Some of my favourite reading and rereading from 2025

Over the next few days we'll be posting the Top 10 most read of this year's pieces. In at no.10, Hugh Aldersey-Williams's essay “Designing the Sublime: Boullée and Ledoux’s Architectural Revolution”: publicdomainreview.org/essay/design... (Full Top 10 here: publicdomainreview.org/blog/2025/12...)

This is the fossil fuel industry spraypainting the lens on the security cameras while they carry off the heist www.usatoday.com/story/news/p...

NCAR is quite literally our global mothership. Everyone who works in climate and weather has passed through its doors and benefited from its incredible resources. Dismantling NCAR is like taking a sledgehammer to the keystone holding up our scientific understanding of the planet. Unbelievable.

🎄There’s still time to spruce up your knowledge of the elements . . . 🎁

#OnThisDay in 2001, at the age of 57, the German writer W. G. Sebald died while driving his car. In a special post we feature the many public domain books of which, and through which, Sebald speaks in his masterpiece The Rings of Saturn (1995) — publicdomainreview.org/collection/t... #otd

#otd 1659, Christiaan Huygens writes to Ismaël Boulliau with his explanation of Saturn’s ring. ‘The greatest proof of the truth of my hypothesis will be when it is found that my predictions agree with observations in 1671 and 72. To do which I hope that you and I will have sufficient life.‘

If publishing and bookselling doesn't take a human-only position, then we're fucked. I really can't understand why anyone sees this differently.

Have to say, if the FIFA Chemistry Prize doesn’t go to these guys, they were robbed

Woordle 1629 2/6 ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

On one occasion, Huygens made so bold as to send a painting of his own to Seghers, along with a verse confessing that it was hardly up to Seghers’ standard

RIP Tom Stoppard. The Coast of Utopia: I could have watched the whole of history unfurl like that.

Ha! Well he wasn't wrong, I don't think. A form of collective hysteria, he told Klug. John Maddox – an anniversary maniac – began preparing the 50th anniversary at the time of the 40th. Sometimes he hit the nail on the head, though, as in this cover of Nature from the *21st* anniversary:

Prompted to check by @matthewcobb.bsky.social quoting Crick as writing, a propos DNA, ‘it never occurred to me that anyone could be so crazy as to celebrate the 40th anniversary of a molecule’!

Just missed it, damn. The 40th anniversary of the discovery of buckminsterfullerene last Friday: www.nature.com/articles/318...

My downstairs reading is Matthew Cobb’s brilliant Crick. Upstairs, rereading Frankenstein (prompted by the del Toro film). It’s throwing up some interesting parallels!

Every year, thousands are rescued after getting trapped by the tide. This research finds misconceptions, not misjudgment, are often to blame. Let’s make “tidal literacy” the new water safety essential. Martin Austin reports. From The Conversation -- thanks! eastangliabylines.co.uk/environment/...

Not sure I’ve done quite the ‘proper analysis’ called for here, but I did something in www.hughalderseywilliams.com/books-findings

He's back!

What the internet was made for. Delightful.

The truly maddening thing is that, unlike when I was a young man in science and the materials and engineering just weren’t there yet, the future is *right there.* The problem is *solved*. What’s holding us back is not just greed, but this bizarre nostalgia, an obsession with petro- masculinity.

Hard to put a date on when the political and media normalizing of blatant racism and far-right views began, but surely it was something of a pivotal moment when the world's richest man gave a Nazi salute and all the media said "Well it's ambiguous". (As did the Royal Society, it seems.)

I can’t believe it’s been five years: Discoveries! Inventions!! New theories!!! Bitter priority disputes. International wars. Fickle patrons. Grim executions. Enormous wigs. www.amazon.co.uk/Dutch-Light-...

Happy birthday and deathday to 17th-century polymath Sir Thomas Browne (1605–1682). See our Browne related content here, including essays by @HoooAW and Claire Preston: https://publicdomainreview.org/tags/thomas-browne #OnThisDay #OTD

Happy birthday (and death day) to Sir Thomas Browne, who had the foresight to write about this particular coincidence. His advice is as good now as ever: ‘Though the World be Histrionical, and most Men live Ironically, yet be thou what thou singly art, and personate only thy self.’

