Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke (2006) A pretty damning review: “For a book with such promise, Yesteryear is a real lesson in not allowing a fun premise to get in the way of a good story.” But when we consider novels in terms of what’s missing, we are necessarily spoilt for choice. Because when a…

Prince 💜 performs Purple Rain at the 1985 American Music Awards! 💜🎸💜

Less by Andrew Sean Greer (2018) What does it take to be a Pulitzer-winning novel? From Harper Lee’s ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ in 1961, John Cheever’s stories in 1979, Philip Roth’s ‘The Ghost Writer’, John Kennedy Toole’s ‘A Confederacy of Dunces’, John Updike’s ‘Rabbit Is Rich’, Marilynne…

it’s embarrassing how many times I’ve watched this performance and their entire 20-minute Live Aid set in the past week, but friends, I love everything, everything about this

Ubik by Philip K. Dick (1969) Why do we read science fiction? Why do we read anything? It’s hard to know at times. When you pick up a book such as this – which is so overwhelmingly silly,. Surely, it can only have a charm for those of us who read it in our distant childhoods. Is science fiction…

Across Sicily With Garibaldi’s Thousand by Tim Parks (2026) Some writer’s are just such pleasant company. So erudite and what once was called wise – but might better be called subtle. Or sensitive. Or aware. Such as the incomparable W G Sebald. Who, it turns out, bears comparison to Parks, when he…

#IsmuasMonthOfMusic #MusicChallenge Day 9- A song that sounds like a painting coming to life… Joe Jackson - ‘Steppin’ Out’ (1982) From ‘Night and Day’. This song always felt like NYC cool; that painting of a pianist playing in a smokey lounge in the West Village. m.youtube.com/watch?v=PJwt...

NASA Perseverance rover captures what a Martian night really looks like from the ground

🚶‍♂️✍️ How do master storytellers use walking in their writing? Join us for The Writer’s Path with walker and author Tim Parks, (Mr. Geography and The Hero’s Way). 📷 wlc.zone/6tu 📅 Feb 25 Pic: Gabriel Tovar #WalkingWriters #TimParks #Storytelling #WalkingAsInspiration

V13 by Emmanuel Carrère (2022) Ever since he wrote ‘The Moustache’ (1988), a profoundly good and original work of fiction, he’s been banging out non-fiction titles: ‘I Am Alive and You Are Dead: A Journey into the Mind of Philip K. Dick’ (2005), ‘The Adversary: A True Story of Monstrous Deception’…

Vincent van Gogh - Green Wheat Fields, Auvers, 1890

You know what we don't talk enough about? Queen & Annie Lennox/David Bowie rehearsing 'Under Pressure' in 1992. So much going on! Everyone's clothes, Bowie with a lit cig throughout, where Annie PROPER GOES FOR IT, George Michael singing along in the background. The amazing vocals. Yes, please!

‘A Love Story’ by Émile Zola (1878) The eighth novel in the 'Rougon-Macquart' series, deals with widowed protagonist Hélène Grandjean who ekes out a sheltered existence with her sickly daughter in bourgeois area of Paris, and then falls in love. It’s an odd novel, but not odd enough to save it.…

Some 2,000 years ago, a Roman fresco painter transformed a room into an enchanting garden filled with lush plants, trees, and birds, all under a clear blue sky! 🌿🌳🐦‍⬛ 😍 House of the Golden Bracelet, Pompeii 📷 by me #FrescoFriday #Archaeology

‘Flaubert’s Parrot’ by Julian Barnes (1984) A curious little book that could be brilliant, but rather falls flat. Barnes never gets the balance right between biography, criticism and fiction – who is the novel’s protagonist? We don’t get quite enough of him. So really, the only interesting bits…

Money by Emile Zola (1891) This is the eighteenth of Zola’s Rougon-Macquart cycle, but follows on from The Kill, which was published almost twenty years before, continuing to follow the exploits of Saccard, the amoral business man, who values money absolutely. Here we have financial speculation,…

A New Zola Top 10 After reading 13 of Zola’s twenty-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart, my top ten keeps changing – though the top 5 are remaining pretty solid. But there’s a new entry at number 6: ‘The Kill’, which like ‘The Beast Within’ has the melodrama needed to make an exhaustive study of…

When Reading is Writing Often, when we assess reading we are assessing writing. Rather than taking issue with this, and changing the way we assess reading, making into a test of knowledge (do you remember what the word X means / how it is used), if we just accept this as the way it has to be, and…

Zola Suspends the Experiment.  Zola complains that his novel has been ‘mis-read’. Readers do that. What’s interesting here is Zola’s anger, his frustration, and his insistence that he’s doing science. Then he ‘suspends the experiment’. Luckily for us, he decides to stay the course: the experiment…

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood (2003) On re-reading this modern dystopian classic, and on recently re-reading Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’, I found myself wondering: what should a good dystopian novel do? Speak to the anxieties of the time – very much as Atwood’s does here: genetic engineering,…

Currently reading Davis & Sumara, Complexity and Education, who offer this explanation for why this doesn’t work:

The Mississippi Miracle Mississippi State’s rise in reading scores - often called the "Mississippi Miracle" - built form the Literacy-Based Promotion Act (2013) - transformed state wide education so that, from ranking 49th nationally in fourth-grade reading, it is now in the top 10 - with the…

Project Follow Through “Project Follow Through was the most extensive educational experiment ever conducted. Beginning in 1968 under the sponsorship of the federal government, it was charged with determining the best way of teaching at-risk children from kindergarten through grade 3. Over 200,000…

The Kill (La Curée) by Émile Zola (1872) The Kill is the only the second novel in Émile Zola's 20-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart, dealing with the loose sexual morality and the lust for money of the extremely wealthy Nouveau riche, a group and a feature that Zola felt defined the Second French…

~W.H. Auden

Now that you know all about the Mid-Atlantic accent, you will be able to recognize it even in 21st-century media.

