This year's best things (2024)
A 2024 round-up. The most viewed and shared editions, my favourite things, the best books/music/gigs/films I've experienced this year, and a small look forward to 2025.
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Almost every Friday morning throughout 2024 I have sent out a round-up of the best things I've seen that week.
I like end-of-year roundups, so I went back through everything I've sent and put together a Review of the Year edition that contains the most clicked and most read, my favourites, and some highlights from shows, books, music and stuff. Enjoy!
Top 5 most viewed and shared editions:
- How can curiosity be a leadership superpower - something I originally wrote for Arts Professional, looking at the value and impact of curious leaders, with perspectives from Nick Sherrard and Kati Price amongst others.
- Self-sabotage. Why don't we prioritise outcomes over outputs and process? - thoughts following an exchange with the Manchester Collective's Joanne Karcheva about the culture sector's need to focus more on outcomes and impact.
- This week's best things (October 11th) - Gen Z's regrets about social media, Adam Koszary thinks it has value, Google's AI search fails, replicating handwriting with AI, the importance of generalists, a story about Gmail, Netflix's endless library, unparliamentary language, and an interview with Clare Reddington.
- What can we learn from Mark Thompson's vision for CNN? - in January, Mark Thompson published a memo setting out his new vision for CNN. There was a lot of interesting stuff in the memo itself, but what struck me was just how much of it could be talking about (or applied to) the cultural sector.
- This week's best things (October 18th) - A new way of exploring the British Museum's collections data, the impact of digital poverty, more issues with Google's AI search results, Netflix insights, the story behind the Lion King, how people use ChatGPT, misinformation, Radiohead, and a children's choir singing a Björk song
Some of my favourite things
A small selection of some of my favourite things I've shared this year. A mix of predictions, commentary, research, and provocation.
The Internet Is About to Get Weird Again: Anil Dash wrote this at the tail end of 2023, it's a hopeful perspective that I'm not sure 2024 really ended up advancing all that much.
However, 2024 also didn't make these things impossible to achieve, and I think much of what Anil observed and hoped for a year ago is still possible and valuable 12 months later.
"I’m not a pollyanna about the fact that there are still going to be lots of horrible things on the internet, and that too many of the tycoons who rule the tech industry are trying to make the bad things worse. (After all, look what the last wild era online lead to.) There’s not going to be some new killer app that displaces Google or Facebook or Twitter with a love-powered alternative. But that’s because there shouldn’t be. There should be lots of different, human-scale alternative experiences on the internet that offer up home-cooked, locally-grown, ethically-sourced, code-to-table alternatives to the factory-farmed junk food of the internet. And they should be weird."

Alter Social Media: It was interesting to re-visit this piece from Marie Dollé published at the end of 2023 on "new, shifting, and emerging dynamics on social media".
The pace of this fragmentation has only increased across 2024 and doesn't seem to be showing any sign of slowing.
Marie also touches on many things that folks who talk about social in the cultural sector (such as Haydn Corrodus and Adam Koszary) have been saying for a while now, namely that community building, collaboration, and actually creating value is where everyone's focus should be on these platforms.
“What's the key takeaway from all this? For brands, the new challenge might lie in their comment section and in implementing more collaborative strategies. It's no longer just about responding or moderating, but rather about valuing each interaction, co-creating, remixing.”

The Disturbing Impact of the Cyberattack at the British Library: I've spoken to a lot of cultural leaders over recent months and nearly all of them have mentioned the deep concerns they have about cybersecurity. I suspect it's only a matter of time before another cultural institution suffers.
This long read in the New Yorker looks at the deep and lasting impact of the attack the British Library suffered towards the end of 2023, the ramifications of which are still being felt over a year later.
"The effect on the B.L. has been traumatic. Its electronic systems are still largely incapacitated. When I visited the library last Monday, the reading rooms were listless and loosely filled. “It’s like a sort of institutional stroke,” Inigo Thomas, a writer for the London Review of Books, told me."

Amazing CX: Jumbo creates slow checkout lanes: It was lovely to revisit this example of how thoughtfully reimagining your customers' experience can have a tangible, positive impact.
As I said at the time, lots in here for cultural organisations to think about, particularly in their role as 'third places'.
"Jumbo Supermarket, a Dutch grocery chain with over 700 stores worldwide, has implemented a unique solution to combat loneliness among the elderly by creating a “Chatter Checkout” lane and a special “Coffee Corner” for customers to chat with the cashier.
This great initiative is part of the Dutch government’s “One Against Loneliness” campaign and was first introduced by Jumbo in the city of Vlijmen in summer 2019. The response was so positive that Jumbo decided to build 200 of these lanes nationwide."

