PENELOPE

"Resembles nothing you’ve quite seen before" – The Hollywood Reporter Mascha Schilinski’s #Cannes2025 standout SOUND OF FALLING is a bold, boundary-pushing portrait of womanhood. Coming soon to the US, UK, Turkey, Canada, Ireland, India and more. A MUBI Release.

The German unconscious in a neat gothic horror bubble

risible person projects "risible" onto a brilliant filmmaker, Ken Loach. your own films are neither risible nor simplistic, we're to assume?

#English The Social Intelligence of Ancient Dogs Long before we invented language, before moral codes and constitutions, someone had already shown us how to live together. They didn’t speak, they didn’t write. They had four legs, attentive ears, and a heart that knew how to listen. They were the ancient #dogs . #Science tells us they were not tools, nor “working animals.” They were beings capable of advanced social intelligence: they could regulate conflicts, protect the vulnerable, educate the young… all without uttering a sound. Imagine a canine mother teaching her pups to control their bite. A gesture that might look aggressive at first glance, but is actually an exercise in empathy: “You don’t bite to hurt. You bite to learn how not to harm.” Or two dogs meeting and choosing ritual over confrontation. A lesson that could have taught us much. And perhaps it did. Our ancestors began to communicate with them through gestures, pauses, and respect. They cared for them, buried them with affection, considered them companions — in life and beyond. And yet today, we often forget that silent lesson. We have built fragile worlds full of noise, hostility, and exploitation. Forgetting that living together is not an algorithm — it is an ancient art that a dog once showed us with discretion and coherence. I explore this in And #Dog Decided to Meet Man, a journey into the emotional and social logic that taught us to become human… before we truly were.

@feuilletonopfer *the* tube

Tube is for some reason full of very posh German this evening. Feels like being at a JU meeting, except there are women.

Fascinating: “His subject is the upsurge of fascination with the spiritual, paranormal, occult and extraterrestrial that occurred in Russia as the Soviet Union went into free fall. He calls it the ‘seeking phenomenon’.” lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/…

My recent Substack in German translation Die ideologischen Implikationen von Chinas ökonomischem Erfolg makronom.de/die-ideologisc…

@i_zzzzzz Wroclaw has like 80000 students. True

Sadly there’s just Wrocław and Halifax

@MoraliaMaxima Istdas im sueden

Im Sommer mal wieder nach Murnau...? 🤔

Lancastrian Rose. Blue dragon. Champions League twice.

Pride of London.

@lilyslynch @nxd1979 A very Belgrade tune!

@nxd1979 in Belgrade they always play "Smooth Operator"

One thing about sitting on a European patio, they WILL play Eros Ramazzotti

Children fold quilts during a life-skills competition at a kindergarten in Zhengzhou, Henan province, March 6, 2026. VCG

cultural marxism

"Even apocalypse turned out to be a bust." Sheila Fitzpatrick on a spiritual perestroika of sorts at the end of history (LRB review of Joseph Kellner's The Spirit of Socialism) lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/…

how do I say this….i thought Sentimental Value was excellent. But I don’t like watching characters who remind me of the Dutch

The month-long Ruhr Uprising, in which 50 to 80,000 workers affiliated with the Communist and Socialist parties formed a Red Army, began on Mar. 13, 1920, in response to the right-wing Kapp Putsch. One thousand workers would be killed in its repression. #OTD #Germany

The lion's share of English revenue during the high middle ages? Bourdeaux wine-conversation.com/conversations/…

Size difference between maine coon and cat