"Manchester’s recent headline successes are well known – the highest growth of any sub-region outside London, surging employment in sectors such as technology, and a hugely improved public transport system – as are the failures, particularly in housing."

Harry Stopes | Manchesterisms

Bev Craig, leader of Manchester City Council before she was comfortably elected last week to replace Andy Burnham as...

lrb.co.uk

Earlier this evening I actually stood still and watched a video of Bono playing a voicemail ex tempore song from Patti Smith from his phone into the mic at Glen Hansard's funeral. What an incredible time to be alive

‘The level of homelessness in Manchester is among the highest in the country. Private sector rents have increased by about two-thirds in the last decade, and by around half in the last five years.’ New on the blog: @harrystopes.bsky.social on Manchester. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/au...

Harry Stopes | Manchesterisms

Bev Craig, leader of Manchester City Council before she was comfortably elected last week to replace Andy Burnham as...

lrb.co.uk

Imagine the outpouring of support from the UK establishment when open Golden Dawn-supporting, convicted attempted-rapist, cocaine-smuggling, Wehrmacht-fan longtime Spectator contributor Taki dies choking on a dog turd

Quite apart from all the [REDACTED COS I DON'T WANT TO GET SHOUTED AT], is it too early to mention that Glen Hansard was shite

This is Butterbeans, if any boy cats in NE4 want to make a teen mam of her you've got about 12 hours before I take her to the vet to be rendered forever barren

Once again I am doing the Great North Run for @actionfdn.bsky.social, a fine organisation who give essnetial support to refugees and asylum seekers in the North East. Give us your money! ajbellgreatnorthrun2026.enthuse.com/pf/peter-mit...

Pete is doing the Great North Run for Action Foundation

Any one of us can be displaced. Give me money to displace my terrible old body around the 13.1 miles of the Great North Run so I can then donate that money to Action Foundation and they can turn it in

ajbellgreatnorthrun2026.enthuse.com

also featured: whale migration, c19th fantasies of comprehensive knowledge, the old Benedict Anderson / Benedict Cumberbatch chestnut, maps, souls, Men's Mental Health, neurodiversity discourse as the ruin of all honest human passion, me getting bitten off Leigh's dickhead cat

The Whale Pod@thewhale1851.bsky.social · 7d ago

🐳 EPISODE 22 🐳 After a fallow week we're back and talking about the word "Caramba!", flavours of autism, how to find a specific whale, and the intense terror of your panicked soul trying to escape your doomed body. All round happy stuff. Listen wherever you get your podcasts from 🐳🐳

Catching up on this story. There is a dedicated far right campaign to scrutinise and intimidate black and brown academics. But this careful and judicious reporting by @lanre-bakare.bsky.social raises a lot of substantial questions. Really, a lot. www.theguardian.com/education/ng...

Playbooks, plagiarism and a pig’s head: new claims surrounding a star Cambridge professor

Jason Arday was regarded as an academic superstar, but then questions about his work prompted scrutiny of his backstory and counterclaims of racism

theguardian.com

also featured: whale migration, c19th fantasies of comprehensive knowledge, the old Benedict Anderson / Benedict Cumberbatch chestnut, maps, souls, Men's Mental Health, neurodiversity discourse as the ruin of all honest human passion, me getting bitten off Leigh's dickhead cat

The Whale Pod@thewhale1851.bsky.social · 7d ago

🐳 EPISODE 22 🐳 After a fallow week we're back and talking about the word "Caramba!", flavours of autism, how to find a specific whale, and the intense terror of your panicked soul trying to escape your doomed body. All round happy stuff. Listen wherever you get your podcasts from 🐳🐳

To mark five years of this book existing I've been collating some of the praise it's received from grateful readers

what all this gibberish of yours is about, I don’t know, and I don’t much care

just found a tiny little worm or grub of some kind inching across my laptop keyboard. will nobody rid me of this turbulent cat

"Making promises might be a recipe for disappointment. It’s also the first step to getting anything done." This week: Burnham, homelessness, and the role of ambition in politics. Also: a daytrip on the new Northumberland Line to onetime pit village, Ashington with @pdkmitchell.bsky.social.

