Another youtube anti-spiral tip, if you have a VPN, switch to Albania, a market Google hadn't monetised, so there's no adverts.

Ideal.

Can anyone recommend a good book on Estonia / Baltic 20th century history? Not Anne Applebaum

Walking 20k a day in Christmas lead up. Weather is... variable

I spent five years researching colonial necropolitics and medical maleficence, kind of with the idea it was history, and while I knew it wasn't, this is still astonishing.

@artreview.bsky.social's 2025 lookbacks have been excellent (more to come). No listicle slop: Amber Hussein on the Year in Eating, @martinherbert.bsky.social on AI, Rebecca Liu on the death of dialogue in film. Great commissioning from @alexanderleissle.bsky.social. artreview.com/category/the...

Excellent interviewee, excellent interviewer @edwinheathcote.bsky.social. Lamb sounds pretty good too. I'm really excited for Kéré's Rio library. www.ft.com/content/a286...

Two weeks after the devastating fire in Tai Po, it’s clear the fault lies beyond Hong Kong’s iconic plant artreview.com/on-bamboo-bl...

Do this if you can, social clubs are vital and seem a dying breed. If you donate by midday the amount will be matched.

There is nothing festive about Outcast but I give you this memory from the Romanian residents of Europe's last leprosarium. It is about how they danced, hidden away, in their common room on hearing of the Christmas Day execution of Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu. The perfect gift for your loved ones.

This is terrible: Matisse works stolen from Biblioteca Mario de Andrade in São Paulo. I saw the show last week, and it was a gem of an exhibition. www1.folha.uol.com.br/cotidiano/20...

Thomas Mann on an unseasonably warm day

Very pleased to see Outcast reviewed in The Polyphony, which is a brilliant resource on the history and politics of medicine. Thanks for your kind words Arpan K Banerjee.

Not exactly Kenneth Clark's Civilisation is it.

Trump is the gift to South America's leftist leaders that keeps on giving (tweeting).

I don't want to be the 'why isn't the media covering this' guy, because that guy is awful, but it is weird that the clearing of Venezuelan airspace of civilian planes, at the behest of the US government, hasn't received much anglophone pickup.

Very happy to see Outcast on the Telegraph's books of the year list. www.telegraph.co.uk/books/author...

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...