I used to take my Nottingham raised son to see Cardiff City play away at various teams in the Midlands a few years back. I only realised the impact the away end had on him when he refused point blank to even consider Cardiff as a possible University destination on grounds of personal safety.

The pause in Defender manufacturing in 2016, due to a need to adapt the design to confirm with Euro NCAP pedestrian safety, prompted Jim Radcliffe’s Ineos to develop its look-a-like Grenadier, so there’s that too!

Monday’s pod debate on what to call next year’s World Cup, given that it’s spread between the US, Canada and Mexico, missed the most geographically correct answer: North America ‘26. While most of the continent’s many countries are not hosting, the 3 that are include about 85% of total population.

Full disclosure: I ran an urban geography field class to New York from 2017-19, so guilty as charged. In mitigation, it wasn't even the most exotic of our offers & by the time it launched was considered quite a passé destination by many of the places with whom we competed for students. But still ...

I know that the @rgsibg.bsky.social was encouraging a critical engagement with the 'field class as recruitment device' arms-race pre-pandemic. But it would be interesting to see whether the field course competition simply started up again following the pandemic as restrictions eased.

Again, not new: the Jamaican music economy was like this years ago as it was virtually impossible to protect IPR. Performance became prioritised as source of income. Big cheaper than a night at Wembley though, admittedly.

There’s a chapter on live performance in the book on The Platform Music Industries by me and @allanwatson1.bsky.social which came out earlier this year. As copyright has been devalorised (for most artists) as streaming platforms makes all music easily available, the event becomes more important.

Agreed, but the success of the tour is also the length of the band’s absence, and the accumulated desire of fans to see them together live again in an age when the financial returns from performance far outstrips those of recordings. This is not new. The Stones have long been their own tribute band.

The parallels to housing subprime are clear, but with a twist. The value of many of the assets is based on repayments from a predominantly immigrant worker market, but ICE action has disrupted such communities, as an earlier FT report (15.9.25 below) pointed out, so undermining the payment base.