‘“Did they hurt you?” Odysseus asks Circe. “They would have,” she answers.’ @angelicabastien.bsky.social excellent on how ‘Nolan’s genius ends when a woman enters the frame’ – and yet Samantha Morton’s ‘visceral’ performance as Circe exceeds his sexual timidity. www.vulture.com/article/circ...

The Odyssey’s Circe Is the Best Female Character Nolan Has Ever Written

Nolan’s never been great at writing women, but what doesn’t exist on the page Samantha Morton conjures through a tricksy, powerhouse performance.

vulture.com

If we know each other through the adventure and expedition world, I'd love to share a new project I'm launching. At the Edge of the Map is a new independent publication covering global expeditions, adventure and exploration through original reporting, interviews and analysis. Continued 👇

‘After decades of marginalisation and perceived irrelevance, academics may not notice that they are being co-opted by a sophisticated PR machine.’ AI companies are inviting philosophers and theologians to work with them. Carmody Grey turned them down giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

Why this philosopher turned down Anthropic

The AI industry is courting the humanities — but it is asking the wrong questions

giftarticle.ft.com

‘A number of years ago there was the whiff of an offer of a newspaper columnist role, and I pushed it away without much thought, because I know what most columnists write, and I have aspirations to be a better writer than that.’ Huw Lemmey on writing, money & time huw.substack.com/p/cancelled-...

Cancelled! Cancelled! Cancelled!

None of you are free of sin!

huw.substack.com

‘People like me, most of the people who read my books—we live in one world, and there are people who live in another world. We know it but we don’t know it, at the same time. And I can’t not feel guilty about that.’ Constance Debré on her new book, Offenses thisispublicparking.com/posts/i-got-...

Can the Green Party’s Nature’s Rights Bill change Britain’s relationship with nature away from the predominant legal model of ‘natural capital’ and ‘ecosystem services’? Is nature really a ‘legal person’ anyway, or is it something far stranger? @jayowens.bsky.social: www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/ju...

Jay Owens | Rights for Gods

The Thames may be cleaner than when it was declared biologically dead in 1957, but other rivers are close to ecological...

lrb.co.uk

... @jayrayner1.bsky.social reviews CUE POINT, whose co-founder, Mursal Saiq, first came to the UK as a refugee from Afghanistan in the late 1990s. Magnificent, and I want to go there now (even though it’s in Notting Hill - might as well be Penzance, it’s that far west). www.ft.com/content/a5c0...

Cambs News editor @johnelworthy.bsky.social says the BBC-funded Local Democracy Reporting Service (meant to plug gaps in local government scrutiny) is no longer worth funding. ‘Overly long, cautious, and formulaic’ writing & avoids reporting real political news. www.cambsnews.co.uk/opinion-the-...

Byzantine drone metal 🤘 www.nytimes.com/2026/06/15/a...

From the Altar to the Alt-Scene: A Greek Priest’s Drone Metal Debut

nytimes.com

I wrote (briefly and elliptically) about the phrase I've been thinking about most from @robgmacfarlane.bsky.social’s 𝘐𝘴 𝘈 𝘙𝘪𝘷𝘦𝘳 𝘈𝘭𝘪𝘷𝘦? A river is not a person but ‘a god. For now, I want to call the river 𝘢 𝘨𝘰𝘥.’ www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/ju...

Jay Owens | Rights for Gods

Britain’s waterways are filthy and flowing with sewage, as well as fertiliser and pesticide pollution, thousands of...

lrb.co.uk

In bookstore trends... REFERENCE POINT, a reading room with a bar in 180 Strand. Art books, obv. A £12/month membership gets you after-hours access, events tickets and drinks discounts. (I have 𝘯𝘰 𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘢 how this makes money but it's founded by a Freud.) www.ft.com/content/2da5...

Is Jonah Freud’s Reference Point the sexiest library in the world?

