The fastest and the greatest!

Guess the year of the IPI Report lede: Newspapers risk becoming "lifeless tools in the hands of a demagogue" unless editorial methods are revised to handle "the big lie" (answer is in here ipi.shorthandstories.com/IPIarchive/i...)

A woman and her house in Tehran Photo credit: Maryam Saeedpoor

Awesome view from Artemis II this morning.

Exciting PhD opportunity coming up

Pysanky, the Ukrainian art of egg decorating. www.presentandcorrect.com/blogs/blog/p... This book is from 1968 and you can find it in full here

April Fool's? After pondering it a bit, I think I hope not. Laibach announce that Melania Trump has finally invited the group to perform at the White House on 4 July

The Hungarian Kim Philby! Will he end his days drunk in a suburban Moscow flat, talking about how great he was vsquare.org/kremlin-hotl...

Thank you @vicderbyshire.bsky.social for putting the survivors front and centre

"You might think, given the subject, that the ... podcast bros would have invited on a woman or two... It was women – Julie K. Brown, Tina Brown, Vicky Ward, Tara Palmeri – who broke and pursued the story. Yet [the bros] waded in and manfully explained Epstein to me." www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

#MedievalSky I received a very important announcement today. Feminae, the bibliographical database on medieval women created and run by Margaret Schaus for the past couple of decades, is going offline as of 1 April. Download as much as you can ASAP: inpress.lib.uiowa.edu/Feminae/Adva...

Incredibly useful - how to run searches on Google to avoid all the slop. cardcatalogforlife.substack.com/p/google-has...

thinking about the medieval cat door in Exeter cathedral again

europeans when asked to help unblock the strait of hormuz

A perfectly formed digital archive of Gunta Stölzl's life and works. I love her Bauhaus Dessau photo ID card on which (I presume) she scribbled out 'student' and replaced it with 'Master' www.guntastolzl.org

#pointlessdetail Why does Pete Headset pronounce the word 'without' as if it rhymes with pith out? It doesn't. All of them sound like machine translations of English fed through autotune

Berlin loves to resemble unfashionable postcards

I spent 4 months trying to answer a simple question: has this book been translated into my language? Turns out no one tracks this. Not ISBN registries. Not Amazon. Not Google. Not libraries. So I built a tool that crosses four databases to piece it together. zenodot.app

"With some people, money and sex are the only truths... Bringing down the royal family may be the least terrible consequence of everything Andrew has done." A system that deserves to be gnawed into oblivion from within www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

This is anathema to all concerned of course but why doesn't this service take a leaf out of my late PhD supervisor's book and write BALLS in big red letters over an entire page of A4? Or even: 'stop plagiarising rubbish, in fact just stop plagiarising, you'll feel much better.'

Stop literally everything. Steve Albini's Fugazi sessions, widely bootlegged and full of lore, now available officially for the first time. fugazi.bandcamp.com/album/albini...

#onthisday in 1616, the Vatican banned Copernicus’s "De revolutionibus orbium coelestium". 🚫Though it laid the groundwork for modern astronomy, both Catholic and Protestant leaders initially rejected the idea that the Earth orbits the Sun!

De La Soul's Tiny Desk Concert! Stakes is High! Me Myself and I! Enough said. [kottke.org]

Welcome to the public domain, GRAND HOTEL (1930) by Vicki Baum 🏨 A glamorous Berlin hotel is the site for intertwined lives in this bestselling novel of drama, romance, and ambition 📖 The 1932 movie starring Greta Garbo. Read it here ➡️ archive.org/details/bwb_... #PublicDomainDay #PublicDomain

✏️ A Marginal Note in the Shape of a Duck in an Ottoman Manuscript, 18th Century

All Evidence Points to Pigs and Camels Being Mutually Exclusive

Chess absolutely everywhere in the Hungarian twentieth century: thermal baths, prisons, parks, railway station waiting rooms. Children, professionals and grandmasters, even Kádár. Smoking optional hetifortepan.capacenter.hu/sakk/

Nonsense, as a NATO member HU can invoke Article 4 if there is a threat, which there isn’t. Getting sticky under those tight mobster collars

Welches Mitglied der Linken hat bei der heutigen #vitscheberlin Demo am Brandenburger Tor gesprochen? Er distanzierte sich ganz weit weg vom Pazifismus.

By this point the Stierlitz jokes write themselves: "The hope is that if at one moment Russian people have to choose between the television and the refrigerator, the refrigerator will win."

Another extreme #berlinale experience. Q: How do you make an 80-minute documentary without dialogue about bridges? James Benning's answer: eight ten-minute static shots of bridges across the US, some famous, some not. "I am teaching you to pay close attention" he said.

#berlinale Traces (dir. Alisa Kovalenko) is a document of surviving and starting to talk publicly about rape under Russian occupation, before the first war crimes trials even begin. Survivors show the path out of darkness towards justice.

Chung Ji-young's My Name is astonishing and in places very hard to watch. Gracious discussion with the director & two leads about historical and structural violence incl bullying, taboos, and hiding behind other names. Wondering about domestic reception after films depart the festival circuit

CALL FOR CHAPTERS! Me and @grahammacklin.bsky.social are putting together an edited collection looking at the use of pseudoscientific ideas by extremist movements. If you are interested, please send us your abstracts at this link: forms.gle/mAUtpDGNEj9i...

Welsh Iranian artist, Roshi Nasehi, speaks to fellow musicians about the dangers of allowing the protest movement to be hijacked by hard left anti-imperialist ideologues and outlines how practical help can be offered The Writing’s on the Wall for the Betrayal of Iran buff.ly/bL70kF6

'Covent Garden' (from 'This Is London', 1959) by Miroslav Šašek

Mein Nachbar wünschte mir 2023 „einen friedlichen Himmel.“ 2026 wünscht mir ein Taxifahrer „Wärme und Licht.“ Der Krieg hat die Menschen in der Ukraine gelehrt, ihre Worte mit Bedacht zu wählen.

Every Ukrainian is now an involuntary sound engineer, acutely sensitive to ambient noise, mentally calculating threats from high-pitched buzz or faint whistle. In interviews with over 40 Ukrainians I’ve attempted to understand the psychological toll of drone sounds w/ @newlinesmag.bsky.social

Also ich nehme gerne Handkes Literaturnobelpreis.

wikipedia turns 25 today! the last unenshittified major website! backbone of online info! triumph of humanity! powered by urge of unpaid randos to correct each other! somehow mostly reliable! "good thing wikipedia works in practice, because it sure doesn't work in theory" - old wiki adage

Awaiting news from #Iran, you might want to delve into Persian poetry.. Before the latest mass protests began, #TheGlobalJigsaw looked into how the leaders of Iran, Tajikistan & Afghanistan are leaning on poetry in politics Video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vbor... audio: www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w...

Am 10. Januar 1927 wurde der Film Metropolis im Ufa-Palast am Zoo uraufgeführt. "In Metropolis schien das gelähmte Kollektivbewusstsein mit ungewöhnlicher Klarheit im Schlaf zu reden." Siegfried Kracauer, Von Caligari zu Hitler, 1947. 🧵

“Write it down on real paper with a real pencil, with real intent, and watch it get real. Spelling is a Spell." — Erykah Badu

Wenn dein „linker Protest“ so aussieht wie ein russischer Kriegsakt, solltest du vielleicht noch einmal ganz tief in dich gehen

Stromness this afternoon. The sun sets as another snow shower arrives.