Two sisters, ages five (left) and four (right). Some serious late Elizabethan cuteness from Isaac Oliver, whose day is today.

On National Poetry Day, the greatest poem I have ever read

🧵on Michelle Mone and Covid contracts 1/ Former Tory peer Michelle Mone has called today’s ruling that PPE Medpro must give the taxpayer back £122m for supplying dodgy PPE an ‘establishment cover-up’. Utter nonsense. Let’s ignore the rhetoric & look at the facts 👇

Bold of Reform-associated people to go for the "yOu CaN't Be PrOpErLy EnGlISh" line while simultaneously complaining about being called 'racist'.

I'm worried that UK Bluesky is being used as a free group humiliation dom experience by American masochists. Not kink shaming or anything, but if I'm going to help Matthew and that chicken tikka masala guy get their rocks off, they'll call me master and pay me for my services thank you very much.

Irrelevant to Tom's point, but on that discourse, one reason cunt paradoxically isn't as offensive here is because it isn't gendered, while in US it is. Genuinely feel a frisson of unpleasantness hearing someone called 'bitch', for this reason. Cunt here truly an equal opportunity insult.

The Moral Maze has always been a sewer, but giving Curtis fucking Yarvin houseroom is beyond the pale. The BBC are both-sidesing themselves to death.

Ben Markovits is a brilliant, and extraordinarily underrated, writer. I'm a fan of several of his books, but Playing Days is both a stunning novel and a book I think with all the time.

Died (alas!) on this day in 1532, Jan Gossaert, sometimes known as Mabuse. Flemish renaissance painter of great talent. Also great beard & A+ collapsible hat for those days when you're just not sure.

Sean Penn looks like Wile E. Coyote after a TNT mishap

British people who keep trying to make interest in the NFL a thing, though. Get those Isle of Man internment camps reopened.

Right I'm off to watch the last part of Newsreader now. Proper well constructed mainstream drama, cracks along at a pace, plenty of twists and turns, every event moves the plot forward. Like good drama should.

Sad to hear Tony Harrison has died. In The early days of the Indy I suggested we print all of V in the paper, so that people could read what they were being told to be outraged about. Didn't reach the end of the sentence before Andreas Whittam-Smith said yes. Never proof read anything so carefully.

There's so many positives this Government is achieving, which might get some airtime if they'd just shut up on the topic of immigration.

Compromise: We introduce ID cards, but Tony Blair has to have one that spells his name "Tonty"

Today’s theory. They put motion smoothing on TVs, and when most people couldn’t see anything was wrong with that, they decided to make politics spiteful and thick, and let water companies put human shit in your tap water. It was the test. We failed.

Great that gov isn't setting up yet another pot of money that councils have to bid for. Much more efficient to allocate money & let councils and local people decide how to spend it. Community power to buy assets & decide what the high street looks like is also positive. www.gov.uk/government/n...

One for #legalsky this: any way I can report our nursery under terrorism legislation for introducing our 3yo to Paw Patrol?

We need to stop calling it an “Administration.” From now on, I’m calling it a “Regime.” Stephen Miller should have his own Nuremberg trial. Authoritarians can be stopped. ⓘ 𝘛𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘶𝘴𝘦𝘳 𝘪𝘴 𝘴𝘶𝘴𝘱𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘦𝘥 𝘰𝘧 𝘣𝘦𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘢 𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘳𝘰𝘳𝘪𝘴𝘵 𝘰𝘳𝘨𝘢𝘯𝘪𝘻𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘤𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘦𝘥 𝘈𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘧𝘢. 𝘗𝘭𝘦𝘢𝘴𝘦 𝘳𝘦𝘱𝘰𝘳𝘵 𝘢𝘯𝘺 𝘴𝘶𝘴𝘱𝘪𝘤𝘪𝘰𝘶𝘴 𝘣𝘦𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘪𝘰𝘳.

the booker prize judges make a lot of fuss about having to read 153 books. but assuming an average weight of 750g per book, that comes in at 115kg of literature - or just under the weight of a single adult male ostrich

Opened Berryman's Sonnets this morning for the first time in many a year. My boy.

