DEN HAAG (ANP) - In het onderzoek naar de diefstal uit graven van een begraafplaats in Den Haag heeft het Openbaar Ministerie nog twee verdachten op het oog. Zij worden verdacht van witwassen, bevestigt een woordvoerster van het OM maandag een bericht van Omroep West.

Op 26 mei werd een 60-jarige medewerker van de gemeentelijke begraafplaats aan de Kerkhoflaan aangehouden. Hij was verantwoordelijk voor het delven en ruimen van de graven. Hij zou daarbij onder meer sieraden en gouden vullingen hebben meegenomen en hebben verkocht bij een goudhandel.

De nieuwe verdachten die bij de politie zijn gehoord, worden verdacht van witwassen door het verkopen van waardevolle spullen afkomstig van de begraafplaats. Het OM bevestigt niet dat het collega's van de eerste verdachte zijn, zoals Omroep West schrijft.

De gemeente Den Haag opende voor nabestaanden een telefoonnummer en e-mailadres, waar zij terechtkunnen met vragen. Het onderzoek van het OM richt zich op dit moment alleen op de Algemene Begraafplaats aan de Kerkhoflaan.

BERLIJN (ANP/RTR) - Lage waterstanden dreigen deze week de binnenvaart op een cruciaal traject van de Rijn stil te leggen. Daardoor dreigt de belangrijke waterweg te worden opgesplitst in twee afzonderlijk bevaarbare delen, waarschuwt BDB, de federale branchevereniging voor de Duitse binnenvaart, maandag.

Jens Schwanen, directeur van de organisatie, vertelde aan de krant Rheinische Post dat het waterpeil bij Kaub, een belangrijk knelpunt voor de scheepvaart op de Rijn, door een gebrek aan regenval naar verwachting voor het eerst tot beneden de 10 centimeter zal dalen. Kaub ligt ten zuiden van Koblenz en is een van de ondiepste stukken van de Midden-Rijn.

"De commerciële scheepvaart zal bij zulke lage waterstanden geen goederen meer kunnen vervoeren in deze regio", aldus Schwanen. Dat geldt volgens hem ook voor dagtochten en riviercruises. "In feite is de Rijn dan niet meer over de hele lengte bevaarbaar en daarmee in tweeën gesplitst."

Volgens Schwanen blijft er wel scheepvaart mogelijk tussen Nederland en Duitsland.

AMSTERDAM (ANP) - Door het massale verkopen van voormalige huurwoningen door beleggers zijn er waarschijnlijk nog jaren maar heel weinig huurwoningen in Nederland. Dat leidt vooral voor studenten en jonge starters die een huis zoeken tot grote problemen, verwacht vastgoedadviseur CBRE in een onderzoek waarover het FD maandag berichtte.

Volgens de cijfers van CBRE investeerden institutionele beleggers, zoals verzekeraars en pensioenfondsen, in de eerste helft van dit jaar ruim 2,7 miljard euro in de Nederlandse woningmarkt. Dat is ruim 40 procent meer dan in de eerste zes maanden van vorig jaar. Ze staken geld in 4391 nieuwbouwwoningen en kochten daarnaast 4377 bestaande woningen.

Maar de stijging zorgt nauwelijks voor meer keuze voor huizenzoekers in de vrije huursector. De vastgoedadviseur verwacht dat zo'n negen op de tien van deze woningen worden verkocht. De daadwerkelijke aantallen liggen volgens CBRE nog hoger, omdat particuliere beleggers ook meedoen aan dit zogeheten uitponden.

Today's links

• The bureaucratic AI arms-race is mutually assured destruction: The only way to win is not to play.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Seymour Cray's tunnels; War on moisture; $5 wrench cryptanalysis; Nauru files; People's Ride; German transit upholstery fashion; Monopolies v small business; Linkedin will put you in ads; NZ Parliament kicks itself off the internet; Adblock Plus v Facebook adblock-block; Cracking 100m VWs for $40; Trump as defective machine learning; Canada sucks at internet law; Goodhart's Law of AI.
• Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

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The bureaucratic AI arms-race is mutually assured destruction (permalink)

