This was the atmosphere in which I discovered Germany. It was a minor act of defiance to choose German instead of Latin for O-level, but with hindsight I was extremely fortunate to have the choice. There were two German teachers in my grammar school of just 600 pupils. Today, even the best state schools seldom offer the subject; not one of our four children has had the opportunity that I had to study German language and, especially, literature up to the high standard that was then expected at A-level.
Today, the texts are almost all recent and appear to be chosen partly with the film of the book in mind. In particular, Goethe has disappeared from the syllabus, presumably because the language is considered too archaic. Yet I recall the immense pleasure and satisfaction of mastering a Goethe play — Egmont. The story of the dashing Dutchman and his martial defiance of the sinister Duke of Alba, the courage of his beloved, Klärchen, who fantasises in song about how wonderful it would be to be a man and fight the Spaniards — “ein Glück sondergleichen ein Mannsbild zu sein“. Somehow I even obtained an LP of Beethoven’s incidental music for Egmont: seldom heard apart from the overture, but brilliantly evoking the grandeur of the drama.
Like Homer, Dante and Shakespeare, Goethe belongs not just to German literature, but to world literature, Weltliteratur — a term he coined. I am told that even in German Gymnasien, Goethe is little studied now. He is certainly a rare bird in English schools — or even universities. It is tragic that educated people, including students of literature, so seldom encounter the greatest of Germans even in translation. We might get on better with Germany if we did.
Daniel Johnson, “How I discovered Germany”, The Critic, 2020-08-02.
April 25, 2026
QotD: Goethe, the lost German master
March 27, 2026
The reason you feel detached from most modern art, movies, and music
Ted Gioia explains what he calls the “Four steps to Hell” that have replaced the aesthetic values of the past and shows why everything in entertainment is being actively enshittified:
MGM’s lion and the Ars Gratia Artis motto (Art for Art’s Sake). But the lion is screaming in pain today.
Smart people have recently asked: What is the aesthetic vision of the 21st century? What are the stylistic markers of our time? What are the core values driving the creative process? What is our zeitgeist?
At first glance, that’s a hard question to answer. We are more than a quarter of the way through the century, and very little has changed since the 1990s.
- Music genres have barely shifted in that time. The songs on the radio sound like the hits of yesteryear — in many instances they are the hits of yesteryear, played over and over ad nauseam.
- Movies are in even worse shape. Hollywood keeps extending the same tired brand franchises you knew as a child. SoCal culture feels like an antiquated merry-go-round where the same tired nags keep coming around in an endless circle.
- Publishers still put out new novels, but when was the last time you read something really fresh and new? Even more to the point, when was the last time you went to a social gathering and heard people discussing contemporary fiction with enthusiasm?
- The same obsession with the past is evident in video games, comic books, architecture, graphic design, and almost every other creative sphere. Everything is a reboot or retread or repeat.
It’s not aesthetics, it’s just arteriosclerosis.
Even so, I see a new dominant theory of art — and it’s sweeping away almost everything in its wake. It already accounts for most of the creative work of our time, and is still growing. Nothing else on the scene comes close to matching its influence.
So if you’re seeking the most influential aesthetic vision on the 21st century, this is it. It’s simple to describe — but it’s ugly as sin.
I call it Flood the Zone. It happens in four steps. […]
Do read the whole thing, but in case it’s a case of tl;dr, he also summarizes it for you:
February 27, 2026
New (or revived) career paths in the age of the clanker
If you work in tech, the future is looking blacker by the day as artificial intelligence threatens to eat more and more tech jobs. Even for a lot of non-tech jobs, the clankers are coming for them too. So what jobs can we expect to thrive in an age of AI agents taking on more and more work? Ted Gioia suggests they’re already a growing sector, we just haven’t noticed it yet and that instead of telling people to learn how to code, we should be telling them to be more human:
This is the new secret strategy in the arts, and it’s built on the simplest thing you can imagine — namely, existing as a human being.
We crave the human touch
You see the same thing in media right now, where livestreaming is taking off. “For viewers”, according to Advertising Age (citing media strategist Rachel Karten), “live-streaming offers a refuge from the growing glut of AI-generated content on their feeds. In a social media landscape where the difference between real and artificial has grown nearly imperceptible, the unmistakable humanity of real-time video is a refreshing draw.”
