My notes an drawings of a lecture on how the novel was put together.

I enjoyed it, but I didn't really understand it. I’m sure I should have more to say about it than that, but really, that sums it up quite neatly. But to try to go a bit deeper… The solar system is populated by various species or clans of posthumans, transhumans, AIs, uploaded minds, whatever. Earth is unrecognisable, though some people – seemingly fairly close to basic-human, though it’s hard to judge, with so many strangenesses – still live there.

The twentieth Battle of Ideas festival will take place at Church House, Westminster on 18 & 19 October 2025.

When Ethan Hunt, the leader of a crack espionage team whose perilous operation has gone awry with no explanation, discovers that a mole has penetrated the CIA, he's surprised to learn that he's the prime suspect. To clear his name, Hunt now must ferret out the real double agent and, in the process, even the score.

Song · 1977 · Duration 3:56

London publicist Helen, effortlessly slides between parallel storylines that show what happens when she does or does not catch a train back to her apartment. Love. Romantic entanglements. Deception. Trust. Friendship. Comedy. All come into focus as the two stories shift back and forth, overlap and surprisingly converge.

Well this is an exciting turnup: remember early in the pandemic, when there was an article in The New Yorker New York magazine about the inability to get a particular pasta shape? The pasta shape was equally mysterious over here. I wrote about it: Bucatini. Well, at last, here it is.

PostNord will stop delivering letters to Denmark at the end of 2025, though package distribution will remain.

Finished reading several weeks ago, in fact. I’m way behind with the change of year. Anyway, this is an odd little book. I stress the ‘little’ because it’s very short. We’re in Peru. An ancient rope bridge, of Inca origin, collapses one day, killing the five people who were crossing it. A priest, Brother Juniper, witnesses the event and decides to use it to prove God has a plan for humans.