1. The Digital Bodleian — medieval Oxford, open at the seam
Digital Bodleian is Oxford’s open image library: hundreds of thousands of high-resolution scans of manuscripts, maps, printed books, and papers, most of them freely usable. Everyone talks about Gallica and the British Library; fewer people actually spend an afternoon inside the Bodleian holdings, which is a mistake. Search for “book of hours”, “herbal”, or the name of a mediaeval town, and the scans open at a resolution that lets you read the marginalia the scribes did not intend for you. Zoom until a Latin abbreviation stops being a pattern and becomes a hand. It is the closest thing on the internet to being briefly, politely, alone in a reading room.
2. Noema — the slow side of technology
Noema, the Berggruen Institute’s magazine, is one of the few English-language journals still willing to publish long essays that treat technology, planetary systems, and political order as a single problem rather than three separate beats. Nathan Gardels, Yuk Hui, Bruno Maçães, Malka Older, and others turn up there without the usual Silicon Valley perfume. Not everything lands, but the average essay is longer, stranger, and more historically alert than what the ordinary tech press produces. Read one full piece with the phone in another room; you will feel your attention span come back within twenty minutes.
3. Are.na — a quiet counter-web
Are.na is a small, subscription-supported research and moodboarding tool that has somehow become the internet’s calmest library. No feed, no algorithm, no attention economy dressed as a friend. Users assemble channels of images, quotes, papers, and links, and cross-link them into open collections. Follow two or three thoughtful people there and your afternoon quietly becomes better read. It is what the open internet was supposed to grow into before it grew into an outrage engine instead.
Amsterdam: two rooms worth walking to
Two suggestions for the weekend. As always, consult the venue for the exact evening; programmes shift.
Oude Kerk, on the Oudekerksplein. The oldest building in Amsterdam is, at this point, one of the most quietly ambitious contemporary art venues in the city: a Gothic hall with medieval floor stones and a shifting programme of site-specific commissions. Go in the late afternoon, when the light slants down the pillars and the tourists thin out. Even between exhibitions, the room itself is instruction — a reminder that a building can outlast several centuries of certainties about what it is for.
Muziekgebouw aan ’t IJ, along the water at Piet Heinkade. A glass box hung over the IJ with acoustics as serious as anything in the country and a programme that swings from early music to contemporary composition without apology. Check the weekend agenda; there is almost always something on Friday or Saturday. Arrive early, get a drink at the bar, and give yourself the twenty minutes when the harbour goes from grey to gold before the concert starts.
Read a manuscript on Saturday morning, a long Noema essay in the afternoon, walk down the Oudezijds Voorburgwal to the Oude Kerk at dusk, and let the water at the IJ carry the evening. The twenty-first century will still be waiting on Monday.