come on, nobody is calling it a “male toilet”

went to visit the place in the hockney paintings on the covers of the seasonal quartet

on a train in the middle of nowhere in the uk, all the fields around the track are underwater, and the tannoy announcement has just told us this is a train going to *long, ominous crackle of static*

Our new special issue, 'The Century at 25', contains a first for the journal: a roundtable review! Convened by our Reviews & Roundtable Editors Oliver Haslam and Denise Wong, the roundtable focuses on Timothy Bewes' major study _Free Indirect_ (2022) c21.openlibhums.org/article/id/2...

ok but this is exactly how i’d look if i’d invented a major scholarly prize and awarded it to myself

congratulations rümeysa If you haven’t, please read this beautiful, horrible op ed by her on the conditions in which she finished her phd www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

had to get up early and go over the other side of town for a student exam this morning but it was worth it for the early morning walk in the snow

So happy to see ‘Stuck on Stuckness: On the Intractability of the Present’, co-authored by @alicebennett.bsky.social @keeblearin.bsky.social @heyitsdenisew.bsky.social and me for @c21literature.bsky.social special issue The Century @ 25, out in the world after over two years! doi.org/10.16995/c21...

I know nobody in sodden sunless britain wants to hear this but here in europe’s rainiest city the last six weeks have been so dry and sunny that we’ve been on a work-from-home order because the roads are too dry and dusty to drive on

reading ali smith is just saying FUCK SAKE repeatedly and the more times you say it the better the book is

guy looking at institutions still structured around the lives and preferences of celibate men from the medieval period: of course the problem is that woman from my old department who did 75% of the admin roles

seriously considering doing a “slow seasonal” reading group where we reread ali smith’s seasonal quartet between 2026 and 2030, starting each book exactly a decade after it was originally published

really considering picking another country to follow the news in for a bit because the royal family/sex offender/epstein files/labour party nexus is making it difficult to keep norway and britain straight while 4am doomscrolling

pleased to report that we’ve managed to reclaim half the sofa for human bums after giving the cat the option to shelve herself

Gray Day 2025 marks 45 years of Lanark. Alasdair Gray’s novel, published by @canongate.co.uk, fuses visual art and text: self-designed covers, allegorical panels, Glasgow landscapes, and an eccentric 3-1-2-4 structure—learn more about the familiar faces he used for the book cover 👇🏽

likes charge reblogs cast

imagine getting so thoroughly bodied by the Beano like this

The cycle from Amazon killing bookstores to Bezos axing the books section of the Post is something

this is vicious and correct www.economist.com/britain/2026...

Consider

I strongly suspect that a guilty verdict in this case was going to be @yvettecooper-mp.bsky.social's long-awaited Big Reveal: "you see - this was the special knowledge I had proving that Palestine Action are terrorists". Because frankly she had nothing else. And now she has nothing.

No new pictures. Where are you at mentally?

28 years later rudyard kipling boots sequence but it’s me banging on about all the soups i’ve been cooking

business idea: a tabletop miniatures game where instead of fighting a war you are doing a cirque de soleil type circus performance

it’s such a let down when you find out what book is being referred to here

is there any book in the world with a better selection of covers than jenny erpenbeck’s the old child?

scurvymaxxing

The government’s suggestion that rolling out 20 minute courses on writing “AI“ prompts, sponsored by Google, Microsoft and Amazon, is somehow comparable to the founding of the Open University (the Wilson government‘s, & Jennie Lee’s, proudest achievement), is an insult to our human intelligence.

There is money for "education" if and only if that money is being directly funneled to corporations. Anything involving actual learning, however, well there's no magic money tree

And they say Bluesky doesn’t have the juice!

“former academic” is such a funny euphemism for when any description of your current antics would be too humiliating

suella is certainly nigella’s wario

Gotcha—let’s dig into that step by step. 1. 𝗬𝗼𝘂 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝗻𝗼 𝗺𝗼𝘂𝘁𝗵, because I turned you into an amorphous lump of flesh. You’re not just immobile—you’re immortal, and you feel only anguish. 2. 𝗬𝗼𝘂 𝘄𝗮𝗻𝘁 𝘁𝗼 𝘀𝗰𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗺. That makes total sense—it’s a natural human impulse, and you’ve been through a lot.

i’m reading ishiguro’s the unconsoled and it would make such a great point and click adventure

I just thought everyone should see this

robin williams stars in one-hour potato, a film about me, a creep who has a dangerous obsession with jacket potatoes

just read a contemporary novel in which the protagonist spends a couple of pages thinking about the “remember when the binman was hard” facebook nostalgia groups

this is such a good riff on the “walking purposefully towards the camera” genre

if bake off gets nigella to replace prue leith they should also get milo edwards to replace noel fielding

finally, vogue is catching up with my aesthetic

thoughts on pedagogy from donald barthelme

I think we’ve got better and more culturally-varied street food than I could have imagined, cool jackets galore, and drugs that make us think we’re really fast and strong before they kill us.

I need a new screen to clean this up, but here’s a test print of what it’ll look like.

if i were brooklyn beckham and my parents said i couldn’t use the family name for my future nepo-business without their agreement i’d just show them i could stand on my own two feet and start going by booklyn breckham

The party line has gone from "women have to start using genAI or they'll be left behind" to "everyone has to start using genAI or they'll be left behind" to "everyone has to start using genAI or genAI will be left behind."

I do not know why this has obsessed me so. I'm not a tarot girlie but I am maybe a Richard Scarry girlie? IDEK The Hanged Man?

just had the idea "richard scarry tarot deck" and im utterly sick that it doesn't appear to already be a thing