Love these pics from Uganda (Jinja district), where groups of women have embraced cricket as a way to stay physically active and socially connected later in life. 📸 Luis Tato

In Anglo-Saxon architecture, Roman stone meets a timber way of thinking: stone becomes articulated into the Saxon timber-centric world view. I suppose, in this way, it is also a memory as well as a material. Here at All Saints', Earls Barton. 📸 my own.

My brother wrote a beautiful tribute to our Dad who passed last week — Voy Ilic: nickilicphysio.substack.com/p/a-life-bui...

“How could this week possibly be worse than the last? Oh…” www.ft.com/content/fd1d...

Just finished (for now) a major project. A BlueSky thread describing the key distinctions I use to bring clarity to my own thinking as a press critic. It's long (28 slides) but I tried to make it worth the trip. It ends with the people of Minnesota and their version of "citizen journalism."

"When in doubt, draw a distinction." Not sure where he got it, but in grad school one of my teachers taught me that. This (long) thread is about the key distinctions I rely on as a critic. There's a Twitter version from 2021. This one builds on that one. I will post them one at a time. Ready?

From 2023: "As a career criminal with deep ties in business, media, and organized crime as well as access to classified information, Trump now has more leverage over the American government than they do over him." sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/servants-o...

“In the next few days a pall fell over the country. The quiet was chilling. We all knew that a bloodbath had taken place, though we didn’t know its true magnitude and perhaps never will.” A report from inside Iran by the novelist Salar Abdoh: www.equator.org/articles/the...

This piece is… scary: www.forbes.com/sites/amirhu...

On Polymarket, ‘privileged’ users made millions betting on war strikes and diplomatic strategy. What did they know beforehand? www.theguardian.com/society/ng-i...

The age of the consumerist arts. Cuisine, fashion. These are deeplye valuable artes, but thei are also extremelye easye for the megarich to buy their waye into. Museums, theatre, literature are out of favor wyth oligarches who prefer art that doth placidly decorate their tables and eventes.

The basic fallacy in chasing votes by being "tough on immigration" is that the modal American's position on the issue is "Deport the Bad ones and keep the Good ones," and they alone know who is which, and that simply does not translate into workable policy. So this kind of gestapo stuff (1/2)

Heard the sad news about Sly Dunbar on the school run of all places. I don’t even really know where to start with his immeasurable contribution to music and, well, everything, but watching him at work is best. Here’s Sly and Robbie in action with Black Uhuru at the Rainbow in Finsbury Park in 1981

Andrej Tarkovskij talking to a small bird, Paris, 1986.

#AtlasNetwork in #Auspol Thanks to Gareth Hutchens #NZpol www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01...

Happy birthday to John Cooper Clarke. Here's Beasley Street, performed with The Invisible Girls including Vini Reilly on guitar. It's taken from the 1980 Granada TV documentary "Ten Years in an Open Necked Shirt" which you can watch in full at 📺▶️ youtu.be/tYK1-AJ4BSU

This woman speaks for the majority of Americans. 🙌🙏🫶👇

Verification (establishing truth), Deliberation (arguing about it), and Accountability (binding power to it). When these work, you have substance. When they break, you slide into performance, and eventually, simulation, and people recognise this, even if they don't use a shared terminology.

State terror has arrived, by M. Gessen, NYTimes gift article link. "It’s only natural that our brains struggle to find logic in what we are seeing. There is a logic, and this logic has a name. It’s called state terror." www.nytimes.com/2026/01/24/o...

Four images of 10 years of transformation in Paris: 2016–2026. @annehidalgo.bsky.social will no longer be mayor in March 2026, but this vision of a Paris for life must live on. Cities are places of solidarity, kindness and well-being in an increasingly authoritarian and brutal world. We need it!

White Americans are learning once again that the *only* thing that has ever made you safe from fascism is being willing to sacrifice non-white people. That is your contract with white supremacy. "Give us someone else so it won't be you."

ARTE

For Jim Moir/Vic Reeves' birthday, a reminder it's thirty years this year since this advert.

On a downtown street in Minneapolis, as people stream out from the massive march, Mary Tyler Moore says “fuck ice.”

For the regime and right-wing billionaires, the value of national media is what it *doesn't* produce.

🚀🚀🚀

If you've heard me cite the Yeats poem, The Second Coming, to describe what Trump is doing then you'll enjoy this little bit of genius as much as I did...

Jean Phillippe Charbonnier, Girl and Cat, Roubaix, France, 1958

state-sponsored child trafficking

Isaac Herzog. Gosh, that name's familiar. Is that the same Herzog who justified the collective punishment of Palestinians? "It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. This rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved, it’s absolutely not true." Surely we wouldn't welcome *him* here.

"Many are criminals without borders who have moved from hijacking businesses to hijacking nations."

For comparison, that is one in five residents in the seventh-most populous city in Europe displaced in three weeks

Carney: "American hegemony in particular helped provide public goods, a stable financial system... this bargain no longer works. Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition... recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as a weapon. Tariffs as leverage ... "

Here's @ronnisalt.bsky.social. "The dark arts"

Time to start collecting evidence to get that Advance group proscribed as a hate group. They won't be able to help themselves based on the quality of the clowns in it. Leopards and faces makes for the best statements

Lovely piece about Poems on the Underground at 40. If you’ve ever spotted a poem you’d like a poster of, you can order one for the cost of postage from @poetrysociety.org.uk here: poetrysociety.org.uk/product-cate... #poetrysky #ukpoets www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

“The collapse of the AI bubble is going to be ugly…AI is the asbestos in the walls of our technological society, stuffed there with wild abandon by a finance sector & tech monopolists run amok.“ Read this article by @pluralistic.net.web.brid.gy. Whether you agree with it all or not, it’s important.

The autobiography concludes its section on this conversation interestingly: "I [Harry Belafonte] felt as if our moorings were unhinging. "Damn, Martin! If that's what you think, what would you have us do?" I asked. He gave me a look. "I guess we're just going to have to become firemen.""

“But what deeply troubles me now is that for all the steps we've taken toward integration, I've come to believe that we are integrating into a burning house."  Dr. King said this famous quote on March 27th, 1968, mere days before his murder. But the context around the quote is interesting...

MLK Jr. said America suffers not just from "the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people." Remember this.

Puffins talking shop // A couple buds shooting the breeze in Elliston, Newfoundland. #puffin #puffins #photography #bird #birds #birdphotography #seabirds #wildlife #wildlifephotography #travel #travelphotography

Córy Doctorow with another verbal bullseye: pluralistic.net/2026/01/13/n...

Eduard Widmer, The Sultan Ahmed Mosque (aka The Blue Mosque), Istanbul,

"Some workers work indoors. Some workers work outdoors. Some work in unmarked Chevy Tahoes, doing jobs that Fascist Busytown residents are encouraged to ignore."

Turn off the noise and the feeds, click through to this and hit play, close your eyes and just imagine a better world for ten minutes.

every time someone says they love their job i think stockholm syndrome

I wrote about the rise of prediction markets, which have FINALLY made it possible for crypto bros to cosplay as war profiteers while getting fleeced by actual war profiteers

International inappropriate touching of exactly the kind parents warn their toddlers against. (I've always thought that rape was violent invasion of sovereign bodies at the human scale; maybe invasion is rape of sovereign bodies at the nation-state scale.)

I Photoshop Paddington into a movie, TV show, or pop culture until I forget: Day 1765