#29 Country People (Daniel Mason, 2026) Quirky characters galore in this sweet story of a family of academics that moves from California to Vermont. But the star of the show is Mason’s heartfelt way with words. Not as extraordinary as his previous NORTH WOODS, but still a good read #booksky 📚💙🖋️

#28 Thousand Cranes (Yasunari Kawabata, 1952) Following the death of his father, a man struggles to understand his feelings towards the latter’s rival mistresses - and the daughter of one of them. Delicate and complex like a tea ceremony #booksky 📚🖋️💙

#27 Endling (Maria Reva, 2025) Part road trip-cum-heist, part metafictional account of the Russian invasion of Ukraine - and what it feels to be forced to see it from its margins while the bombs drop #booksky 📚🖋️💙

Ceci n'est pas un Président

Me, June 2026: reading handwritten exams is hard! Also me, July 2026: hold my 1770s original handwritten notary records, in French and literally crumbling

RIP Sam Neill Australia, your move now

#26 The Edges (Angelo Tijssens, 2022) A man reluctantly returns to his childhood town, to the house where his abusive mother just died, to his former lover and first love whom he has never forgotten. Melancholic and sharp and heartbreaking, like the past crashing in wave after wave. #booksky 📚🖋️💙

#25 The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (Stephen Graham Jones, 2025) An important book - literary horror, a postcolonial re-imagining of the vampire lore, set in frontier USA - but I did not connect with it the way I hoped, especially after his brilliant (and superior) THE ONLY GOOD INDIANS #booksky 📚🖋️💙

Ghent! Gem of a city. If you get the chance, a visit to the Ghent Altarpiece in Saint Bavo's cathedral (smack in the historic city centre) is a must. www.bbc.com/news/world-e...

🚨 New piece out at @poqjournal.bsky.social with superstar @cvargiu.bsky.social We use the #Mangione killing as a natural experiment to investigate partisan shifts in support for #PoliticalViolence TLDR: ⬆️ support among DEMS after the arrest Open paper: tinyurl.com/4hrnp5aj Open data: osf.io/y5mn3

🚨 Happy that this piece is finally out in @polstudies.bsky.social ! Across 9 (!) studies and multiple data sources, we ask a simple question: is the “directional” definition of Negative Campaigning still valid and reliable? TLDR: yups! Paper: tinyurl.com/3yvs5a38 Open data: osf.io/un4f8

Our current historical moment perfectly distilled

#24 Love Forms (Claire Adam, 2025) From the trees heavy with fruit of Trinidad to the quaint roads of London, the story of a mother and the son she had to leave behind. For once, the cover burb speaks the truth - Claire Keegan meets Elizabeth Strout. Touching and vivid #booksky 📚🖋️💙

Federer and Nadal being emotional at Federer’s farewell event, 2022

#23 On the Calculation of Volume III (Solvej Balle, 2021) Tara is still stuck on November 18, but she is no longer alone. And in finding more people, perhaps she lost direction. Third entry in Balle's septology, and this are definitely accelerating - not sure if for good. Vol IV awaits #booksky📚🖋️💙

#22 The Dead Zone (Stephen King, 1979) Had not read this one in a while - perhaps among the most “literary” of SK books, and of course the one in which he famously “predicts” a politician that break norms and threatens to blow up the world. Good character study, at times a bit thin #booksky 📚💙🖋️

New piece out at @jepopy.bsky.social with the wonderful @cvargiu.bsky.social & Diego Garzia We use an experiment to test whether musical preferences and political attitudes influence each other. We find effects in both ways! Paper ungated: tinyurl.com/rpau9eyb Open data: osf.io/7vqgn

By the author of which book, now?

They should do a joint venture with the Swiss-Italian transport authority (Ferrovie Autolinee Regionali Ticinesi)

#21 The Story of a New Name (Elena Ferrante, 2012) Book 2 in her Neapolitan series, and if possible even more astonishing than the first. The characters that populate it are fragile, genuine, brutal, naive, beautiful, mean, lonely, and so intense that they scream out of each page #booksky 📚💙🖋️

Am old school - this exists only locally on my computer But here it is in all its glory. The only rule I have is max 1 song per artist in the list

Dutch University vending machine

#20 The Day Of The Owl (Leonardo Sciascia, 1961) Presented as a murder investigation, but in reality a sharp exploration about silence and the layers of power in a Sicily still not ready to call out the mafia for what it is. Masterful. Worth for the author’s short tailpiece alone #booksky 📚🖋️💙

#19 Seascraper (Benjamin Wood, 2025) A young man, his horse and cart, his clothes that smell rotten shrimp, the unforgiving Irish sea, an unexpected visitor, and his dream of becoming a singer. Hauntingly beautiful. Longlisted for the Booker 20215 #booksky 📚💙🖋️

#18 The Mighty Red (Louise Erdrich, 2024) North Dakota, small town life set against the backdrop of a looming farming and financial crisis. A simple yet universal story of a love triangle, of mothers and their children, of community, regret, hope, and of mistakes big and small #booksky 📚🖋️💙

Are y’all also seeing this? I was able to use it until a couple of hours ago

Proof, for the rightfully skeptics

When google is a bit too literal, evidence #1457988 I was googling that story of an airport (?) recommending people to “hang out at a gas station” while waiting - and below is one of the first search returns Puts "hanging at a gas station” under a whole different light

As I always say, not enough attention is currently being paid to Sensor Networks in the field of democratic theory Unfortunately I cannot take over this kind invitation, am too busy exploring ways to bring orthodontic insights into attitude measurement research

#17 Flesh (David Szalay, 2025) The prose is sparse and the story of (spoiler alert) rags to riches to rags one that has been written before - and yet this was hard to put down. There's something fresh in the way Szalay describe the inner life of his characters, terse and sharp and sad #booksky 📚💙🖋️