the gents were here all last month taking photographs of everything and measurements. nice lads but all patently hard as nails. they are even, in what i think is a lovely touch, retaining some of our errors in alphabetisation - so ian mcewan's "sweet tooth" will be shelved next to adam mars-jones

Colin Bramwell’s FOWER PESSOAS has won the 2025 Duas Leabhair na Gàidhealtacht / Highland Book Prize “Colin Bramwell puts all four of [Fernando] Pessoa’s heteronyms into a present-day Scots-language vernacular, & so creates a parochial Pessoa for our own times” www.highlandbookprize.org.uk/winner/

The best analogy to the conversion therapy Bill would be a Bill that banned smacking children "unless the adult believed that the little blighter deserved it."

If only these Scottish football pundits were asking questions about Morocco's occupation of Western Sahara.

More 10-year-olds say they want puppies than parents do. What's behind the divide?

In the Search Room at Manchester Central Library, scrolling through newspaper pages from 1792. It is quiet, cool, sprayed with dappled light from St Peter's Square. On the otherwise bare walls, a large black & white photograph of the Buzzcocks.

Blue, mmm, stay.

But that is exactly how the suffragettes operated. With a nationwide organisation of sleeper cells of arsonists and bombers. I’m gratefully people have reached out and referenced my work today. I remain (I believe) the only academic expert on the terrorism of the suffragettes. Links below:

Moor Mother: taster for an album of poems, to be available at concerts after 28 September: moormother.bandcamp.com/album/hundre...

The article explains why people are angry about data centres. The picture, I guess, is there to suggest how you get rid of them. www.commonweal.scot/articles/mag...

We scattered our parents' and grandparents' ashes in a place they loved and left Beethoven to keep them company.

'Under the slogan “Drop Bass Not Bombs,” thousands danced and waved glow sticks while demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, due to the government’s escalating push towards rearmament and close relationship with U.S. President Donald Trump' popularresistance.org/in-japan-rav...

As Haiti and Scotland prepare to meet in the men’s football World Cup, it might be a good time to remember some other times representatives of the two countries came together on a historic occasion. www.bulldozia.com/2026/06/12/w...

As Haiti and Scotland prepare to meet in the men’s football World Cup, it might be a good time to remember some other times representatives of the two countries came together on a historic occasion. www.bulldozia.com/2026/06/12/w...

There's probably never been a better time to remind you that when David Hockney first took his Mum to California she remarked 'all this lovely weather and nobody puts their washing out'.

Suddenly thought what a powerful image an abandoned data centre is. Plants growing through it. Cracked concrete. And we’ll see it soon. Either when the bubble bursts, catastrophically, or they win and make the planet unfeasible for humans to live on. Redolent and inevitable.

Academic writing should be addressed neither to the public nor to other academics. It should be addressed to a single interlocutor with whom you have a petty rivalry and whose work you are trying to discredit

'Opening the World Cup' does sound like something in Norse myth that would cause the sundering of the earth and release of all evil

On the Legislation (Definitions of Woman and Man) Amendment Bill currently under consideration in New Zealand. A biologist speaks. 'If you want ‘biologically based’, learn some biology.' substack.com/inbox/post/1...

I don't quite trust this report. I suspect FIFA's objection may be because of the Polish flag incorporated in the design, which actually makes a more interesting story www.theguardian.com/football/202... 1/2

In the second part of a tribute to Steve Barrow, Steve Barker selects ten tracks from the catalogue of Blood & Fire, the reggae reissue label helmed by Barrow and underwritten by Simply Red’s Mick Hucknall and Elliot Rashman www.thewire.co.uk/audio/tracks...

Steve Barrow (29 September 1945–30 May 2026) Steve Barker gives a personal appreciation of the reggae historian and label runner who has died aged 80. www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/e...

Luke Dunne takes the train to Munich, following the tracks of Bertolt Brecht's 'Of Poor B. B.' (1922), 'a poem of transit written in transit' in which 'one catches a glimpse of a road English-language poetry did not take' thelondonmagazine.org/essay-tap-da...

Saddened to awake to the news of the death of musician, artist, and all-round good guy, Brian McFie. The world's just got a wee bit less joyful and colourful...

'Colonial French officers used the call to signal infantry units to advance on the enemy during battle. Enslaved ancestors who served in France’s armies made the phrase theirs—just as they claimed the land and turned Saint-Domingue into the First Black Republic.' haitiantimes.com/2025/11/22/g...

