Hello!

In last week’s email, I said I needed to swim in a river and, instead, I swam in a lake. CAN YOU GUESS WHAT HAPPENED??? I got swimmer’s itch. This is when a little microbe that lives in the water crawls into your skin, dies, and leaves little itchy welts.

So I wanted to be swallowed by nature, but also nature got swallowed by me. Lol.

If you can believe this, it was only FIVE DAYS AGO that Joe Biden decided not to seek the nomination. I don't know about you, but that feels like it's been at least a month. It may be that simply too many things are happening, but it may also be that I'm just paying an awful lot of attention. I've seen a number of people say that Joe Biden's decision is "unprecedented" and I'm sure in the details it is, but there have been lots of incumbent presidents who decided not to run for re-election, starting with THE FIRST ONE. So, in a strict sense, there is precedent here.

Now, do I think that this election season will be looked at by future historians as a particularly weird and important one? Absolutely, yes. But even if Donald Trump wins, that will still have a precedent, as Grover Cleveland won non-consecutive terms in the late 1800s. I'm sure those people also felt the weight and the peculiarity of their time. They were not wrong, and neither are we. But broadly, if you think there's no precedent for "THINGS ARE GETTING REALLY WEIRD!!" you just haven't watched enough Crash Course: World History.

Things are certainly very weird right now, I think we are sensing that correctly, but no one gets to live in unprecedented times. But everyone gets to go for nice walks outside. Instead of making jokes about couches, I am going to try very hard to do that this weekend.

Hank

You can always email us at [email protected]

This Week in Stuff

• You can watch the live Dear Hank and John from VidCon 2024!

• There’s a YouTube channel partially dedicated to covering songs in Zelda. The uploads are infrequent, but art can’t be rushed.

• Numberphile explained the new way to represent pi.

• A family in Texas wrapped an orphaned bird in a warm tortilla for safekeeping until a wildlife rehabilitation center could step in.

• Hank, Ceri Riley, and Daniel Peake faced questions about practical pencils, pyromaniac profiteers, and prodigious protoplasm on Lateral with Tom Scott.

• Bouvet Island, the most remote island in the world, has accumulated over 700 reviews on Google Maps.

Please send us stuff you think we should feature to [email protected]

Fourteen countries in the world get almost all of their electricity from renewables

Pablo Rosado

Since 2020, 14 countries have consistently generated over 95% renewable electricity, according to Ember’s Yearly electricity data. In eight of these countries, electricity has been almost entirely renewable-based for over 20 years.

Renewable sources include hydropower, solar, wind, geothermal, biomass, tidal, and wave power. In all these countries, the largest source of electricity was hydropower.

Sub-Saharan countries, however, use significantly less electricity in their energy mix compared to countries in Europe or North America.

Our World in Data is a UK-based non-profit organization that publishes research and data to make progress against the world’s largest problems. You can find more of their data insights here.

This Week at Complexly

We’re halfway through the inaugural season of Crash Course Pods: The Universe! In this series, theoretical astrophysicist Dr. Katie Mack walks bestselling author John Green through the history of the entire universe from the first millisecond to the eventual death of… well, everything. Every other Wednesday learn about the next step in the story of our universe with John and Katie wherever you get your podcasts! Catch up on the first seven episodes now in your podcast app or on YouTube.

If someone (say, a small child) asks you why the sky is blue, you might dive into an explanation of Rayleigh scattering. But if you want to give them a way cooler explanation, you can tell them it's because of bacteria.

Some Games to Play!

Tiles (by NYT)

SpellCheck.xyc (by Answer in Progress.)

Download Gubbins on iOS or Android!

If you post your results on social media, we’d love it if you post a link for folks to subscribe to “We’re Here” (https://werehere.beehiiv.com/subscribe)

Your Summer Vibes

Here are a few of the things that represent summer to you! Thanks to everyone who sent us some virtual sunshine last week. If it’s not summer for you, we hope this reminds you of everything you can look forward to. The seasons start coming and they don’t stop!

Thank you for reading!

Don’t email us immediately, but the next time you see a word you think is extra amazing…just, like, a really good word, respond with that one word. We’ll pick out some good ones to share.

We're Here is the newsletter of Nerdfighteria; the community of people that sprung up around Hank and John Green's YouTube videos. That community has many focuses and has spawned many projects but the overarching theme is that hopelessness is the wrong response to imperfection. What makes the world better is groups of people trying to understand and solve problems, and people can only do that for an extended period if they're having at least a little bit of fun.