. (Dylan, from Big Boys, and his mum Jackie, are the absolute heart of this series. Watch it if only to see their gorgeous relationship).

I’ve been thinking a lot about this essay from The Care Gap — “The Office Men Made — And the Women It Ruined.” The writer describes being asked, again and again, to prove her reliability at work — not because she’s unreliable, but because motherhood is seen as a potential liability. The assumption lingers that women, especially mothers, are one sick child or elderly parent away from letting the team down. The essay reminds us that the modern office — its hours, hierarchies, expectations of constant availability — was designed by men who didn’t have to think about school pickups or emotional labour. That’s not a moral failing, it’s just the architecture we inherited. Care — invisible, unpaid, essential in our society — has been excluded from the way we design work. The fact that women/mothers often take that burden of care on, means that women are the ones bearing the brunt of this failing. “Women report that competence is questioned, that they’re mistaken for someone more junior, and that microaggressions are still pervasive. In 2024, the share of women reporting competence-based microaggressions jumped sharply again, evidence the “vibe shift” didn’t fix culture.”

I had no idea I was interested in the Berlin techno club scene, but the podcast Search Engine has shown me otherwise. I’m new to this series — where the host takes a listener’s question and investigates it with obsessive, journalistic rigour — I started listening a few days ago and I’m ready to get knee deep in their back catalogue. The aforementioned episode, about Berghain, the notoriously-hard-to-enter club in Berlin, was one of the best podcast episodes I’ve listened to. It starts with the question (posed by Chris and Dan): ‘Why Didn’t Chris and Dan Get Into Berghain?’ and it becomes a deeper meditation on belonging, boundary, and what it takes to be in. The episode investigates the cultural history — techno, Berlin, post-Wall liberation — that gives Berghain its mystique. Something about the way it’s reported (we love the This American Life cadence), and the techno music pulsing beneath the narrative, makes you feel like you’re standing outside the club yourself — waiting, hoping, wondering if you’ll get the yes.

There are other episodes I’ve loved — one on the swimming pool in Buckingham Palace for instance — and I know the show will pop up again on this list.

I hope you liked my first go at open tabs! It’s fun because I love consuming all this stuff and I love talking about it. Tell me what you are watching, reading, listening to. I’d love to know.