Today, Pete and Andy have a Freaky Friday body swap, which means Pete tells Marcus and Jim about some Turkish transfer news and Andy tells us about a world-champion hot dog eater that has been banned from next year’s competition. Incredible.

Elsewhere, we make the case for Ant and Dec to host the Champions League draw and Marcus gets excited about Lee Carsley’s first England squad. Plus, Andy explains why Federico Chiesa could be a good signing for Liverpool. Mo Salah’s replacement?

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We're back on stage and tickets are out NOW! Join us at London Palladium on Friday September 20th 2024 for 'Football Ramble: Time Tunnel', a journey through football history like no other. Expect loads of laughs, all your Ramble favourites, and absolutely everything on Pete's USB stick. Get your tickets at footballramblelive.com!

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This past April, just weeks before the opening of Dak’Art, Africa’s largest and longest-running biennial, the Senegalese Minister of Culture abruptly postponed the event citing unrest stemming from the recent political turmoil surrounding the former president’s proposal to postpone national elections.

Senegal’s democratic exceptionalism within a continent rife with military coups was at stake. Protesters set tires ablaze. Tear gas was fired. Amid such chaos, preparations for the biennial pushed on as hundreds of artworks arrived from overseas for their Dakar debut.

Such a precipitous pronouncement was awkward indeed. Collectors, artists, and curators from around the globe had made travel arrangements that could not be conveniently canceled. Indeed, the startlingly late postponement oddly echoed the former president’s bid to reschedule national elections.

But just as the citizens of Senegal had taken to the streets in defense of democracy, the creative community banded together in solidarity for the arts, announcing more than 200 events across the city in the weeks that followed. The consistently frenetic, often delightful, occasionally rigorous compilation of exhibitions, panels, and parties that followed marked a watershed moment in the autonomous momentum of African contemporary art.

Activities were swiftly organized through a newly created Instagram handle #theoffison, which was subsequently changed to #thenonoffison, indicative of the feisty spontaneity fueling the event. Pop-up public spaces of all kinds offered a study in contrast to the austerity of the former Palais de Justice, which had served as the official biennial’s center of gravity in past years. Venues ranged from large, state-affiliated cultural centers to unique nooks of the metropolis—an elite all-women’s social club with prime waterfront real estate, for example, that was nearly impossible to locate amid new construction and abandoned vehicles.

Nevada State Sen. Robin Titus—at the time a member of its state House—received an email from a speech pathologist in rural Nevada. The pathologist and his students had noticed that the state constitution used the phrase “deaf and dumb” to describe people who were deaf or hard of hearing. 

“He said, ‘Hey, this is just wrong. We shouldn’t be using this terminology anymore,’” Titus, the Nevada Senate’s Republican minority leader, told me. Where people with disabilities are concerned, Sen. Titus says official language should not put “some negative connotation on what their needs are,” as such terms do. 

Now that the bill has passed Nevada’s House and Senate unanimously in two consecutive sessions—a prerequisite to place an amendment on the state ballot—Nevada voters will decide whether to remove the words “insane,” “feeble-minded” and “dumb” in describing, for example, programs that help disabled people find employment, replacing them with more modern terms. 

“This ballot measure is also creating public awareness of disability issues and the value of people with disabilities.”

Taiwanna Anderson’s life changed forever in December 2021, when she found her 10-year-old daughter Nylah unconscious, hanging from a purse strap in a bedroom closet.

Barely an adolescent, Nylah wasn’t suicidal. She had merely come across the “Blackout Challenge” in a feed of videos curated her for her by TikTok’s algorithm. The challenge circulating on the video-sharing app encouraged users to choke themselves with household items until they blacked out. When they regained consciousness, they were supposed to then upload their video results for others to replicate. After several days in a hospital’s intensive care unit, Nylah succumbed to her strangulation injuries. Anderson sued TikTok over product liability and negligence that she alleges led to Nylah’s death.

For years, when claimants tried to sue various internet platforms for harms experienced online, the platforms benefited from what amounted to a get-out-of-jail-free card: Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a 1996 statute that offers apps and websites broad immunity from liability for content posted to their sites by third-party users. In 2022, a federal district judge accepted TikTok’s Section 230 defense to dismiss a lawsuit filed by Anderson based on the assessment that TikTok didn’t create the blackout challenge video Nylah saw—a third-party user of TikTok did.

“TikTok reads 230 of the Communications Decency Act to permit casual indifference to the death of a ten-year-old girl.”

On Wednesday, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) weighed in on the Trump team’s tussle with an employee at Arlington National Cemetery during a wreath-laying ceremony on Monday honoring falling American soldiers. And by “weighed in,” we mean lied and told the vice president to “go to hell.”

At a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, Vance told a crowd that he didn’t think there was actually anything notable about what had transpired: “The altercation at Arlington Cemetery is the media creating a story where I really don’t think that there is one,” he said, adding, “a lot of [those families] were there with [former President Trump], they invited him to be there and to support them.”

“It is amazing to me that you have, apparently somebody at Arlington Cemetery, some staff member, had a little disagreement with somebody, and the media has turned this into a national news story,” Vance continued.

The Ohio senator went further, telling Harris that she could “go to hell” for criticizing Trump’s visit to the cemetery. The choice words came despite Harris having never publicly commented on the incident, contrary to Vance’s claim that Harris “wants to yell at Donald Trump because he showed up” at Arlington. When asked for comment, Steven Cheung, communications director for the Trump campaign, claimed that Vance had been referring to Harris’ campaign team—not the VP herself.