Just a reminder that AI is not only a money-making grift but it's not even good. You can teach your students to use Google or GoogleScholar in the same amount of time it takes to learn how to use an AI and they will get better results.

there are many psyops intended to make you interested in "American late night" and I just would advise anyone to stay safe and log off if you feel tempted to watch any of these videos

Anti-racism and anti-fascism norms are breaking down. Failure of the mainstream to speak out against them is encouraging this sorts of extremism.

The problem with the Ezra Klein view of the world is it's based on the existence of a centre-right and centre-left willing to find common ground. Authoritarians aren't interested in common ground, just power.

This really reflects how technocratic neoliberal logic has captured the centre of political spectrum. The argument against it is not moral or ethical, it's on cost and feasibility grounds. It's the logic of managing the numbers is what gets you elected.

It is genuinely absolutely bonkers that one year into a massive new government majority, all the discourse is about what will happen under the allegedly inevitable majority by another party. Much of it is the govt’s fault but not all - this very much has not happened under past unpopular govts!

What's effectively happening here (in the British media at large, too) is the construction of "anti-racism" as somehow a "political alternative" to racism, rather than as a minimal civilisational standard, which in turn (further) vindicates racism as *also* an acceptable political position.

Superb dissection, indeed dismemberment, of Eliezer Yudkowsky's new book by @adambecker.bsky.social. And a very useful insight: these people's vision of AI is a projection onto it of the pathologies of Silicon Valley CEOs. www.theatlantic.com/books/archiv...

The main story on BBC 6 Music News this morning is that a ‘boat carrying migrants is on its way to France’ Delivered in the same upbeat tone as England winning the women’s Euros. The migration ‘debate’ in this country is unmoored from reality, and the media-political complex is feeding it

Doubt is a homage paid to hope. It is not a voluntary homage. Hope would not consent to be merely a homage. - Lautreamont, Poesies

This is a lovely sentiment, with which I agree wholeheartedly. And if you stick with the thread you will get to see Naomi very calmly and quite kindly demolish an Islamophobe. Chapeau.

Given the context and the crowd, despite Musk’s weasel words, this was a call for violence against the British state, from a foreign national who controls a major propaganda engine, and has engineered it to monetise hate

Not unlike dogs, in fact.

I'm going to be charitable here, because I genuinely think it hits *perfectly* on the problem pervasive among the pundit class: They genuinely lack the critical reasoning skills to parse a message and can only comprehend tone.

I made the mistake of reading this article last night. It's worse than the headline. The world where someone is handsomely paid to write this total shit isn't one I want to live in.

conspiracy theories used to be fun, they used to be about Jeff Mangum going back in time, rescuing Anne Frank, and marrying her in the present. They used to be about the Avril Lavigne Replacement. They used to be about how Wilco predicted 9/11

Yes, the Professor Watchlist Targeted Professors for Personal Harassment because of Their Views. But Maybe It Was About to Become a Reading List my latest for The Atlantic

Grateful that having listened to so very much 2 Many DJs as a teen, the older me gets to listen to this little masterpiece: open.spotify.com/album/2GRms1...

Hyphen-blindness is real.

Trial of X in Belgium for refusing to remove unlawful content. In the UK, X appears to be treated as above the law, as it actively defends so much extreme & unlawful content of many kinds, with so little challenge since those responsible for the rule of law seem to be indifferent or asleep

This paragraph comes from an absolutely extraordinary article. One of the most remarkable things I've ever read.

Celebrating the week of my fortieth birthday by listening to the reformation album of a band I was listening to at sixteen. I'm not the problem, time is. mcluskymclusky.bandcamp.com/album/the-wo...

still think the single best political observation I've ever made is that Liz Truss has an internal monologue exactly like that of Roddy Ho

This is a good quick read. I suggest you read it. I wish my students would read it, or more accurately, want to read it.

Raymond Scott, #BOTD in 1908, was a fascinating guy. He invented some of the earliest electronic instruments, collaborated with Jim Henson and the Muppets, and with Berry Gordy of Motown fame. Gordy bought an Electronium from Scot (like the one pictured) in 1969. 3/ #filmsky #musicsky #moviesky

V interesting on the great news at the National, and the potentially much less good good news for the poor, slightly orphaned Tate Britain.