In the run up to Scotland's game on Sunday, the Herald, in its infinite wisdom, chooses to run a story about what it calls 'voodoo' in Haiti's qualification for the World Cup in 1974. www.heraldscotland.com/sport/261787...

Nigel Farage Listens to the News

Beguiling glitchy orchestral music with gorgeous piano solo: dragonseyerecordings.bandcamp.com/track/voices...

Pleased to see that my MP @benlake.bsky.social and his three Plaid colleagues have signed this motion. But barely 10% of Labour MPs.

Elaine Mitchener, with Elizabeth Kenny on lute, sings Purcell, Dowland, Robert Johnson (both of them), Ellington, Dankworth, Dylan, Armatrading, Marley and a glorious 'Joker Hysterical Face' by Mark E Smith (at 32'): www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

Georges Perec, Modes d'Emploi: exhibition, BNF François Mitterand, Paris, 13 Oct to 14 Feb: 75.agendaculturel.fr/exposition/g...

Every time I see a headline like this I wonder if withholding the name of the place really increases the chances of readers clicking for more details. Ditto concealing the name of an (often only vaguely) prominent person. Is it just a hunch, a habit, a trend, or has robust research been undertaken?

Autocorrect just gave me Gérard Monkey Hopkins.

At the Peabody Essex Museum, a first-of-its-kind exhibition on sculptor Edmonia Lewis honors the pathbreaking artist’s Black and Indigenous ancestries.

I do wonder if the audience for this is Trump and Blair’s US funders rather than the U.K. or labour www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

"Most surprisingly, the Norman Conquest of 1066 appears to have been largely an elite process." Scientists once again riding to the rescue of historians, who had previously assumed 1066 was a largely peasant-driven enterprise. theconversation.com/beyond-anglo...

The markets are so ... emotional!

'Is that a warship or something? Are you worshipping something?' Ian Anderson's orchestration of Moor Mother's third album, Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes, is a triumph: www.youtube.com/watch?v=AF1v...

What is so fascinating about men and AI is how much it mirrors men and patriarchal relationships with women in general. It's like the author of this book is Adam. ChatGPT / AI is Eve. Sent by God to be a servant and companion, but instead, he was seduced by AI's apples of fake information.

This - finely crafted - opening salvo from Hugh MacDiarmid always makes me smile. (From Scottish Scene, 1934: archive.org/details/mac-... - different edition)

I like the idea floated here that J H Prynne's poetry often reads like a homophonic translation of a text unknown to us: vamoul.substack.com/p/bank-on-th...

Colston looking good. (M Shed, Bristol).

A neuroscientist on the radio just called the brain a lump of electrified paté.

Frederick Douglass was not only a perceptive writer about music; he was also an accomplished singer and competent violinist. All very much in evidence during his tour of Britain and Ireland in 1847: www.bulldozia.com/douglass-in-...

In 1985, Welsh historian Gwyn Alf Williams described Labour majorities standing ‘like Aneurin Bevan’s memorial stones’. Forty years on, the stones have finally been eroded ✍️Nye Davies wp.me/p8Mk4U-1kQw

Interesting remarks on American TV travel shows, which are now all about 'ancestral homelands': 'The host's own ethnic background became the organizing premise' in contrast to the 'older move of going to places [s/he] had no claim on & trying to listen': fugitivemargins.substack.com/p/the-end-of...

When you go to the pharmacy with your prescription and they tell you the item is permanently out of stock, ask them if that's the drug or just the size of tablet. Because they won't necessarily think to tell you.

The Runaway Train. After voting in Maenclochog yesterday we paid a visit to the grave of Thomas Evans, victim of a tragic accident 150 years ago this week. He was one of several railway workers who jumped from a goods train coming down the hill from Rosebush when the brakes failed. 1/3

'There is not a single book, in which, by dissecting it in this manner, sentence by sentence, & passage by passage, you may not discover immorality, blasphemy & treason ... I would advise you at once to lay the axe to the roots of the tree, & to bring an indictment against the alphabet itself.' 1/2

Ok. It appears you have never paid attention to how people post photos on here? The 2 photos side by side/4 photo grid joke format is a visual vernacular born of the limitations of the form that this idea would absolutely ruin for no good reason. Nobody wants this to be Instagram.