london people, it’s Open Gardens weekend if you haven’t got your ticket. this is Carlton House Terrace gardens (Atheneum members amongst others get to use it usually)

'London Bridge and the Monument from the South West' (first exhibited, 1791) by Joseph Farington (Private collection)

Got no sleep at all last night (which is a sub optimal amount even by my non ambitious standards when it’s an up at ridiculous hour day ) putting a certain pressure on my ability to nod off tonight

Been reading ‘the defector’ by Richard Kerbaj. A good read but the idea that James Angleton was a Soviet agent, as opposed to a power crazed nut job, seems dubious. Baffling it took supposedly serious people so long to notice tho.

There is not a single political party that is coming remotely close to telling the public the truth on tax. Instead, right across the political spectrum, in different ways, every party is repeating the a variant of the opposite: YOUR taxes are too high, but someone else can afford to pay more.

'Gloomy Old London' by Harriet Lawless harrietlawlessartist.com

economist.com/culture/2026... “…the proliferation of agents…has something to do with the proliferation of mediocre books. Many should have never have been printed.” The Economist culture writers always make feel better re the amount of time it takes me to find a promising book, as I browse :)

Gulf rulers are desperate to prove they are in fact strongmen economist.com/middle-east-... I wonder what % of idiot Brits who moved for ‘safety’ a) thought autocracies doing shitty things to people only means ThoseBadPeopleNotMe b) actually had no f’ing clue what kind of governments they are

Protesters have controlled Bolivia’s capital for a month economist.com/the-americas... This is bonkers

Donald Trump says Pete Hegseth loves war. That should disqualify him economist.com/united-state... from The Economist

You want to see Norway men’s national football team’s official photo for World Cup 2026 www.nytimes.com/athletic/733...

'Evening by London Bridge' by George Ayling (1887-1960) (Private collection)

"Oh yes! This rough-hewn guy seems like the kind of person a right-wing chud would like! Let's recruit him!" "Oh no! This rough-hewn guy is exactly the kind of person a right-wing chud would like!" Ad infinitum

Well I guess Susan Collins now doesn’t have to be Concerned for another six years

No surprise these two would become instant best friends. #MayTheGrouchBeWithYou

"In the code of America’s greatest generals, hatred of war has been as foundational as grim awareness of the necessity to prepare for it." www.economist.com/united-state...

I spent my lunchtime listening to this and my day is better for it:)

How to crush Gen-Z socialism economist.com/leaders/2026... The poor letters editor will be having a fun week

'Crossroads from My Window', Battersea Rise (1932) by Leonora Kathleen Green (Wandsworth Heritage Collection)

BYD is losing its spark economist.com/business/202... “Models from its luxury Yangwang brand can float in water or jump over potholes” The latter I would like to see

www.lemonde.fr/en/culture/a... Would like to have taken a look see at this, but it’s being taken down before I’m next over. Wonder if people found it nice during the heatwave :)

www.lemonde.fr/en/pixels/ar... An entire industry built on IP theft, filling the web with drek and degrading the culture. Great job tech bros.

Never gets old. J-school essay topic: Is there any performance test for essentially life-tenure columnists? A limit on how many big calls you can get totally wrong, before they say: Hey, buddy, how about taking a step back for a while. Maybe a few reported pieces? Where you go out and ask around?

Listening to ‘Mort’ by Terry Pratchett, read / listened b4 many times. And just had a perfect illustration of why Pratchett, who gets tagged as a ‘humour’ writer, is so much finer a writer than any number of fantasy writers - and not just fantasy - who have no idea how to draw a character well …

I have only attended one ball game but did not observe this How does that even work!

www.theguardian.com/film/2026/ju... When I rule the universe there will be a theatre equivalent of a no-fly list, and said morons will be escorted out having been added to it. And their moron phones hurled into traffic first, obv

economist.com/culture/2026... Happy to watch the intro, what drives me mad are promos for the streamer’s other offerings, which you often can’t skip even if paid for ad-free NowTv show this moronic ad for some dumb thing about a reality star, and annoys me so much I can’t see me keeping the sub

economist.com/graphic-deta... The sad/ daft thing is, to do the actual job, for the vast majority of roles, you never actually needed it. It’s not that hard to pick up so unless your starter level job is/was writing software to detect ballistic missiles, was always BS requiring a degree

www.ft.com/content/341f... before - search engine most people liked and used, that produced useful results - rolling in cash Now - search engine produces LLM drek mostly useful for being sniggered at - ‘please give us money’

You used to be able to google the time of the sunset, and Google would give you the exact time right on top every single time. Thankfully, with artificial intelligence, you can now ask Google what time the sun will set and it will conveniently tell you "I don't know."

Why do so many people want to read about asparagus? economist.com/britain/2026... “It goes to great lengths for cover shots of cows (your correspondent followed a photographer for a morning to chase sheep around a freezing field).”

It took 30 or so years after "Hitler's Willing Executioners" but I think by now we've thoroughly disproved the notion that there was anything particular about German culture that determined that sort of mass and institutional behavior.

there does seem to be something of a pattern here www.ft.com/content/2c3a...

Forest Witches https://www.wikiart.org/en/paul-klee/forest-witch-1938

The dangerous delusion of modern warfare economist.com/interactive/... from The Economist

Finished Claire Tomalin’s biography of Austen last night, which I highly recommend. Still outraged on behalf of her female relatives tho, a crazy number of whom seemed to get married, be permanently pregnant, and in the worse cases were then killed by the 11th or whatever kid.

Ok so don't borrow from them then, that's fine. Do it all with taxes, knock yerself out

Going to go out on a limb and posit that had a hockey / cricket / La crosse team lost a game tonight, I’d not have just seen the losing supporters vandalising stuff in a sulk

poppies in a field near Goring

Would American military action against Cuba work? economist.com/the-americas... from The Economist

www.lemonde.fr/en/france/ar... Try and imagine a headline like ‘city braced for trouble as big tennis/ hockey/ cricket match happening’ and you can’t , bc that isn’t a thing

Vetheuil - 1880 https://botfrens.com/collections/41/contents/9540

French railway term of the day: Train balai. Literally means "broom train" or sweeper train in English. First one of the day over the high-speed line runs at reduced speed to check the infrastructure. Today that's us so we're running at 230 km/h instead of 300 from Paris to Lille. #BehindTheScenes

www.nytimes.com/2012/07/31/b... Just finished ‘The Twilight War’. Not a new book obv but can’t recommend enough if you want a history of the US and Iran since 79

Nah fuck off Wired, you don't get to do the wry snarky headline treatment for a guy you were fluffing a couple of weeks back when you ran a book extract that any competent editor would have rejected as unevidenced waffle

The refugees Donald Trump wants are white and middle-class economist.com/united-state... “They tend to be fluent in English and Facebook, where they gripe about America’s threadbare social-safety net.” If you’re stupid enough to emigrate to the US oblivious of that fact…

calls into question the UK's plans to invest £12 billion into developing our own wolf

Smart tech is making war a dumber choice economist.com/leaders/2026... Seems good news now that the hyper power is a threat to basically any country not run by a thug friendly to it