According to an Economist editorial, "AI is breaking the British state" by making it too easy to file complaints, demands and appeals, which will "drown the state" with "demands as well-crafted as a first-class lawyer's":

https://archive.is/VTrj9

Let's pause a moment to appreciate the Economist's touching credulity about AI's coming legal mastery. The law seems to be the area where AI is most prone to "hallucinate" (that is, "produce defective outputs"), which can only be sorted through by skilled practitioners whose experience gives them the discernment to distinguish useful arguments from foolish ones:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/28/hitl-ers/#ai-ai-oh

(And this requires those skilled practitioners to avoid the "automation blindness" that afflicts people who are asked to remain vigilant for things that seldom occur, a phenomenon that has turned every TSA agent into the water-bottle-detectingest motherfucker the human race has ever produced, who still misses 95% of the guns that red teams bring through the checkpoint):

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/investigation-breaches-us-airports-allowed-weapons-through-n367851

More notable than the Economist's faith-based predictions about the impending army of hyper-competent robo-lawyers is the magazine's proposed solution to this looming crisis: "stop creating entitlements that are ripe for AI-fuelled claims…prune the mass of procedural rights." Above all, replace the bureaucrats who process your "complaints, demands and appeals" with more AI, which will arbitrarily decide who gets what, through "personalised welfare interventions" that are not based on any kind of guaranteed rights.

Writing on his blog, the political scientist Henry Farrell tells us where this will inevitably end up: with AI-based robot wars in which increasingly stingy and pernickety robo-bureaucrats create demand for progressively more aggressive robo-lawyers:

https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/the-downside-of-robot-solutionism

As Farrell writes, this end-time was foretold by the prophet Alan Moore with his 1980s 2000 AD character Abelard Snazz, "the man with the two-storey brain":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abelard_Snazz

Snazz "solves" the street crime epidemic on the planet Twopp with "Big Police Robots," who spiral out of control, arresting the citizens of Twopp for trivial crimes like wearing brown shoes with a blue suit ("breaking the laws of good taste"). To solve this new problem, Snazz invents "Big Criminal Robots" whose "cunning, efficient" crimes "take up all the police's time."

Twopp is left in a state of high-stakes Big Robot crimewars, in which the most efficient criminals imaginable battle the most ruthless robocops science can deliver, with the Twoppians caught in the crossfire, collateral damage in a robotic forever war (on crime).

As Farrell writes, this is already afflicting the US health system, where an army of insurance company robo-claim-deniers have been countered with a doctors' army of robot-claim-appealers:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/10/health/doctors-insurers-artificial-intelligence.html

The point being that people need health care, people need public services, and while there will always be some waste at the margins (whether due to incompetence or dishonesty) responding to this by beefing up the system's defenses with more advanced red tape just requires the people who legitimately need these services to employ more aggressive tactics.

In support of this, Farrell points to a great, long essay by Dan "Accountability Sink" Davies for the Niskanen Center, "'The Problem Factory' – Preemptive risk aversion in infrastructure planning and the role of professional services":

https://www.niskanencenter.org/the-problem-factory-preemptive-risk-aversion-in-infrastructure-planning-and-the-role-of-professional-services/

Davies' essay describes how increasing bureaucratic defenses against frivolous or dishonest claims drives the participants in these processes to assume a war footing and approach the system as a battlefield, leading to the very runaway cost inflation that the bureaucratic process was instituted to prevent.

(Davies, a cybernetician, has some fascinating advice about how to structure planning processes to minimize this, but that's out of scope for this particular post.)

This reminds me of nothing so much as the spam wars. There was a time when it was very easy to set up a mail server and provide email access for anyone who wanted it – including spammers. Increased spam begat increased anti-spam countermeasures, notably the creation of blocklists that allowed mail administrators to automatically reject email from "insecure" mail servers.

Inevitably, spammers figured out how to send spam from "secure" servers, resulting in stricter, more onerous standards for mail server configuration. Spammers – for whom the ability to send spam is an existential matter – figured out how to meet these standards, so the security demands jumped again – and again, and again.