This return to human contact is happening everywhere, not just media and the arts. Amazon recently shut down all of its Fresh and Go stores — which allowed consumers to buy groceries without dealing with any checkout clerk. It turned out that people didn’t want this.
I could have told Amazon from the outset that customers want human service. I see it myself in store after store. People will wait in line for flesh-and-blood clerks, instead of checking out faster at the do-it-yourself counter.
Unless I have no choice at all — in that I need to buy something and there are zero human cashiers available — I never use self-checkout. I’ll put my intended purchases back on the shelf rather than use a self-checkout kiosk. And I don’t think of myself as a Luddite … I spent my career in the software business … but self-checkout just bothers me. I’ll take the grumpiest human over the cheeriest pre-recorded voices.
But this isn’t happenstance — it’s a sign of the times. You can’t hide the failure of self-service technology. It’s evident to anybody who goes shopping.
As AI customer service becomes more pervasive, the luxury brands will survive by offering this human touch. I’m now encountering this term “concierge service” as a marketing angle in the digital age. The concierge is the superior alternative to an AI agent — more trustworthy, more reliable, and (yes) more human.
Even tech companies are figuring this out. Spotify now boasts that it has human curators, not just cold algorithms. It needs to match up with Apple Music, which claims that “human curation is more important than ever”. Meanwhile Bandcamp has launched a “club” where members get special music selections, listening parties, and other perks from human curators.
So, step aside “software-as-a-service” and step forward “humans-as-a-service”, I guess.
January 31, 2026
La trahison des comédiens (The treason of the comedians)
In the above-the-fold portion of this post, Andrew Doyle points out that it’s the comedians who should be leading the charge to ridicule the excesses of the powerful, yet they shrink from their cultural duties and avoid offending those who most need to be taunted:
Holly Valance is an unlikely satirist. Yet the pop singer’s latest track, “Kiss Kiss (XX) My Arse”, takes aim directly at the pretence that human beings can change sex, and that a man need only declare himself a woman for it to be true. Upon its release the song immediately reached the top of the iTunes bestsellers chart, only to be swiftly deleted by Apple Music. Valance had committed the cardinal sin of ridiculing the establishment.
The song is based on Valance’s 2002 number one hit “Kiss Kiss”, now reworked with new lyrics for Pauline Hanson’s animated satire A Super Progressive Movie. This is the song’s opening verse:
They say that I’m a he but I’m a she,
Cos I gotta V and not a D,
And I don’t care what people say,
I’ll never be a him or them or they.Unsubtle? Perhaps. But let’s not forget that its target is the least subtle ideology that has ever been birthed. This is satirical mimesis; the essence of parody. For Apple Music to delete the track (only to reinstate it after multiple news outlets drew attention to the deletion) surely proves Hannah Arendt’s point that the “greatest enemy of authority” is “contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter”.
It is an indictment of the state of the comedy industry that pop singers are left to do the work of comedians. Television panel shows are now bland affairs thanks to the sheer lack of courage on display. The woke movement represents one of the most authoritarian, intolerant and illiberal developments in the recent western world. It demands conformity, peddles fantasy at the expense of truth, and punishes freethinkers. And yet most of today’s comedians are eager to prop it up rather than see it tumble.
They are called “regime comedians” for good reason. They have willingly turned themselves into cheerleaders for the powerful, bolstering those who have bullishly set the agenda, or – as the satirist Chris Morris once put it – “doing some kind of exotic display for the court”. It is a great shame that so many of Morris’s former collaborators now fall squarely into this category.
To put this cowardice into perspective, consider the example of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Just one year before he was gunned down by Islamic terrorists, the cartoonist and editor-in-chief Stéphane Charbonnier (known as “Charb”), was profiled in Le Monde. Was he not worried, the interviewer asked, about possible reprisals for drawing cartoons of Mohammed? For his answer, he paraphrased the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata: “I would rather die standing than live on my knees”.
If a man like Charb refused to back down from criticising an oppressive ideology – in spite of the death threats he received on a daily basis – why is it that so many of our comedians are too afraid to tackle the woke? These activists may talk tough online, but in real life they are about as intimidating as a sea sponge. While the impulse to preserve a mainstream career is understandable, it does suggest a lack of genuine vocation if that means ignoring the target that is most in need of skewering.