It's also not "just another" extinction, it's the first from mainland Europe in centuries. CENTURIES. And there will be others within our lifetime. That's biodiversity loss. We'll never hear this sound, ever again xeno-canto.org/398794

Well, it's official. After our paper last year (onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....), the Slender-billed Curlew is officially declared Extinct today. Scientists dream of describing new species, not writing their obituary and epitaph, knowing that they are gone forever #ornithology

A searchable works list has been released to identify the authors’ works that were stolen by US Corporation Anthropic, to train its AI models. It includes UK authors whose works were copied without their permission or payment.

A strange statement typical of our times: if a Fellow publicly espouses and acts from values contrary to the freedoms the Society finds important to scientific research, expelling that Fellow seems to be acting in the best interests of science by the Society’s own lights.

RIP Tony Harrison. When I was writing a thing about the German WW1 chemist Fritz Haber, I wrote to him in relation to his then recent play Square Rounds. He sent back this typed postcard, patiently answering my questions, and ending up, ‘I doubt it will be revived in my lifetime. Afterwards, maybe!’

If, like me and, apparently, Rembrandt, you can’t draw dogs, then copy someone else’s drawing . . .

Tylenol/paracetamol and #scicomm - what is the strategy? Is there a strategy? Or is even firefighting wrong in this context? makingsciencepublic.com/2025/08/09/f...

Notice, #earlymodern #skystorians, the logo at the middle of the photo? The VOC (Dutch East India Company). All the more reason to reckon with the legacies of these companies and how they integrate (or don't) with shifting ideas of globalisation, integration, capitalism, and national identity.

Love this picture. I used in Dutch Light as illustrative of the Huygenses’ household music-making (although Constantijn Huygens played the theorbo, and there isn’t one here).

21st century Britain where it's illegal to project an image on a wall but not illegal to supply weapons to mass murdering genocidal psychopaths

Slightly diminish a book: Drive Your Car over the Mini Roundabout near the Cemetery

Asylum seekers can now volunteer in Norfolk thanks to two local charities, New Routes Integration and Voluntary Norfolk. Fantastic news for International Charity Day

Constantijn Huygens was born on this day in 1596. As he grew older – and older – he wrote himself little birthday odes. On his 70th: ‘How many Septembers, Lord, and how many fourth days will you suffer me yet?’ At 82: ‘Cease murderous years and think no more of me . . .’ (He died at 90.)

From the conclusion of my Christiaan Huygens biography, Dutch Light. Now unexpectedly and horribly pertinent.

This is a great resource, much more searchable by theme than the BBC Sounds archive. Not sure what Thomas Browne would make of rubbing shoulders with ‘John Bull’ though.

Lovely opportunity here to explore Constantijn Huygens’s music and adventures in perfumery.

Will spend the rest of my life considering how we were rushed into "going paperless" for the good of the environment only for the next generation of digital tools to become far worse for the environment.

Reform UK, which has a grand total of four MPs, was just given an uninterrupted platform for an hour and a half on the BBC and Sky News channels, in order to talk about its plans for mass deportations When was the last time the Greens (with four MPs) or the Lib Dems (with 72) were given the same?

Off to the seaside (II)? The English word seaside, meant as a holiday destination, was coined by the Dutch Constantijn Huygens in 1670. This is his verse to the painter Peter Lely (then in England) containing its first usage:

Off to the seaside (II)? The English word seaside, meant as a holiday destination, was coined by the Dutch Constantijn Huygens in 1670. This is his verse to the painter Peter Lely (then in England) containing its first usage:

Off to the seaside? Wondering why the sea is blue? This man found the answer, and won the first non-western Nobel Prize publicdomainreview.org/collection/r...

Lovely Lübeck, Hanseatic city. From the days of trade before nationalism.

In Hamburg, disappointed to find no commemoration of Hennig Brand at the site in St. Michaelisplatz where, in 1669, he was the first person to discover a chemical element – phosphorus.

Location footage fans! Last night Together TV, which screens some incredible 1970s curios at the weekends, unearthed a film from 1974 called Got It Made, described by its sole IMDb reviewer as ‘the most Norwich-centric film ever made’. I wonder if @djtaylorwriter.bsky.social knows about it?

This article by Vincenzo Latronico in today's Guardian, about fiction in translation and the domination of anglophone literature, is excellent. 🔗 www.theguardian.com/books/2025/a...