Alex Rhys-Taylor

big foot wearing a leather jacket riding through a sandalwood forest

male grooming products that purportedly smell like big foot wearing a leather jacket riding a motorbike through a sandalwood forest smoking a cigar.

i’m not saying that they’re the cause of all the world’s ills. but they’re not helping things either.

how do you teach about the emergence of the modern nation state? with 40 year old pop cultural references. that’s how.

Happy New Academic Year! To get things rolling, we hosted the first School of Global Change Symposium - Excellent contributions from Sociology, Anthropology, History, Politics and Law academics and students 💥!

From Horses to Cane Rats: Meat, Moral Panics and Race | 4 | Food and M The conflation of the horse-meat scandal with both myths about Romanian savagery and ‘Little England’s’ distrust of European bureaucracy were, however,

www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/mon... Xenophobic swan-eating panic has happened before and it’ll happen again. Here’s your primer for all migrant-based meat madness.

can’t remember who i was talking to about ‘Your Party’ last month, but whoever it was… i told you so.

i think the smartest people i know are also the best gossips.

i’m thinking a lot about olfaction and postmodernity. i guess i’ve been thinking about this forever really. at least since i read baudrillard’s ‘cool memories’. but maybe, just maybe, i’m going to finally write something about it.

we can never be modern.

for a londoner, the number of DRIVERLESS CARS in san francisco is mind blowing.

i know people say londoners are cold and unfriendly. but try walking around at 04.55am. everybody i just saw said ‘good morning’ or nodded/chin lift. there’s a shared camaraderie in the last hour of dark.

i can believe.

i dunno. maybe the alternatives of Grent or Kentwich were just too much for a vanilla comms team.

the latest evidence of end times? needing a subscription to watch pétanque championships.

a black and white photo of a bald man in a suit and tie scratching his head . ALT: a black and white photo of a bald man in a suit and tie scratching his head .

1 day into term and the secondary school kids have found multiple hacks for the ‘phone vaults’ the school shelled out £00000s for.

power, it seems, is everywhere.

the passive aggressive circulation of screenshots via whatsapp trying to prove which day school starts again.

it’s an annual event that i enjoy spectating.

typoos. urgh.

when life gives you 🍋, 🥒 and 🍺, this is what you should make.

i made pickle juice lemonade. family have taken this as exemplary evidence of why you shouldn’t do everything the algorithm tells to you too.

in contrast i have turned it into a delicious alcohol free pickle juice shandy and will now be handing over all major life decisions to the algorithm.

"Paris," he says, and his eyes tell her he's lost again, "I went there. London, too. Great Portland Street." He nods, satisfied somehow. "Before the first devaluation....”
Wind sighs past the window.

exactly

from Visionary San Francisco (1990), Paolo Polledri ed. ‘a fresh look at the tradition of urban planning in San Francisco during [the last] century.

line drawings of a po mo vision of a futuristic golden gate bridge. all spheres, cables and girders. cross hatched in black and white.

a william gibson deep cut: ‘skinners room’. a story about vagrancy on the golden gate bridge. it describes an exquisitely po mo world, layered with repairs and hacks. like a medieval london bridge for a late 80s vision of the future. illustrations by ming funn and craig hodgetts.

Help your UCU Higher Education reps decide what we should do next for our pay dispute Please read, fill in, and share with your contacts

NEW on our Substack: Help your HEC reps decide what we should do next for our pay dispute!

Please see the linked form, fill it in, & pass to your contacts. The form is open until 5pm Friday 27th Aug in advance of HEC on Monday 1st Sep.

Please repost #ucu

ucucommons.substack.com/p/help-your-...

i’m running out of news feeds and channels to block.

63% of people think net migration rose in the last 12 months
8% of people think it fell

Yet it fell by 400,000 in 2024 vs 2023
[It is falling further in 2025]

Public service broadcasters are doing a core part of their job on this topic badly if that 8% is not closer to 30% at least

take three very large potatoes

given the extent to which one constructs identity both within and against dominant forms of representation, @towerhamletsnow.bsky.social could make ££££ selling some ‘tower hamlets’ t-shirts right now.

bunbunbun has great food and lovely service. son qué has great food and a reassuring sense that their food is so great, overly polite service doesn’t really matter to them (the fam prefer the former, me the latter). also both hoxton not spitalfields. two good szechuan spots in spitalfields though!

a jumbo cone makes for a much less messy ‘2 scoop’ ice cream. but it looks silly until you put a third scoop on.

history obsessed #2 just casually naming these two ‘ronnie and reggie’.

though I’m all for getting the Colorado River to consistently run all the way to the sea again