timsmith-laing.com - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

Find Justin Webb on Today on Radio 4 completely unlistenable when it comes to the US: glib, ill-informed and opinionated is the worst possible combination in this moment

submitted 11 hours ago • 61 comments

Love this double package: Requia and The Yellow Princess. Prime era Fahey.

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

Spare a thought for Chris Mason as he flies home. He'll have to write positive things about Keir Starmer. He'll need a new vocabulary.

submitted 4 days ago • 11 comments

The initial story was overhyped, but I fear this reading is too generous. It shows that if you press people on what dictatorship really means, they get cold feet. But they're drawn to the idea in principle & struggle to see the point of constraints. That's a problem that goes far beyond "Gen Z" 🧵

submitted 4 days ago • 11 comments

When one of your satirical pieces breaks Google

submitted 5 days ago • 31 comments

RIP to the incredible Bill Fay. The first thing I ever wrote for @pitchfork.com was a look at how his aesthetic approach to christian music was centered in a determined, grounded spirit of incarnation—meaning, he never seemed like he wanted to leave this earth behind. pitchfork.com/thepitch/758...

submitted 9 days ago • 1 comment

"This novella is mischievous, strange and sinister" @shaunwhiteside.bsky.social on Paul Valéry's Monsieur Teste (as translated by @avecsesdoigts.bsky.social) in this week's @thetls.bsky.social www.the-tls.co.uk/regular-feat...

submitted 5 days ago • 1 comment

God, this is quite brutal.

submitted 6 days ago • 0 comments

To the vatniks, campists, fascists and self-described "pragmatists" saying "maybe Trump has got a point": There is one nation and one nation alone that should decide the terms for peace in Ukraine. Ukraine.

submitted 6 days ago • 59 comments

That’s this letter in the London Review of Books in 2013. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v3...

submitted 6 days ago • 1 comment

The current proposals that AI companies should be uniquely excluded from paying for other people’s IP and creative labour is effectively a state subsidy worth trillions of dollars, paid for by content creators and copyright holders.

submitted 7 days ago • 7 comments

Front page of every single UK newspaper today. Generative AI is theft.

submitted 7 days ago • 32 comments

this whole album is just so crucial but esp the song "Disco" by the Rollies...so necessary

submitted 9 days ago • 4 comments

'Off to the Pub.' (The Weekend) At the time of this work (1912) Walter Sickert was painting pairs of figures arranged variously within domestic settings to produce emotional or psychological tension, as in the melodramatic crisis portrayed here, it culminated in 'Ennui.' (c1914)

submitted 9 days ago • 0 comments

This is the kind of naive glorification of pre globalisation 'small towns' that I find so unrealistic. Technology evolved, and it wasn't as if there wasn't crime without immigrants. Nostalgia won't restore the idealised times that never were, we need to understand the world of today.

submitted 10 days ago • 10 comments

The Procuress, by Dirck van Baburen, who died (alas!) OTD 1624. When you wonder who in Dutch Golden Age looked at such works, know that this one was owned by Vermeer's mother-in-law. A nice Catholic lady!

submitted 11 days ago • 2 comments

Books designed to be read only by human eyes are different from books designed to be read by machines, which is why Google will tell you that the phrase “shake my booty” can be found in an 1863 English translation of Don Quixote.

submitted 344 days ago • 82 comments

At last, something!

submitted 11 days ago • 0 comments

Takeshi Terauchi transformed the image of the electric guitar in Japan during the early 1960s, shifting its perception from a “bad boy” accessory to the central instrument of the decade’s youth culture.

submitted 11 days ago • 2 comments

submitted 12 days ago • 4 comments

The slippery, sane-washing desperation of Boris Johnson as he realises what his whole-hearted backing of Trump means. Excruciating.

submitted 12 days ago • 46 comments

This is excellent.

submitted 12 days ago • 0 comments

Badenoch accusing Labour of being people 'who will pander to whatever is going on because they're not rooted in anything serious' is just amazing. Incredible stuff.

submitted 13 days ago • 0 comments

to commemorate the official death of the Humane AI pin, let us revisit my blog. Never forget how stupid this was: www.404media.co/we-must-neve...