January 26, 2026
How Al Stewart struck gold, the folk boom and a flat-share with Paul Simon
Word In Your Ear
Published 20 Dec 2024The 17 year-old Al Stewart played electric guitar in a dance band in Bournemouth in 1963. When he borrowed an acoustic and sang “Masters Of War” in the break, he heard the sweet sound of applause. The next night he played three Dylan songs and sensed which way the wind was blowing. He talks here about moving to London, playing at Bunjies and becoming the compere at Les Cousins as his now 60-year career began to lift off. And about his Farewell Tour which kicks off in the UK in October 2025, a combination of songs and story-telling coloured by two great heroes, Peter Ustinov and Alistair Cooke.
This cracking exchange steers by way of Bert Jansch, Bob Dylan, Helen of Troy, Stalin, Hitler and the Battle of Moscow, the Weeley Festival of 1971, the three songs he always plays, the young Cat Stevens and what he told Paul Simon he should do with the just-composed “Homeward Bound”.
December 25, 2025
Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” is still the best-selling single of all time
I knew Bing Crosby was big with my parents’ generation (including my father, unusually, who generally had little time for American singers), but I didn’t know that Bing’s recording of “White Christmas” is still, after all these years, the top single. Ted Gioia has more:
Pop culture devours its own. The destiny of all bestsellers is to fall off the charts. Even the stars in Hollywood, like those in outer space, eventually stop shining — and it happens a lot sooner.
Consider the case of Bing Crosby. Some of my readers might not even recognize the name. But a few people still alive today can recall when Crosby was both the biggest pop singer in the world and the hottest movie star in Hollywood.
Bing Crosby publicity photo from the 1930s via The Honest Broker
If he’s remembered nowadays, it’s only during December, when his version of “White Christmas” briefly returns to heavy rotation. Even today, it ranks as the bestselling single of all time. There aren’t many records that last eighty years, and least of all in the record business, but Crosby still sits atop this chart.
Here it is (courtesy of Wikipedia):
I’ve written about Crosby before, and will again. But today I want share four of my favorite (and very different) perspectives on Bing.
Repost – “Fairytale of New York”
Time:
“Fairytale of New York” by The Pogues featuring Kirsty MacColl
This song came into being after Elvis Costello bet The Pogues’ lead singer Shane MacGowan that he couldn’t write a decent Christmas duet. The outcome: a call-and-response between a bickering couple that’s just as sweet as it is salty.
December 15, 2025
QotD: Free-form Jazz
James Lileks, The Bleat, 2005-09-05.
November 27, 2025
Lack of talent is no obstacle to music success … even before Auto-Tune
One of the reasons I like Ted Gioia’s Substack is that even when I’m not overly interested in the topic of any particular post, I usually learn something:
I’ve tried to identify the turning point — the moment when the rules changed. By my measure it happened one night in 1958.
Let’s revisit that fateful day …
One Friday evening in 1958, record producer George Avakian sat down in front of his TV set, and watched an episode of the popular detective show 77 Sunset Strip. This chance incident would have surprising ramifications in the music business for decades to come.
A few minutes into the episode, the record producer decided that one of the actors on the show looked and talked like a rock star. His name was Edd Byrnes and he played a hipster character named Kookie.
Kookie parked cars at a Hollywood nightclub in the show, and acted very cool. He had the right look and said witty hipster-ish things. The TV audience loved him, especially younger viewers.
Check Kookie out and decide for yourself.
There was just one tiny problem. Byrnes wasn’t a musician.
But Avakian didn’t worry about this. “I was sure that kids would like his talk and his looks, especially a way he had of looking out of the corner of his eye,” he later recalled. “And — the real clincher for his popularity with kids — parents would loathe him.”
They didn’t have Auto-Tune back then, but studio engineers had a few tricks to fix vocal imperfections. They knew how to splice together different takes, or make slight alterations in tape speed.
But when Byrnes did an audition for the label, it was bad. It was scary bad. This promising rock star had no sense of pitch. He had no range. He couldn’t even stay in rhythm with his accompanist.
