Last night, with my phone volume accidentally on, I was woken up in quick succession by the Ukrainiam air raid app that I have still and a Brazilian civil defence push notice of a cyclone. Only the cyclone came for me.

128 people murdered by Rio police.

Awful things unfolding in Rio, over 60 dead, lots of favelados friends either unable to go home or trapped in their homes. Evil cops, evil state governor.

We take no joy criticising a young left-wing UK political figure who has often spoken up for workers' rights and progressive causes. But these barely coherent comments from Zarah Sultana on Ukraine sum up much of what is wrong with her wing of the left www.instagram.com/reel/DQT62ys...

Wrote about the rogue scheme to share museum membership cards that has been doing the rounds in London artist Whatsapp groups. www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...

Very proud that I, editor-at-large at ArtReview magazine, have not ben to the Frieze Art Fair in a decade. Career making.

Evolutionary biologist @scs22.bsky.social has had a lot of success recently sequencing ancient RNA viruses from museum samples. This summer I had the chance to accompany him and a team of researchers to the Arctic where they hope that the permafrost might allow them to go further back in time. 🧪

Outcast: A History of Leprosy, Humanity and the Modern World x Oliver Basciano hararereview.wordpress.com/2025/10/08/o...

Heartened by @hararereview.bsky.social 's description of Outcast: "Fascinating and expansive, you’ll likely never read anything more magisterial. If you read just one non-fiction/history book this year, make it this one". Taking this as my Nobel. hararereview.wordpress.com/2025/10/08/o...

Bang on solid Nobel lit choice that.

I will forever lap up 'academics and scientists find out they have got the Nobel in slightly comic or heart warming fashion'.

Always stand up to bullies.

The pope got mansplained the Bible.

PRs! Top tip! If your client can't be trusted to speak, don't say they are too busy for an interview but will reply to written questions. Clearly the latter takes far longer. Anyway. No.

Brazil sadly came last in this year's Intervision, the song contest established by Russia after they were thrown out of Eurovision. Despte the act really leaning into "being Brazilian". www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JJl...

Wrote a few obits recently. Perhaps the saddest personally being for John Morgan, the graphic designer (including of ArtReview). You can read that here in the Guardian. www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...

I went to the first Nag Nag Nag, and then most weeks thereafter. On the second week I chatted up a nice looking boy, There was no plan I'd be living with him and a dog twenty-three years later in Brazilian mountains, but I guess these things happen.

Currently reading Mircea Cărtărescu and revelling in the fact I have no idea what's going on most of the time. Just a massive wave of post-war (set) Romanian brilliant madness.

"The operating orthodoxy was that police killings, CIA coups, black site torture, and institutional misogyny were aberrations, deviations from the American norm that would eventually be corrected when the arc of the moral universe, long as it is, finally got around to them."

if you read one thing today, make it this absolutely devastating piece from a fact-checker who quit the New Yorker bidoun.org/articles/hou...

Wrote on Donald Locke and Anderson Borba and, I guess, bodies joyful and cruel.

Bolsonaro convicted. 💚

Two books I've read recently that have entirely put me off Gauguin (was never on, but now decidedly off): - Outcast x @olibasciano.bsky.social - Annah, Infinite x @mailbykite.bsky.social

Melvyn Bragg has been one of the last standard-bearers for a really important, and unfashionable, idea: that good conversation, between people who really know their stuff, on complex or difficult subjects, can be fantastic radio - and that the national broadcaster should do this. I hope it endures.

Enjoyed this conversation between @questingvole.bsky.social and @joannapocock.bsky.social on buses, app disenfranchisement and the US.

COP prep fever in Belém.

We like an index joke, and here's a good example of the "use the whole span of the book to make a point" index joke #IndexSky

Sunday reading decision, to go north or south

Sally Rooney putting her money where her mouth is (figuratively of course). Bravo. www.irishtimes.com/culture/book...

Amid the annihilation, Nikita Kadan explores a paradoxical freedom in Kyiv artreview.com/mikita-kadan...

Looking forward

The artist David Chichkan has been killed fighting on the frontline of Ukraine-Russia war artreview.com/david-chichk...

On today's new Little Atoms podcast, @olibasciano.bsky.social on his new book Outcast. Out now from @faberbooks.bsky.social. Listen to it wherever you get your podcasts or here: shows.acast.com/b5fe8d16-751...

Incredibly @melanieonnmp.bsky.social has decided that her dog whistle racist language was too spicy for Bluesky, and deleted, but calculated it'll play well with Twitter, and kept the post there. x.com/melanie_onn/...

Long before Nelson Mandela began his 27 years of imprisonment on Robben Island off Cape Town, it held many other people captive. From 1845 onwards, in particular, leprosy patients were taken to the island. In this excerpt from his book, Outcast, @olibasciano.bsky.social evaluates this history.👇

Unseen Histories has an excerpt from Outcast: it's about the Cape Colony, perhaps the clearest example of how leprosy fear and sanitation laws were used to pave the way for other forms of repression.

The difficulty with writing anything about anything is that any given thing, on closer inspection, appears to be connected to every thing, and now you’ve gone from writing about anything to writing about everything 😅

Probably wouldn't be writing now if I hadn't fallen in love with Burglar Bill and the Jolly Postman. www.theguardian.com/books/2025/j...

I went to Kyiv to chat with Nikita Kadan about war, freedoms, eugenics, and, unexpectedly, his memorial the victims of Japan's leprosy containment policy. Online now with @artreview.bsky.social. artreview.com/mikita-kadan...

As Mozambique faces escalating climate disasters, it is shut out of the very funds meant to protect it. africasacountry.com/2025/07/the-...

Weird that there's a Christopher Hitchens book out of print. I need that Cyprus book of his, but stupid money online and one secondhand shop was like 'yeah that era of Verso has basically disappeared.' (been using BL copy, but have to head back to Brazil now)

Back to Brazil, with the essentials.

I spent a whole day reading through C19th Cape Colony memos on the subject of corsets at the Robben Island leprosarium a year or so ago, looking for something else. Eventually the sheer insanity of the process demanded the corsets had to enter the book, and did so fruitfully.

9am TODAY on ⁦‪@BBCRadio4‬⁩ Sanctuary, refuge and exile Start the Week Marina Warner, Oliver Basciano and Fergus Butler-Gallie discuss our need for places of belonging, community and welcome with Tom Sutcliffe.

In the TLS on dying in Britain and Molly Conisbee's new history.

Appeared on Germany's Deutschlandfunk public radio, talking about Outcast and the legacy of leprosy and colonialism for a feature-length documentary. www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/lepra-die-mi...

Also contains Cathy Gere's beautiful review of Outcast, really appreciate how much she got what I was trying to do with the book. literaryreview.co.uk/anatomy-of-a...

Really important and thought-provoking piece

A new book tells of how leprosy became a byword for segregation and fear, while the 200,000 people newly diagnosed a year are forgotten.

Slowly making my way through @olibasciano.bsky.social's Outcast: A History of Leprosy, Humanity, and the Modern World (slowly bc it's a bit of a hard read for me, I'm an empath:/)