Meet the men still championing print

ft.com

Also in new aesthetics: goo. Gen Z goo! ‘The clean look that once signified sophistication now reeks of venture capital funding, or worse, artificial intelligence. “The worse it looks, the better it performs.”’ Callie Holtermann on ‘the glitchy, gloppy look of now’ www.nytimes.com/2026/06/17/s...

The Glitchy, Gloppy Look of Now

nytimes.com

𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘝𝘦𝘳𝘨𝘦’s homepage has evolved again, and is back to looking a little more traditional. Exec creative director William Joel (who's since left for 𝘠𝘢𝘩𝘰𝘰 𝘍𝘪𝘯𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘦) explains the new design. A useful read for me – though at the 𝘓𝘙𝘉 we’re looking at archive first ... www.theverge.com/bulletin/914...

The next evolution of The Verge’s homepage is here

We’re continuously improving how The Verge works for you.

theverge.com

In further ‘Please do not bulldoze the sacred mountain’ news: A proposed uranium mine on the slopes of Mount Taylor in New Mexico, which is sacred to Diné and Pueblo people. It is a very significant cultural site - akin to putting a mine on top of Stonehenge. sourcenm.com/2026/01/15/m...

Mining company announces milestone in push to dig new uranium mine in NM • Source New Mexico

“This is a big deal in a number of senses,” said Eric Jantz told Source New Mexico on Thursday.

sourcenm.com

There’s a new gold rush in the American west. Trump’s Unleashing American Energy Act reclassified gold and silver as critical minerals and made BLM approve mining projects on public lands. Will this mean an open-pit heap leach mine on sacred Conglomerate Mesa? www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Showdown in the desert: the small town fending off a new California gold rush

A prospecting company’s search for gold has the town of Lone Pine and Indigenous leaders on edge, as the Trump administration greenlights new projects across the American west

theguardian.com

Granta will no longer publish the Commonwealth short story prize winner after this year’s AI debacle, saying ‘it would no longer be involved in “external publishing partnerships” in which it had no editorial control.’ Wise! Y’aint literary without gatekeeping. www.theguardian.com/books/2026/j...

Granta stops publishing short story award winners over AI controversy

Literary magazine will no longer engage in ‘external publishing partnerships’ after Commonwealth prize furore

theguardian.com

‘I have spent more than half my life chronicling the exploitations of California, so I know delirium to be a condition of the land.’ Mark Arax on the AI boom www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

Welcome to California: land of plunder and hypocrisy | Mark Arax

From gold to water, California’s wealth was built on extraction. The AI boom is reviving an old question: who pays the price?

theguardian.com

I wrote (briefly and elliptically) about the phrase I've been thinking about most from @robgmacfarlane.bsky.social’s 𝘐𝘴 𝘈 𝘙𝘪𝘷𝘦𝘳 𝘈𝘭𝘪𝘷𝘦? A river is not a person but ‘a god. For now, I want to call the river 𝘢 𝘨𝘰𝘥.’ www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/ju...

Jay Owens | Rights for Gods

Britain’s waterways are filthy and flowing with sewage, as well as fertiliser and pesticide pollution, thousands of...

lrb.co.uk

Oh man I need this: BIRDIE: ‘The air quality monitor that drops dead when your air quality gets bad. Until you open your windows and bring it back to life.’ www.kickstarter.com/projects/bir...

Birdie® Pro: the iconic air monitor - now smarter!

The cutest, best-reviewed and most iconic air quality monitor in the world — Now upgraded!

kickstarter.com

‘It’s the first time that rights of nature have been formally considered at Westminster. It could not be more different from the instrumentalised, financialised model of nature that talks of “natural capital” and “ecosystem services”.’ @jayowens.bsky.social on the blog www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/ju...

Jay Owens | Rights for Gods

Britain’s waterways are filthy and flowing with sewage, as well as fertiliser and pesticide pollution, thousands of...

lrb.co.uk

The new Nature's Rights Bill calls for Nature (capitalised) to be recognised in UK law as ‘a legal subject and rights-bearing entity’. But what if a river is less a ‘legal person’ than a god? New from me on the @lrb.co.uk blog. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/ju...