No technology could fix this mess.
Record producer Avakian was no fool. During an illustrious career, he worked with Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck, Sonny Rollins, and Keith Jarrett, among others. He had collaborated with genius, and now he had someone on the opposite end of the spectrum.
Maybe this situation is commonplace nowadays, but back in 1958 the record business believed in something called musical talent. Avakian’s bold decision to ignore that variable marks a historic moment in our culture.
Anybody else would have walked away from this looming disaster. They would have feared not just commercial failure but a tainted reputation. You don’t want to be the exec to greenlight a recording by somebody with zero musical ability.
But in a moment of brilliant insight, Avakian decided that Kookie didn’t need to sing, he could just rap. Of course, rapping wasn’t even a concept back in those days. But it sorta existed without a name. Deejays at radio stations often introduced a song by speaking in a hip tone of voice over the intro to a song.
Kookie would do the same. He would speak or rap his part, while somebody else did the actual singing. Connie Stevens, another Hollywood talent with the right look — and a slightly better voice — could handle the actual vocals.
November 23, 2025
John Cage’s 4’33” meets the anti-clanker protest song
Ted Gioia on Paul McCartney’s latest single — his first in several years — and what he’s protesting against … clankers in music and the arts:
Paul McCartney is releasing a new track. It’s his first new song in five years — so that’s a big deal. But there’s something even more significant about this 2 minute 45 second release.
The song is silent. It’s a totally blank track — except for a bit of hiss and background noise.
What’s going on? Has Paul McCartney run out of melodies at age 83? Is he nurturing his inner John Cage. Did he simply forget to turn on the mic?
No, none of the above.
Macca is releasing this track as a protest against AI.
His new “music” is part of an album entitled Is This What We Want? It’s already available on digital platforms, and is now coming out on vinyl. All proceeds will go to the non-profit organization Help Musicians.
“The album consists of recordings of empty studios and performance spaces,” according to the website. In addition to McCartney, more than a thousand musicians are participating, including:
Kate Bush, Annie Lennox, Damon Albarn, Billy Ocean, Ed O’Brien, Dan Smith, The Clash, Mystery Jets, Jamiroquai, Imogen Heap, Yusuf / Cat Stevens, Riz Ahmed, Tori Amos, Hans Zimmer, James MacMillan, Max Richter, John Rutter, The Kanneh-Masons, The King’s Singers, The Sixteen, Roderick Williams, Sarah Connolly, Nicky Spence, Ian Bostridge, and many more.
I keep hearing that protest music is dead — and has been losing momentum since the Vietnam War. But there’s now a new war, and it’s stirring up creators in every artistic idiom.
They are fighting for their livelihoods and IP rights. And, so far, it’s been a losing battle.
You can see the new battle lines across the entire creative landscape.
Vince Gilligan, one of the most brilliant minds in TV, admits that he “hates AI”. He calls it the “world’s most expensive plagiarism machine”. For his new show Pluribus, he has added this disclaimer to the credits:
This show was made by humans.
AI represents the exact opposite of creativity, Gilligan warns. It steals the work of others. So any attempt to legitimize it as a creative tool is built on lies. A bank robber might just as well pretend to be a financier. Or an art forger claim to be Picasso.
[…]
This is the new culture war.
And it’s very different from the old culture war — which was a dim reflection of politics. This new battle is happening inside the culture world itself, and threatens to cut off artists from their own longstanding partners and support systems.
This new culture war will only escalate. The stakes are too high, and artists can’t afford to stay on the sidelines. But they face heavy odds, with the richest people on the planet opposed to their efforts.
How will this battle get decided? It really comes down to the audience. If they prefer AI slop, we will witness the total degradation of arts and entertainment.
I’d like to think that people are too smart to fall for this crude simulation of human creative expression. Who wants to hear a bot sing of love it has never experienced? Who wants a nature poem from a digital construct that exists outside of nature? Who wants a painting made by something with no eyes to see?
Will the public find this charming. Or even plausible? Maybe a few twelve year olds and fools, but not serious people. That’s my hunch.
In any event, we will soon find out.
