For the ninth installment in its 1970s ECM Special series, Trio Records in Japan presented its second of three artist spotlights, this time devoted to Ralph Towner, whose guitars have long served as measuring instruments for ECM’s most elusive cartographic spaces. The compilation begins where many listeners would instinctively begin, with “Icarus,” his most enduring composition, presented here in the version from Matchbook, his duo album with Gary Burton. Its melodic intelligence never…
I have begun this 4th of July listening to a variety of podcasts: an interview with The Rest is History British podcasters and David Remnick and a NYT Book Review podcast with Jill Lepore talking about history and good books for Independence day. I listened to this story on heartland rock, which didn't tell me anything I didn't already have figured out about Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A." This piece on Octavia Butler's typewriter was disappointingly short. I have been re-reading Octavia…
Video transcript: Glengarry Glen Ross at the Old Vic Theatre sees the cast swap genders, so rather than it being an all-male cast, it becomes an all-female cast, and this is an interesting take on it. It somehow accentuates the aggressive masculinity of the play. They don’t swap any of the names; they use all the male names. It is literally just a change in actors. And I really liked how it just emphasises this, that aggressiveness in a way far greater than productions I’ve seen with an…
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It…
A worn American flag languishes in the sun at Stemmons Towers in Dallas, Texas. The post Mangled appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.
Yesterday, it happened again. I had an error message that made me scratch my head. For a moment, I thought, “God, why am I doing this? I should start a garden or something.” I copy-pasted the error message into Google. StackOverflow didn’t help that much. I was tempted to go to Copilot. But I held my horses. A few moments later, “Oooohh, here it is!” A one-line code change fixed it. Stupid Entity Framework Core! I was in a rush a few days before and I missed a small detail: I used a collection…
To this point, I’ve talked about Mystery—the fourth of The Four Principles, which are alignment, sensitivity, creativity, and mystery—in terms of ritual and storytelling. The principle of Mystery hinges on the Jungian idea that our souls need a sense of mystery, a sense that we are, even in the simple activities of daily life, participating […]
Calls to simplify financial regulation are met with warnings that doing so would destabilise the financial system. Correct?
The Iron Age occupants of this broch had to abandon it in a hurry, but they left behind some clues about their way of life
The saddest thing about the collapse of the US empire is that instead of a dignified decline or a catastrophic collapse, we had to endure the spectacle of the White House being turned into the White Trash House.
Since today is the 4th of July and in most places the beaches are still open, I thought I would revisit, Jaws, with a bonus track. After trying to convince people that Mayor Vaughn wasn’t as bad as people make him out to be, I thought I would talk about someone else in the movie whose actions can also be looked at as villainous. I am not sure I fully be… Read more
And for today’s post we have May’s monthly Round-Up. I’m over a month behind with these things now, but June’s models should offer me an opportunity to do some more efficient post-catch-up. For the first time in a long time, May also allowed me to take the Round-Up photos in the light box rather than spread across the table. That’s right! A month with no terrain pieces! Spoiler alert – June’s stuff will be the same. Not that I didn’t work on terrain over the last month – just that none got…
Last year, I tried the first of Benjamin Stevenson's Ernest Cunningham novels after some initial skepticism, but Everyone in My Family has Killed Someone (2022) sold me on Benjamin's hilarious, classically-styled meta whodunits and quickly followed it up with Everyone on This Train is a Suspect (2023) and eventually Everyone This Christmas has a Secret (2024) – bridging the gap with the non-series Last One to Leave (2022). Benjamin dominated "Murder in Retrospect: The Best and Worst of 2025" as…
From my novel Evertype. Illustration by Trent Reker.
Note: Yes I use em-dashes when I write, and no this is not AI. There are three kinds of startups. I have worked at all three — feel free to guess which is which. First, hype-driven startups. It may sound bad, but this is the kind VCs like the most. You have something many people want — or at least the vision for it. Traction is obvious, for competitors too. You must chase growth at all cost to stay relevant. Your goal is to raise ever-larger rounds. Second, customer-driven startups. You have…
I started my day checking the headlines on news sites and saw an interesting title that caught my eye because it's about CSS. These posts are generally interesting because it'll mean I learn some new CSS tricks. The posts I've read are https://dbushell.com/2026/07/03/fixing-full-bleed-css/ and since this refers to https://www.joshwcomeau.com/css/full-bleed/ I've read that too. And the only thing I think while reading is... why are you making this so complicated. But still you should read those…
On 4 July 1857, the Dead Rabbits raided a Bowery Boys clubhouse and kicked off two days of gang warfare in Lower Manhattan. Around 1,000 fighters. Eight confirmed dead. The police ran away.
