ruben's rampant 2 minute reds

apologies, everyone. for the first time this year, i've hit the darlene love button. christmas is coming, and it really is the greatest of all christmas songs www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1uJ...

introduce yourself with four footballers

sanctions update: imported guanciale and nduja still in our local italian deli in moscow

great to see "purview" out in the wild

a quite frankly bizarre set of toilet symbols i saw in an indian restaurant in moscow last month

why does it take defeat for people to realise this? surely it's the most obvious part of any election? www.nytimes.com/2024/11/07/o...

the 1pm news bulletin on sky news just replayed a clip from an interview with a small business owner who was literally in tears at the prospect of a rise in the minimum wage and him having to pay his staff a bit more. wonderful stuff.

election interference is one of those terms that hammers home the discursive divide between "us, the good guys" and "them, the bad guys". the west, like everyone else, has been interfering in elections for decades, blanketed as "democracy promotion". nothing new here. www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/t...

even goal rush can’t save me from what is one of the worst saturdays of premier league football i can remember

there’s big news in dubai, where they’ve finally started selling “luxury market” camel blues. previously, the only place you could buy them was at duty free at departures

same for me — a childhood being obsessed with football and playing a lot of football manager. lost count of the amount of times i’ve been in bars across europe and somebody tells me where they’re from, thinking i will have never heard of it, and i say “ah, enschede, you must be an fc twente fan”

in edinburgh, which is lovely this time of year. xmas markets, once a nice kitsch touch in british cities when they kicked off decades ago, now seem to take over, and distract from, some of the most important public spaces. here, it's even worse, with the view of the castle blocked by a ferris wheel

'Your people can build the world's tallest buildings. You can make forty-nine different kinds of mayonnaise. You can teach dolphins to do the most complex tasks. Why can't you teach your hockey players to pass the puck more than two metres?' www.newyorker.com/culture/cult...

darnton is one of the best stylists to ever write academic history. his "great cat massacre" was one of pioneering books that brought cultural anthropology to history writing and did so without compromising on "good writing". www.nytimes.com/2023/11/04/b...

the athletic does hockey writing very well -- this is great on crosby v ovechkin, the messi v ronaldo of the nhl theathletic.com/5081263/2023...

probably the best sports book i’ve ever read, not least because sergei fedorov is the coach of our beloved cska