kalmn

(Okay, I have an essay-review coming out on several works which deal with moral panics around coffeebars and jazz clubs and so forth in the 1960s - 'the monkey walk was good enough for us'....)

But on the one hand wo wo the yoof of today are not even getting into leg-over situations, though the evidence for this as far as the UK goes dates to the NATSAL 2019 report based on survey undertaken 2012.

And if they do, The death of the post-shag sleepover: Why is no one staying over after sex anymore?

Okay, very likely - I dunno, is the '6 people I spoke to in a winebar last week' cliche still valid or has this migrated to some corner of social media, but amounting to pretty much the same thing as far as statistical sociological validity goes?

But while it may be all about anxieties around sleep hygiene rituals, or looks-maxxing practices, which will not sit happily alongside unrestrained PASSION and bonkery -

- there is also mention that, individuals in question are living with room-mates and one does wonder whether they actually have RULES about overnight guests who might hog the bathroom wherein they perform their wellness things (apart from any other objections such as noise....)

Yes, my dearios, I am already doing the hedjog all-more-complicated flamenco about this, and thinking about a narrative theme of the 1960s of young women rising from beds of enseamed lust in order to go home to the parental roof and sleep in their own chaste bed so that they can be plausibly awakened therein. (And is there not a current wo wo narrative about young people still living with PARENTS???)

Hampstead’s retro cafés fight back against a revamp:

“London is a muddle” as EM Forster once observed — but one whose complexity is enjoyed by inhabitants. This bitter row over cafés, with small operators objecting to a tendering process that rewards a chain, has pitted the Corporation’s efforts to modernise facilities against those who feel protective towards their homeliness.
....
But as the campaigner Jane Jacobs, who championed haphazard urban environments, pointed out, city life is inherently messy. Imposing more rigid schemes can destroy its vitality, what she called “the intricate social and economic order under the seeming disorder of cities”.

Shop windows tell the story of London’s revolutionary illustrated newspapers:

Printing on the Strand in the 18th century was a major hub of London’s popular print culture, characterised by vibrant publishing activity that wasn’t constrained by rules affecting printers within the City of London.
Key sites included Bear Yard, near present-day King’s College London, which hosted significant printing and publishing operations, and a King’s College exhibition, which is free to view through the shop windows, tells their story.
The printers moved away when the area was redeveloped, hence the exhibition title, the Lost Landscapes of Print, which is a mix of objects and stories from the printers’ trade.
Although Fleet Street is synonymous with the newspapers, two of the most popular newspapers of the 19th century were printed on the Strand, not Fleet Street. They were the Illustrated London News and rival The Graphic, both trading on their revolutionary ability to print pictures in their pages.

More and “Better” Babies: The Dark Side of the Pronatalist Movement - we feel this is the darker side of an already dark movement, really.

***

Apparently this was found to be missing recently from Le Guin's website but has now been restored: A Rant About “Technology”:

Technology is the active human interface with the material world.
But the word is consistently misused to mean only the enormously complex and specialised technologies of the past few decades, supported by massive exploitation both of natural and human resources.

And talking about people getting all excited about 'technology' me and a load of other archivists and people in related areas were going 'you go, girl', over the notes of cynicism sounded in this article about the latest Thrilling New Way Of Preserving The Record (it is to larf at): Stone, parchment or laser-written glass? Scientists find new way to preserve data.
Admittedly, I can vaguely recollect an sf novel - ?by John Brunner - in which an expedition to an alien planet found the inhabitants extinct but had left records in some similar form.