Matthew Turner

Liked for the marriage, not the threatened closure.

Happy birthday, Reese! Hope your year is much more than OK.

Map

Frame in the red zone

River with ducks and rowers

Bridge

Rode the Ōtākaro Avon trail on Waitangi Day. More than 27km on the bike which isn’t bad when I haven’t been on my bike for yonks. It’s a wonderful trek from Barbadoes Street Cambridge Green through to Pages Road in Bexley right by New Brighton.

Half of Japan’s samurai were women, groundbreaking exhibition at British Museum says ‘Samurai’ explores over a thousand years of Japanese history related to the elite warrior class

There isn't a sigh hard enough for these dumbass headlines. Warriors were a SOCIAL GROUP, and later a legal classification. Gender was not relevant to whether one was part of a warrior group/family/etc. You might as well write: THIS JUST IN: WOMEN EXISTED! www.the-independent.com/asia/japan/b...

I've been following bitcoin crashes since 2011, i don't want to get my hopes up for this one

Wilkins has his own band, The Close Readers, and "close reading" is just what happens in the article 👆

And wasn't aware that their 2014 LP 'The Lines are Open' had garnered an A- grade from US critic @rxgau.bsky.social

theclosereaders.bandcamp.com/album/the-li...

That’s wonderful. Hope you continue getting good news.

National milestone: It’s been 10 years since the Waitangi dildo strike When Josie Butler threw that dildo, she split our nation’s timeline into two eras: before dildo (BD) and after dildo (AD).

"In the weeks following the purchase, she and her flatmates trained hard at “dildo target practice”. “It was mostly us just throwing the dildo at each other unsuspecting around the house,” she explains." thespinoff.co.nz/politics/05-...
Top yarn by @haydendonnell.bsky.social @thespinoff.bsky.social

Another London, by Hari Kunzru Excavating the disenchanted city

If you want a break from snow or ICE, I have a #longread in the current @harpers.bsky.social about a mystical drift through London. Includes Blake, Hawksmoor, the Sex Pistols, Derek Jarman, John Dee and conversations with Alan Moore and Iain Sinclair harpers.org/archive/2026...

The Clear Blue Sky - Evan Morgan Williams — Bulb Culture Collective “Oh, it’s definitely our story, Paul.”

The light is on for Evan Morgan Williams! @pahoehoe.bsky.social💡

“The Clear Blue Sky” is a moving story of tension, where the fractures between two people stand starkly against love.

Check out Evan’s amazing writing over at the site!

Very sorry for your loss, Greg.

Helena Bonham Carter joins Steve Coogan for The White Lotus season four The Oscar-nominated star of The King’s Speech will check in for the new season of hit comedy drama set in France

I missed the Steve Coogan announcement. Hope I’m still alive when this comes out.

What do Kanye West, Taylor Swift, Mark Zuckerberg and Donald Trump have in common?

As cultural critic @wdavidmarx.bsky.social argues in his book Blank Space, they are all representatives of a single MONOCULTURE that has taken over the planet...

Full convo HERE 👇🏻

youtu.be/d_fwbtnUr5Y

Review of The Divide: Stories by Evan Morgan Williams Evan Morgan Williams’ latest book, The Divide (Cornerstone Press February 2026), is a collection of short fiction rooted in the Mountain West. The stories collected here center on characters who fa…

New! Variant Lit’s Managing Long Form Fiction Editor @suzyeynon.bsky.social reviews The Divide by Evan Morgan Williams (@pahoehoe.bsky.social), out with Cornerstone Press in February.

variantlit.com/review-of-th...

Loved Woodface, came out when I was living in Japan and listening to it made me feel homesick. Was gutted when Tim left the band.

Nice. Well done, everyone. Can't see any way in which this could go horribly, horribly wrong, especially at a time when there's already so much conflict around 🤦‍♀️

'There are...general musings on what it means to be Chinese – like, do you “have it in you to hate the Japanese”?'

I remember this and thinking these thing

Happy birthday! What a nice way to celebrate.

The cover of the novel “Lessons” by Ian McEwan, featuring an image of a schoolboy playing a piano

Currently reading LESSONS by Ian McEwan

#books #booksky 💙📚

This phenomenon - this experience - is best articulated in @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social's Paradise Built in Hell.

When you are there, and you see an entire city of goddamn heroes around you, it is nothing short of a transcendent experience.

Goya's Third of May 1808. Faceless, anonymous Napoleonic troops murder anonymous Spanish resisters in Madrid. No nobels, No God. No salvation. Fear but also defiance. Groundbreaking in its depiction of war. Ordinary people. Those already murdered. Those about to be. Those waiting their turn.El Prado

The first #PenguinAppreciationDay was in 1972, California (?) Gaining traction between 2017 - 2020.

The name "penguin" most likely comes from Welsh, derived from the words 'pen' (head) and 'gwyn' (white), originally describing the Great Auk (a now-extinct northern bird with a white patch)

Photo of staff member adjusting a framed artwork hanging on the gallery wall while wearing gloves.

NEW VACANCY: Exhibitions Curator, permanent, full-time, primarily based at Tūranga, applications close 11.55pm Friday 23 January 2026.

www.cccjobs.co.nz/jobdetails/a...

Best wishes!

The faux formality of ‘accepts’ is unforgivable sanewashing of what is actually an embarrassing and abject pantomime from both Machado and Trump

First line of haiku
Second line of the haiku
Third line of haiku

Disposable Razor: All Blacks coach Scott Robertson expected to get the sack - reports Only a few years ago, Scott Robertson was hailed as the future of NZ rugby.

Disposable Razor: headlines at RNZ are getting livelier

www.rnz.co.nz/news/sport/5...

Revisiting the “Comfort Girls” of Report 49: Race, Sex, and Information in Asia’s War for Empire Abstract. In 1944, a Japanese American intelligence officer stationed in Ledo, India, unwittingly composed a famous historical document: “Japanese Prisoner

They fixed it! My article is now open access. academic.oup.com/ahr/article/...

Escape review – notorious Japanese revolutionary tells story of country’s most wanted criminal Director Masao Adachi – formerly of the Japanese Red Army – on the infamous Satoshi Kirishima, who went on the run in 1975 after a series of corporate bombings

Adachi Masao's Escape is showing at the ICA in London from Friday, and just earned a four-star review in the Guardian. www.theguardian.com/film/2026/ja...

The cover of "The Divide," a story collection by Evan Morgan Williams. It depicts a mountain range beneath brooding dark clouds.

The Divide releases from Cornerstone on February 17. Here's what the blurbs are saying:

“Insightful, compelling, and beautifully written ... a storyteller working at his peak.” - @cbbernard.com , author of the award winning Ordinary Bear

Pre-order at Bookshop, B&N, or your favorite bookstore!