November 19, 2025
QotD: Rum Sodomy & the Lash
The album was even launched on the river, upstream, on board HMS Belfast with the band wearing Nelson-era naval regalia. They’d been ferried to the moored cruiser from Traitor’s Gate, arriving to find the assembled journalists (one of whom ended up, temporarily, in the Thames) already tearing into the drink. After the gig, MacGowan’s admiral’s hat vanished; in one story settling onto the river bed with all that other historical debris. At the time, the album felt like a raucous act of vandalism. Now, it’s viewed almost universally as a stone-cold classic.
The cover, a remade version of Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, where the band themselves are among the wretched shipwrecked crew, acts as a framing device. What Rum Sodomy & the Lash does is allow erased, abandoned or sidelined histories to erupt — the piratical and press-ganged, the adventurous and the damned — in a way that gracefully, modestly hides the band’s self-taught virtuosity and the lyricist’s songwriting genius. It was an album that, at that time, socially and politically, shouldn’t have existed, but through courage and sheer force of nature had to.
The Thames may not forget, but society is all too willing to. There are, alas, few signs of gratitude or even recognition of the colossal impact the Irish have had on London. A statue of Oliver Cromwell, the Butcher of Drogheda, stands pride of place outside the House of Commons, but there’s scarce trace of his Hibernian victims. It took the London Irish Centre to erect a plaque in Camden Square, in 2017, to the “Forgotten Irish”, “who left their homes, counties and country … to work and rebuild this city and country, ravaged and destroyed by war … Many would never return to Ireland”.
[…]
Even at the time of the album, in fact, the Pogues ran into opposition, and not just among musical snobs and gatekeepers in England. In Ireland, their adversaries were two-fold — traditionalist embalmers of folk music, and cringe-beset “cosmopolitans” who were mortified with anything too Irish, too plebian, too diasporan. Ironically, it turned out that the Pogues were far more effective custodians of Irish traditional music, and more authentic examples of cosmopolitan hybrid-culture, than their adversaries, exemplifying the maxim that, “Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire”.
At the heart of Rum Sodomy & the Lash‘s success and legacy is embrace of apparent opposites: high and low culture, Ireland and England, city and rural, home and exile, intellect and soul, sacred and profane, debauchery and dignity, stars and gutter. So you get “Navigator”, a tribute to the Irish workers who built the railways, and MacGowan’s rowdy “Sally MacLennane”, a tribute to his uncle’s Irish pub in Dagenham, the Irish car-making workforce it served and the real-life characters he encountered, some less than salubrious. There’s also a fierce and atmospheric instrumental, “The Wild Cats of Kilkenny”, inspired by Spaghetti Westerns, or else the industrial hangover of Ewan MacColl’s “Dirty Old Town”, especially poignant at a time of deindustrialisation.
The true legacy of the Pogues exists not in print, of course, but in music. Their inheritors include the drone and conscience of the modern band Lankum, the otherworldly transformations of the past in the music of Lisa O’Neill and John Francis Flynn, and the pulse of the new in Fontaines DC. But the album also impels its listeners to articulate discontent, defy the rot, preserve the fire, to genuinely transgress, to face reality in surreal or raw terms, to lament and howl not in the transience of placards or social media, but in an art form that hits far deeper, than rusting plaques, and lasts much longer. It’s all out there, more than ever, out of sight, below decks or at the bottom of the river, waiting to escape.
Darran Anderson, “The Pogues soundtracked Irish London”, The Critic, 2025-08-05.
November 8, 2025
QotD: Singing in church
Note: I used to have a good singing voice, not quite commercial quality, IMHO, no, but quite good nonetheless. I loved to sing. I still do, the songs I can still handle, too.
Almost nobody sings reliably in my church. Oh, they can, but they generally do not. The exceptions are hymns everybody knows the tunes to, some of the responsorials, ditto, and, notably, last 4 July, “America the Beautiful”. And, at Christmas, the traditional Christmas songs.
So why those and not the others. Well, the typical hymn in the typical modern church was penned by a couple of nuns from the Order of the Discalced Sisters of Sappho, or priests from the Gay Jesuit Alliance, and printed in the hymnal largely as an exercise in flattery.