Over The Wall

This week: Burnham, homelessness, and the role of ambition in politics. Also: a daytrip on the new Northumberland Line to onetime pit village, Ashington; and some extra notes on airships.

jonn.substack.com

in which we vulgarise and bewray with the filth of our sniggerings the towering spires of Art

The Whale Pod@thewhale1851.bsky.social · 3w ago

🐳 EPISODE 21 🐳 We cover lots of ground in this episode... The meaning of meaning, how Moby-Dick was written, and even Iron Maiden. Listen for free on Patreon or wherever you get your podcasts. 🐳 patreon.com/thewhalepod

Imperial Nostalgia nostalgia

Peter Mitchell@pdkmitchell.bsky.social · 3w ago

To mark five years of this book existing I've been collating some of the praise it's received from grateful readers

Agree with all above

I appreciate Bluesky's probably useless for this because you're all effete metropolitans, but I've been adopted by a very young cat who I think probably has an owner somewhere. West End of Newcastle, NE4. Haven't been able to scan her for a chip yet. I've temporarily named her Butterbeans

In fairness, while I think Starmer will be rightly cursed for a lot of big stuff (and grudgingly acknowledged for some very decent small stuff), he won't be remembered as the party's murderer - only as an unusually diligent gravedigger who happened to be on hand when it arrived at the cemetery

James Ball@jamesrball.com · 3w ago

Contrary to whst the 20 remaining ultras on here think: no, history will not remember Keir Starmer's premiership kindly. The best he can hope for – and the likeliest outcome by far – is that history will barely remember his premiership at all.

That Reform think this naked hypocrisy can fly is largely downstream of how the political media class responded to a neo-nazi murdering Jo Cox by holding the left to account, telling the racists they have a point & then adopting their rhetoric & policies around immigration / integration

Adam Bienkov@adambienkov.bsky.social · 3w ago

After Zia Yusuf accuses critics of endangering Reform politicians with violent language, he is read a list of quotes where he called Reform's opponents "lunatics who deserve extinction", "sick arsonists" and "traitors" who will face a "reckoning". He says these are in "a totally different category"

To mark five years of this book existing I've been collating some of the praise it's received from grateful readers

Actual Onion headline

The Columbus Dispatch@dispatch.com · 3w ago

Opinion: A retired professor shares how political polarization is impacting his dating life in modern America.

Yes! Good! More!

The Green Party of England & Wales@greenparty.org.uk · 4w ago

Rent controls would save households up to £2,400 a year and the Government £2 billion a year. It's a no-brainer. But only the Green Party has a policy to introduce them.

In this episode, we wonder what kind of reader Melville was, and conclude - with the help of the incredible 'Melville's Marginalia Online' project - that the answer is "an angry one". Here he is slagging off an illustration he doesn't like in Thomas Beale's 1839 'Natural History of the Sperm Whale'

Congrats as ever to 'More in Common' for Simply Seeking To Understand Where People Are Organically At and somehow in the process consistently supplying the far right media with its most inflammatory lines

Nate O@nateo.bsky.social · 4w ago

Lost behind the incendiary headline and subhead is a third of respondents to More in Common’s survey apparently believe in ‘remigration’, that is, the forced, rapid expulsion of millions of British people who aren’t white to countries they have never lived in. This is a form of genocide

LIKE if you would have sex in the Moby-Dick Love Hotel / RETWEET if we have always been, all of us on this earth, in the very realest sense, having sex in the Moby-Dick Love Hotel www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...

We’re having sex inside Moby Dick! The wild architectural world of Japan’s love hotels

From cruise ships to UFOs, from King Kong to a giant whale, half the sex in Japan may take place in its dazzlingly imaginative love hotels. But have some become just too seedy? Our writer checks in

theguardian.com

Fascinated by this absolutely chaotic article, in which we learn that Moby-Dick is the Americaest book and America the Mobydickiest country www.ft.com/content/6494...

‘Moby-Dick’ is the Great American Novel of pursuit and destruction

Like its country of origin, the book is unabashed, sometimes self-indulgent, often brilliant and never subdued or apologetic

ft.com