🚴‍♀️🚶❄️ www.fsg.org/blog/can-sno...

You’ll be shocked to hear the “10.8 million families get their news from X” stat is…not correct! www.thenewworld.co.uk/rats-in-a-sa...

By Handl, written for the feast of the Epiphany. Impossibly beautiful “And all from Sheba shall come, bearing gold and incense…” open.spotify.com/track/6WTWcn...

How my colleagues see me when I tell them my shoes squeaking means I must have nicked them, and no REALLY people do say that where I’m from, I’m not just being weird

Writing this I had to look through Grok's mentions. Earlier I counted around 8 requests PER MINUTE featuring "bikini" and "her". Thousands of women and girls stripped each day. I found users stripping dozens of women per hour, from female celebrities to gym selfies. www.thetimes.com/uk/technolog...

Good piece focusing on a neglected demographic but I am also unconvinced young men are radicalising right in the way claimed

Prediction: ‘Listen to this article’ players will be redundant soon. Like translation, people will just use the tool in their browser.

Sunrise inside Sagrada Familia, Barcelona

LOLLY WILLOWES is celebrating its 100th birthday(!!) & this STW classic will be our first book for #NYRBWomen26, starting January 3! Details here: www.joiedevivre9.com/nyrbwomen26....

A horrible confluence has occurred between two things that make me cry (kind YouTube comments; the songs of John Darnielle) www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QOD... #thisyear

“Ah, but they aren’t violent until I’ve edited them." —When asked how such a ‘nice lady’ could edit Martin Scorsese’s movies. HBD, 👑 Thelma Schoonmaker...

Good on her. I cycle to work in the City and not sure which of my routes feels sketchier: riding through Bank junction, or crossing Upper Thames at the top of Southwark Bridge. Both are lousy with people who barely know how to handle a bike shooting through reds giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

The economist had a poll in the field when Iran was bombed. Look what happened.

while my mom was pregnant with me, she was delivering chinese food on bike in new orleans. i like to think that the music she heard in the streets made me the way i am now. happy new year everyone!

The ideal airport experience is one where you do not stop walking between the Elizabeth Line and your seat

Really enjoyable 1995 interview on iPlayer - in the way it’s always a pleasure to watch someone serious about their craft www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p...

Leonard Freed. Grand Central at New Year’s Eve, NYC, 1969.

"7 a.m. (New Year's Morning)," László Moholy-Nagy (c. 1930)

Friendly reminder that the Hootenanny clock men are available for hire for events where "clocks and times are prevalent"

Our @yougov.co.uk data journalism extraordinaire Matt Smith has compiled all news tracker results from 2025 into this stunning graphic This tells us so much about what 'cuts through', how news cycles evolve, and what grabs attention re: flash moments vs ongoing stories yougov.co.uk/politics/art...

Think @sundersays.bsky.social is accurate here. The UK has not suddenly become much more racist. However the (re)normalisation of open racism by "respectable" right-wing media and politicians has led to both increased visibility for open racists, & radicalisation of some "soft" racists/xenophobes

James Merril’s poem “Christmas Tree,” written while he was dying of AIDS. 1995.

Semiotic paradox alert!

There's a great 1879 book about telegraph operators who have online chatrooms after work. As well as online dating it has cat fishing and all sorts of things we think the Internet invented

Just watched the new Knives Out and I think it's really important you know that the scene in the Seminary's Gym is filmed in the same place Rick Astley filmed the music video for Never Gonna Give You Up. I saw the window tracery and immediately made my friends pause the film so I could tell them.

How dads comment on someone leaving the lights on, around the world...   5. It’s like the Blackpool illuminations in ’ere (UK English) 4. Are we living in Bethlehem? (Croatian) 3. We’re not in Versailles (French) 2. Is it Diwali again? (Hindi) 1. Was your grandpa Nikola Tesla? (Serbian)

Rochdale Winter, painting by Reg Gardner.

“If this analysis is correct, then the situation is actually more bleak…if diversification efforts generated a huge change, then the backlash to it might be acceptable…Instead, what appears to have happened is a lot of empty talk, no real significant change, and backlash that is causing real harm.”

subscriptions >>> shop.viz.co.uk/viz351bs

World champion shows jump in form on Colle de Rates compared to 12 months ago bit.ly/3MMSWbc

Am thinking of writing a Christmas/anniversary post about why Jane Austen is our greatest writer about law. She can deftly describe the most complex of legal relationships - entails, succession, etc - in a sentence or two. And you don’t even notice she’s done it. Awesome.

Guess what Christmas film we’re watching from the Does The Dog Die entry

Sharing this @lrb.co.uk article on the modern interpretation history of the beautiful Fayum portraits from ancient Roman Egypt www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Ah, time for the traditional Christmas blubbing out of the eyes

Thrilled to find “The Mirror Has Two Faces” on Netflix - a charming work of fiction which asks you to pretend Barbara Streisand is not an unobscurable smokeshow m.youtube.com/watch?v=vGAv...

Is there any legal precedent where somebody has successfully sued their partner for leaving a ginormous spider in the sink?

Your annual reminder that the most revealing difference between Irish and Scottish Gaelic is definitely in the words for December: Mí na Nollag (Month of Christmas) in Ireland, and An Dubhlachd (the Blackness) in Scotland. So once again may I wish you all a lovely Blackness.

“--it's not gasps and blood and falling about---that isn't what makes it death. It's just a man failing to reappear, that's all ---now you see him, now you don't, that the only thing that's real: here one minute and gone the next and never coming back...” --Tom Stoppard

LFG

Perfect Tom Stoppard story from DTel obituary: His response to a letter from Harold Pinter canvassing support for a proposal to have the Comedy Theatre in London rechristened the Pinter Theatre, “Have you thought, instead, of changing your name to Harold Comedy?”

Vincenzo Latronico has his own little death in Venice. @thetls.bsky.social

Small changes to ‘for you’ feed on X can rapidly increase political polarisation

Nice dataviz from the ONS showing median wealth split by category at different points of the distribution: www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopula...

I like this post but it stops short. It might be that building loads of flats in central London doesn't reduce rents much, but that means it's creating an enormous and growing stream of rents. It's a gdp factory as @ironeconomist.bsky.social and I have discussed previously. And we need that too.

What is Reform-curious voters' biggest hesitation? The party's lack of governing experience That's according to new @thinksinsight.bsky.social research shared exclusively with PolHome this weekend Reform as a "risk" to the country, and a single-issue party (immigration), are also concerns

Tickled by these photos for NA-KD where the shoot concept was “woman finds office air con too cold”

(And here's the Transatlantic Sessions performance I mention, which includes a young Rufus Wainwright, his mother and aunt, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, and Emmylou Harris.) www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_Bo...

There were 92,400 Lego cutlasses inside the shipping container that fell off the Tokio Express back in 1997. This one was found in August by Laura Dale on a beach near Newquay some 28 years after it plummeted into the ocean. Photo: Laura Dale

Uh this is enormous