Jay Owens

So the romance novelist Sally Rooney is a terrorist but these guys scoping political killings aren’t, is that right?

I find Rooney’s message that the only real meaning in life comes thru marriage kinda violent, for sure. But I wouldn’t say she should be arrested for it.

The long afterlife of a so-called dead medium. (US 𝘝𝘰𝘨𝘶𝘦 is now down to 8 issues a year! Damn.) But ‘where were today’s teenagers supposed to find things to paper their walls? Instagram feeds?’ As such, 𝘞𝘠𝘰𝘶𝘵𝘩 (pronounced ‘double youth’, appaz.) www.nytimes.com/2026/09/07/s...

‘The kids are yearning for pre-internet times,’ editor Ava Nirui said. ‘They want something that they can pull out of their bag and share and enjoy with their friends.’

“A landslide changes a slope. A flood rearranges a river. A retreating glacier exposes sediment and unstable ground. The first hazard changes the landscape in which the next one happens.” @bedforms.bsky.social on dynamic, cascading hazards in the Himalayas. theconversation.com/nepals-devas...

‘“Did they hurt you?” Odysseus asks Circe. “They would have,” she answers.’ @angelicabastien.bsky.social excellent on how ‘Nolan’s genius ends when a woman enters the frame’ – and yet Samantha Morton’s ‘visceral’ performance as Circe exceeds his sexual timidity. www.vulture.com/article/circ...

In bookstore trends... REFERENCE POINT, a reading room with a bar in 180 Strand. Art books, obv. A £12/month membership gets you after-hours access, events tickets and drinks discounts. (I have 𝘯𝘰 𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘢 how this makes money but it's founded by a Freud.) www.ft.com/content/2da5...

STUDIO NOCTURNE, a ‘purveyor of spells, books and art objects’ in De Beauvoir Town. This is absolutely nepo money, you can’t persuade me otherwise. studionocturne.co.uk www.wallpaper.com/fashion-beau...

In bookstore trends... REFERENCE POINT, a reading room with a bar in 180 Strand. Art books, obv. A £12/month membership gets you after-hours access, events tickets and drinks discounts. (I have 𝘯𝘰 𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘢 how this makes money but it's founded by a Freud.) www.ft.com/content/2da5...

Also in new aesthetics: goo. Gen Z goo! ‘The clean look that once signified sophistication now reeks of venture capital funding, or worse, artificial intelligence. “The worse it looks, the better it performs.”’ Callie Holtermann on ‘the glitchy, gloppy look of now’ www.nytimes.com/2026/06/17/s...

How magazines respond: Creative editorial director Mi-Anne Chan ‘has been steering 𝘛𝘦𝘦𝘯 𝘝𝘰𝘨𝘶𝘦 through a redesign that emphasizes hand-drawn lettering and digital embellishments.’

𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘝𝘦𝘳𝘨𝘦’s homepage has evolved again, and is back to looking a little more traditional. Exec creative director William Joel (who's since left for 𝘠𝘢𝘩𝘰𝘰 𝘍𝘪𝘯𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘦) explains the new design. A useful read for me – though at the 𝘓𝘙𝘉 we’re looking at archive first ... www.theverge.com/bulletin/914...

The challenge: how do you balance a magazine with a ‘firehose of news’? Some readers visit multiple times a day, others only occasionally. With a reverse chronological feed, ‘some of our best work simply didn’t stay visible long enough.’

In further ‘Please do not bulldoze the sacred mountain’ news: A proposed uranium mine on the slopes of Mount Taylor in New Mexico, which is sacred to Diné and Pueblo people. It is a very significant cultural site - akin to putting a mine on top of Stonehenge. sourcenm.com/2026/01/15/m...

‘I have spent more than half my life chronicling the exploitations of California, so I know delirium to be a condition of the land.’ Mark Arax on the AI boom www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

There’s a new gold rush in the American west. Trump’s Unleashing American Energy Act reclassified gold and silver as critical minerals and made BLM approve mining projects on public lands. Will this mean an open-pit heap leach mine on sacred Conglomerate Mesa? www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Lone Pine in eastern California was one of my main sites for my book 𝘋𝘶𝘴𝘵 (2023), as some of you may remember :) Reporting by Griffin Jones, who managed to speak to Numu (Paiute) elder Kathy Bancroft before she passed away in January.

Granta will no longer publish the Commonwealth short story prize winner after this year’s AI debacle, saying ‘it would no longer be involved in “external publishing partnerships” in which it had no editorial control.’ Wise! Y’aint literary without gatekeeping. www.theguardian.com/books/2026/j...

The new Nature's Rights Bill calls for Nature (capitalised) to be recognised in UK law as ‘a legal subject and rights-bearing entity’. But what if a river is less a ‘legal person’ than a god? New from me on the @lrb.co.uk blog. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/ju...

And can the Nature's Rights Bill really alter Britain’s relationship with nature for the better? @robgmacfarlane.bsky.social has doubts: ‘I wonder heretically if so many people are drawn to the notion of nature’s rights because they are longing for something like transcendence from the law ...’