Lovely review, but when did British people start saying 'Rube Goldberg' instead of 'Heath Robinson'? This makes me sad.

“An age in which millions of people voluntarily sit through the podcasts of venture capitalists is one which has grown altogether too credulous of the idea that wealth is evidence of special insight into the human condition.”

One lesson of the Epstein emails is the total intellectual vacuousness of the international business elite www.thetimes.com/comment/colu...

When you get visited by three Puerto Rican ghosts

“Their house is crammed with tell tale signs of their cushy lifestyle. In the kitchen Mrs Dougan offered us a cup of "tea or coffee". Oh yes. The big spending Dougans have BOTH.” Tabloid report on family on benefits from Viz comic, c. 1990s.

"Better [this] than another politely reverent variation on Sunday-evening telly." I got on all right with "WUTHERING HEIGHTS". ‘Wuthering Heights’ review: Less 120 Days of Sodom, more Carry on Heathcliff www.irishtimes.com/culture/film...

Irregular verbs, unplanned pregnancy edition: • I was a surprise • You were an accident • He was a mistake

The Inside Aardman exhibition at the Young V&A is an absolute delight (opens 12 Feb). 1/ Early concept drawings for Wallace and Gromit. 2/ Ship from The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists!

Whereʼs the cue ball going??!??!?? To heaven because it has died

And Dorian Stuber writes beautifully about Gabriele Tergit's 1951 German-Jewish epic "The Effingers," a novel with everything in it--"weddings, children’s games, art auctions; Passover seders, prisoner-of-war camps, love letters"--that somehow never feels stuffed www.wsj.com/arts-culture...

"You mean the distraction that was about to end before you opened your gob?" "Er..."

become less attached Francis Ponge, ‘The Trees Decompose in a Sphere of Fog’, tr C.K. Williams.

I think about this a lot. Feel like it's analogous to ecosystems where "invasive" species barge in and establish a monoculture - but they can only do that because the existing ecosystem has been so roundly fucked up (by us) that it's lost any kind of spikiness or resilience.

same energy

Wild that every time Musk makes promises for "the future of civilization", it seems less and less appealing for civilisation to have a future.

We need stricter punishments for misuse of the Breaking News graphic

Songs don't say stuff like "Do wah ditty ditty dum ditty do" anymore. No one's in the mood for that shit

I'm convinced AI is our generation's radium - a discovery with genuinely useful applications in specific, controlled circumstances that we stupidly put in everything from kid's toys to toothpaste until we realised the harm far too late where future generations will ask if we were out of our minds.

Every so often, one of my tweets catches the light and ends up in the Discover feed of people who don’t follow me. The replies when I get up the next morning are always interesting. Slightly concerned that the below is this week’s winner.

I wrote about Patience Strong, almost certainly the best-selling English poet of the twentieth century, who wrote six poems a week for the Daily Mirror (all on a Monday morning) as well as a hit song, greeting cards and calendars, and whose print runs were in the 100,000s

I never noticed this either.

The “World Wide Web” was a great name, in hindsight. I’ve been trapped here for decades.

Surely a scenario for which the phrase “Kill ‘em all, let God sort them out” was invented.

You know what really boils my piss? The pissboiler2000 from JML.

TL:DR - no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the public

“… and it was fucking terrible”

- Will the film of Wuthering Heights be faithful to the book? - No, I was hoping it might be good.

Every now and then I think about Lee Evans basically saying he has enough money at 50 and withdrawing entirely from public life so robustly that we've pretty much never seen him ever again.

Coming round to Nadine Dorries thought - she was so real for this

British values

Incredible story here of a man who recognises no values - moral, ethical, or legal - other than TikTok views. Real stop-the-world-I-want-to-get-off stuff.

If you wanted to design an organisation to kill journalism, you would create something very much like Reach.

in the wrong hands, 1200 words can really feel like a lot

“Katie Mettler, a former chair of the Washington Post guild, said: “I’m glad Will Lewis has been fired. I wish it had happened before he fired all my friends.””

"difficult decisions have been taken" is an all-time use of the passive voice

Counterpoint: Beryl Cook’s paintings are not very good - we should not put her in the Tate

“The human population will then have expanded to reach infinity and will thus automatically annihilate itself.”

Well that’s pretty comprehensive. Was there a meeting about this at which everyone agreed the new consensus.

[watching curling] after 1 min: ugh this is dull 10 min: spin on that stone is off 30 mins: three in the house means nothing if your centre guard is ripe for a pick and roll 1 hour: SWEEP BITCH SWEEP

This is TK Maxx*-tastic *other vendors of random tat are available

An attempt to disconnect our gas connection earlier today👇 SSE Airtricity’s AI chatbot is going a little out of scope 😬

I don’t want to laugh at a small business but also VERY funny

“I am like a man who has just come too much (if you will forgive me the expression).” Gustave Flaubert writes to Louise Colet about the mental and physical impact of writing the “Big Fuck” in Madame Bovary, 23 Dec 1853, 2am: (Translated by Geoffrey Wall)

“We parted company at the moment when all kinds of things were about to find their way into words.” Find yourself a correspondent who writes to you as Gustave Flaubert did to George Sand.

If proof were needed that the algorithm still doesn’t know shit, Instagram is currently trying to sell me big bags of LIQUORICE. You know, the devil’s droppings? [don’t write in]

V interesting piece, esp for readers in the UK where we don’t have the same “mass market”/“trade paperback” distinction. Though I suppose the gradual move here for all genres to now appear in larger B-format paperbacks, initially the preserve of “literary fiction”, is similar.

The verbal equivalent of the guitar solo in Ball and Biscuit