Today, sending and receiving mail is so technically challenging that most of the internet's email is run by a handful of giant, mostly US-based corporations. If any of these companies decides your mail server is spamming, you effectively disappear from the internet and good luck getting them to acknowledge an error. Meanwhile, these companies emit an avalanche of spam, but no one will ever block their servers, because to do so would be to cut off billions of legitimate email users:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/10/dead-letters/

And since most of these companies are US-based, they are liable to being weaponized by Trump, who has taken to ordering his tech giants to block foreign officials whose policy decisions make him angry:

https://carnegieendowment.org/emissary/2026/07/icc-trump-push-dismantle

Another parallel is the content moderation wars that saw the large platforms coming up with progressively more detailed rules about what constituted harassment and hate speech, only to have dedicated trolls master these rule-books. Trolls – for whom harassment was a full-time vocation – became the world's greatest experts on the platforms' speech policies, which let them skate right up to the line when abusing their victims, and to get those victims kicked off the platforms if they could be lured into putting a single toe over the line in response:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/07/como-is-infosec/

Farrell criticizes the Economist's answer to the (alleged) looming robo-lawyer threat as "solutionism," Evgeny Morozov's word for "Recasting all complex social situations either as neat problems with definite, computable solutions":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_fix

Using AI to root AI-generated bureaucratic appeals sacrifices the system's putative purpose – delivering services – in the name of defending that service from abuse and misuse of the system's resources. As the pioneering cybernetician Stafford Beer famously wrote, "the purpose of a system is what it does." If your bureaucracy is more concerned with fighting fraud than delivering service, then it isn't a service delivery system at all – it's a service denial system.

As Farrell writes, the people of Twopp can tell you how this ends – in a war of giant robots in which we are all collateral damage.

(A brief postscript: Farrell is a font of science fictional analogies to modern policy issues. This weekend in the FT, he and Dan Wang published an excellent editorial on the relevance of the paranoid, claustrophobic fiction of Philip K Dick to our present political reality:)

https://archive.is/2YT4k

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Hey look at this (permalink)

• John Crowley (1942-2026) https://floggingbabel.blogspot.com/2026/08/john-crowley-1942-2026.html

• Ebooks Are Coming to Libro! https://blog.libro.fm/ebooks-coming-librofm/

• What Defeating the American-Israel Political Action Committee Means, on the Ground https://rickperlstein.substack.com/p/what-defeating-the-american-israel

• They Live https://badtastegoodcause.com/they-live

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Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Seymour Cray liked to tunnel under his house https://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~toby/writing/PCW/cray.htm

#20yrsago Fake anti-Net Neutrality groups https://web.archive.org/web/20060815175125/http://www.commoncause.org/site/pp.asp?c=dkLNK1MQIwG&b=2007877&auid=1871905&kntaw4229=C9E5C86AD89540898B5D07CB54AB0FE6

#20yrsago HOWTO fold a bottle opener out of paper https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrXmDiYHUY0

#20yrsago Wikipedia’s template language is Turing-complete https://web.archive.org/web/20070707115525/http://www.mentalpolyphonics.com/?p=30

#20yrsago Schwarzenegger sends Guard to California’s airports https://web.archive.org/web/20060813201014/http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/08/11/SECURITYLOCAL.TMP

#15yrsago Marvel to comics retailers: we’ll give you limited edition singles if you destroy our competitors’ products https://web.archive.org/web/20110908023907/http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2011/08/the-great-marvel-comics-rip-off/

#15yrsago LinkedIn opts you into being used in advertisements; here’s how to opt out https://brandimpact.wordpress.com/2011/08/10/a-box-you-want-to-uncheck-on-linkedin/

#15yrsago MagicJack owner follows up his dumb lawsuit against Boing Boing with a dumb lawsuit against Women’s Professional Soccer https://memex.craphound.com/2011/08/11/magicjack-owner-follows-up-his-dumb-lawsuit-against-boing-boing-with-a-dumb-lawsuit-against-womens-professional-soccer/

#15yrsago Al Jazeera fixes its protections for whistleblowers https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/08/al-jazeera-follows-effs-whistleblower

#15yrsago New Zealand Parliament may lose Internet access due to insane new copyright law https://web.archive.org/web/20110830211231/http://www.greens.org.nz/press-releases/parliament-risk-fines

#15yrsago British aviation bans all hand-luggage http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4778615.stm?ls

