Monthly Link Dump: January 2026

This is my monthly link dump, a regular monthly series containing a mix of links to interesting blog posts I’ve read from the past month covering arts & culture, myth, folklore, landscape punk, hauntology, anarchism, utopianism, the gothic, neo-fabulism, and the Weird - all discovered through my RSS feed reader (another reason why you should get a feed reader too).

How small committed groups can change the world and how we need new groups now in a time of crisis
by Richard Smith at Richard Smith’s non-medical blogs

Dutch historian Rutger Bregman’s fine Reith lectures boil down to a core argument: the world is in a mess; we need drastic change; small groups of committed people can make that change happen; it takes time for their ideas to make the change happen; we need to start now. He quotes in his second lecture Margaret Mead’s famous quote: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

Writing on the Internet and elsewhere
by Pete Brown at Exploding Comma

Then go start your own, and stop turning all your thoughts over to extractive industries. Get a notebook and a pencil, and write what you’re thinking there. Start a blog. Write it there

Digital aura and the source of Truth
by Tracy Durnell at Tracy Durnell’s Mind Garden

In a sense, Nikhil is describing Truth channeled through the artist. The art object electrified a connection between artist and viewer, transmitting the artist’s experience of truth across time. To express aura, art must be authentic to its sublime, whatever that might be.

Real like ghosts or real like celebrities?
by Matt Webb at Interconnected

Always Coming Home is a collection of texts from the Kesh, a society in far future Northern California which is also, I guess, a utopian new Bronze Age I suppose? A beautiful book.

These Go To Eleven
by Bix Frankonis at Bix dot Blog

In some sense and to some degree, this is why the television adaptation of Station Eleven speaks to me as deeply as it does. It’s undeniably dystopic for the world to endure a decimating global pandemic. Yet the entire premise of the show is that both community and art allow that dystopic era to become, slowly and with work, something else. That whataver happens, there is the capacity for and possibiltiy of renewal, but only if we confront the trauma and only if we do it together.

It’s time for a different future.
by Pete Brown at Exploding Comma

A few days ago, I was thinking about how, while many people have a very specific and set idea of what societal breakdown will look like—chaos, death, roving gangs fighting over dwindling resources—no one actually knows if that is true. It is all, like so many things these days, based on what we have seen in movies and TV shows (and increasingly, video games).

There's a Starman waiting in the sky
by Cormac Pentecost at Temporal Boundary

Ten years ago today Bowie left this life to return to the stars. It has become something of a meme to say that the world went to shit after Bowie died but I do believe that there is a level of literal truth to these things. Bowie was somehow able to conjure the future into being; he could see a world that was beyond the technical possibilities of the present and he was able to draw a picture of it that enabled it to unfold.

About January 2016: And then Bowie died
by Tim Footman at cultural snow

Because maybe 2016 really did start roughly on schedule. Lots of people died (Pierre Boulez, Alan Rickman, Terry Wogan in the same month) but I don’t think it was until April (Prince, Victoria Wood) that the whole Death Year thing was apparent. And then Brexit happened and then Trump happened and here we all are a decade later.

How does it feel on the first day of a war?
by Richard Smith at Richard Smith’s non-medical blogs

We in Western Europe have enjoyed a remarkably long period of peace, but now we begin to recognise that we could be at war soon. Quite how or when a war will start we don’t know, but we have to recognise that war is moving from a possibility to a probability. We wonder how we will feel when war begins and what will happen to us during the war? And, will it be a war that will end or a war that will annihilate us, perhaps in parts of a second?

Failure vs. Success is the Wrong Frame.
by Joan Westenberg at joanwestenberg.com

The Renaissance workshops were serious places of serious craft, and they were also full of people trying bizarre experiments. Vasari’s Lives of the Artists describes painters mixing strange pigments, attempting techniques no one had tried, taking on subjects everyone said were impossible. Leonardo's notebooks are crammed with wild speculations, most of which went nowhere. He was playing at the edge of what was possible, and occasionally something stuck.

A Spell Against Fear: Tracy K. Smith on Poetry and The Art of Productive Impatience
by Maria Popova at The Marginalian

The most menacing word of the three is the smallest, for fear really is something we live inside, not with — a cage, a tomb, a small dark room that comes to eclipse the world as the hand quivers outside the pocket in which the key is kept. The best key I know to the prison of fear is curiosity, and the most generous form of curiosity I know is poetry.

The internet’s hidden creative renaissance (and how to find it)
by Alexandra Ciufudean at New_ Public

The kinds of posts and projects you’ll find are creative, personal, experimental, and sometimes so intimate you feel like you’re intruding. However, they’re not the kind of content that usually goes viral on TikTok. That’s beside the point. The focus isn’t on personal branding, growth or monetization, or “content” creation, but on freedom from those things. Instead of polished, 10-second snippets optimized for mass-appeal, engagement, and profit, these are largely slow-cooked projects made just for fun.