Elise Bell

Keen to read Lost Lambs by Madeleine Cash - in part because the Substack commentary is driving me insane and I haven't even read the thing. I get 'dimes square-adjacent' is annoying, but a lot of the critique amounts to: This plot point is WEIRD and I don't agree with it!

Presented by Keir McGuiness 2009

Angus Fairhurst, Pietà (first version), 1996
https://botfrens.com/collections/14375/contents/1123070

A life-size cast of the artist as a drowned man, lying on a gallery floor

Very sad to hear of the closure of CCA, Glasgow, and the loss of all those jobs.

I have such fondness for the place, not least as it was the site of one of my finer moments.

Cancel John Updike? Not so fast The great writer has been branded a misogynist and narcissist. Yet as his letters prove, his writing remains uncannily evocative

I love John Updike but I had to stop reading ‘Couples’ because it was so compulsively nasty that for the two weeks I was nose deep it genuinely made me a meaner, and like, Activated for a Fight. www.telegraph.co.uk/books/non-fi...

Obsessed with ‘The Office Party’ episode of Man Alive on iPlayer - a 1969 documentary about an office Christmas party at a London based advertising agency that has it all: marital affairs, eyeliner, drunk directors, a man singing opera in Welsh. Long live the archive!

the point of this isn't that Elon is getting Tolkien wrong

My time has finally come

*tears in my eyes* am I allowed to say I don’t like the Bloomsbury Group now

I have been saying this for years

what is going on here

The Reality Of Europe’s Border Crisis: This Is Life Onboard Migrant Rescue Ships It was late afternoon, the heat thick and unmoving, when the call came through. I was the only journalist aboard the Ocean Viking, a search-and-rescue ship patrolling the Central Mediterranean, wh

My story for @service95stories.bsky.social on @sosmediterranee.org's Ocean Viking. The Libyan 'coast guard' opened fire, risking the lives of survivors and crew.

It was a privilege to see them in action - truly incredible people

#searchandrescue
#Mediterranean

www.service95.com/the-reality-...

Haven't been using this app but I am not going to be using it to effectively live broadcast my Masterchef thoughts from episodes that aired two weeks ago, I hope that is okay and allowed

The problem with people my age and younger going on Masterchef is that 90% of the time everything they cook feels a liiiitle bit too Mob Kitchen. The Ben Lippett effect needs to be studied.

Monogamy and Polamory both beautiful names for a baby girl

Obsessed with the name of this baby carrier.

Students in England shun foreign languages at A-level, report finds Ofqual figures show a sharp fall in pupils taking exams in French and German

New @hepi-news.bsky.social report shows continued fall in foreign language study in England at A-level.

Language teacher recruitment consistently falls well below government targets – in 2024, just 43% of the target was reached.

on.ft.com/4l5SYX4
(Full report www.hepi.ac.uk/2025/07/31/n...)

One in three Gazans goes multiple days without eating.

Malnourished mothers can no longer produce milk to breastfeed their children and hospitals have run out of nutritional supplements to treat gaunt babies https://on.ft.com/3H9L154

Incredible wall signage at the Titanic Immersive Experience

Lot of big celebrity deaths of late. I feel in my waters a 2016-wave is approaching. We need to keep tabs on Al Pacino or so help me god

All famines are man-made, all famines are political. Historians of empire and humanitarianism have known this forever. Gaza is not starving, Gaza is being starved, by Israel, and this starvation is enabled by our government and by every other government that does not step in to force food and aid.

It's time for a new kind of political party - one that belongs to you.

Sign up at yourparty.uk.

Terrible. When I got my AHRC PhD funding I applied directly to the AHRC with my own project. Now students are increasingly tied in to what universities and partner organisations want them to do, stifling research independence - plus fewer projects getting funded overall.

Friends getting married, what a concept!

Yesterday Palestinian mums & kids were queuing at a clinic to get nutritional supplements when Israel attacked. At least 15 people were killed, including at least 9 children.

James Elder from UNICEF tells how one of those young children had spoken their first word that morning - mama

AI technologies and other techno-utopian potentialities are currently ripping through film, television, music and the platforms through which they are distributed. The last time I (a layperson) remember a similar story in the Noble Arts was NFTs, and no one’s talking about Beeple anymore.

I also read this as a consequence of gig economy/doggedly monetising your hobbies. Obviously rich celebrities don't NEED the money, but I think now it's an expectation that you publicise/professionalise anything you do for 'fun'

Maybe it speaks to an implicit, unspoken recognition of the devaluation of their original art medium (i.e. film, tv, music) and a retreat (however naive) to a medium of art perceived as more ‘concrete’, ‘traditional’ and resistant to devaluation by current trends?

I'm sort of surprised by my own snobbish reaction (although I actually think Robbie's is the least soulless of all of them) but the works are so bad, and the media coverage so breathless, and we're reaching a 1-popstar-a-week status.

Real trend at the moment re famous people (actors, musicians etc) releasing to the media news of their artistic practice, almost always some terrible version of abstract expressionism and/or cartoonish version of pop art. A way to get cheap clicks? Media boost with faux sense of intelligence?

Patricia Lockwood · Arrayed in Shining Scales: Solving Sylvia Plath I was under no illusion that The Collected Prose would solve the mystery, or lay to rest the lie, of how Plath was...

"I was under no illusion that The Collected Prose would solve the mystery, or lay to rest the lie, of how Plath was absolutely ordinary up to the point that she wasn’t." Brilliant Patricia Lockwood piece on Sylvia Plath. Cracking intro, too. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...