Wet towel in space: NASA astronaut demonstrates how surface tension forms a perfect water sphere in microgravity at the ISS

His Excellency Eugène Rougon (1876)  The sixth novel in the Rougon-Macquart series, was serialized in 1876 in Le Siècle, before being published as a novel. Set in the highest echelons of Second Empire government, it follows the career of Eugène Rougon and his Machiavellian scheming in the regime…

La Terre (The Earth) by Émile Zola (1887) Who needs an even more miserable, more shocking and more disturbing account of life – a damning indictment of the family, the individual, all the community gone to pot - than ‘L'Assommoir’ - considered to be Zola's masterpiece in the twenty-volume series…

A spectacular googly-eyed octopus does battle with a lobster in this 2,000 year-old Roman mosaic from Pompeii 🐙 🦞 Some fantastic fishy onlookers too! House of the Geometric Mosaics. On display Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples 📷 by me #MosaicMonday #Archaeology

New York City - 1978 📷 by Joel Meyerowitz

The phrase ‘learning is invisible’ is a lazy and sloppy cliche which we should probably stop using. open.substack.com/pub/bernarda...

Coverage is not progress. Students struggle for 3 curricular reasons: lack of specificity, lack of systematicity, and lack of subject sensitivity. open.substack.com/pub/daviddid...

A Zola Top 10 Having read half of Zola’s twenty-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart, what is considered to be the better half, as well as his break out success ‘Thérèse Raquin’ of 1867, I am now in a position to construct a Top 10. What are the best Zola novels? Where should one start? Nana The…

The Belly of Paris by Émile Zola (1873) Zoa, the quintessential novelist of modernity, set out to write about the period of tumultuous change through which he had lived during the Second Empire in France – 1851-1870. Capitalism suddenly was this great engine of change, it was ripping everything up…

Whenever I go church crawling, I obsessively look for graffiti. Recently, in All Saints Church, Claverley, I hit the jackpot when I found this fantastic little guy ✨️ #history #churchcrawling #churches #historicgraffiti #churchesoftheworld

It's still common for people to assume that more activities needing a "human touch" - care, "hand holding" - is not vulnerable to AI. So teachers, doctors, care workers have some moat. It's plausible, but certainly not guaranteed.

Alice Augusta Ball found the cure for leprosy at 23. She died in a mysterious lab accident at 24. Arthur Dean stole her research, stole it and renamed it from "The Ball Method" to "The Dean Method." It took 90 years before her original research papers were found and she got the credit due to her.

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932 Often compared to 1984 by George Orwell, these two dystopian classics are judged on how well they predict the future. Inevitably each one gets a few things right. But which one is a better warning, for its time – 1932 in Huxley’s case, and 1948 in Orwells?…

The Débâcle by Emile Zola (1892) This is not one of the more enjoyable novels of the Rougon-Macquart series. Perhaps the least readable, relevant, enjoyable, insightful and important of all the novels of the series I’ve read so far. The running ranking: Nana L’Assomoir The Ladies Paradise Pot Luck…

The Beast Within (La Bête Humaine) by Émile Zola (1888) Probably not top 10 in Émile Zola’s ‘Les Rougon-Macquart’ literary cycle – it suffers from how dated the criminal psychology / sexuality stuff feels: its all quite implausible, basic and even naive – seen from a modern perspective – that…

Marvellous 3,500 year-old Minoan clay flask decorated with a wide-eyed octopus 🐙❤️ Excavated in 1903 from a Bronze Age settlement site at Palaikastro, Crete. Heraklion Archaeological Museum 📷 by me #Archaeology

Number 2 in the Top 20 in Émile Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart literary cycle ‘Window-shopping’ in French is ‘lèche-vitrines’ - literally ‘window licking’ – and reading Zola’s ‘Au Bonheur des Dames’ - ‘The Ladies' Paradise’ – it will becoming clear why the French language veers this way. This is a…

The Ladies’ Paradise by Emile Zola (1883) Why is it that Zola’s novels read like ‘important books’. Every ‘serious’ novelist thinks they are writing ‘important’ books, but what separates the important from the merely ‘self-important’? Zola’s stated mission to produce - over 23 years - a…

The Genesis of Secrecy – On the Interpretation of Narrative by Frank Kermode (1980) The celebrated British literary critic, author of ‘The Sense of an Ending’ - a defining work of fiction theory – here sets out to decipher cryptic passages and concealed meanings in the gospels, with the aim of…

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James (1898) The ambiguity of so many sentences – typical of the prose of James after 1890 when he started to dictate his writing rather than writing it himself – renders this novel a difficult read. But the ambiguity is at the heart of the novella: watching a screen…

The Kingdom by Emmanuel Carrère (2017) A fascinating book, about a fascinating topic, by a fascinating author. I have felt compelled, and still feel compelled, to read all his works, from ‘The Moustache’ of 1986 – which is a profound work of literature, a real masterpiece of a novel – through to…

@didau.bsky.social that Binet book was a bit of a let down. Nowhere near as good as his other 3. I’m onto Kingdom now - more engrossing