Colin Danby

I felt sad as I packed boxes of discards last week, but also realized I'd been curating a museum of past enthusiasms.

Just back from Fellow Travelers at the Seattle Opera, which was excellent.

Sad puppy being carried

When you get kicked out of the bar for humping a baby goat

Is it so barbarian
to nosh on tasty carrion?

Yes. And it's pretty clear that what Starmer means by it any campaign prepared to speak to Muslim Britons. The degree to which he has adopted Reform's language and assumptions is appalling.

And that McSweeney is an authentic Starmerite. Or maybe it is the other way around.

If you read the letter in its entirety, it puts substantial weight on Galloway as an explanation for Labour's defeat.

Galloway is horrible. But the Starmer letter is an implausible effort to attribute this defeat to him.

This! Also the way the letter attributes their defeat to George Galloway. He cannot admit the possibility that his policies have alienated people.

And the letter blames the defeat on George Galloway? Seriously?

Saw one today in Seattle, charging itself in the supermarket parking lot.

All faculty careers start with naivete about your role in the institution, and end in the realization that you have almost zero influence and admin thinks you're a loon. Support your colleagues and be happy you have a job.

"Much of this is on me. I have ­never done well with institutions whose performances fall far short of their ­s­tated principles."

Smith is a sociologist? *Every* institution's performance falls far short of its stated principles.

The preening, the tedious length, the absent self awareness.

Early, Middle, and Late March

Such a strange vertigo at this moment. DEI work addressed tacit, structural, unacknowledged discrimination. Usefully! And at the same time these luridly evil people were plotting it explicitly.

Particle traces in a bubble chamber. https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/513924/what-causes-the-spirals-to-be-inward-in-the-bubble-chamber-images

If AI works out how to reverse time we can draw all kinds of lines.

Thanks!

Not seeing the problem here.

I would love to boost the account of @entandsoc.bsky.social, probably* the best journal of business history in the world. So if you (or your followers) are interested in business history, very broadly defined, please consider following and reposting bsky.app/profile/enta...

Get well, Enkidu!

The crinkling of the wrapper, the crumbs on the floor.

I heard a Proust joke once.

It's the one thing everyone thinks they know about nutrition.

Are we clear that the latter is satire?

In fairness, Soviet modernism produced some weird and wonderful buildings. With architecture as with music there was also a lot of interesting internal political and cultural tension. There is probably a book on this.

Just rubbing it in now.

elements, uncladded surfaces, form following function. The Metro uses these things to create a sense of space and avoid the claustrophobic feeling of most subway architecture.

The Washington, D.C. Metro The underground architecture of Harry Weese

Yes, you will find, if you look long enough, Soviet versions of the style.

But anyone who grew up in the built environment of the 1960s will recognize the DC Metro as quintessential High Modernism, indeed one of the more successful examples of the style: simple geometric shapes, repeated design

The ornate Moscow Metro

The opposite.

My bank, reassuringly