submitted 13 days ago • 6 comments

Happy 92nd birthday to the brilliant artist @yokoono.bsky.social!

submitted 14 days ago • 0 comments

Penal populism has broken Britain’s prisons. My piece for @newstatesman.com on why our addiction to longer sentences is unsustainable. www.newstatesman.com/politics/soc...

submitted 14 days ago • 10 comments

It is the job of diplomats to make the best out of any given situation. It is the job of journalists, writers and historians to say very clearly and without hesitation what the situation is. Both jobs are important but they are not the same.

submitted 14 days ago • 12 comments

Dear #BookSky can you help us find our lost audience? We left 140,00 people behind on X and we want to reconnect!

submitted 15 days ago • 13 comments

After the Bath, 1823: provocative, ingenious trompe l’oeil by Raphaelle Peale, who was born OTD in 1774.

submitted 14 days ago • 3 comments

Had better graphics on my BBC Micro.

submitted 15 days ago • 0 comments

The only rule you absolutely have to follow in order to have a successful news organization is "don't print lies in the newspaper" and they are going hard for the plagiarism machine that frequently hallucinates false information

submitted 15 days ago • 13 comments

I thought it was impossible for me to respect NYT leadership less but nature finds a way.

submitted 15 days ago • 8 comments

Why is spotify relentlessly trying to get me to listen to some version of "two dudes who don't know shit discuss the state of the world" ?

submitted 15 days ago • 29 comments

PSA: All of David Lynch's features have just dropped at archive dot org, including Industrial Symphony No 1, Hotel Room, and the Duran Duran concert

submitted 15 days ago • 21 comments

Impossible to convey all the pleasures of this marvellous book in one post. Enough to say that one of the least of its glories is that it spends almost two pages tracing the affinities between Satie and Les Dawson.

submitted 18 days ago • 17 comments

Ian Hamilton Finlay, A Valentine, 1993

submitted 18 days ago • 0 comments

Okay, another deep breath. Look it doesn't matter whether it's Blunkett, Philp or the Wizard of Oz suggesting it, ID cards would have absolutely no impact on undocumented working, channel crossings etc. It's pie in the sky nonsense which a two second application of commonsense tells you. #r4today

submitted 18 days ago • 5 comments

'Villains have straight hair. Idiots have curly hair.'

submitted 19 days ago • 0 comments

If you go into the backstory you find that Everest was actually given a starter 500m by its parents.

submitted 19 days ago • 9 comments

Died (alas!) on this day in 1538, in his home town of Regensburg, Albrecht Altdorfer. Here, Alexander the Great & Persian king Darius clash in the Battle of Issus, painted by Altdorfer in 1529.

submitted 20 days ago • 3 comments

Gore Vidal on Henry Miller

submitted 22 days ago • 3 comments

Born on this day in 1591, Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, better known as Guercino. Painted dogs. And himself with dogs. Here he's painting one in an allegory of faithful love (nice!) in 1655.

submitted 24 days ago • 5 comments

Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia will tomorrow permanently disconnect from Russia’s power grid. Russia can no longer use energy as a tool of blackmail. This is a victory for freedom and European unity.

submitted 25 days ago • 77 comments

My latest article is out! It argues that the public subvention of photography in Parisian hospitals enabled the institutionalisation of photography and shaped the kind of photography that could be done #photohist #histmed 📷📸🗂️ It took me literal years to write!! www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

submitted 26 days ago • 3 comments

With the beatific Stax-inspired "Knowledge," @edwyncollins.bsky.social lets go of his "old self" in favor of who he is today. I spoke with him and his wife/manager Grace Maxwell about aphasia, optimism, Orange Juice, and more for my newsletter.

submitted 26 days ago • 3 comments

Have to assemble a 'teaching CV' for some very welcome professional develoment at work, and realise I've now been teaching at one level or another for 15 years ... and someone has only just now thought to offer me formal training on the job. Exciting times.

submitted 26 days ago • 0 comments

This is indeed a great article. A classic, in my mind, and one I think about regularly as a model for thinking about the past and art in general.

submitted 27 days ago • 0 comments