Jay Owens

A danger to myself and others In Samanta Schweblin's Good and Evil and Other Stories, the horror comes from realizing maybe you're the monster.

‘If you spend that much time thinking about the worst, most transgressive thing you could do in any given moment, that feeling eventually hardens into desire.’

Max Pearl on Samanta Schweblin's ‘Good and Evil and Other Stories’

substack.com/inbox/post/1...

An essay in praise, ultimately, of black eyeliner worn as lipliner and ‘the crappy hill in Talma, Finland that churned out hundreds of legendary snowboarders in the 90s because they could do dozens of laps in the same time you could ride a normal mountain once’ — that is, of limits.

EMILY IN BERLIN A zeitgeist update

Is everything about culture ‘actually just downstream from cheap rent (and its disappearance)’, and is it ‘even possible to have a meaningful conversation about cultural criticism that’s not just about that?’

Emily Segal went back to Berlin and it had changed:

open.substack.com/pub/nemesisg...

‘We produce more than ever before … but the things exist mostly in order to be captured in images again.’

www.ft.com/content/e637...

Why designers abandoned their dreams of changing the world Design was once seen as a tool to improve lives — but as modernism has become marketing, that sense of social purpose has drifted away

‘All the algae and fungi, the recycled water bottles and seaborne-plastics have made not a blind bit of difference to the planetary crisis, and design as a profession and an industry knows it.’

@edwinheathcote.bsky.social on design’s existential crisis:

www.ft.com/content/e637...

The list of books included in the Anthropic copyright settlement is now up.

If you published a book before July 2021 and it ended up on Libgen file sharing, there's a good chance you'll be eligible to claim c.$3K before fees

Search for yours and file a claim:

www.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com

Participants in China’s intense fan culture ‘know that real-life idols can disappoint’, Yun Sheng writes.

‘It’s safer to worship the dead or invented than the living. One tribute to circulate online lately was a Labubu doll placed in front of Marx’s tomb in London.’

www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

The list of books included in the Anthropic copyright settlement is now up.

If you published a book before July 2021 and it ended up on Libgen file sharing, there's a good chance you'll be eligible to claim c.$3K before fees

Search for yours and file a claim:

www.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com

As California glaciers disappear, people will see ice-free peaks exposed for the first time in millennia The glaciers of California's Sierra Nevada are disappearing as temperatures rise. Scientists recently found that the glaciers probably have never before melted in human history.

Human beings have never seen the Sierra Nevada ice-free: its glaciers formed before our species reached the Americas.

But by the end of this century they will.

Many glaciers have lost 70-90% of their ice since the late 1800s, and are projected to melt completely.

www.latimes.com/environment/...

From the Rickowens community on Reddit: no more seasonal tags confirmed Explore this post and more from the Rickowens community

Though we are all VERY UPSET that he is taking the seasonal label off his clothes 😭

Sound biz and sustainability reasons, but still: Dustulator (FW06), Dirt (SS18), Tecuatl (SS20), Phlegethon (SS21), Gethsemane (FW21) - it's what you collect. They conjure worlds.

www.reddit.com/r/Rickowens/...

And today SS26 ‘Temple’ in shades of fawn, dust, milk, dinge - and of course black.

Stairs, shoulders, sculptural forms, and sclera-obscuring contacts. An iterative approach to fashion, each season building on the last, no ‘in’ or ‘out’ of style.

www.vogue.com/fashion-show...

Tom Ford: Ready-To-Wear SS26 The house of Tom Ford has always had a libido and in Haider Ackermann’s hands, seduction reigns supreme.

Also Haider Ackermann’s Tom Ford, oh my god.

I am so glad he’s back, and properly funded. Is he the only man left in fashion who can cut a jacket? Probably.

10magazine.com/tom-ford-rea...

Rick Owens: ‘The best way to spend €20 is on M&S Victoria sponge cake’ The fashion designer loves his platform boots, the Palais de Tokyo and naps

‘What I’m proposing is not a fantasy, it is a valid and viable way of living.’

Rick Owens on cake, Luxor, gay literature, exquisite little tea vessels, a 1920s monkey fur coat, his bald cat and the extravagance of building your life around a daily nap.

www.ft.com/content/c959...

Notes on Tiresias 1. Consider Tiresias: the blind seer (see-er). What can he see? The future. For Greeks of a certain vintage, to be a seer was, specifically, to see (and think, therefore) ahead in time. Blindness –…

‘For Greeks of a certain vintage, to be a seer was, specifically, to see (and think) ahead in time. Blindness – either of the occipital lobe, or in the dark of the adyton/cave – may not have been a prerequisite for oracular vision, but it didn't hurt.’

wchambliss.wordpress.com/2025/10/01/n...

