Freston Tower Feb 2026.

Just learned about Freston Tower from a friend who stayed there.Β 

β€œPencil Magazine is a themed print publication featuring work created entirely with graphite pencil and paper.” 

I’ve been locked out of my Baylor accounts β€” I changed my password and now neither the new one nor the old one works β€” and I’m trying to decide whether that’s a bad or a good thing.

The fourth and last post in my series for the Dispatch on the Second World War is up.

Dickovers, baggravation and botiquette: 18 new words to describe our tech hellscape:

How much time do you think we have collectively spent, as a species, convincing robots that we are not robots? By now, we must have wasted several millennia ensuring we have clicked all the various parts of a bicycle on a captcha grid of someone’s front garden, or sliding a jigsaw puzzle precisely into a pixellated hole, or clicking a box that says β€œI am not a robot” as if the internet has suddenly discovered the honour system. Listen, if we ever want to pretend to be robots, let’s do it the old-fashioned way, by covering ourselves in tinfoil and beep-booping our way into an enemy moon-lair.

The corrected and slightly improved paperback version of my critical edition of Auden’s The Shield of Achilles is now available. I really do think it’s his masterpiece and highly recommend it to you. Back when the first edition came out I wrote a brief essay on it for the PUP website.Β 

If you only listen to one Dolly song in memoriam, make it this one.

If there is not a National Day of Mourning for Dolly Parton, we will have failed as a country. May she rest in peace and rise in glory.