I'm gonna queue up all the Christmas movies on Netflix. Desperate times.

The morning after a May Ball, students in tuxes mooring their row boat at dawn - the cox in her evening gown. Walk of shame, Cambridge-style. I love this town.

Next week's forecast: 4 consecutive days at 34°, in June. The nerve. I didn't up sticks to England for this foolishness.

The attacks in Edinburgh, in which an armed bare-chested white man terrorised Muslims, leaving five people injured, don't feature on a single newspaper front page this morning. Two tier journalism

citations are what tie you down to a shared reality and a shared discourse--to the inconvenient facts which discipline thought--instead of just spinning off into that gauzy mental space where everything is just the way you need it to be

Counter-terrorism officers investigate after five injured in violent incidents in Edinburgh

“A new paradigm is needed, one that redefines theory as a dynamic and evolving process rather than a fixed product awaiting discovery.” Conclusion of Lindsay’s (2025) chapter: doi.org/10.1108/S147...

Suddenly?

I dunno, maybe we'll find out he's secretly a serial killer, but in the meantime he makes everyone else look terrible.

Comment on dit front républicain au Royaume-Uni?

"So ... so I said ... why not sign your treaty here, at Versailles?"

Not subtle with the foreshadowing, are they.

Nothing mixed, unclear or unstable about it.

Scream it from the rooftops (But I know this will not change anytime soon. Researchers and law enforcement and security services are obsessed with ideology as if it is somehow explanatory.)

Are we doing Old vs New Terrorism all over again? Because reified types are the problem, period. The question remains: what motivates the emergence of the new categorical label? Especially when it comes from frontliners. What do they experience that makes them want to call it something else?

Ideology is quite possibly the least useful dimension I can think of around which to organize an operational definition of extremist crime. Victimology, social ecology, behaviour, even motivation - any combination of these has to be more pertinent than ideology.

He wanted to bury Epstein with Iran. That part worked, didn't it? Might be enough of a consolation prize until the next invasion.

The idea is a target article, followed by invited and submitted peer-reviewed commentaries representing diverse perspectives, with the original authors given a right of reply. The goal is to open up space for discussion on how we can get Open Research to work for everyone. Any takers?

I spend just long enough on LinkedIn to repost the activities of my research group, then I have to run away in vicarious embarrassment.

Governments still on X enacting these bans - which is all of them - have zero legs to stand on.

Je me demande ce qu'il aurait eu à dire sur la fractionnalisation de l'identité moderne. Je continue à penser que la gauche (surtout américaine) s'est tiré un missile Exocet dans le pied.

🚨 CTRG at #TASM2026 🚨 Many CTRG researchers will be presenting their work at this year’s Terrorism and Social Media conference in Swansea next week 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿

THE BOROUGHS hits a "Thursday Murder Club Meets Cocoon by way of The Goonies" spot I didn't know I had.

If this isn't national security, then nothing is.

Twitter/X is an enormous national security threat on a global scale, and a lot more nations need to grow a spine and start blocking it (and taking other active, aggressive measures).

Hyper fragmentation of our moral ecology. The root of dysfunction.

🧵 Thread: Does the internet threaten democracy? I argue that it does in my latest piece in Science: doi.org/10.1126/scie... Here's the short version. 1/9 1/10

I endorse this message. Zero stars for torture porn. Could always light up "A Little Life" to set "Fifty Shades" on fire?

"The design of these clinical trials... makes it very difficult to attribute the unfavorable effects of UPF-rich diets to ultraprocessing per se... these effects are highly likely to be due to differences in traditional nutritional properties that frequently—but not uniformly—co-occur in UPFs."

From what I've heard, a lovely guy who also had a lot of fun playing villains post-Giles. Proper gut punch for any sci-fi fan of my generstion, this one.

I don't accept this news.

At this point it's basically pathlogical. The site is once again being used to whip up race riots and people with responsibility for national security are on it merrily whistling away.

"we need to ... begin recognizing that they are now 'parasocial media.' Doing so raises new questions about digitally mediated sociality" danah boyd's book on the digital lives of teens is +10 years old and I still reach for it all the time. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Amen.

The Ukrainian decision to double down on drone warfare, from the battlefield, to mid range and long range strike, and not to draft all of its young men to make infantry, will be seen by historians as one of the most important decisions in 19th-21st century warfare.

I'm trying to work out who won the game from the noise outside but I can't work it out, and now it feels like a cheat to look it up.

George. Queen. Everybody. The 80s and 90s. Damn I miss you.

tl,dr; Scientists no longer allowed to use federal funding to publish, attend meetings, or talk to the public. They cannot collaborate internationally. Grants can be cancelled for any reason, at any time, political appointees have a final say over what gets funded, and who gets funded.

And that's the short list.

I can imagine what my late grandmother would have said if she'd seen my neighbour go on a run at midday - 34 degrees in the shade - as I default back to Mediterranean basics: up at 4am to throw the windows wide open. All errands done by 11am - and then lockdown. Ils sont fous, ces anglais.

"Academics in permanent roles are like faraway stars, whose light takes years to reach us . . . Looking at them, you’re looking into the past." www.ft.com/content/8097...

Russian bots working overtime trying to convince Americans that Trump has not been decisively defeated by Iran, Russia’s ally, has to be peak 2026.

Share widely:

Bank holiday weekend goals. Forget the barbecue. Let's throw a conclave.

I've done all sorts of things but few have delivered the same feeling of achievement as teaching myself html in the late 90s, laboriously hand-coding my first website, watching it appear exactly as I had envisioned it and having someone post the first link to it. Community.

As a science fiction writer I really fucking resent tech bros for ruining the phrase "artificial intelligence." 80 years of it being all about cool androids and interesting computers destroyed by five years of "Spicy autocorrect making everything shittier for money." NEVER FORGIVE.

I've spent the last 2-3 days sifting through every breadcrumb of digital evidence I could find on the killers. There is nothing to suggest there was any association with NVE ideology. Did they try to be edgy in their online lives? Yeah, but like in a full blown Nazi way.

Umbrella Corporation hoist with its own petard.

"One big question is whether it still makes sense to talk about radicalisation of a perpetrator if they are just interested in getting paid.” Advantage to criminological models: it's ALL criminal propensity development. The variant is motivation ie. *situation*. www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m...

The most striking thing about this is how completely unsurprising it is that the U.S. would end up here.