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We're back on stage and tickets are out NOW! Join us at London Palladium on Friday September 20th 2024 for 'Football Ramble: Time Tunnel', a journey through football history like no other. Expect loads of laughs, all your Ramble favourites, and absolutely everything on Pete's USB stick. Get your tickets at footballramblelive.com!Find us on X, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, and email us here: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

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Two Trump campaign staffers reportedly got in a fight with an official at Arlington National Cemetery on Monday during a wreath-laying ceremony to honor soldiers who died in the United States’ withdrawal from Afghanistan. (NPR first reported the incident on Tuesday.)

The cause? Trump’s staff allegedly wanted to ensure he’d be photographed honoring the troops, even though federal law “prohibits political campaign or election-related activities,” including photographers, at the cemetery, according to an Arlington National Cemetery spokesperson.

Nonetheless, Trump’s team did manage to turn the event into an opportunity for content, producing and posting a video to their TikTok account, set to somber music, that suggests the soldiers’ deaths were President Joe Biden’s fault. As of Wednesday afternoon, it had more than 6.6 million views. (The video was also posted on Trump’s Instagram page, which posted other footage from the event, too; Trump’s senior advisor Dan Scavino also shared videos on his X page.)

What a time to be alive, it’s the Carabao Cup second round! Like all of last night’s fixtures, Marcus, Jim and Luke start today’s show by continuing to pay tribute to the great Sven-Göran Eriksson.

Elsewhere, Luke and Jim explain why Manuel Ugarte could be a great signing, not just for Man United but also the Ramble. Plus, a local council leader in Wolverhampton has responded to Noni Madueke and we learn that Andros Townsend currently is being held hostage in Turkey. At least the weather is nice, we suppose.

We're back on stage and tickets are out NOW! Join us at London Palladium on Friday September 20th 2024 for 'Football Ramble: Time Tunnel', a journey through football history like no other. Expect loads of laughs, all your Ramble favourites, and absolutely everything on Pete's USB stick. Get your tickets at footballramblelive.com!

Find us on X, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, and email us here: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Sign up to the Football Ramble Patreon for ad-free shows for just $5 per month, with 15% off annual subscriptions until the end of August: https://www.patreon.com/footballramble.

Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more. On Saturdays, we round up the biggest stories of the week.

The 100 bestselling books of the past 50 years

Interesting to browse this list of the 100 best-selling books of that last fifty years from The Timesso see just how different the UK market has (and hasn’t been) different than here in the States. I don’t want to spoil it because it is worth it for the surprise, but only would I never have guessed the #1 best-seller, but I wouldn’t have gotten any of the top ten.

Anthropic Sued by Authors for Training Its AI on Their Books

Anthropic is now the third major tech player (after OpenAI and Meta) to be sued by authors for using copyrighted works to train their large language models. In this claim, the Books3 data set, which includes thousands of copyrighted books, is the central target. It was used to train Anthropic’s Claude LLM: this isn’t in dispute, as Anthropic has already admitted it. The question though is this legal? Does it rise to level of piracy? Or does machine-learning have the legal protection of human-learning, in which I can read as many books as I want to learn how to write better. This is probably the most important and interesting question out there in the world of books and reading.

How Ireland became the world’s literary powerhouse

The world’s literary powerhouse might be a little much, but Ireland does seem to outpunch its weight when it comes to big-time awards and influence (four Nobels and six Bookers), so why exactly might that be? This article argues that it is sort of everything? From libraries to funding to bookstore to lit mags to readership: Ireland seems to care more, on a per capita basis, about reading and writing than most countries. It would be fascinating to see some sort of breakdown/quantification of this “care,” some formula of public funding and educational dollars and book sales and so on, both for Ireland, and the wider reading and writing world.

Recent & Upcoming Adaptation Hype Meter

My personal internet this week was chock full of adaptation news, reviews, announcements, teases, reveals, and other digital publicity efforts. And you know what? I was into it. So as a way of covering some of the notable fall adaptations: my personal hype rating of six notable upcoming adaptations, scaled 1 to 10 (1 being this should not exist and 10 being I would drop everything and watch this now if I could).

Here are the posts that, for whatever reason, got the most activity this week:

The Best Books About the ’80s and ’90s

Those times are long gone, as my eight-year-old loves to remind me, and so if you’re like me, and want some nostalgic reads or an escape from *waves hands* all of this, grab your favorite snack—bonus points if it’s something that was also around in the ’80s or ’90s (does anyone else remember the candy Bonkers?? SO good, right?)—and let’s take a look at some of the best books about the ’80s and ’90s.

The Most Read Books on Goodreads This Week

The order is shuffled a bit from last week, but to add a more variety, I’ve included the top five most read books on Goodreads last week in three countries around the world. This time: Denmark, Malaysia, and Portugal. Denmark’s and Portugal’s most read titles this week are both not (yet?) available in English.

The Biggest Book Club Books Coming Out This Fall

There’s a natural breeze and I can smell people cooking soup. And listen, I am all for leaving this hell of a summer behind us. Turns out the book world is, too. As various fall reading lists have been popping up, I’ve selected a few books that I think will be on everyone’s TBRs this fall.

THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION at 30

On the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the theatrical release of The Shawshank Redemption,here is our Book Nerd Movie Club episode about the novella and film. A classic.