Six Things, Volume 116

Hello | Owls | Benches | Dataviz | Fridge Door | Breakfast

Jun 22, 2025

The latest offering from The Pudding is well up to their usual high standards.

It stems from an experiment involving about 1,500 volunteers. They were paired with a stranger, and asked to talk to them on a video call for thirty minutes. The researchers asked them how they felt before the conversation, then again at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end. A simple enough assignment, but one that would have many (myself included) fidgeting nervously. The results tell us a lot about our biases, our attitude to strangers, fear of the new, and the erosion of social trust.

As usual with The Pudding, the results are presented in a visually pleasing style, and reward both superficial and more detailed examination.

If I have one criticism, it’s that there aren’t nearly enough owls in it.

Thing 2 – Owls in Towels

Well lookee here.

Thing 2 doesn’t tell us much about our biases, our attitude to strangers, fear of the new or the erosion of social trust. But it does confirm what many of us already knew: owls are inherently fascinating and adorable.

I have featured this before, as a sort of footnote to a Birds post a few months ago, but it is so good and wholesome it deserves to be reshared in a more prominent position.

It is, quite simply, a collection of photographs of owls, the catch being – and I’m sure you can see where this is going – that they’re all wrapped in towels.

You might be thinking “oh no how cruel!” But the towel-wrapping is simply a function of the owls having been brought to a wildlife rehabilitation centre, where they need to be weighed, treated and fed. And a simple way to keep them safe and calm while this is happening is to wrap them in fabric.

Hence owls in towels. The popularity of the site can only be enhanced by the pleasing and serendipitous rhyming of the two nouns in its title.

Thing 3 – Museum Benches

A wooden bench in the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Not my ideal, frankly. As well as the lack of a back there’s a serious danger that you’ll miss it altogether and end up on the floor.

It’s a strange phenomenon that while a visit to an art museum can be nourishing for the soul and intellect, I almost invariably find them exhausting. This has something to do, I think, with pace. Contemplation of art, whether you’re spending an extended period absorbing a single piece or wandering through a gallery taking in the overall vibe and spending no more than a few seconds in front of each work, is by necessity a slow endeavour, and the descent of somnolence is – for me, at least – almost inevitable.

Unsurprising, then, that I pounced on this piece by Ben Street about benches in museums with the alacrity of a foodie on a bunch of samphire.