Jay Owens
I’m Head of Audience at @lrb.co.uk and I write about environmental politics. ‘Dust: The Modern World in a Trillion Particles’ (2023)
🔗 https://JayOwens.me
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📙 hachette.co.uk/titles/jay-owens/du…
- Reposted by Jay Owens[Not loaded yet]
- ‘Solo newsletter-podcast plus front-facing video channel is the new blog.’ @chaykak.bsky.social on the new media model. open.substack.com/pub/onething...
- This sounds like the ‘New Games Journalism’ I was reading in PC Gamer magazine in the early 2000s. By @kierongillen.bsky.social et al. I barely played games! (Only really Baldur’s Gate and some sims.) But the reviewing was some of the most interesting culture writing I had access to.
- The group chats between Mark Andreessen and Silicon Valley insiders ‘are the single most important place in which a stunning realignment toward Donald Trump was shaped and negotiated, and an alliance between Silicon Valley and the new right formed.’ www.semafor.com/article/04/2...
- ‘A company registered yesterday is, in the eyes of the law, an entity with legal standing and a suite of rights, including the right to sue – but that a river who has flowed for 10,000 years has no rights at all.’ Robert Macfarlane in the Guardian on his new book www.theguardian.com/books/2025/a...
- Anyone else seen this? WhatsApp appears to be blocking me from sending a photo of (just part of!) an FT article to a friend. I can send other pictures just fine. Is this copyright protection? Wild/quite creepy
- Reposted by Jay OwensBig new one from me and @ibogost.bsky.social: DOGE has hovered up unprecedented amounts of government data and is pooling it. What can they do with it? They can actualize the surveillance state in ways that were previously unthinkable. An American Panopticon www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...
- The new Observer (post Tortoise takeover) launches this Sunday, publishing about eight to 12 stories a day “that we put a lot of love and time into” – focusing on analysis and explanation, not news coverage. The Tortoise brand is to disappear almost entirely 🐢 pressgazette.co.uk/publishers/n...
- ‘The style is George Saunders meets Ottessa Moshfegh, filtered through 4chan, mumblecore and 18th-century marriage manuals ... To even call it a comedy ends up feeling a kind of weird category error.’ Anthony Cummins reviews Sophie Kemp’s 𝘗𝘢𝘳𝘢𝘥𝘪𝘴𝘦 𝘓𝘰𝘨𝘪𝘤 www.theguardian.com/books/2025/a...
- ‘Perhaps this destruction may be necessary.’ Lara Feigel very good on Constance Debré’s ‘Nom’. www.theguardian.com/books/2025/a...
- Meanwhile, the Pituffik Space Base commander has been fired after she sent an email after Vance’s visit to all base personnel - including the Greenlanders who work there - expressing care for how it had affected them and distancing the base from Vance’s remarks. www.military.com/daily-news/2...
- In the @lrb.co.uk, James Meek writes on how Greenland is caught between Danish colonialism and the imperial ambitions of America. ‘The Trump assault had caught Denmark off guard because it was based on Greenland’s desirability, a concept Denmark had long ago rejected.’ www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
- Peter Thiel-associated techbros want to build a libertarian ‘freedom city’ in Greenland as ‘a hub for artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, space launches, micro nuclear reactors and high-speed rail.’ By @rachlevy.bsky.social and @alexandraulmer.bsky.social www.reuters.com/world/europe...
- Btw Garbage Day meet-up in London on Weds 23 April. If you aren't there, are you even online? Organised by @ryanhatesthis.bsky.social partiful.com/e/iH4P0umCC4...
- “Paying someone $100,000 a year to host your blog. Come on buddy. I said I hate being a businessman, but even I know that’s fucking stupid.” @lukeoneil47.bsky.social and other newslettrists on why they left Substack for Ghost and Beehiiv. digiday.com/media/former...
- A major swing to the Greens in the St Ann's by-election, in a Labour-since-the-dawn-of-time bit of Haringey. (David Lammy's our MP.) We were canvassed SO MUCH but it did increase turnout from a typical 20% to 29%. It will be interesting to see what happens in the May 2026 borough-wide elections.
- ‘ I make my own compost so that I can convince myself that even when the world seems socially and ecologically broken there are still mechanisms for recovery: it shows that change is possible.’ @frasermacdonald.bsky.social in the latest @lrb.co.uk lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
- ‘Pacific, temperate, egalitarian, avowedly non-violent, the epitome of unimpeachable, quietist radicalism: if the police can do this to the Quakers, what could they do to you?’ @piercepenniless.bsky.social on last week’s Met Police raid on a Quaker meeting house: www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/ma...
- On the @lrb.co.uk blog: @harrystopes.bsky.social on the four activists in Berlin who are set to be deported for Palestine activism. There has been no proof they have committed a crime. But yet Germany ‘descends into lawlessness in the name of its Staatsräson.’ www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/ap...
- ‘“We don’t give our name,” one responds. “Can you please specify what agency is taking him?” she pleads. No response. Those of us who have lived in countries terrorized by a secret police force can’t shake a feeling of dreadful familiarity.’ Masha Gessen: www.nytimes.com/2025/04/02/o...
- “The student movement didn’t happen immediately after the fall of the canopy. It happened after the government responded violently to the peaceful silences. That was the spark.” @graceblakeley.substack.com speaks to one of the Serbian protestors: graceblakeley.substack.com/p/were-not-b...
- ooh critic-on-critic violence, what a treat Becca Rothfeld questions Andrea Long Chu’s ‘Authority’. accessible version: archive.is/w3Ey3 www.washingtonpost.com/books/2025/0...
- ‘My mother inhales you, she swallows you up. You’re in the belly of the whale. It’s beautiful, it’s hot, it’s spectacular. To be swallowed up by her is so good.’ An excerpt from ‘Name’ by Constance Debré, out this month. www.theparisreview.org/blog/2025/04...
- ‘In katabasis, a living person journeys into the underworld to consult with the dead. Why consult the dead? To learn something you cannot know otherwise.’ Wayne Chambliss on La Grotta della Sibilla, near Naples: wchambliss.wordpress.com/2025/04/01/k...
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- How the Klamath dams came down — and why this kind of river restoration really matters. grist.org/project/indi...
- How does @us.theguardian.com make paywall-free journalism profitable? ‘We cover so much breaking news and it drives a lot of traffic … Even if we only monetize one percent, it’s a lot.’ — editor Betsy Reed Can other publications follow their playbook, then? Mostly not. nymag.com/intelligence...
- Teen Vogue is doing oligarchy explainers www.teenvogue.com/story/what-i...
- ‘For all of Gary Stevensons’s talk about the “real” economy, there is next to nothing in the book about the actual impact of Citibank’s practices: predatory lending, mass foreclosures … That’s because Stevenson goes out of his way to keep the focus on himself.’ jacobin.com/2025/03/gary...
- ‘The standard Labour line is that any historic act of struggle was noble and necessary – indeed, they would have manned the barricades themselves – but modern equivalents are the preserve of malcontents who deserve a good truncheon or tasering.’ New from James Butler: www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/ma...
- ‘Part of the work now is to try to see and name the whole fascist aesthetic trap—not just the bait but the springs behind it, the metal jaws above and below, the cage we see in this video and the one that’s waiting.’ By @jeffsharlet.bsky.social open.substack.com/pub/slowcivi...
- End of an era. I’ve had the career I had because of Twitter – first in social media research at @pulsarplatform.bsky.social (doing research on Twitter for Twitter), then in wider digital strategy and now leading digital editorial at @lrb.co.uk. It’s been a good run but all things must end.
