Saw Wim Wender's film Perfect Days. Influenced by the excellent ethnographic work of Laura Haapio-Kirk I took this to be an essay on how a Tokyo toilet cleaner embodies the Japanese ideal of Ikigai - a sort of artisanal approach to work - with here perhaps Buddhist undertones?

📚📚📚New Book Review! 📚📚📚 Daniel Miller Daniel Miller reviews //Thanks for Watching: An anthropological study of video sharing on YouTube// by Patricia G. Lange Patricia G. Lange 2019 University Press of Colorado Consortium #anthrotwitter #youtube Read it here!⬇️ anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/am…

"[T]he broad lesson that utopians... should derive... is that of attentiveness to collective agency and recognition of the epistemic value of social practices on the ground." 🇮🇪 📖 Read Justas Petrauskas's review of Daniel Miller's new book in full here: oxfordpoliticalreview.com/2024/04/01/les…

Lemonade, Renaissance and now Cowboy Carter. Sometimes you have to admit, that it's not the Arty and the Indie, but the mainstream pop that just blows you away.

We have a one-year post here at Digital Anthropology UCL. Just follow the link ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/se…

After 1,200 pages I am still only starting volume 3 of The Story of the Stone/The Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin. But that's ok. I don't really want the book to end.

Just published - an interview I did for a website trying to combat stereotypes about ageing. theluxuryofageing.com/exploring-the-…

The end of a very very long and very very dark tunnel is finally in sight for the UK.

Out canvassing for the Labour Party. I live in a marginal constituency and the idea of another five years represented by a Tory is beyond awful.

I will be doing a live interview about my new book - The Good Enough Life - at the WITW Festival in Salford this Sunday at 13.00. The full festival programme can be found at:- weinventedtheweekend.com/wp-content/upl…

Canvassing and leafletting done. Horrified by the number of people who still intend to vote Tory. Just hope the Labour supporters will actually come out and vote tomorrow in our marginal constituency. Fingers crossed.

Decided to take the day off. One last push to get the Labour vote out. Then at least you feel you did what you could.

Obviously happy with the national result, but especially happy that in the end, we did win our local constituency of Finchley and Golders Green. The one next door was won by 150 votes which shows why it's worth making that extra effort.

Highly recommend Reinventing the Good Life by Jeannette Pols with UCL Press uclpress.co.uk/products/230892 Not just a similar title to my book The Good Enough Life, but both books juxtapose ethnography with philosophy to show how we can learn from good practices within imperfect lives.

Sorry to hear of the passing of Barry Wellman, a really key figure in developing the way we think about networks and the internet.

I look forward to WOMAD all year and then it never disappoints. Highlights yesterday - Amadou and Mariam, Young Fathers.

Magical moment at WOMAD. Two Catalan singers called Tarta Relena.

My book 'Ageing with Smartphones in Japan: care in a visual digital age' is published today with UCL Press (open access)! Based on 16 months of ethnographic research in urban Kyoto and rural Kōchi Prefecture. uclpress.co.uk/book/ageing-wi… UCL Anthropology Christ Church

Enjoyed End of the Road festival, especially Ichiko Aoba, CMAT, Cat Clyde, Cerys Hafana, and Nusantara Beat

I hadn't looked for quite a while. But just found that the downloads for our Why We Post book series have now passed one million, eight hundred thousand. Not bad for a bunch of anthropology monographs