#15yrsago Soldering is Easy: CC licensed HOWTO solder comic https://mightyohm.com/blog/2011/04/soldering-is-easy-comic-book/

#15yrsago Taxonomy of technological risks: when things fail badly https://web.archive.org/web/20190221205543/https://www.sei.cmu.edu/about/divisions/cert/index.cfm

#15yrsago Secret anti-racist shirts covertly distributed to neo-Nazis https://web.archive.org/web/20110810082217/http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,15305581,00.html

#15yrsago XKCD on the password paradox: human factors versus computers’ brute force https://xkcd.com/936/

#10yrsago American Bar Association votes to DRM the law, put it behind a EULA https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/after_strong_debate_house_calls_for_publication_of_privately_drafted_standa/

#10yrsago Trump only writes the angry tweets, the nice ones are written by a staffer with an Iphone http://varianceexplained.org/r/trump-tweets/

#10yrsago Aviation’s war on moisture turns ten today https://memex.craphound.com/2016/08/10/aviations-war-on-moisture-turns-ten-today/

#10yrsago Court rules that FCC can’t force states to repeal laws banning municipal ISPs https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/08/in-blow-to-muni-broadband-fcc-loses-bid-to-overturn-state-laws/

#10yrsago NRA is spending $3m on pro-Trump ad that says Clinton “will leave you defenseless” https://edition.cnn.com/2016/08/09/politics/nra-hillary-clinton-donald-trump-election-2016/index.html

#10yrsago Nauru files: leaks tell abused childrens’ stories from Australia’s offshore concentration camp https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/aug/10/the-nauru-files-2000-leaked-reports-reveal-scale-of-abuse-of-children-in-australian-offshore-detention

#10yrsago Why did it take a private foundation to do public science right? https://medium.com/the-spike/how-a-happy-moment-for-neuroscience-is-a-sad-moment-for-science-c4ba00336e9c#.58om85nvg

#10yrsago Profile of People’s Ride: a co-operative, driver-owned alternative to Uber https://www.democracyatwork.info/profile_peoplesride

#10yrsago The story of the story of Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/herocomplex/la-ca-hc-ghosts-disneylands-haunted-mansion-20151016-htmlstory.html

#10yrsago Designer makes clothes out of German transit upholstery fabric, rides trains https://web.archive.org/web/20160808130200/http://www.bbc.com/autos/story/20160804-why-are-trains-seats-so-hideous

#10yrsago America will finally gather statistics on which and how many people are killed by law enforcement https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/aug/08/police-officer-related-deaths-department-of-justice

#10yrsago Monopoly power and the decline of small business: big business vs democracy, growth & equality https://ilsr.org/article/independent-business/monopoly-power-and-the-decline-of-small-business/

#10yrsago As social media centralized, blogging’s core infrastructure has withered https://medium.com/@anildash/the-lost-infrastructure-of-social-media-d2b95662ccd3

#10yrsago 48 hours later, Adblock Plus beats Facebook’s adblocker-blocker https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/11/12439990/facebook-unblockable-ads-defeated-by-adblock-plus

#10yrsago 100 million VWs can be unlocked with a $40 cracker (and other cars aren’t much better) https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurity16/sec16_paper_garcia.pdf

#10yrsago DEA bribes rail/airline employees for tipoffs that lead to warrantless cash seizures https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/2016/08/10/dea-travel-record-airport-seizures/88474282/

#10yrsago Trump is an object lesson in the problems of machine learning https://mathbabe.org/2016/08/11/donald-trump-is-like-a-biased-machine-learning-algorithm/

#5yrsago IRS leaks reveal billions reaped through ultra-wealthy lobbying on the tax bill https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/11/the-canada-variant/#shitty-man-of-history-theory

#5yrsago Canada's got the world's worst internet ideas https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/11/the-canada-variant/#no-canada

#5yrsago End of the line for Uber https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/10/unter/#bezzle-no-more

#1yrago Goodhart's Law (of AI) https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/11/five-paragraph-essay/#targets-r-us

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Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Virtual: EFFecting Change: Who the Machine Serves, Aug 12
  https://www.eff.org/event/effecting-change-who-machine-serves

• Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17
  https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales

• Sydney: The Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Aug 23-24
  https://festivalofdangerousideas.com/program/

