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6 min read 22

UofWinds 438, Week 22, 2026: The Ethiopian running secret, Rising Narratives for Radical Futures, Sacred Harp


Good morning. I'm at my desk in the study as my husband moves through the house to open all the windows in preparation for the unseasonable drop in temperatures for today. He will be heading to the Ford Test Track shortly to help run the fields of the 'Kick Off Cup' soccer tournament for this year's crop of 12 to 18 year-olds.

Sadly, he will miss the Champions League game that I will be watching with my son later this afternoon. And after that, I will hopefully have enough time to pick up my new e-bike so I can re-start my cycling commutes to work again.

The Ethiopian running secret


Yesterday at a table shared with friends, the conversation turned to doping in sports and all the monetary incentives that drive the practice. For my part, I shared that I was inclined to support the recommendation I once heard made by a sports journalist about how to clean up the Tour de France: lay collective punishment to the entire field of racers if even just one person is caught with performance enhancing drugs in their system. I did not win anyone over with this argument as it was pointed out that the mass forfeiture of money would make this call almost impossible to make. I then re-iterated to the table that this was an argument I was happy to lose because I really don't approve of collective-punishment and of the coercion that it requires.

But I do very much like the idea of collective training in sports.

What Ethiopian running says about the limits of human ability [ht] has a delicious subtitle: One school of training is highly personalised, technical and data-driven. The other is the one that wins marathons. It begins:

Gojjam wipes a streak of vomit from the corner of his mouth and turns to his friend Zeleke. ‘I did your turn at the front today,’ he says, ‘and my soul almost came out.’ He squirts water from a bottle into his mouth and spits. ‘Leading is hard. It’s like carrying someone else’s burden.’ The two athletes sit on the side of the Chinese-built road that leads southwest into Oromia from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital city. Beyond the tumult of cars and buses and the occasional horse-drawn cart, farmland stretches to the horizon in every direction. They have just run 25 km with 14 other athletes at a pace designed to prepare them for an upcoming marathon. Before they started, their coach, Messeret, carefully divided the responsibility of leading sections of the run between them, emphasising the importance of doing their ‘duty’ as pacemakers and invoking them to ‘share their energy’ with their teammates. As the exchange between Gojjam and Zeleke illustrates, monitoring the effort of training is understood as a collective endeavour, requiring a great deal of trust and reliance on others.

Rising Narratives for Radical Futures


In April of 2023, a group of over 250 belligerent protesters shut down an Essex County city council meeting that was meant to approve The County of Essex Official Plan (2022-2052) entitled "One Land, One Climate, One Future, Together." The protesters were vehemently against the possibility of planning for a "15 minute city" as they believed it was a form government oppression that was designed to limit movement of the population.

It wasn't until I read Tactical Technology's The RePlaybook: A Field Guide to the Climate and Information Crisis that I learned that it was Jordan Peterson who stoked the fires of this particular conspiracy theory.

The RePlaybook gathers insights from 30 organisations and practitioners at the forefront of the response. From attention-sucking algorithms to AI-generated slop, it explores how our information environment is shaping and influencing opinion on climate and offers strategies to decode disorder, challenge tech paradigms, and counteract division.This collaborative guide combines thought leadership and practical approaches. It equips communicators, campaigners, journalists, and researchers with fresh tools for navigating complexity and strengthening climate discourse in an age of cultural divides and contested truth.

I think this is work that I want to contribute to but I'm not sure how I want to engage with it. If I sound hesitant, its because I've seen some of the work being made in response to the Climate Information Crisis, and I'm not sure if this work is good fit for me.

Last week from Sentiers, I found a link to a report called Rising Narratives for Radical Futures: “A first-of-its-kind narrative study by RadComms and The Rising Majority. It offers movement workers a materially grounded, emotionally resonant roadmap to move beyond mere resistance, connect across different values, and set the terms for a multiracial, radical democracy where we are all free.”

The graphic typography and colour of the report brings to mind a risograph-printed zine but it uses iconography that give me alien conspiracy vibes. The report text is self-declared as radical. And it is funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation? Personally, I feel that the contained graphics overwhelm what is the strength of the report, which is that its recommendations on activist messaging are based from the results of a 300,000+ Narrative Observatory panel of media consumption in the U.S. provided by a media research group called Harmony Labs, who are, themselves, funded by a variety of philanthropic agencies.

Harmony Labs breaks down the U.S. population into four audiences with each holding "distinct attitudes, distinct cultural affinities, and participate in distinct media cultures." "People Power and Tough Cookies share values that center collectivity, for instance, whereas If You Say So and Don’t Tread on Me trend toward individual autonomy."

I'm sharing these reports because I'm struggling with my conflicting feelings as I review them. I do believe that making progress in funding the infrastructure we need for our warming climate will require a broader base of support and some confrontation with the bad actors who are deliberately polluting the information environment around climate issues. But when I see a set of slick "radical" evidence-based media recommendations on how to re-shape narratives to attract audiences who are not receptive to current messaging about the cause at hand, well, I get the ick.

Sacred Harp


This might not be new to you, but it was only in the last two weeks that I learned about the practice of Sacred Harp choral singing. If I can make a recommendation to follow only one link in this newsletter, it would be to the Wikipedia entry of Sacred Harp so you hear for yourself "186 (Sherburne)" as performed by the Alabama Sacred Harp Singers.

Sacred Harp singing is a tradition of sacred choral music which developed in New England and perpetuated in the American South. The name is derived from The Sacred Harp, a historically important shape-note tunebook printed in 1844; multiple subsequent revisions of the tunebook have remained in use since. Sacred Harp singing has roots in the singing schools that developed over the period 1770 to 1820 in and around New England, related development under the influence of "revival" services around the 1840s. This music was included in, and became profoundly associated with, books using the shape note style of notation popular in America in the 18th and early 19th centuries.

(A bonus link, here's a German website ("Sacred Harp ist a cappella Heavy Metal") that breaks down Sacred Harp songs into their constituent parts but using now-dated computer "singing". Here is its version of 186 Sherburne.)

Dear Reader, I learned of the Sacred Harp musical practice because of A.i.

Berlin-based artists Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst approach AI as a coordination and communication technology, much like singing has been for millennia. Historically, singing techniques like call and response have been rituals for communication, leading us to build spaces and structures for gathering, processing, transmitting information, and creating meaning in social and civic life. Like a choir, where many individual voices become a collective, the artists propose that AI can further augment the transformation from the individual to the collective.
The Call centres on developing new protocols and materials for the creation of choral AI models. To train the AI, Herndon and Dryhurst have composed a songbook of hymnals, singing exercises and a recording protocol, travelling with the Serpentine Arts Technologies team to record fifteen community choirs across the UK. The choristers are now part of a Data Trust experiment that allows for the distribution of power between the contributors to the training data and those who use the models.

The day after I first heard of Sacred Harp, BBC Radio 3's Late Junction played "Babylon Has Fallen" by the Georgia Sacred Harp Singers, and again I was moved.

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