Lmao

Wrote about the marvellous idrisi endemble for the guardian www.theguardian.com/music/2026/f...

Sectarian. The sheer contempt and entitlement in that word. Thousands of Muslim voters just voted for a white, (I think) working class non-Muslim woman because they feel abandoned by Labour and agree with her views on a huge foreign policy issue and on immigration policy

Scoop: Lebrecht gone from R3

van-magazine.com

Over on Instagram, Yuja Wang fires back at Norman Lebrecht…

RIP Eliane Radigue, a legend of slow sound

Asif Aziz's Criterion Capital halts mass eviction after London Centric uncovered what was going on. Hundreds of Londoners now receiving bizarre door-to-door visits blaming misinformation and being asked to record videos saying they don't want to be evicted. www.londoncentric.media/p/asif-aziz-...

Former UK PM Gordon Brown is providing - voluntarily and not for the first time - information to the police about abuses of power relating to the Epstein files. As PM Brown was briefed against by people such as Alistair Campbell and Peter Mandelson as being ‘psychologically flawed’ ….1/

Pardon

Sharing from a friend, a passage from the Leveson Inquiry regarding the British actor Denholm Elliott, who died of AIDS in 1992. Three years after her death, the News of the World journalist Paul McMullan did the following to his daughter—neither a celebrity nor even someone of public interest.

When the edible kicks in just as Knee Play 2 gets going and it could be Franky it could be very fresh and clean it could be it could get some gasoline shortest one so all these are the days my friends and these are the days my friends

Exclusive: Josh Simons claimed to be “surprised” and “furious” at a PR agency’s work to investigate journalists on his behalf. He had been personally involved in naming them to British intelligence officials and falsely linking them to pro-Russian propaganda. w/ @dansabbagh.bsky.social

I Never Thought The Leopards Would Eat My Face, sobs woman who wrote innumerable opinion columns about how there were reasonable concerns about how regulations banning leopards eating people’s faces endangered women

you're laughing? Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor got arrested on his birthday, and you're laughing?

prince to Andrew to “man in his sixties”

Okay, this is quite outstanding from Bedford Council.

Proposals to curb SLAPPs have been dropped from upcoming justice reforms by Labour due to fears of a backlash by lawyers. Campaigns say issue is being kicked into long grass, The Times reports www.thetimes.com/uk/law/artic...

The ban was justified by Yvette Cooper, who imposed it when she was Home Secretary, on the grounds that she knew some special secrets about PA the rest of us didn't: a shocking abuse of government privilege. She has never produced this "evidence", and we have reasons to believe it does not exist.

Palestine Action have WON their judicial review in the High Court! A massive victory for free speech, freedom of association and the right to protest. A massive defeat for the draconian attempts by Keir Starmer's government to curtail our fundamental rights.

It’s amazing how much Yvette Cooper gets away with on the basis of being a good committee chair a decade ago and knowing how to look ‘unimpressed’ and give a ‘details obsessed vibe’

A total, total humiliation for the government www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

Wow! Palestine Action win judicial review - Guardian report. This is a *big* legal win. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

A fascinating politician. Does not do the job, visibly and audibly not interested in the brief…bizarrely aggro about people pointing it out.

hell yeah for journalism

In @vanmusicmag.bsky.social on 12 Feb: my ranking/round-up of 345 Darius #Milhaud pieces! Over four months, I listened to or read as many of his 443 opus numbers as I could find. Today and tomorrow I’ll post highlights: as this is Milhaud, it’s going to be a LONG thread 1/

An essay I wrote for The Dial about Wikipedia's humanity in the age of AI informational slurry is out now!

Wikipedia’s survival has never been under greater threat. There’s the growing volume of anti-Wikipedia sentiment on the right. And who will need Wikipedia if they can get an AI summary? Imogen West-Knights on the advantage that humans have in keeping it alive: www.thedial.world/articles/new...

HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW: “.. In our in-progress research, we discovered that AI tools didn’t reduce work, they consistently intensified it.” hbr.org/2026/02/ai-d...

Benito is a threat b/c he makes art so alluring and enjoyable you want to understand everything about it and then you end up learning about sugar and slavery and colonialism and the Taínos and Hawaii and then you probably have some thoughts of your own, and that's why art is powerful and dangerous

When talking about righteous anger, worth remembering that the Labour Party has been supporting a genocide in the Middle East for more than two years.

UPDATE: I've had a response from the Cabinet Office! "the statistics cited ‘19.2 million British citizens registered with X and 10.8 million families using the platform’ were provided by OmniGov, the government's media buying agency, who received this data directly from X itself."

🔴 BREAKING: Labour Together paid controversial PR firm £30k to investigate journalists who were digging into how its undeclared funding Reporters from Sunday Times, Guardian and other outlets targetted *And* Morgan McSweeney knew about it Full story: democracyforsale.substack.com/p/exclusive-...

anne nails this. Another one bites the dust

Among those laid off by the Washington Post today was Michael Andor Brodeur, the paper's classical music critic: another blow to an invaluable yet increasingly precarious discipline.

In 2023, Leon Botstein couched Jeffrey Epstein as an embarrassing footnote. The newly-released documents tell a slightly different story.

…in 1842. Astonishing clickbait.

BREAKING on ft website: Lord Peter Mandelson leaked a sensitive UK government document to Jeffrey Epstein while he was business secretary that proposed £20bn of asset sales and revealed Labour’s tax policy plans www.ft.com/content/fdf7...

Chaslin's management page on IMG Artists has been deleted imgartists.com/roster/frede...

Worth remembering that something did happen: the journalist who revealed this died from a car bomb.

Some Sunday breaking news

Most of Epstein’s victims were either too frightened to come forward, or silenced through legal threats. Oh, and here’s a senior British politician giving Epstein tips on how to silence them

Feel very angry about all this on behalf of younger people. When you also factor in the catastrophic state of the housing market, it feels like everything is stacked against them, particularly young people without reasonably well-off parents. The political short-sightedness around it is shameful.

if you want to read a similar critique of the same book from two years ago, check out this VAN essay I wrote... van-magazine.com/mag/igor-lev...

I’m really quite surprised at the BBC website today. ‘Here is a video, some people say it does not show what it very obviously shows’ is not how you report this.

The Economist coverage is grim but this is exactly how it should be reported. economist.com/united-state...

I know some people are cynical about everything now and just say “eh, what do you expect” at every new low, but really this is just astonishing and outrageous, and I don’t think we should shrug at that www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

The New World asked me to speak to some British trans women about what life has been like for them over the past few years - here's what they had to say, in their own words: www.thenewworld.co.uk/marie-le-con...