Come for the great writing, stay for the embedded playlist that sees @DanielHCohen spring "Lil Uzi Vert" on an unsuspecting LRB readership. https://t.co/JsHpoAJyZO

A girl in the club smoking section on the weekend asked me "do you go to the gym?" And my girlfriend leaned over to say "no" and explained in great detail the little kettlebell workout routine I do in the garden. Mortifying. Elite defensive manouver.

It's pretty funny that there are now tons of menswear influencers, and menswear podcasts(?), and crazy expensive stuff like Arcteryx is selling like gangbusters, but dudes absolutely do not look appreciably better than they did ten years ago.

Slavic excellence.

I could not possibly be more Penelope Fitzgerald-pilled. Every novel should be (i) almost unfathomably good and (ii) fewer than 150 pages.

If you asked Macron what he most wanted he’d tell you something about his name being writ first on the Vendôme then the heavens themselves. Sunak - if he’s honest - would like to be 5,10 and governor of California.

No way they get along. I was shocked to learn Sunak is 5,6. Macron has embraced and tapped unashamed short guy energy. It beams from every photo and is the source of his power. He will never respect someone who tries to seem normal height.

Here's @stephenburanyi's review of An Intimate History of Evolution by Alison Bashford

Just stepped on an upturned tack in my kitchen, and, while gripping the injured foot with both hands and hopping around on the other, my only present thought was “hmm this is definitely something you don't see so much anymore”.

I couldn’t get into the room it was so full (!) but I heard there was a good joke about me researching and reporting nude. Buy the book to learn more.

The dumbest Gorbachev take is that Russia's basket-case 90s and current derangement is somehow singularly "his legacy". Gorbachev wanted the dissolution of WTO/NATO, and a closely integrated, politically plural Europe with Russia a part of it. We might ask why that didn't happen.

Gorbachev news really showing how twitter can't process complex events and figures because (i) short form, and especially (ii) loudest voices are total morons. Every tweet is like "wow, you just gotta say, what a life."

I should do one of these accounts but just like "the ADHD urge to light the pile of styrofoam crates you found in an abandoned K-Mart on fire"

Neither here nor there, but it's pretty funny how ADHD has been recast as a set of almost-charming adult neuroses wheras when I was a kid it was when I disrupted class and started a few fires so they gave me speed.

Lot of interest and messages from the fellas on this "arms" thing. Thinking of rebranding as a positive masculinity/mental health guy and doing a "friday cheers"-like bit where dudes post their forelimbs and we all compliment each other.

A guy I kinda know greeted me recently by saying "nice arms, man", which I think is the kindest thing you can say to a dude in his 30s. Everyone should do this.

I wrote something about the importance of good food while red and nude (saunas) for this. I bet the other pieces are great too. Buy the book!

25°C and sunny in London. If you haven’t started your yearly read of Hilary Mantel’s epic, deeply horny novelization of the French Revolution “a place of greater safety” yet, today is surely the day.

Teachers sleeping with students? Bad. Often illegal, always gross. Teachers sleeping with each other in increasingly convoluted pairings and locations until it blows up and basically the whole town gets divorced? Hilarious.

Back off NYMag I am still planning to get rich off of this.