‘She came late to the ordained ministry, spending more than 35 years in the NHS, as a cancer nurse, then the youngest chief nursing officer for England at 37 … before giving up her nursing position in 2004 to serve as an assistant curate in Battersea’

‘Meta and OpenAI’s new platforms (AI-generated content is already rife on TikTok and YouTube) are a fitting endpoint for social media’s warped evolution from a place where people swapped updates with friends and family, to one with less and less human-to-human interaction.’

‘For decades all the information tracking the MBTA's trains was analog. The system used sound waves, wires and electromechanical relays, which were housed in hubs called signal rooms. The equipment being replaced on the Red and Orange lines is approximately 50 years old, according to the MBTA.’

Finnish photographer Niko Luoma TS08, 2022 (Found Vintage Postcard and Enamel Paint) #Photography #ContemporaryArt

Frederick Pegram

‘His speech was intended as high Renaissance performance art, but that’s not to say it was secular, humanist or modern – rather, it was profoundly weird.’

‘Lorde maintained her distance from organised activism… Her poetry and essays offer something else: a reflection of that work, an analysis of its tensions and a language for its losses and aspirations.’ @keeanga.bsky.social on Audre Lorde in @lrb.co.uk

That’s right!

Yellow band https://botfrens.com/collections/25/contents/4873

Marc Chagall working on the panels for New York's Metropolitan Opera: The Triumph of Music #MarcChagall

‘Chunk’s weight was estimated at 1,200 pounds by contest organizers. While they do not weigh individual bears during the contest because of safety concerns, Chunk and others have had their density scanned to bolster weight estimates in the past using laser technology called LIDAR.’

‘Did stars and galaxies give rise to black holes, or was it the other way around?’

Flower piece, 1939 by Franz Sedlacek

Otto Marseus van Schrieck, Nocturnal Forest Floor Still-Life 1671, Oil on canvas, 59 x 47 cm (Private collection)

‘Brooklyn Bridge Park is entirely human-made and built over what was essentially an industrial wasteland. But now it’s a complex ecosystem and a refuge for a number of important species, including monarchs. That ecosystem is rooted, unsurprisingly, in native plants’ By @benjij.bsky.social

‘The way out of AI hell is not to regroup around our treasured flaws and beautiful frailties, but to launch a frontal assault. AI, not the human mind, is the weak, narrow, crude machine.’

‘“we find that when developers use AI tools, they take 19 percent longer than without — AI makes them slower”’

This would be why I am such a strident critic of digitization as a substitute for actual archival preservation. My sixteenth century documents are far sturdier and likely to survive another 500 years than the detritus on the internet. And digitization is not democratization.

Sōen Nakagawa Bright Moon

Friends — Hideo Tanaka, 2023 acrylic on canvas

reminder:

I love the nineteenth century

The Double Life of Véronique Krzysztof Kieślowski 1991

Haywain - Open

Liza Lou, Desire Lines (detail) (glass beads and oil paint, 2018-2019)

‘But in the realm of the red house, Frida painted a mural on the kitchen walls, possibly around 1938. “El mesón de los gorriones,” the mural reads, which translates to “The sparrows inn.” But the line also plays on the Spanish word gorrones: freeloaders.’

‘While they don’t have much of a taste for the … ivy, they have cleared … five acres of invasive plants from the island, mowing … space for thousands of native plants … to be sowed… “They’ve exceeded our hopes… They can do things that people and herbicides can’t do. They’re … our advance troops.”’

American photographer Erwin Blumenfeld Maroua Motherwell, New York 1941-1943 #ErwinBlumenfeld #Photography

Homer B. Sprague. Milton’s Cosmography; Diagrams for Milton’s Paradise Lost. 1879. 1/2

‘Working late one night in his darkroom, he left a funnel and a thermometer lying on a sheet of photo paper. When he turned on the light, it acted as a flash. He lifted the objects and found the traces they had left: ghostly silhouettes against a night-black ground.’

‘It was remarkable to observe not only different species, but different characters within species, these older lions having the look of a biker gang menacing a high street, compared with the sleepy, almost kittenish brothers of the day before.’

‘From her, we learn that Picasso mixed his colours on a table covered with newspaper rather than a palette; that he worked in total silence and often with “his body doubled over . . . sitting on the floor. The discomfort did not bother him. You might even say it stimulated him.”’

the booker prize judges make a lot of fuss about having to read 153 books. but assuming an average weight of 750g per book, that comes in at 115kg of literature - or just under the weight of a single adult male ostrich

Porträt der Elisabeth Lederer (Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer), 1914-1916 by Gustav Klimt

Violet-Orange by Vasily Kandinsky, 1935 https://botfrens.com/collections/212/contents/137587

‘although there are, of course, campaigning fictions, a resistance to preachiness is part of the novel form. What we tend to think of as the wisdom of a novel … has more to do with a higher-order interplay of contrasting points of view than it does with paraphraseable wisdom’

“parts of the parchment bear the traces of warty growths from the skin of the sheep that was killed to make it. These disfiguring marks ‘argue for accepting things as they come, which itself is an argument for accepting the poem’s conclusion’.” @tomlukejohnson.bsky.social for @lrb.co.uk

‘There's at least one pair of Birkenstock sandals on the dance floor. The 40th birthday party friends are wearing t-shirts decorated with a sandwich and the slogan "Lettuce Turnip The Beet."’

poets have warbled the praises of the soft eye of the antelope, and the lovely plumage of the bird that never alights

Jumping ジャンピング (1984) Directed by Osamu Tezuka

William de Brailes - Noah's Flood. 1250

‘there seem to be more rocky planets than giant planets in the universe—a ratio that isn’t reflected in our solar system, which has the same number of both’

‘But art within baths wasn’t always about opulence or conspicuous consumption. Sometimes, it reflected everyday life and served a functional purpose. Bath mosaics were … just one way to remind visitors to take off their shoes and have a nice wash’ By @sarahebond.bsky.social for @hyperallergic.com

‘“We are people, there is no doubt, who exist solely insofar as we write”’ The @bostonreview.bsky.social on Italo Calvino’s letters, from 2013:

my team in zurich is holding a 2-day conference (at uni zurich!) on the history of science of 20th century agriculture, focusing on third-world connections between Africa and Asia. come one come all -- private papers circulated on day 2, email/msg me or anyone on the team 🗃️ #HistSci

CHOTINER: So you’ve become very famous for hating fish AHAB: One fish in particular CHOTINER: Yes, I see that, and, in this case the fish is actually a whale AHAB: I’m not sure I see what you’re getting at

Abduction of Ganymede — Correggio, c. 1530

Garden of Earthly Delights

We are delighted to reveal the #BookerPrize2025 shortlist – six books that ‘are all brilliantly written and brilliantly human’. ➡️ Discover the full list: thebookerprizes.com/bp2025