The glee on his face. Magnificent.
06.03.2026 21:10
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The glee on his face. Magnificent.
He just made me enormously happy
Just finished Mao II, in which Don Delillo describes the funeral of another Ayatollah. Incredible book. And weird timing.
As the analysis starts of the Gorton and Denton result, I wanted to flag some aspects that my experience yesterday suggests are being over or under-played
(Caveats - I went to Longsight, Gorton and Denton town centres and spoke to as many people as I could, but it was mostly during the working day)
Green Party got 47% in the Gorton & Denton by-election
their previous highest by-election result anywhere, ever, was just 10%
Vivid and courageous reporting from @sommervilletv.bsky.social. Was listening yesterday in the car, and missed my turning: www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
Putin is making Russia small again:
”Our model suggests that Russian casualties are now between 1.1m and 1.4m, of whom 230,000-430,000 are dead. That would mean one in 25 Russian men between the ages of 18 and 49 may have been killed or severely wounded since the start of the full-scale war.”
On Saturday, five European governments concluded that the Russian dissident Alexei Navalny was poisoned with a frog toxin. From 2024, read Navalny’s account of his last years. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...
Manchester Free Reference Library opened on this day 1878 in the old Town Hall, King Street. Demolished early 20th century, colonnade can still be seen in Heaton Park.
Stunner, by Gideon Lewis-Kraus, in this week's @newyorker.com . Deep reporting and gorgeous writing about Anthropic, AI, and the soul of the new machine: www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...
Poland will launch an investigation into possible links between the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and Russian intelligence, as well as any impact on Poland, Prime Minister Donald Tusk said on Tuesday.
This piece from inside Iran @equatormag.bsky.social is fascinating and horrifying: www.equator.org/articles/the...
Manchester 1976, what a photo
I'm into behindcore, but could get on board with the steak and eggs bit
The bank has form.
Ten years ago, I wrote about DB's wild mirror-trading scheme: www.newyorker.com/magazine/201...
A two act play...
Yesterday: Deutsche Bank's offices raided in German investigation into money-laundering. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
Today: Deutsche Bank announces record profits of 9.7 billion euros. www.db.com/news/detail/...
This is possibly my favourite quote about politics. paw.princeton.edu/article/stil...
Can confirm that being a journalist is occasionally very sick indeed.
it's no "AKA Kim Jong Un" for sure
His fellow indictees, not to be outdone:
Strong AKA game from the freshly-indicted Ryan Wedding:
Rifaat al-Assad has died. This obit in NYT omits a) he used to own Witanhurst, and b) his vast offshore wealth was partly managed for nearly a decade by Mark Bridges, the Queen's private solicitor. (Obit does mention: Mitterand gave him the Legion D'Honneur ffs.) www.nytimes.com/2026/01/21/w...
I actually spat out a little coffee.
The US granted visas to Jews but only allowed 30,000 in from Germany a year. You had to wait for your number to come up.
Meet Robert Smallbones. An unassuming British diplomat who 'hacked' this system so effectively (saving 48 THOUSAND Jews) the UK government kept his scheme secret for decades /1 🧵
We're absolutely delighted to welcome Sophie Heawood and @nivenj1.bsky.social to The Fence as columnists for the print magazine in 2026. Their first outings will be in Issue 27. Subscribe today to get eyes on their words first.
www.the-fence.com/shop/
The Prime Minister of Belgium speaks:
Cleminson Street, Salford. Salford pioneered play streets, traffic-free from 8am till sunset (borrowed from New York) in the 1930s. Legislation followed: there were 700 in England and Wales in the 1950s, all but forgotten by the 1980s.
I also really enjoyed the piece.
Lovely essay by John Phipps about a man and his cello. (Contains the word "luthier", which improves any piece.)
www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...
'She was long in the body, but strong of limb and rib,
and her muscles moved under the skin
like currents in a bay of the river.
She was swift as the wind or as the summer swallow . . .'
from Sean Jennett's ‘I Was A Labourer’.
Photograph: Chris Killip