These are great fun - I like the variety of styles and difficulty. Recommended. Nice easy one to start the new season… Thinky Dailies 3-1 The Journey Begins Solved in 0:14 thinkygames.com/dailies/puzz...

Just finished this wonderfully funny, smart, sad book. Highly recommended. 'Slyly sophisticated' is bang on. Love the cleverly layered metatextual elements. Love the two main characters. Love the endless descriptions of food. And the ending is heartbreaking. Leaves you with a lot to think about...

Love this bit on Ai from the Royal Society. A classic case of the probability engine getting itself in a mess and revealing its complete lack of understanding

Laughed at this image for 10 entire minutes

I have friends who would consider this opinion sacrilege but... have to agree. But despite having a fair bit of filler, there's also plenty of pure gold - All My Little Words is quite simply one of the finest pop songs ever crafted... youtu.be/eo8vW_0H_Kg?...

Look, plantar fascitis sucks but I think this guy has bigger issues going on

I’m absolutely living for the passive-aggressive shade M&S is throwing at ‘gender critical’ transphobes! 👏🏻💕😘👌🏻

Excellent puzzle as ever. Blog by me now up at fifteensquared fifteensquared.net/2026/05/31/f...

A lot of people from around the world are about to experience the dark side of the USA.

I did a thread on 15 minute cities on X which went so viral I ended up in the Times and on BBC Radio. I thought I'd repeat it here... This was my parents house in Coventry. They bought it in 1965 and it was my home throughout the 1970s & 80s. My mum lived there until 2021. It was a happy home. 1/22

Saw this huge mf of a fly buzzing round my home office. Alarming. Managed to capture it then looked it up on the internet for identification… turns out they don’t bite and they’re pollinators, so I let it out the window to go about its good work… www.naturespot.org/species/pell...

Most of the letters: "Even as an avid reader, I was dismayed to see your list featured Ulysses & Proust which only pointyheaded wankers & poofs pretend to read. Couldn't the Guardian have given the Best Novel prize to something everyone enjoys, like a nice pint or a packet of cheese & onion crisps"

Mum’s selling the family home so I’ve been clearing the loft of 40 years worth of accumulated crap. Found my old Commodore 64 that I thought my parents had chucked years ago! Not sure that cassette deck will still work mind…

The kind you find in a second hand store.

Remember, don’t buy a cow, or a car, and expect your city to give you someplace to park it. #UrbanTruth

So what happens when Reform take over your local council? This. #KentCountyCouncil

Park a 2-ton private SUV on public space? No problem. 🚗 Suggest a bike lane on that exact same space? All hell breaks loose. 🚲 As our cities work tirelessly to build safe bicycle lanes and create better streets, the automotive industry is actively working against us by supersizing vehicles.

go to see my show next february

What a day to pick to hire a van with no aircon to help my mum shift some furniture… to make matters worse, it doesn’t have DAB either!

There are days when I miss being an editor. I loved writing headlines. Whoever did this, I hope they took the rest of the day off.

Ok I've designed an LLM prompt to make Google AI just give you a list of links. It's longer than you might think because it kept ignoring the instructions. This is efficient. This is The Future™

Glad we cleared that up... Sir Kazuo Ishiguro keeping the secret to a great book under lock and key 🤔🔐 What do you think makes a great book?

Slept badly. And that's my excuse for being so dozy this morning that it took me far, far too long to understand why ARCH was not the correct solution to the clue 'Bird missing front part of foot (4)' in the Times crossword... 🤦 #thebirdsandthetrees

So much about this has me screaming into my motonormativity cushion. Why further subsidise all the wealthy people who drive? Why NOT subsidise the poorer people who don't drive?

Just picked up Polly Barton’s new novel - What am I, a deer? Best opening sentence I’ve read in a while. Never knew I could so strongly empathise with the inner turmoil of a 12-year-old girl pretending to be Celine Dion in front of her whole school 😂 Strong start #nowreading

Funny things still happen over at the bad place This guy put a prompt in his LinkedIn and now AI recruiters are writing him in Old English and calling him "my lord"

Not that anyone asked for my opinion but here are my ten (not necessarily in this order): The Remains Of The Day Middlemarch Howard’s End Cat’s Cradle The Long Goodbye Parade’s End Pride & Prejudice Riddley Walker Troubles Perfume

I am once again thinking of the French girl attempting to say "Burger".

Nation of Language doing The Boss. Uncanny how damn right this sounds. Just works really well as a cover. I love it... youtu.be/lgDAUwMNKxI?...

Signed.

Let the 30,000 Games begin: www.theguardian.com/crosswords/c...

God it makes me cross. Fuckers. Awful, rotten fuckers. Apply this to pretty much whatever you like.

Four months sober and counting, cheers!

The "famous" fishmonger hasn't sold a single haddock for a long time. He is the boss of a Newcastle tech company called Grid Smarter Cities and a "parking campaigner" who lost his case in the High Court back in 2010. Why Harron's opinion on any subject could be of public interest, only The O knows.

Bargain ebook recommendation: Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte is currently 99p for Kindle and Kobo. Easily my favourite book I read last year. Dazzlingly brilliant writing and very, very funny. Made me cringe hard at times but I couldn't put it down! www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/...

Barbara Pym's wonderful Quartet In Autumn is the subject of @thebookerprizes.com May spotlight - possibly my fave of hers, more poignant than her earlier books but just as funny and perceptive as the likes of Excellent Women... highly recommended (by me!) thebookerprizes.com/features/mon...

I’ve been hearing so much anger and disappointment from frontline workers about the BBC investigation into fraudulent asylum claims. One of the most damning responses has come from one of the experts they interviewed, solicitor Ana Gonzalez. It’s really worth reading her response in full:

Raise your hand if you want to at least VISIT the Land of Boobies.

Astonishing end to the marathon. Wow!

What do you get if you cross an anagram with a joke? A kind of joyous, eager magic that wows at any hour. #anagram

"He liked I expect the idea of effortless excellence, and being unable to combine the two has settled for the one he could be sure of" Helen DeWitt - The Last Samurai #nowreading

Pope Leo has lost the Protestants, I repeat Pope Leo has lost the Protestants, this is unpreced— <wait my producer is just whispering something in my ear> Apparently this is precedented

Great list from someone who clearly knows his stuff. Glad to see Duck Amuck included - my all-time fave (these things are highly subjective of course but I’d have to make a place for ‘Bugs and Thugs’). Need to investigate the ones I’m not familiar with - including the one in number one spot…

Thinking that taking a day off work is "childish" is some real corporate brain-poisoned baby shit actually

"The sweat wis lashing oafay Stephen Dedaluis; he wis trembling. Ah wis jist sitting thair, focusing oan the telly, tryin no tae notice stately, plump Buck Mulliganame, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.”

Ironically the BBC stumbled on a really important story: Desperate asylum seekers being forced to turn to fraudulent fee-charging “advisors” to navigate a system that is intentionally impossibly baroque and from which all sources of free advice have been removed. But no: they chose Fake Gay Panic.

"My search for the abstract novel has, of course, forced me to consider, appreciate, be seduced by, and employ nonsense." —Percival Everett