Meg Walls (left) and Anna Marks Pryce (right) in Lulla at the Omnibus Theatre. Photo: Lidia Crisafulli Lulla, presumably short for lullabies, which weave through this play, centres on 16-year-old Marin (Anna Marks Pryce), a queer 16-year-old who has bunked off school to get to know Dolores (Meg Wallis) more intimately The two are having a lovely time when her mum (Madeleine MacMahon) comes home early and catches them in a compromising position. Her mum doesn’t take the idea of her daughter…
Remember when my friend Duncan Newmarch was Stuck in the 80s? Well, he’s back, with a new show for the weekend. Or is a show from four decades ago? Or is it both?
Toronto consists of enclaves. All right, and parks. Enclaves are areas inhabited by minorities. There are a hundred and five minorities in Toronto, and new ones are being created all the time. Surrounded by invisible lines, walls and wires of separation and by a very visible medley of customs and languages, these minorities are becoming … Continue reading "Living in exile: Dying in Toronto by Daša Drndić"
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.We hold these truths to…
Hog Lowe Pike- an intriguing name for an intriguing place. The humpback hill sits high on the surrounding moorland and despite its modest size, it is a prominent landmark easily seen by travellers on the Grane Road. The earliest evidence of human activity on the hill comes from the Mesolithic era. This was a time […]
I finally managed to organise a life-drawing session—my first since April—to get back into practice. My aim is to get back into regular life drawing about three times a month to strengthen that part of my artistic practice. I decided to change from the graphite pencils I’ve been using so far this year to Sanguine pencil & Conté crayons, which I last used a year or two ago. Thirty minute drawing with Sanguine pencil & Conté crayons It took until the third drawing of the session—reproduced…
It’s a lovely summer morning at Catcott level crossing and halt as the 9.05am Evercreech Junction to Highbridge service rumbles pastSwanky Syd is on gate duty today, covering for crossing keeper Dafne Dando, who’s off to Highbridge market to buy a few bits and bobs she absolutely doesn’t need but will insist were a bargain.National treasure Uncle Bob has climbed out of his car to watch the little train trundle by. Today it’s graced with an ex-Southern Railway Maunsell brake composite in the…
Tangled is a Github competitor built on top of atproto. The company behind it is a Finnish startup, situated in Finland, with all servers and data held in the EU. They have taken VC money, but at least conceptually the fact that it's built on top of atproto means that if the strings that came with that cash pull the company in the wrong direction, your data is still yours and you could potentially move it somewhere else. Continuing down my atproto rabbit hole, I spent some time getting a CI…
Probably his most famous work, but I didn’t enjoy it as much as the critics do. It sounds insane to criticise hemingway’s writing but I found his stacatto sentences offputting e.g: I wanted to go to Austria without war. I wanted to go to the Black Forest. I wanted to go to the Hartz Mountains. Where were the Hartz Mountains anyway? They were fighting in the Carpathians. I did not want to go there anyway. It might be good though. I could go to Spain if there was no war. The sun was going down…
Tammy Roe was absolutely certain that the whole country was celebrating her birthday. She lived up the street from us on South Bend’s south side in a neighborhood the families called Rabbit Hill. 31 children had been born along our street within a few years of me, and on the evening of July 4, 1976, all of us were out at once — sparklers going up and down the hill, somebody’s dad setting off bottle rockets in his front yard, fireworks popping against the setting sun. Tammy stood in the thick of…
The Norfolk Broads is the only place you are likely to see native Swallowtail butterflies in the UK today. There has, for many years, been a suggestion that it is distinct from its various European counterparts. A paper from Nabholz et al. discusses the genetics of this wonderful creature. Co-author Mark Collins (erstwhile President of the Swallowtail and Birdwing Butterfly Trust) tells me the main conclusion is that “We have confirmed beyond doubt the clear separation of our British…
Over the past few months a recurring theme has emerged in my inbox, as well as within the community channel, and it is one that I have been chewing on for a while now. Several of you have, kindly and very politely, told me more or less the same thing, which is that even though the topics I write about are interesting enough, the posts themselves have grown so long and so dense that actually getting through one of them has turned into something of a commitment rather than the casual read it…
