Mark Bould

Ann Radcliffe eating hard cheese right before bed to give herself nightmares, Stoker claiming Dracula was the result of a nightmare induced by a “too generous helping of dressed crab,” let’s go back to the golden age of eating incredibly rich food before bed to create horror literature

Ben Shapiro @benshapiro 1d If you're at a dinner and somebody introduces himself as "Dr. Smith," you'd be rather upset to learn that he had a doctorate in musicology if you were to suffer a stroke at the table. Evan Williams @evanwilliams... 36s If you were at a dinner party and someone introduced themselves as "Ben Shapiro," you'd be rather upset to be at that dinner party. -Dr. Evan Williams, DMA Music Composition

Cause of Death: Severe burn.

Dad’s books are full of empathy, common sense, and a healthy suspicion of the powerful. But at its heart his work is also about how systems keep people poor while pretending it’s their own fault. So I hope Kemi’s taking notes as well as reading the jokes.

Rob Hell and Emu

Way to go, Chicago, more of this! Kristi Noem is upset that ICE agents in Chicago are being “denied entry” to restrooms and lunch spots.

John Oliver is an exceptional human being, and also a comedian.

Required my juniors to use em-dashes and semicolons, which I taught them how to use last week, in an in-class essay today. They were showing each other their em-dashes and semicolons. Monsters officially created.

Overheard in hipster caff: “He’s 45, but he’s still very active.”

How to figure out who will win the Nobel Prize for Literature - The Berliner Caring about the Nobel Prize in literature is cool. Betting on the outcome is even cooler.

The Berliner thinks Amitav Ghosh will win this year's Nobel Prize for Literature.
www.the-berliner.com/books/how-to...

Healthcare should be guaranteed as a human right #MedicareForAll @salaambhattiva.bsky.social

YouTube video by Newsmax 'I DO NOT LIKE BAD BUNNY RABBIT': Greg Kelly

In a crowded field of competition, I award Greg Kelly of Newsmax the prize for Most Gibberishy Rant Against The Announced SB Halftime Performer He’d Obviously Never Heard Of Ten Minutes Ago

youtu.be/hnYCbudhn94

The image is an X post by Acyn (@Acyn ) from 13 hours ago, quoting Pritzker: "He's saying that Chicago is a war zone. None of that is true. They're just making this up. And then what do they do? They fire tear gas and smoke grenades, and they make it look like it's a war zone." The post includes a screenshot from CNN's "State of the Union" showing two individuals discussing, with a chyron indicating DHS officers fired at a driver who rammed their vehicle, later determined to be someone trying to storm the Presidential Palace, as the South Caucasus Coalition.

This is like planting evidence and then making an arrest.

Can't believe the uni library's had the nerve to recall a book I had out all summer without cracking it even once but which I was definitely gonna start reading any day now...

Let it never again be said that a woman with no real reporting experience who fell for a Twitter account called "Official Antifa" cannot be the head of a huge news organization

Either the US Govt is getting into the drug biz, or he means we’re going to start bombing trucks as well as boats. I could believe it either way tbh

Doesn't take the form of minutes but this is very much the energy of John Sayles' 70s story "At the Anarchists' Convention"

Another win! A federal judge issued a late-Sunday ruling temporarily blocking the Trump administration from deploying National Guard troops to Oregon. U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut (a Trump appointee) granted a restraining order sought by the states of Oregon and California,

More reporting on Al Jazeera than any UK mainstream source, of course.

'Marginal gains': Growth in British renewables has cut electricity prices by up to a quarter New analysis suggests last year's wholesale electricity price could have been up to 33 per cent higher without contribution from wind power generation

When Kemi Badenoch lays into Britain's Net Zero efforts and extols the virtues of fossil fuels, consider this: "wholesale electricity price [in 2024] could have been up to 33 per cent higher without contribution from wind power generation."

Clean energy means freedom from disasters & dependency.

Beyond Folk Marxism: Mind, Metaphysics and Spooky Materialism - Salvage Why, and how, are any of us capable of self-reflective thought? Of experiencing emotion, ratiocination, preference, cold, whim, melancholy, joy? Anything at all?

A little - well, quite long - something from China Mieville

BBC Laura Kuenssberg Show Accused of Anti-Green Bias After Cancelling Zack Polanski Interview The new Green Party leader was the only major party leader not to have been granted a conference interview on the flagship BBC show

The Greens requested an interview on the Laura Kuenssberg Show with Zack Polanski when he was elected leader, but were denied, with a promise to interview him during Green conference instead.

This was then scrapped citing the Manchester synagogue attack. Polanski is both Jewish and from Manchester

Warms the heart to see the biggest Dutch pro-Palestine demo yet! 🫶🏻❤️🔥

This video of Chicagoans intervening to save a man from being abducted off the streets by ICE is making the rounds on Instagram.

Community action works.

Source: www.instagram.com/reel/DPZL2AL...

Mortsafes in Greyfriars, Edinburgh, designed to prevent bodysnatchers

Snowstorm traps 1000 people on slopes of Mount Everest Rescue teams have been deployed to clear the snow on the world's tallest mountain, Chinese state media reports.

Approx 1,000 people trapped on the slopes of Mt Everest.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Quite an odd thing to boast about

New episode of @utopiaanddystopia.bsky.social landing on Wednesday and given its close connection to my own research on play in utopian and dystopian fiction and the fact it marks a year since we started the podcast it's certainly a special one for me.

Blimey, Londo Mollari’s let himself go a bit

TERRORISM EXPERT HERE:

This statement is a clear example of what is known as “State Terrorism”: When the dictatorship will order all instruments of its state security & intelligence apparatus against its own citizens to terrorize the population.