Oh well done! Never managed it with mine.

Openness in this sense is a machine value - it's about smooth integration of systems, zero-handshake interactions, frictionless data exchange. It can't contribute anything of real value to humans (even the convenience it supports is principally about reducing costs for organisations).

I fear we've shredded human subjectivity and autonomy in the name of an essentially corporate imperative to openness. More closed (or at least not radically open) places! More friction! More deliberate interaction!

Fascinating. My fear, though, is that we've collectively misrecognised the web's openness. We've read 'open' here as analogous to 'freedom' but, in fact, it's a synonym for a kind of instrumental transparency the purpose of which, it turns out, is control, ownership and exploitation.

Two detectorists work the beach at Great Yarmouth, behind them the stripey hot-dog stand and the sea. A high-contrast black and white 35mm photograph.

Detectorists, Great Yarmouth, around 2005.

Sure you're right about this case (and others) and it's kind of telling that apparently the only way for ordinary human beings to alter the behaviour of these ugly, metastasising corporations is to launch shonky law suits and hope for the best, while our governments (mostly) just wring their hands.

GROSS/69 - 1978 - Grease is a miserable thing but it has a magic realist ending that I can’t stop thinking about You were probably in a school production of this strange and rather cruel story.

Read the full review - outside the paywall for you greasers and pink ladies - in GROSS: bit.ly/4uN1KiJ

Grease - 1978's top-grossing Hollywood movie and fixture in small town theatres everywhere - isn’t what you think it is. It’s a pretty dark and sometimes quite cruel movie and it has this startling, magic realist ending that I can’t stop thinking about…

Still from 1978 film Grease with text overlaid: 'GROSS/69 - 1978 - Grease is a miserable thing but it has a magic realist ending that I can’t stop thinking about'

Grease. 1978's top-grossing Hollywood movie. Is the strange ending actually magic realism or is it really just a lazy resolution to a tortured and resistant text that honestly needed something…

GROSS, the cinema history newsletter: bit.ly/4uN1KiJ

The thing is it's our own fault, right? I mean our deference to the hegemon is essentially complete. We fill our news bulletins with American stories, consume American politics as if it were our own. We should take a week off or something.

It had such a huge effect on listeners that the whole thing was put out again, in a single two-hour broadcast, on the Light Programme, the BBC's biggest outlet, a few weeks later. Looks like the original 1946 tapes have been lost but an abridged 1948 version has gone out occasionally since then.

The impact of Hersey's article in Britain was delayed, but not by much. Hardly anyone had seen it and the magazine was unobtainable. Producer Joel O'Brien had the idea of broadcasting the whole piece in a reading, using multiple voices, across four nights in October, on the new BBC Third Programme.

Great first try from Nathan McBeth there, although I'd prefer it if the commentators called him 'the Scottish prop' as superstition dictates. #SixNations2026

LOVE ISLAND IDEA. We fly a drone over the compound and drop a couple of bags of Banagrams in there.

Such a treat, on my cycle to work, to see the crocuses and daffodils in the verges. Lifts the heart!

Yes, I'm sure it's to do with the fact that none of the main roads in that quadrant of North London has any cycling provision at all! (although tbh I quite like it that way - I find the cycle superhighways terrifying!).

On my commute into central London I don’t encounter another ordinary pedal-cycle until approximately Maida Vale. It’s fascinating. Before that it’s all delivery kids on lethal-looking e-bikes. The outer boroughs are the domain of precarity and electricity.

Our stupid toy poodle Topper, who also made it to 16, did exactly the same thing, once too wobbly to actually come down the stairs on his own. We're were summoned like Uber drivers to bring him down.

Yeh but I wouldn't want to live there

No clocks in Evri HQ

In Britain I think the Winter of 1962/63 caused a big shift. My parents told me they urgently installed central heating (taking out a loan to pay for it) after that. Always wondered if there's any research into the effect of that terrible, long Winter on heating becoming a more widespread thing.

What is she, three feet off the ground?

The regal gold emblem of Donald Trump's Board of Peace with the words 'Board of Peace' replaced with 'Bored of Peas?' in a similar style

One thing that I think is important, for those of who are not American, is to at least act like what happens there isn't important to us and that it is, in fact, laughable. I mean we live in a sovereign nation a long way away and we really shouldn't defer so pathetically to American pathologies.

Except, hold on a minute: Amanda's cop skills were ridiculed. It was one of the show's best comic elements and it resulted in her early eviction. And the FBI thing was made up, just gameplay, the opposite of copaganda. I mean am I missing something?

Telephone exchange? Always extra tall to accommodate all that clicking-clacking mechanical switching gear!

Au Pairs
Raincoats
The Gossip
Big Joanie
Patti Smith

@dmandl.bsky.social Hey Dave, I was just leafing through my copy of Radio Text(e) and noticed for the first time that you were an editor of the book! One of my faves!

BORED OF PEAS?

Only learnt about her myself the other day. Another hidden genius.

Crimewave still running out of control in London