economics

Opens in full prepper register (Strait of Hormuz, fertiliser shocks, food prices coming for you in 6 to 18 months) and I nearly stopped reading. But once the doom clears, it turns into a genuinely useful primer on growing at home from seed: what to start indoors, what goes straight in the ground in April, why soil matters more than anything else, and the unromantic economics of a £3 tomato packet. I grow a fair bit from seed myself—herbs, tomatoes, courgettes, strawberries, even purple cauliflower this year—and there’s something to the argument that you get to enjoy more of nature’s lifecycle this way, rather than the garden-centre-to-windowsill-to-compost-bin shortcut. Worth it if you’re thinking about planting anything this year.

Tom Rowley asks publishers, agents and the boss of the Booker why fiction still debuts in hardback when readers clearly prefer paperbacks. The answer is margin; the first edition is a “glorified marketing tool” for the paperback a year later. Indies are already breaking the pattern: Fitzcarraldo has always done paperback-first, and Faber recently published Eliza Clark’s “She’s Always Hungry” in both formats simultaneously. Fine for non-fiction and cookbooks. For a novel you want to shove in a bag, less so.

Musicians are in peril, at the mercy of giant monopolies that profit off their work.