Find this question very funny, wouldn’t it be “I don’t know” if the answer is yes lol
Oliver Mantell
@olivermantell.bsky.social
Cultural audience researcher. Interested in everything, including poetry. Director of Evidence & Insight at The Audience Agency; Board member at Grimm & Co and Sheaf Poetry. From Reading, living in Sheffield. [Header from Tara Bergin’s Savage Tales]
An ‘excitingly boring’ answer to this is that the idea of an artistic ’avant-garde’ is a response to a specific historical period (and places/traditions) and was never an uncomplicated concept anyway. (e.g. arguably Modernism was both the apogee and disintegration of the idea of the avant-garde…)
Financial Times@financialtimes.com · yesterdayThe exciting boring decade ft.trib.al/W3yuTTW
I’ve been struggling to find things to do with my sons (mid primary and early secondary age) around #Reading / south #Oxfordshire (that we couldn’t do as easily at home). What am I missing? (I don’t want where I’m from to seem boring to them!).
I’ve been struggling to find things to do with my sons (mid primary and early secondary age) around #Reading / south #Oxfordshire (that we couldn’t do as easily at home). What am I missing? (I don’t want where I’m from to seem boring to them!).
This thread (which Robin pursues down a couple different, useful forks) is a great overview of the mess that is eBook licenses for libraries, especially 24-month expiring licenses for books in series! (Context: cost per circ = cost per each time it's checked out.)
Robin Bradford@tuphlos.bsky.social · 5d agoBook 1 is $59.99 went out 4 times. Cost per circ $14.99 Book 2 is $59.99 went out 4 times. Cost per circ $14.99 I'm not buying book 3. If the cost per circ was $5 or $3, I wouldn't mind. But that is WAY too high, especially for a thing that expires after 2 yrs.
People often celebrate Yorkshire (and Yorkshire Day) with beautiful landscapes of dales and moors and coastal cliffs and abbeys. I love *that* Yorkshire, but I love *this* one too (the cities, the people, the industry, politics and culture…). So it’s not clear if we’re celebrating the same thing…
I know this one! It's because "table" in the US is (usually) short for "lay on the table," meaning, basically, to delay working on something until the group is ready to deal with it -- the motion goes back to Jefferson's parliamentary manual as far as I can tell.
John Bull@garius.bsky.social · last wk.also weird but necessary sidebar to the uefa/fifa drama. in UK/International English, 'tabling' something means proposing it. so being 'on the table' means it is actively being considered. for some weird reason US English reverses the meaning. Uefa are talking in the UK, not US sense, here.
Host the anti-world cup in Avignon, you cowards.
Sky News@news.sky.com · last wk.European nations agree to boycott World Cup if FIFA goes ahead with World Cup sell-off
My close reading of Andy Burnham's letter to the Guardian in 1991, defending Philip Larkin as a great poet
Mancunians would no doubt be surprised at the omission of the Alpha+++ category from this list…
alanbenzie@alanbenzie.bsky.social · 2w agoAccording the Globalisation and World Citie Research Group Mexico City is an Alpha City. I'm thinking the Alpha++ and Alpha+ cities on their list are the ones people are reaching for here
…especially if you’re going on holiday to a marsh. (‘Nothing beats a Jet2 soggy glade!’)
The ref’s been far too lenient. No-one got carded for that half time show.
Two people tried to enter a screening of The Odyssey without buying tickets after hiding inside a miniature model of the Trojan Horse. 😂😂😂
Growing up is going from being the kid crying at the heartbreaking England defeat to being the adult comforting your kids crying about the heartbreaking England defeat (then staring into middle distance for about an hour afterwards).
Amazing detail I just learned from a discussion of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ student diaries: he once gave up looking at the sky for Lent
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Yes, France are the best team at the world cup so far by a distance, but the best team *often* doesn’t win (Hungary ‘54, Netherlands ‘74, Brazil ‘82, Italy ‘90, France ‘06 etc).
I saw a map of 1577 Yorkshire which has my tiny village of less than 200, just because everywhere is so much smaller.
This is a good idea (although obviously it wouldn’t solve *all* problems with opinion columns).
Sam Freedman@samfr.bsky.social · 4w agoI think opinion writers should just collectively agree that nothing is a panacea or a silver bullet so it wasn't felt necessary to say so all the time.
Rounding up some translations of Count Binface that have been appearing in foreign press 🇷🇴 Romanian: Contele Tomberonez 🇫🇷 French: Comte Tête-de-Poubelle (bin-head, more accurate than bin-face) 🇮🇹 Italian: Conte Faccia-da-Bidone 🇪🇸 Spanish: "un hombre con un cubo de basura en la cabeza" (!) Cont...
At the moment I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past. Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf 1925-1930
Not the biggest Mary Oliver fan, but I love Schumann, and I was surprised by this lovely poem in her new Penguin Selected:
The How Many Dimensions is Chess Really discourse this morning is excellent content
Adam Squires@adsquires.bsky.social · last mo.Good point. Which would apply to (actual) 3D chess too, if the middle and upper levels are squared 65-128 and 129-192. I feel like we're now concluding that any finite arrays are essentially 1 dimensional...
UK Department for Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS) spend data, transactions over £25,000, April 2010 - May 2026 drive.google.com/uc?export=do... (1.5 MB XLSX) #publicspending #opengov #opendata