‘Wouldn’t it be fun not to be famous?

Wouldn’t it be fun not to be rich?

Wouldn’t it be pleasant to be a 

simple peasant

And spend a happy day digging 

a ditch?’

Only in dreams, in poetry, in play do we sometimes arrive at what we were before we were this thing that, who knows, we are.

— Julio Cortázar, born  in 1914

56 million years ago, the Earth suddenly heated up – and many plants stopped working properly The Conversation

The Landscape Is The Main Character Of This Rosebery Renovation

A tour of author Bri Lee's cosy bookish sanctuary in Kings Cross

When Oprah Picks An Argument With You Even As She Picks Your Book

Novelist Ann Packer is OK with that. “As any veteran author knows, books that get people talking have a better chance of bubbling up on the best-seller list, even without celebrity endorsement.” - The New York Times

The Man Who Helped Determine The American Literary Canon

Determining what the nation did and did not read was the through line of Malcolm Cowley’s career. He was a great discoverer and nurturer of talent: Jack Kerouac, John Cheever, and Ken Kesey were among the writers he championed, and, of the critics he commissioned to produce reviews at The New Republic. - The New Yorker

What Possesses People To Want To Own More Books Than They Can Possible Read?

Bibliomania, the only hobby which is also a mental health affliction. The person with piles of titles on their nightstand, in their closet, in the trunk of their car. Books in front of books on their bookshelf. “With thought, patience, and discrimination, book passion becomes the signature of a person’s character.”  - LitHub

Winners of the 2025 International Landscape Photographer of the Year

The Atlantic no paywall – “A collection of winners and selected images from the competition’s “Top 101” group, chosen from more than 3,600 entries by professional and amateur photographers around the world…”

2025 ILPOTY Awards – The Results – To see the flipbook with the Top 101 entries, see the bottom of this article. To see the Top 202+, click on the Archive link above and select 2025 Top 202+ Entries. For the past 12 years, we’ve been putting together an authoritative book full of amazing landscape photographs. 

There’s no doubt that each of the 101 photographs in each of the 12 books is a masterpiece, a study in the art and craft of landscape photography, but we should also spare a thought for the hundreds of images that we couldn’t include in the books. Photography is subjective. While there are preferences and popular styles, there really is no right or wrong – these are not useful words for photographers or for artists. 

So as we present the Top 101 landscape photographs for 2025, we’d like also to acknowledge the amazing work that we didn’t publish – and recognise another 100 or so that were literally one point away – see our Top 202+ on this website..”

Literally a Map Showing All the Buildings in the World

Gizmodo: “The world has a lot of buildings. Now you can see them all with a single glance. A research team at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) in Germany published the GlobalBuildingAtlas, a high-resolution 3D map of all buildings worldwide. 

The map consists of 2.75 billion building models, which the team gathered from satellite images taken since 2019. 

This is a huge leap from the previous global dataset, which contained about 1.7 billion buildings, and offers much better resolution, which is about 30 times finer than comparable databases, according to the researchers in a statement. A detailed account of how the map was created was also published in the journal Earth System Science Data on December 1…”