I wanted to repost this as soon as it came out. Anna Ciaunica's work is so interesting to me, I think she's right.

I just wanted to say that I hate people saying 'financials' (financial details, accounts) and 'socials' (social media accounts).

I haven't been on here much. The top inch of my phone screen has stopped working, thereby weaning me off all technology that involves pressing 'send' or 'post', ruining my career as a carrier pigeon and most of my friendships.

fold one dish

So love wobbegongs. Everything is good about the wobbegong. Its name. Its flattened Oscar the Grouch face. Its frondy bits. Its lazy life as a hungry rug. And it’s a shark. Outstanding animal 10/10

Do I know anyone working at TNA over the next couple of weeks, who'd be willing to call up and take a snap or two of this document for me? discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C5...

I knew it was out there. Me in an am dram Arcadia when I was 18. RIP Tom Stoppard, sorry we murdered you.

A polymathic visionary, Sergio Pitol (1933-2018) was a towering figure in Mexican literary history, whose work is highly influential, while also being singularly his own. As the writer Daniel Saldaña París puts it: “he is a literature entirely of himself.”

To begin with today, happy 117th anniversary to this entirely reasonable cat

LOVE to see an F-bomb in the FT, many thanks to the OBR www.ft.com/content/e67c...

I think it is very good that the BBC is defining metaphors used in politics.

Missing from the book piracy debate is any mention of predatory academic publishing conglomerates like Elsevier, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, De Gruyter Brill et al: all of which are massively profitable and don't pay anyone (authors, peer-reviewers) who made the bulk of their money extorting libraries

Really had to pause over this image that came up when I tried to look up some quite prosaic information about a gym. Like an AI borked version of Klee's angel of history. 10/10.

When will it stop raining? Asking for a cat.

Have you ever seen a cooler book?

A radio programme like the Shipping Forecast but it’s called Bin Day and it just reads out every single council in the country’s bin schedule

Hello, my name is Olivia’s neighbour and I like standing in the street banging my silly little bin like a drum at midnight.

The 2018 World Chess Championships logo was something else.

To add to our list of wonderful public lectures this term, we're delighted to announce our next Professor of #Poetry lecture by A.E. Stallings @aestallings.bsky.social Rhyme as Experiment/ Rhyme as Alchemy 26 Nov, 5.30pm Examination Schools, Oxford ALL WELCOME! No booking required.

It has been a nice year for me in which a lot of good things have happened, but my highlight is definitely my children saying I reminded them of the dad in Danny, Champion of the World.

How ill do you have to be before people stop telling you to have a whiskey?

A friend told me he had been clearing out his gran’s house. The most amazing thing he found there was this knitted effigy of the man who had run off and abandoned my friend’s pregnant aunt. Into the effigy had been stuck twenty knitting needles: one for every year since the man had vanished.

It is a shame that every time I get ill the whole infrastructure of the area collapses in empathy, because it means I have to listen to diggers and drills instead of resting.

I once went to a wine tasting evening at an Oxford college. My answers to ‘what does it taste like?’ were wrong, I was told: the scope of appropriate vocabulary was quite small: ‘cherry, vanilla, tobacco’ and not my ‘satchel, pining, storm’. I was already seeing things other people weren’t. Then…

Enjoyable exchange from a trashy ‘if you got a PhD and left academia what do you do now?’ thread

What might the category of brain fog (cf. trauma) open up and what might it foreclose? Thanks @dialogueshg.bsky.social for the opportunity to respond to @davidjbissell.bsky.social's article on brain fog/'being out of it' journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Anyone with a USS pension, do you know what ‘retirement income builder pension credit’ means? Is this the amount you get yearly when you retire? Another inscrutable letter

I love the fact that ‘sublingual’ just means literally under the tongue, and not a set of primal noises or telepathy.

Writers, friends. For research for my new novel, I need to see the Marie-Antoinette exhibition at the V &A. sadly it is sold out for when I am in London except for members of V &A. I'll be in UK 19-21 Nov in case anyone can help. DM me. Mercciiiiii. Please RT.

Ever wondered what stories lie behind Kew’s collections? 🌍 Today’s the day to find out – it’s #AskAnArchivist Day! Our archivists are here to answer your questions about rare books, explorers’ journals and the care of centuries-old plant records. Ask below 👇 #AskAnArchivist #KewArchives

I find this a really interesting debate in philosophy/science, and this explains some of the key positions (though it is a critical essay):

looking up the types of residence cards you can get in France for a piece and HONKING at this part of the drop-down list, from the official government website (!!) www.service-public.gouv.fr/particuliers...

Recalled an email and it actually worked.

I've lost track of how many people over the past years I've told to watch for Elizabeth Scott-Baumann's next book coming out, and now it's here. Proper good ideas: press.princeton.edu/books/paperb...

Multi-generational vulture nests hold 700 years of human artifacts. www.popsci.com/environment/...

Complained to one of my elderly neighbours about my local council gripe for so long *she* made excuses to get going. I just thought I should tell everyone that I have broken the natural order and space/time is about to collapse.

Here is the first clear photograph of Andromeda, the closest galaxy to our Milky Way. It was taken by Welshman Isaac Roberts in 1888 #Astronomy 🔭 #Science 🧪 www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

What on earth is a ‘coach-heir’? What a pretentious academic title, I think to myself for twenty minutes, before I see it written down.

Ah, the perfectly-chosen ending to a day like today: standing on a wasp.

Do you remember when everyone was into tardigrades for a year or two?

Jean-Luc Godard => conjugal dread

They’re saying the fictional character I am most like is the dad from Danny the Champion of the World.

Just removed the date label from an old book and discovered that someone has drawn a design for a teapot that can serve either tea or poison how's your day going?

I've taken on the habit of having cream in my coffee. Every time.

Pretty words on stones, lightning, etc.

These beautiful icicles formed on the surface of a frozen body of water, c.1900 (Powerhouse Museum, Sydney)

We’ve long known Samuel Pepys was a sleazebag, but Guy de la Bedoyere’s new edition of his journal reveals it was way worse than that — he was a relentless sexual predator www.theguardian.com/books/2025/a...

This will be really good, and I hardly ever think that about academic books.

Could someone who gets the New Yorker send me the Patricia Lockwood piece?