Okay, that’s not really true … or not entirely anyway. No, the real problem is that, and I cannot emphasize this enough, NOBODY KNOWS THE BLOODY TUNES, SO OF FREAKING COURSE THEY DON’T SING, WHILE THEY CHANGE THE HYMNS SO OFTEN — WEEKLY, AS A MATTER OF FACT — THAT NOBODY EVER HAS THE CHANCE TO LEARN THE TUNES.
So I propose the following: Pick five hymns — among my recommendations, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”, “We Gather Together”, “Amazing Grace”, “How Great Thou Art”, “Abide with Me”; but I’m not a fanatic about it — and use only those five for however long it takes for 75% of the congregation to sing all of them. Then change ONE and keep at that until 75% will sing that. And keep doing that until you have a repertoire of 20-25 songs everybody knows and most everybody will sing.
“Make a joyful sound unto the Lord” and see if your parish doesn’t grow and if your parishioners aren’t a lot happier in mass.
Tom Kratman, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-07-03.
November 7, 2025
QotD: The Boomer career path
After that they got bored and became Glam rockers, and then switched to Disco because it had a better beat. They used all their free money from Disco record deals to buy cocaine and Malibu real estate at $3 per acre. In 1980 they decided there was even more money in selling cocaine, so they all moved to Miami and drove around shooting machine guns from their Lamborghini Countachs to Giorgio Morodo synth music.
After Reagan’s re-election the Boomers decided greed was good and they all moved to NY where they became serial killer investment bankers and collected up all the Andy Warhol originals. That’s when all of their real estate holdings made them billionaires which they leveraged to get in on the bottom floor of the Internet bubble in the 90s while taking designer drugs.
Today those same Boomers are all driving around to orgies at The Villages in $500k luxury golf carts waving giant Trump flags, laughing it up while lighting doobies with their Social Security cash and executing Howdy Doody’s Final Plan: the secret Boomer Immortality Pill that will allow them to keep their money away from Millennials and Zoomers FOREVER
David Burge, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-07-30.
October 8, 2025
Rush returns – Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson announce new tour for 2026
The announcement video popped up yesterday on YouTube, as Lee and Lifeson announce the decision to bring Rush back after a decade of retirement (triggered by the death of Neil Peart in 2015). In the National Post, Colby Cosh discusses the much-anticipated return:
Rush in concert, Milan 2004.
Photo by Enrico Frangi, via Wikimedia Commons
The inevitable has happened: Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson, the living members of the legendary Canadian band Rush, have announced that they will go on a brief concert tour in 2026. They will, perhaps controversially, go out on the road as Rush rather than adopting some sort of “Lifeson and Lee and Friends” branding. The circumstances of the announcement are familiar ones: Rush had a spectacular farewell tour in 2015, with their renowned drummer Neil Peart increasingly overwhelmed by his own phenomenally intricate parts and his remorseless perfectionism. Peart died of glioblastoma in 2020, which seemed to put a permanent seal on the group.
Over the years, eleventy thousand rock bands have mourned (or just fired) a drummer and moved on, but Neil Peart was NEIL PEART. If you ever watched the crowd at a classic Rush concert, fans doing air-drumming always outnumbered the ones doing air guitar about a hundred to one. Rush in its heyday was an austere three-piece that eschewed sidemen, guest performers, and cover versions on stage almost to the point of dogmatism. They will inevitably feel incomplete or weird with a stand-in for Peart. But Lifeson and Lee say they have been playing Rush songs together privately, and that they are in good health.
They are at the apex of their own individual professions as players, especially Geddy, and … well, a looser, more open, less thoroughly programmed live Rush is something some of us have always wished for, or at least thought about. Variety‘s coverage of the announcement, delivered on Sunday at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio, reveals something almost as surprising as a Peartless Rush: they’re going to tour with a keyboard player! (Other papers are breaking the news as you read this, but Variety had the advance scoop, and has the most extensive coverage of the prospective tour.)
The question on the mind of every Rush fan, of course, is who could possibly step into the shoes (and drum kit) of Neil Peart? That would be a daunting task for any drummer, but Lee and Lifeson think that Anika Nilles will be up to the challenge. I hope she will.
If skeptics visit her YouTube channel and click randomly, they won’t need more than a few seconds to spot her technical credentials for playing Rush songs: she’s inhumanly precise and seems positively allergic to playing in 4/4. Don’t look down, Anika.
