Anyone know whether today is a ‘ceasefire’ day or a ‘destroy your civilisation’ day yet?

Deb Never - This Alive (Official Audio) YouTube video by Deb Never

Not saying anything novel, but I, like many others, often wonder if there’s a point to my work amidst all this chaos. Then I recall how restorative + motivating it’s been to discover new music over the past year. So grateful for people making nice stuff.

I’m really liking Deb Never this week.

Oh lord
won’t you buy me
A Mercedes Benz?
My friends all drive Porsches
I must make amends
Worked hard all my lifetime
No help from my friends
So lord won’t you buy me
A Mercedes Benz.
- Psalms of Janis

“You’re fired!” - Felons 45:47

"Never forget your towel" -- Hitchhikers 29:3

"I seem to have got a little plastered" YouTube video by klishnor1

Trump's ballroom.
youtu.be/_pq3PLA57m4?...

IBM reverses course on decades of DEI efforts Bowing to public pressure, the company dissolved its DEI team and erased much of its DEI messaging.

Much of what we call inclusion practices come from early IBM models. This isn’t just a company reversal. I think it’s just another sign of how much illiberalism has taken hold.

www.hr-brew.com/stories/2025...

For me, as an Eastern European, the USSR meant occupation, repression, loss of freedom, and hunger, not emancipation. When the Western Left ignores these experiences, it reproduces the very exclusion it claims to criticize.

How is TJ Maxx not getting in on "looksmaxxing," riding it hard for a fiscal quarter of advertising campaign, then walking away with the satisfaction of having murdered the trend.

Bird sitting on a branch, with cutout phrase “Pi Pi Pi…” coming from its beak. Caption: Postcard collage by Wisława Szymborska, date unknown

“No One Thinks in Esperanto.”
Yup, Wisława Szymborska wrote a humorous anonymous advice column for Polish journal Zycie literackie (Literary Life). Letters from her 20 yr run are in, “How to Start Writing (& When to Stop).”
@poemakontsa.bsky.social #poetry

Archived NYRB article: archive.ph/WznM6

a snippet of a mini-comic, at top - straight line stretches from point A to B. Immediately below, same dot at A, then becomes a curving, meandering line that winds through the page and ends at a point with rays and a question mark emanating from it. Text reads: "Nothing can do this for you - for that robs you of experience and conflates answers with learning. Rather, it's all the decisions you make along the way, the mistakes, struggles, and surprises! These pathways you create - this is learning. https://spinweaveandcut.com/fall-2025-syllabi/

In case anyone needs it for their syllabi, my statement in gen-Ai from the minicomic I made as a syllabus for class last semester. All online and printable here spinweaveandcut.com/fall-2025-sy...

Now Online: a Treasure Trove of 1000s of Secret Concert Recordings For decades, a guy named Aadam Jacobs has been recording live music shows. His collection of over 10,000 shows since 1984 feature the likes of Nirvana, R.E.M., The Pixies, Björk, Depeche Mode, Liz Phair, Sonic Youth, The

For decades, Aadam Jacobs recorded live music shows. His collection of over 10,000 shows since 1984 features Nirvana, R.E.M., The Pixies, Björk, Depeche Mode, The Cure, and so many more — and they're now available on the Internet Archive for free. [kottke.org]

Reform-Run Kent Council Sells Off Antony Gormley Sculpture After Raising Taxes Nigel Farage's flagship council quietly sold Two Stones, one of the sculptor's earliest commissions, as part of a wave of publicly owned art disposals that critics call "shameful"

Reform-run Kent County Council has sold off a work of public art by one of Britain’s most respected sculptors, Antony Gormley.

Gormley’s ‘Two Stones’ was hosted outside the Kent History and Library Centre in Maidstone until a few days ago. Latest for @bylinetimes.bsky.social

Not Jesus, obviously, just some bloke selling loaves and fishes

"The image clearly depicts me as a simple vendor of seafood sandwiches"

The rise of ‘infrastructural populism’: Urban infrastructure and right-wing politics
(Geography Compass) highlights how mobility and urban models like the 15-Minute City are reframed in political narratives.

compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Ok some thoughts about Hungary. I think an underreported aspect of the outgoing Hungarian government is the sheer scale of corruption.
I know it’s tempting to see this result as the beginning of a wave of European ideological realignment, but that doesn’t quite ring true imo.
1/n

British crypto billionaire Ben Delo says he has given £4m to Reform UK Delo, pardoned by Trump after violating US banking law, describes himself as champion of free speech

Reform donor Ben Delo, who has given £4 million to the party, is making legal threats to those who reference his 2022 US conviction for failing to implement anti-money laundering laws, prior to a pardon by President Trump.
www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

The Köln Concert live at The Barbican. A dream come true. Thomas Enhco and Maki Namekawa did the magic.

Hall of fame FT correction

Nothing to see here, just a US university living the Stasi dream universitystar.com/35240/news/t...

For a sense of the scale of the federal occupation of the Twin Cities metro this winter...

Chicago and LA were too big so they tried picking on somewhere smaller.

They were thick on the ground here but they still left in disgrace.
www.axios.com/local/twin-c...

I’ve been thinking about this guy almost daily for ten fucking years. essentially my entire 30’s. when he finally croaks I imagine I’ll let out a sigh so deep it realigns my fucking spine

‘I see it as trafficking’: the brutal reality of life as a foreign student in the UK The long read: Universities in Britain rely on overseas applicants paying full fees, which has given rise to some unscrupulous recruiters and left many hopefuls and their families deep in debt

This is where our idiotic, decades-long obsession with reducing immigration has got us: exploiting hard-up people across the globe so as not to tax the wealthy to fund education, then resenting their very presence, whilst opening the recruitment pool to sharks. Well done everyone supporting this

The Cambridge Disinformation Summit opened with a very informative and intuitive pre-Summit workshop on Cognitive Warfare from Prof Chad Briggs.

He noted, among other things, that a core objective is cognitive paralysis, which affords considerable relative power to a malign actor.

RMDSZ (the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania) campaigned for the pro-EU Nicușor Dan in 2025 to become Romania’s president.
Now, the same RMDSZ is actively trying to steer the votes from Romania’s Hungarian community toward the anti-EU Orbán.

Such a disappointment!

You know what? I'll admit it. The credible threat by a madman to wipe out a nation of 90 million people for basically no reason (presumably using nuclear weapons) successfully distracted me. I am now distracted.

Insane

The Garden of Earthly Delights (detail), by Hieronymus Bosch, 1480-1505, 📸 by @alexbrandon

Surely Reform-curious ‘Christian’, no?

And, to the people suggesting that splitting the left wing vote is why the right wing wins, no. *This* is why the right wing wins. The supposed left parroting right wing lies. Embedding right wing narratives.