Jay Owens | Rights for Gods

Britain’s waterways are filthy and flowing with sewage, as well as fertiliser and pesticide pollution, thousands of...

lrb.co.uk

omg you sexually identify as an attack helicopter, and that's extremely problematic actually.

Ben Miller@benwritesthings.bsky.social · 2mo ago

in which an “essay” “argues” that consenting adults using an app to hook up are actually … committing drone warfare?

Just fyi, Private Eye has this story in its current edition, published last week

Lighthouse Reports@lighthousereports.com · 2mo ago

Britain will use AI to assess ages of asylum seekers in a world-first, with other countries likely to follow suit But our investigation, based on a leaked report and our own algorithmic audit, finds the technology is deeply unreliable

“We want Greenland,” Trump said. Four men - a biker, a groper, the governor of Louisiana and a Greenlandic bricklayer - ‘sprang into action to make fantasy a reality’. Ben Taub on America’s ‘ludicrous, deadly serious plan to take over Greenland’. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Inside the Ludicrous, Deadly Serious Plan to Take Over Greenland

“We want Greenland,” Trump said. Four men sprang into action to make fantasy a reality.

newyorker.com

Bruce Schneier: ‘Human systems rely on so many norms that we scarcely recognize the existence of until they are broken.’ Yet ‘To an AI model, constraints are just things to get around and not general truisms about the world.’ www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

The Anthropic ‘Fable’ saga proves: we have opened the AI Pandora’s box. What now? | Nathan E Sanders and Bruce Schneier

We have opened the AI Pandora’s box. Now we have to make the best of it

theguardian.com

Bloody hell: At the peak of Trump’s Greenland ‘rampage’ in January, the Danish goverment started ‘considering the obscene logistics of a mass evacuation of Greenland.’ This wasn’t reported at the time – new in Joshua Hunt’s report from Nuuk for @vanityfair.com www.vanityfair.com/story/trumps...

A Month of Menace: On the Ground in Greenland for the Start of Trump’s Rampage Across the World

When President Trump’s unwanted advances toward Greenland escalated into veiled threats of force, Joshua Hunt was there to watch distinguished members of the global news media slip and slide across fr...

vanityfair.com

“People told us that print is dead, but I feel that there’s a boomeranging movement back to print; we all have so much digital fatigue,” Negar Azimi said. “It feels good to give physical form to what we’re trying to do, which is a magazine and also a movement.” link.nymag.com/view/63b4a15...

Love a womble.

The Guardian@theguardian.com · 2mo ago

Wombles set to return after 27 years as IP deal opens door to comeback

Ötzi the ice man is also meant to be dead and yet his microbiome is still active too. (Scientists used the yeasts in it to make bread!) www.scientificamerican.com/article/otzi...

5,300 years after his death, Ötzi the murdered Iceman’s microbiome is still active

More than 5,300 years after Ötzi’s death, researchers identified yeasts in his gut microbiome that continue to be active—and they used it to make bread

scientificamerican.com

Jay Owens@jayowens.bsky.social · 2mo ago

‘The soil wouldn’t stop breathing.’ Dirt respires. Microbes, innit. Heat it, blast it with sterilising gamma radiation and put it under pressure until it’s as dead as a dodo (or oughta be): it still emits CO2. What on earth is going on? Siddhant Pusdekar www.quantamagazine.org/the-dirt-tha...

Space/acc: still a thing. ‘Crisis averted’ as astrophysicists confirm universe’s expansion hasn’t slowed down. ‘By proving our measurements are correct, we can get back to trying to understand what dark energy actually is, rather than wondering if it exists at all.’ ras.ac.uk/news-and-pre...

'Crisis averted' as experts confirm universe's expansion IS accelerating

drupal-media[data-view-mode=half_page_width] { display: inline-block; width: 50%; } Our universe's expansion is still accelerating despite recent claims suggesting o...

ras.ac.uk