Do you bootstrap that first year from your redundancy payments, savings, and/or your partner paying for things for a time? (The most unspoken financial privilege!)

Yes of course.

But that’s not the headline. The story is ‘Now we’re independent and doing journalism better’.

Why’s that not leading?

Idk if I’m objecting to Press Gazette’s headline here or their own positioning here, possibly both?

But you wouldn’t expect a new publication launched by men to be described in this way, know what I mean?

404 Media came out of the gate saying ‘We’re independent!’ and were profitable in 6 months.

Former Observer big-hitters launch new title with redundancy payouts Five former Observer journalists including Carole Cadwalladr have launched their own culture publication using their redundancy money.

The framing of this – ‘big-hitter’ journalists but using their ‘redundancy payouts’ to pay for the launch – is a bit 😬😬😬, no?

It plays it too small and misses the point of the new newsletter biz model!

pressgazette.co.uk/news/former-...

Looks really interesting; I’ve just emailed them for a copy, fingers crossed (not got academic journal access). Cheers for surfacing it.

The Last Bastion of Free America?: Meagan Day’s “Maximum Sunlight” | Los Angeles Review of Books Olivia Durif reviews Meaghan Day’s book about Tonopah, Nevada.

Perhaps you gotta go to Nevada for that feeling these days. I went through Tonopah in 2023 and it felt lawless: a place where life is close to the bone; a place that people can (and do) just disappear.

@meagansday.bsky.social’s MAXIMUM SUNLIGHT caught this well

lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-...

Yep — and as if anyone (let alone California) needed an extra environmental hazard to worry about!

Where are you based?

‘But the “this is the edge of the earth” existentialism Bakersfield used to have has long been phased out and replaced with big box stores and vacuum-sealed tract houses and ominous undecorated corporate buildings called like AGGISTICS, which is a totally different breed of existentialism.’

Yup — cheers for this link, useful context

Death Dust The valley-fever menace.

He got Valley Fever, which is also endemic in Kern Co. — making it a terrible place to reopen a prison, but then the cruelty is the point.

Dana Goodyear did some excellent reporting on ‘death dust’, the tiny fungal spores that were increasingly making people sick.

www.newyorker.com/magazine/201...

I Survived a Deadly Disease in Prison. No One Else Should Have To Face It. Valley fever disproportionately impacts people targeted by mass incarceration. California can move to prevent this harm.

A good piece in @truthout.org last month by Duane Palm – who’s currently incarcerated at California Correctional Center in NorCal – on the environmental politics of the American prison system.

truthout.org/articles/i-s...

‘Hell on earth’: immigrants held in new California detention facility beg for help Six people at a remote Ice facility in California City describe medical problems and filthy conditions, which operator CoreCivic denies

Speaking of Kern County, California City – a planned utopia in the Mojave desert – now has an ICE detention centre.

And it’s going as badly as you would expect: dirty water, not enough food, mistreatment by guards. ‘Hell on earth,’ one detainee reports.

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

‘I can’t read this piece ever again because it was really me working through the feeling that the Bakersfield I knew, old labor camps and canals and Dust Bowl grit, was going away, and I was doing that thing where you realize your concept of home is going away and you have to make your own now.‘

From The Archives: Merle Haggard, Son of Bakersfield Note: I wrote a bunch of stuff before posting the actual article. You know, like recipe sites, except I heard some of those guys make money. So just scroll down a thousand words for the actual thing y...

‘All you’ve got is memory, a place where you can’t live.’

Discovering Kaleb Horton’s work – his California, the farming towns at the edge of the desert; my California too, though I don’t know when I can ever go back there.

From his obituary for Merle Haggard:

kalebhorton.ghost.io/from-the-arc...

🐧 Pingos: Dome-shaped mounds formed during the Ice Age from underground ice pushing up the ground (which can then collapse into ponds).

Back from the dead: the ‘zombie’ ponds repumping nature into Essex farmland A conservation project is helping identify and restore wildlife-rich sites previously degraded and dried up

The taxonomy:

👻 “Ghost ponds”: completely obliterated but identifiable via old maps

🧟‍♂️ “Zombie ponds”: degraded, dried up but ready to be brought back to life.

www.theguardian.com/environment/...

‘It’s resurrection’: 1,000-year-old seeds could grow ancient plants in England’s ice-age ghost ponds An expert team are resurrecting ice age ponds and finding rare species returning from a ‘perfect time capsule’

“It’s not rewilding, it’s not restoration, it’s resurrection. If you want to recreate a woodland you’ve got to plan it and plant your own trees. Here it’s all ready to go, like an instant cake mix – just add water.”

UCL geographers are restoring Ice Age ponds

www.theguardian.com/environment/...