Recently updated blogs

For many people, eating a diet of nothing but potatoes (or almost nothing but potatoes) causes quick, effortless weight loss. It’s not a matter of white-knuckling through a boring diet — people eat as much (potato) as they want, and at the end of a month of spuds they say things like, “I was quite surprised that I didn’t get tired of potatoes. I still love them, maybe even more …

I meant to link to this earlier this year, but just stumbled upon it again in an open tab (yes, from August, so shoot me) and remembered how good it was. Sam Kriss takes on the now-ubiquitous “book lists”, taking aim first at the middlebrow blandness of Barack Obama’s, then the angsty teenage boydom of Reddit’s: “What we’re looking at isn’t really a list of the greatest books ever written, …

A drawing on a rock at Empire Shopping Center in Burbank. For more of my photos, follow me on Instagram.About | My Book I Newsletter I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Consulting I Email

September 2024 Day 2 of my coast walk and after breakfast the first thing to do is get back to the point I left the coast yesterday. First I walked along the coast until near Koper than cut inland to a bus stop just south of Koper by a main road, where Google told me the bus stopped. It was correct and it was only about a 10 minutes journey …

Fifteen years ago, courts generally avoided categorical pronouncements about the legitimacy of competitive keyword advertising. That produced a string of waffly or irresolute rulings, such as the appellate rulings in Rescuecom v. Google (2d Circuit) and Rosetta Stone v. Google (4th Circuit). Whatever legal ambiguity might have existed then has been decisively resolved, at least with respect to competitive keyword ads that don’t use the trademark in the ad copy. …

Our review of The Savage Storm: The Battle for Italy 1943, by James Holland, first published in September 2023. An in-depth investigation into a few months in the Battle for Italy: we get a sense of what it was like for the soldiers and civilians that lived through the battles.Highly recommended, both for WW2 buffs and those of us like me who don‘t read much military history. ★★★★☆ This book …

How the African Risk Capacity (ARC) helps protect African countries following extreme weather events. This year marks the 10th anniversary of ARC Group, a specialised agency of the African Union. It provides technical assistance and rapid prearranged finance following an extreme weather event, such as drought, tropical cyclone and soon fluvial flood, to various African countries through its regional risk insurance pool. It provides both sovereign insurance to African governments …

I like to think she was looking for better reception by the window. There were so many tourists in Florence — including me — that I was consciously looking for photos without any people in them. This one seemed right to me though, a single person living their life in a city that felt overwhelmed with people. Photograph tags: europe, florence, colour, travel, italy, x100t, architecture

The other night at Rosh Hashonah dinner, my stepbrother was playing my guitar and found his way into “Black Peter.” This was not because he had ever sat down and learned it, but because it’s embedded so deeply in his unconscious that he could teach it to himself in real time. This is yet another Dead tune that I loved as a kid without knowing why, and then didn’t think …

Stories of Crime & Detection, vol. 7: Death Croons the Blues (2024) is, as of this writing, one of the recent additions to the ambitious, ongoing project to restore James Ronald's crime, detective and pulp fiction to print – scheduled to conclude next year with vol. 14. The headline novel of this collection is the second of three novels about the morally flexible, ace crime reporter of the London-based Morning …

by Zahid Fayyaz Former winner of Taskmaster and Celebrity Mastermind, and following regular appearances on Frankie Boyle’s New World Order and The Last Leg, Sophie Duker tours her new show to London this month. This is the sequel to her award-nominated 2019 debut, But Daddy I Loved Her, a play on the trademark phrase from Ariel in Disney’s The Little Mermaid, is a loud, brash and electric show from Duker. …

Forbes recently published the Forbes 400 List for 2024, listing the 400 richest people in the United States. This inspired me to make a histogram to show the distribution of wealth in the United States. It turns out that if you put Elon Musk on the graph, almost the entire US population is crammed into a vertical bar, one pixel wide. Each pixel is $500 million wide, illustrating that $500 …

Largely hidden from view, enclosed behind a brick wall in Chelsea is a beautiful and historic site. The Chelsea Physic Garden is a four acre botanic garden, established in 1673. Chelsea Physic Garden is both a beautiful, relaxing place to visit but one that is also packed with history and stories to tell. Chelsea In […] The post The Chelsea Physic Garden: London’s Oldest Botanic Garden appeared first on Living …

Poached from Lydia Lunch's official Instagram page. Photo by Marcel Jas Lydia Lunch, Effenaar, Eindhoven 1988. You may be cool, but you'll never be Lydia-Lunch-in-a-Slayer-shirt cool.

This is the fourth in a series of posts on the reasons I will not be voting to return the former president to the White House. My focus here is not to support his opponent but instead to explain why I believe that Donald Trump is manifestly unqualified for the role.The Wikipedia article entitled "False or misleading statements by Donald Trump" starts with this editing note:This article may be too …