5 things I like – 25th January 2026

It has been a week. This week's post will be short and sweet.

A musical

A view of the stage at the Savoy Theatre. The set is a shopfront with a red hat visible.

Back in December when all the Paddington The Musical reviews came out I knew I had to find a ticket. It's rare that a show gets such a uniformly positive response and with the existing hype about Paddington (the movies, The Paddington Bear™ Experience, etc.) it would have been easy to write this off as a cash grab. That's what made it so heartwarming to see a show with a strong original score, a funny and poignant book, and top class production design, direction, and performances. The show stands out, like Matilda before it, as a show that is unabashedly for families whilst also being a great creative work in its own right.

An article

The Hacker News 'best' RSS feed is an interesting place. It's a bit like a virtual water cooler for part of the tech industry and I find it interesting in and of itself to see what does, and does not, make it to the feed. One of my favourite genres of article though is that of an engineer's personal blog and the moment when someone distills a hard learned lesson in a way that can be shared with the world. This is one of them:

Why Senior Engineers Let Bad Projects Fail

When I was a junior engineer, my manager would occasionally confide his frustrations to me in our weekly 1:1s. He would point out a project another team was working on and say, “I don’t believe that project will go anywhere, they’re solving the wrong problem.” I used to wonder, “But you are very senior, why don’t you just go and speak to them about your concerns?” It felt like a waste of his influence to not say anything. So it’s quite ironic that I found myself last week explaining to a mentee why I thought a sister team’s project would have to pivot because they’d made a poor early design choice. And he rightfully asked me the same question I had years ago: “why don’t you just tell them your opinion?” It’s been on my mind ever since because I realized I’d changed my stance on it a lot over the years.

Lalit MagantiLalit Maganti

A video

I was catching up with a friend and the topic of Oh Mary!, another great show, came up. The show is written by Cole Escola whom I first stumbled across when they were performing in Our Hit Parade, a recurring alternative cabaret night at Joe's Pub at The Public Theater. These YouTube videos of New York City cabaret where something I would savour every time they came out, along with Justin Sayre's The Meeting of The International Order of Sodomites which I got to also see in person when I moved to NYC for a year. Cole has always been hilariously funny and this campy parody commercial is something I treasure.

A book

What if a book were written in a mixture of first, second and third person? And what if it used a framing device around a framing device around sometimes another framing device? And what if it did those things driftingly, fluidly, without feeling the need to mark them always, just trusting the reading to flow along with it and follow its lead?

And what if, while doing this, it managed to be astonishingly beautiful?

Simon Jimenez answers those questions with The Spear Cuts Through Water.

- Roseanna Pendlebury, nerds of a feather

This book was a gift. I knew nothing going into it and that was also a gift. It stuck with me.

An independent media outlet

The title for this one was hard. London Centric is a relatively new outlet covering London, founded by ex-Guardian journalist Jim Waterson. It is something I am very happy to pay for and does the kind of investigative journalism that the world needs right now. Here is their absolutely insane piece on snails, tax avoidance, and the mafia. Your day will be made by giving this a read, I promise.