You are a Westminster-educated theologian named Timothy who has achieved a double first at Oxbridge, having converted from Anglicanism in your late teens. Which path do you take?

Uncertain way of gain! But I am in So far in blood that sin will pluck on sin: Tear-falling pity dwells not in this eye. — Act IV Scene II Richard III Shakespeare

typical LRB nonfiction: oxford dons write 7k-word reflections on codicology in Old Church Slavonic, Scottish proto-socialism, patronage in the court of Karl V, etc; Mr Lanchester solves capitalism fiction: 1 extremely online young American does personal essay near a bestseller

Bronze-age totemic figures of the Altai

Simply gorgeous

I've been watching the geoguessr world cup and I kid you not the commentator has just said "that wire is more common in west Kazakhstan"

Denied a delicious, nutritious energy drink as I didn’t have my red bull loicense on me

This guy would have 3 million followers today

Oxbridge discourse has been won. There isn't anything after “you shouldn't go to prison for child pornography because you didn't go to Oxbridge.”

Note that a “restrictive, puritanical cultural milieu” is presented as the cause of the problem, when such an environment is clearly what is needed to be control the behaviour of people like Huw Edwards

1848 as Napoleon's revenge

Caesar's destructiveness around the Rhine can be seen in the palynological record around Cologne. The area was densely cultivated starting about 250 BC and reforested after 50 BC, implying depopulation for a century.

In his substack post, British Foreign Secretary David Lammy seems to endorse Azerbaijan's actions in Nagorno-Karabakh as a liberation. davidlammy.substack.com/p/the-united-k…

I enjoy how much the Godfather soundtrack sounds, at parts, like the overture to Verdi's Macbeth.

“Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realise that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.” ―Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

There is radiant beauty all around

“But man is a fickle and disreputable creature and perhaps, like a chess-player, is interested in the process of attaining his goal rather than the goal itself.” ―Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground