Ultravox!: My Sex - from their 1977 self-titled debut album Co-produced by Brian Eno, Ultravox! and Steve Lillywhite www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmH7...

Join the club.

Said it before, but really just a remarkable feat that @patrickwyman.bsky.social's Past Lives has taken on as its first subject the verifiable extant lives of enslaved individuals in the historical record, then expands from thin detail to create fuller portraiture. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/p...

Everybody needs an undead friend. This cute Mari Lwyd was made by the talented @skullsandsheets.bsky.social and now has a forever home with me 🐴

Popol Vuh: Wehe Khorazin - from Florian Fricke's 1981 film, Sei Still, Wisse ICH BIN; produced by Klaus Schulze www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ttQ...

Me most days:

I was on Twitter for the writers and the book recommendations, the essays, the poetry, the community. I am here now for the same. I’m a nerd. Please reply with a favorite recent essay or poem or story or book recommendation, and thank you.

Little known fact: prog rock was invented in Sopot in 1968 when Wojciech Młynarski said to Czesław Niemen “if you could knock out some music to accompany Norwid’s poem A Funeral Rhapsody in Memory of General Bem, that would be really quite something.” youtu.be/CgkWs5p6Nk0

"As his post goes on, his language gets older. 100 years older with each jump. The spelling changes. The grammar changes. Words you know are replaced by unfamiliar words" Fascinating. So how far back in time can YOU go?

It’s not funny at all, nor is it anything new: National Socialism united people who wanted to go back to some pre-1919 Golden Age with those who wanted Autobahns and Fordism everywhere.

"If Kraftwerk are the electronic Beatles, then Karl Bartos is their George Harrison: an essential third voice and creative power in a band away from the formational duo, whose contributions are among the absolute highlights of the band’s stories career." An interview with Karl Bartos:

It’s on Google, even though it is making search worse. It’s on WhatsApp, even though I absolutely do not want “homework help” or “relationship advice” from my messaging app. In the year of our lord 2026, it is everywhere. And it *doesn’t work*.

I believe cats to be spirits come to earth. A cat, I am sure, could walk on a cloud without coming through. ~Jules Verne 🎨 Lionel Lindsay (1924) #caturday

A pattern among women's names gave me a reason to dig very deep into linguistic prehistory, lost grammar and language's arbitrariness. These rank among my favourite interests, along with 1990s pop music. Put them all together, and I can offer you this long read: dannybate.com/2026/02/19/m...

My students:

We simply don't need so many men today.

A decades-long study suggests that men with higher intelligence quotient ratings are less likely to hold conservative political views.

Lithuania’s Laukiai Oak in bid to be Europe’s Tree of the Year www.lrt.lt/naujienos/la... 🌳

Getting shown up in the arena of elite impunity by *the British monarchy* is an incredible “America at 250!” achievement

‘Ukraine’s capacity to generate electricity has largely been destroyed; the grid relies on three functioning nuclear power stations and imports from Europe.’ @jenstout.bsky.social in Kyiv in winter. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Did someone say 'undine'? #aria

Conserve The Sound: An online museum of vanishing and endangered sounds www.conservethesound.de

Ethnonationalism is intrinsically utopian in a general sense; it is aesthetics mistaken for effective real-world politics, it is what happens when collective narcissism leads people to overestimate the extent to which common categorical identity is responsible for social order. (1/n)

Precisely. The subject of one of my favorite pieces by Lynn Hunt, which I love teaching

Little Mari is making pancakes for her ghostie friend

A vaguely Olympics-related fun fact is that in Czech you can say something expensive 'stojí majlant' ('costs a fortune'). This unusual word "majlant" comes from German Mailand – the city of Milan! It seems to have come via Czechs fighting in 19th-century Italy, clearly impressed by the rich city.

“It can seem that the world watches Russia’s war on Ukraine as if it were a film. When attention wanes, there is a demand for an ending — if not good, then bad. For Ukrainians, this is not cinema but reality. It will last as long as it lasts” — Nataliya Gumenyuk. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/15/o...

More and more of what used to be regarded as aberrant or perverse activity is now accepted as more or less conventional behaviour.

Not all old ladies are harmless; across the Caribbean she has many names. Soucouyant on French islands, the Hag or Blood-Sucking Hag on English ones, among many others. She leads men astray in the night, often as an insect before sucking blood. #MythologyMonday 🖼: gemgfx

Funny to think that in my lifetime I’ve seen a shift from educators warning students not to use Google and Wikipedia as sources for academic pieces, to teachers suggesting kids check and verify their AI search results by reference to Google and Wikipedia.

"Looking for" in Polish is "szukać" and it's spelled very similarly to czech "šukat" which means "fuck".

It's called "falling in love" because you hit the ground.

People will soon be living only in the present and will not be interested in the future at all.

🇪🇺

Over on threads someone just use ai;dr and we all need to adopt that right quick

‘My friend K said that what was most remarkable now was that you could get so many of your needs met without paying a dollar. “It’s almost like a parallel society being built, a form of anarcho-communism.”’ Amna A. Akbar on community defence as community-building. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/fe...

C. S. Lewis tried to warn us about AI

It is International Day of Women in Science! For this ocassion, a thread on influential women that illustrate prehistoric life🧵 Marta Szubert. Creator of one of the first to-scale feathered dinosar models (1997). If you've been to Poland or Slovakia, you've probably seen her models on display.

In Kyiv: ‘High-rise blocks, twelve or sixteen-storey Soviet prefabs, and newer, even taller, buildings of concrete or glass march into the distance; almost none of these thousands of rooms had a light on.’ Jen Stout on the Russian assault on Ukraine’s energy grid. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

always so funny to me when people are like “how am I supposed to explain Gay to my kids?” my kid asks me way harder shit all the time. “why did they build the road this way? why are some people bad?” I don’t know. please ask me about Gay

always feel very cheated at the airport when you get to the gate and they load you onto a bus. this isn’t what we agreed. pull the plane around mate.