I’ve been hoping a new Manchester Mill-style journalism outfit would come to Leeds for a while, so I’m very pleased to be pledger number 131. Please consider joining too! leeds.ghost.io

RIP Frederick Wiseman. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/16/m... At Berkeley, a four-hour long documentary about the University of California at Berkeley, is one of my favourite films of the 2010s (and is Kanopy, if you have access to that).

Is the point that the US is a big chunk of the developed world, so the company can't afford with that cut out? Or is the implication of this that the super-high costs of healthcare in the US are actually good for everyone else, because they end up as an effective subsidy for drug development?

Fantastic piece in the @FT on London's poor record of building the homes it desperately needs. I added in another major global city* in the UK which seemed to have slipped out of the data during production 😉 giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

Interesting article by Siobhan Roberts in the NYT, interviewing some mathematicians who are “mildly AI-sceptic” (at least relative to people on X/Twitter). www.nytimes.com/2026/02/07/s...

I appreciate this is not a healthy relationship to have to a news magazine, but I have been hoping for this, in the same way a football fan might hope their club is going to sign a talented out-of-contract player.

I thought I already had a pretty good idea of how weird Greenland sharks are but what do you mean they can be pregnant for the best part of two decades.

To answer my own question: Is This Thing On? £434k @ £930 per screen Nouvelle Vague £73k @ £740 per screen Melania £33k @ £210 per screen

Marshawn Lynch: "the Skittles-scarfing bruiser" @secondmentions.bsky.social www.theguardian.com/sport/2026/f...

👑 (via www.ft.com/content/3f82...)

“4 is discrete π”, the much-anticipated follow-up to my previous maths blogpost “2 is discrete e”. mpaldridge.github.io/blog/4pi.html

“4 is discrete π”, the much-anticipated follow-up to my previous maths blogpost “2 is discrete e”. mpaldridge.github.io/blog/4pi.html

"2 is discrete e" (maths blogpost by me) mpaldridge.github.io/blog/2e.html

"2 is discrete e" (maths blogpost by me) mpaldridge.github.io/blog/2e.html

Useful information I did not know! Also: Kanopy - which, depending on your taste in film, maybe has an even better selection. www.kanopy.com/en/uol

Glad someone else crunched the "Is the Melania doc selling tickets" data, so I don't have to. But I wanted a comparison: How many seats are normally sold this many days in advance? How are, say, Nouvelle Vague or Is This Thing On doing? takes.jamesomalley.co.uk/p/i-really-d...

for reasons not totally clear to me, in the 60s, the annual chess tournament in Wijk aan Zee (the 2026 edition is going on right now!) was covered by Dutch press photographer who all went insanely hard on it

We were encouraged to take left-over food from the conference – but we had to sign a form promising not to keep it for more than two hours and not to reheat it. (Anyway, that was about three hours ago.)

Spent the conference dinner on a table of Londoners complaining that their public transport sometimes falls short of their highest expectations, and I fear I may have made a bit of a scene on behalf of the north.

Can I interest @secondmentions.bsky.social in a "Marmite to Dove soap conglomerate"?

The recent … issues seem to be the thing that have finally managed to get people to start calling it “X“ rather than “Twitter”.

There is always an XKCD

"It was Christmas week: we took to no settled employment, but spent it in a sort of merry domestic dissipation." --Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

Tim Paulden's thexmaspuzzles.com (FKA the Royal Statistical Society Christmas Quiz, now in association with Chalkdust magazine) are keeping the family quiet this festive period.

Delighted to learn that my stepsister got that side of the family to watch Andrea Arnold’s 2003 tense poverty-realist short film Wasp on Christmas Day.

Left: My mum’s dining room, traditional location of Christmas dinner. Right: Alternative plans.

🎄

Bob Dylan attempts to explain Willie Nelson in The New Yorker's profile of Willie: www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

I have been listening to these “Noëls variés” for organ and soprano by Pierre and Jean-François Dandrieu. open.spotify.com/album/3sUeMs... The constant ornamentation on the front of the note and the very reedy organ tone just teeter on the edge of being extremely irritating in a way I’m enjoying.

Jordan Ellenberg is cited in the Mirriam-Webster dictionary under “Markov chain”, “information theory” and “haggard”. statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/12/22/w...

PICS RAP FOR No10 RAM MAN

EU CRIM DATA ‘NO’

Wonderful @secondmentions.bsky.social www.theatlantic.com/national-sec...

😋 A bit of fun with entropy! "Shakespeare, Entropy and Educated Monkeys"⁉️ Full paper here: arxiv.org/abs/2512.11880

This is official now: www.newyorker.com/news/press-r... They've also used AI to write subheadings for old articles – in my opinion these are usually lower quality than a human editor would write, but generally pretty adequate.

Seven people in just over a week!

I don’t think it should take 14 years to build two tram lines. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Happy 100th birthday to the art journalist Calvin Tomkins. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

That time of year again!

Six people in five days!

Celebratory last-lecture-of-the-year mince pie.

An academic disliked an Oxford Very Short Introduction (145 pages) in his field so much that he wrote a 200 page book review attacking it. www.pierre-legrand.com/ewExternalFi...

Wanted some celebrity names with lots of Z’s in them. Thought this might be the sort of thing AI would be good at.

Ruben Östlund’s 2014 Swedish film Turist is called “Force Majeure” in English and (I learned today) “Snow Therapy” in French, thereby being a rare example of a film whose English title is French and whose French title is English.