• Melbourne: Enshittification at the Wheeler Centre, Aug 25
  https://www.wheelercentre.com/events-tickets/season-2026/cory-doctorow-enshittification

• Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8
  https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/

• London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9
  https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn

• South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6
  https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/

• Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12
  https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/

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Recent appearances (permalink)

• The AI Enshittification Bubble (Hidden Forces)
  https://hiddenforces.io/podcasts/the-ai-enshittification-bubble-cory-doctorow/

• F@#$ the AI Overlords (On The Media)
  https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/articles/f-the-ai-overlords

• Why AI Won't Replace Workers, But Will Crash The Economy (Smart Cookies)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRRmUuxJolY

• AI and the Enshittification Era (The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dAIJRjb-Bw

• AI is not inevitable (Betakit)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbiTVkq1WHo

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Latest books (permalink)

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

• "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

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Upcoming books (permalink)

• "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

• "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

• "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

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Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

• “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 692 (692 total).

• "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

---

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

There will be a host of world-class athletes in Birmingham this week but the 800m should shine like a supernova

They say betting is a mug’s game. But here are two predictions to take to the bank. The European Athletics Championships this week in Birmingham, with the BBC shoving its considerable heft behind it, will be far bigger than people expect. And the women’s 800m final on Friday night, featuring three of the best female stars in any sport, should shine as brightly as a supernova.

The list of great athletes who will grace the Alexander Stadium in the coming days is long and lustrous. Mondo Duplantis, Jakob Ingebrigtsen and Yaroslava Mahuchikh are all Olympic and world champions and world record holders. Amy Hunt, Matt Hudson-Smith and Katarina Johnson-Thompson should also do Britain proud. But no event is more anticipated than the women’s 800m.

Continue reading...

A good scalp cleanse can be useful, but it partly depends where you live

We’re experiencing the “skinification” of the scalp, says Desmond Tobin, professor of dermatological science at University College Dublin. After decades of consumer obsession with improving the quality of facial skin, attention is now being turned to our heads.

A wave of products have launched – from scalp scrubs and acid exfoliants to deep-cleaning shampoos – claiming to “detox” the scalp and promising everything from shinier hair to boosted growth.

Continue reading...

From the Odyssey to conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, we can see how poetry fills the gap when ordinary ways of writing or speaking aren’t enough

The biggest sales of poetry since records began are expected this year. The reason? The movies, of course. UK print sales of The Odyssey increased by 1,400% in the four weeks to 25 July compared with the same period last year. In the US, year-to-date sales of The Odyssey are up 76% so far. Christopher Nolan is doing miracles for Homer – whatever problems one might have with the movie (and Emily Wilson, who made the most popular recent translation, has a few).

Strip out the Odyssey factor, though, and poetry is still doing exceptionally well, driven by writers whose work is often mildly denigrated as “Instapoetry”, such as Lucas Jones. His is a kind of versifying that delivers immediate uplifting aphorisms rather than either the kind of dense, allusive play with language that might reward repeated reading; or the sort of limpid, performable music that propels a well-translated Homeric epic. But even so, the poets of Instagram reach for something that can’t quite be expressed through everyday speech. And readers respond to it.

Continue reading...

She started standup at 17 playing ‘unsafe basements’ and braving revolting hecklers – and even worse headline acts. Now she writes for SNL and is giving Edinburgh a blast of her surreal comedy

Comedy isn’t just a career for Bella Hull. It’s a compulsion. “Standup for me is like – I have to do it,” says Hull, who first picked up a mic aged 17. “Regardless of what the response is.”

A decade in, the response is resoundingly positive. The 28-year-old had a sell-out show at last year’s Edinburgh fringe (Doctors Hate Her, which explored a break-up, insanity and the occult), appearances on Have I Got News For You and The News Quiz, and a coveted role as writer on the new UK version of Saturday Night Live. “There’s something symbolic about being the person with the voice,” she says of standup. “A lot of situations in my personal life, I don’t feel like that at all.”

Continue reading...

BONGURI has added a photo to the pool:

福井県に入って国道417号線からちょっとそれた渓流。以前にも撮った場所かな。
Photo taken Ikeda town, Imadate district, Fukui pref.