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"To say that someone has a strong will means that she desires fiercely. Or it means that she has conquered her desires and is no longer their servant... The person who breaks his diet wishes for two things at once: to eat and to refrain." harpers.org/archive/2026...

great piece on gwendoline riley - including the salutary reminder that scorn and contempt allow us to retain our dignity at uncertain costs www.bookforum.com/print/3301/g...

Grammar of DiscontentGwendoline Riley breaks free of her phantoms – Hermione Hobywww.bookforum.com

browsing an absolutely wonderful anthology of Akkadian literature, and I find, as ever, the universality of human experience so moving. a 4,000 year old incantation baked into clay, intended to help ease a difficult birth - "bring out the sealed one ... let him come out and see the light!"

TIL that "omicron" in the greek alphabet means "little o" and "omega" means "large o." little and large; micro and mega

nice argument. however, i've already depicted myself as the chad boethius, smiling over my hindu-arabic numerals, and you as the soyjack pythagoras, struggling to match my calculations with your reckoning board

very much enjoyed that the bible of relativity, the 1973 textbook Gravitation by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler, ends with this helpful illustration:

What a fascinating story - Fernstedt is like a character from a Joseph Mitchell piece - the homeless man (and former journalist) living in the porch of the UKs most expensive house www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

It was Britain’s most expensive house. Why is its only resident a homeless man who lives on the porch?2-8A Rutland Gate had jewel-encrusted bathroom suites and gold wastepaper bins in its 45 rooms, but has lain empty for years. With many people desperate for secure housing, what does the abandonment o...www.theguardian.com

advertising has really reached some transcendent peak over on X, the everything app

for some reason i had not seen this animation of DESI before and i find it very beautiful - it's amazing how we've essentially recreated a compound eye, with a focal plane formed of 5,000 individually articulated fiberoptic strands, all shimmering under the night's sky

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had a conversation with a writer friend and we concluded that the worst thing that could happen as a result of AI text generation - the very worst - is if people lose the will to write; if we begin to believe that there is simply no need, no reason to try, and elect to stay mute

i i often wake up early against my will, around 4am, and response is to soften the blow by making pancakes, strong coffee, and listen to something soothing, usually radio 3's The Essay. anyway, i can really recommend this recent one on insect noises: www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

BBC Radio 3 - The Essay, The Insect Singers, 1. Let Those Bugs SingThe Essay celebrates the sheer musicality and beautiful noise of Earth’s insect singers.www.bbc.co.uk

entranced by this unfinished canvas from Turner. the subject is unknown but i like the interpretation that it was inspired by Shelley's Masque of Anarchy, which reframes the biblical rider on a pale horse as the anarchic violence of the state unleashed at the Peterloo Massacre

bought a huge bottle of dr bonner’s almond shower wash on a whim and now realising I’m going to spend the rest of summer smelling like battenberg

someone told me this today and I didn’t believe them: the dashboard of a car originally referred to a barrier at the front of carriages that shielded the occupants from dirt “dashed” by the horse’s hooves

lol - "I am sometimes inspired by dreams, but before this sentence too is corner and torn to pieces by the experts, I hasten to report that they are my own dreams"" bsky.app/profile/sara...

re: guardian top 100 novels, i'm really curious what the equivalent top 100 from le monde, el pais, la repubblica, etc, would be — and then what novels would have the greatest overlap (proust? mann? hugo? the latter weirdly not appearing in the guardian at all...)

just remembered some of my favourite recent poetry: journals of medical students dosed with ketamine and accompanying explanatory notes

"Eatherly began filming himself berating black people in public. It’s a strange way to make a living, even in 2026. But it’s not unique to Eatherly." the odious, depressing nexus of resurgent racism and an online ecosystems that incentivizes extreme content: www.thebulwark.com/p/the-rights...

The Right’s Worst New Star Just Shot SomeoneMeet “Chud the Builder.”www.thebulwark.com

carlo rovelli making an argument against the hard problem of consciousness, which I might mushily summarize as: it's all qualia, therefore nothing is www.noemamag.com/there-is-no-...

There Is No ‘Hard Problem Of Consciousness’ | NOEMAConsciousness is not separate from the physical world — our “soul” is of the same nature as our body and any other phenomenon of the world.www.noemamag.com

"What is different here is the drone unit commander mentions repeatedly that there is no time lag in the video link [...] Operators can be based in another area, or on the other side of the world." - how long until we see offshored drone warfare? www.forbes.com/sites/davidh...

Ukrainian FPV Operators Pilot Drones From Long RangeUkrainian drone pilots use a remote system to operate FPVs, bombers and other drones from long distances with negligible time delay. This could change drone warfare.www.forbes.com