The Year the Millennials Handed the Internet Over to Zoomers: Looking back at 2024, this op-ed in the New York Times from Max Read feels pretty spot on.
As he cites, there have been numerous pieces written over the past year that are all variations on the topic of 'the internet isn't as fun/good as it used to be'.
Rather than being objective descriptions, he suggests that they are instead perhaps symptomatic of one generation's preferences simply no longer being the main priority.
"The heaviest users and most engaged American audience on the internet are no longer millennials but our successors in Generation Z. If the internet is no longer fun for millennials, it may simply be because it’s not our internet anymore. It belongs to zoomers now."
The Slack generation can’t communicate with the email generation. Why more platforms are dividing the workplace: Following on from the above, I've shared a bunch of things this year that have looked at the increasingly stark generation divide in communication skills and preference, particularly in the workplace.
This piece in FastCompany looks at how inter-generational differences in communication styles and preferences are being exacerbated by the shift to more remote working, and the accompanying proliferation of communication platforms.
"while 86% prefer communicating via email, nearly 90% say that mode of communication is most likely to cause misunderstandings [...] Effective communication is not a one-size-fits-all solution in today’s modern, digital workplace,” says Johnson. “You have to have an understanding of the demographic preferences, you have to consider what type of information you’re communicating, the urgency of the message, the context of the message; all of these are key factors when deciding on the mode of communication.”"
10 ideas for purpose-driven leadership in museums: new work from Dr Oonagh Murphy in the Musée international de la Croix-Rouge et du Croissant-Rouge, there are a number of really valuable ideas and provocations in the document, "we hope that it will serve as both a source of inspiration and a roadmap for re-thinking museum practice. We need museums. This text makes the case for museums as critical infrastructure at the service of their communities"
I finally get Radiohead: Revisiting this video of Michael Palmisano having his mind blown by a Radiohead live performance, and then meticulously unpacking exactly what it was he found so impressive was a joy.
"There’s something really magical here, watching a real expert (and an enthusiastic one at that), encountering something so unexpected (in real time), and doing a really good job of explaining why it’s good (and strange).
It’s a great watch if you like music, music theory, Radiohead, or just an enthusiastic expert encountering something new and unexpected for the first time."
Most clicked links from the 'this week's best things' editions:
- Ash Mann - What can we learn from Mark Thompson's vision for CNN?
- Adam Koszary - Content of the Week #1
- Louise Benson for D&AD Annual - Branding a cultural institution
- Jamie Kennedy for Spectrum News - A California history museum is creating a big stir on social media
- Seb Chan - Words from Substrakt’s Digital Works, Leeds, April 2024
- Colleen Dilenschneider - Do School Group Visits Correlate With Adulthood Attendance to Cultural Entities? It’s Not What You Think.
- Danny Birchall - "I had a chat with a Benin Plaque about where it thinks it belongs"
- Is My Blue Your Blue
- Christopher Butler - The Rhythm of Your Screen
- Matthew Stasoff - OUTSIDERS social media signals 2024
Best books
The best books I read in 2024 were:
- The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon - a sweeping, vibrant story that "follows the lives of two Jewish cousins, Czech artist Joe Kavalier and Brooklyn-born writer Sammy Clay, before, during, and after World War II. In the story, Kavalier and Clay become major figures in the comics industry from its nascence into its Golden Age." I loved this.
- A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles - another story set over many decades against a backdrop of vast societal change. This time the story of a Russian aristocrat placed under house arrest in a grand hotel in Moscow through the first half of the 20th century. This was a deeply charming book.
- Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver - (heavily) inspired by David Copperfield, but set instead in the south of the United States, Appalacia, in the midst of the opiod epidemic. This was such a rich, brilliantly told, brilliantly written story.
- Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel - simultanouely told over two time periods, before and after an apocalyptic pandemic this is both a recognisably realistic portrayl of a post-pandemic America, and a moving study of things lost along the way. It's also very satisfyingly tied up.
- Eight Mountains by Paolo Cognetti - elegaic (I never get a chance to use that word so I'm using it here because it's very appropriate), and beautifully written.
- James by Percival Everett - a retelling of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim. This is a really, really good book; smart, moving, funny. It should win all the awards.
Best shows, music, TV etc
Hammer by GöteborgsOperans Danskompanis took the prize for probably the best thing I've ever seen in a theatre.
Rivals, The Diplomat, and Black Doves were the most enjoyable things I watched on TV.
Sigur Rós playing with a 41-piece orchestra in Copenhagen was wonderful (more gigs should have an interval!). Joining the Efterklang audience choir for their show at Skeppet in Göteborg last week was a really special evening.
New albums from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds (Wild God) and Efterklang (Things We Have In Common) have been on heavy rotation.
I can't really remember too much great stuff from going to the cinema but The Holdovers and Poor Things (which both came out in Sweden in January) were excellent.
2025
Ok, that's a round-up. I hope you all have something festive and restive lined up for the next few weeks.
I'm not going to attempt to make any grand predictions for the year ahead.
I suspect the things I've seen this year that seem hard for the cultural sector around digital (and, well, everything), will continue to cause issues. Namely; priorities, capacity, skills, and money.
The conversation around ethics and AI isn't going to go away, and it's good to see artists pushing back against unfettered and free usage of their work to train these models. However I also think the sector will need to grasp the nettle around the reality of how widespread usage of these tools probably already is inside their organisations.
I hope to see more conversations around different types of audience experience, digital leadership, different approaches to building things, and shifting the sector's understand of how and where digital might add value.
There'll be a bunch of changes and new things coming in the new year, and I'm also keen to hear if there are any things that you think I should start/stop/try with this newsletter.
Thanks for reading.