Dear Texas A&M, Clarifying that you did not ban all of Plato, just the parts that call into question the state's governing ideology is not quite the win that you seem to think it is.

"I would like to interrupt this council meeting with an anecdote about the time I confronted a caricaturist in Leicester Square about the quality of his portrait of The Jackson Five" "Sorry but I don't see how that's germane" "That's EXACTLY what I said"

Corollary to yesterday's World Cup question: are you a ⚽ fan living OUTSIDE the United States who is or was planning to attend a WC match in the US? Have you changed your plans or is it full steam ahead? (Let me know if you're willing to be quoted, and if so, what you would like to be called.)

The worst music festival ever just dropped.

holy shit. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/13/u...

Eric Adams, former NYC mayor, launched a memecoin (cryptocurrency) today. He marketed it as an “NYC Token” and used media appearances and his social media to promote it. Within hours, Adams then drained its liquidity, apparently having scammed investors out of $3.4 million—a move called a rug pull.

Can’t think of a better encapsulation of the downstream effects of neoliberalism as an ideology than powerlessness of the state to penalise a billionaire-owned child pornography generator, substituted with a reflexive will to crack down on individual consumers who engage with said generator.

Good morning

Choose a passive-aggressive number of books that shaped you. Even if you are indifferent to or despise them now. No explanations. 20/725 Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (1982)

Choose a passive-aggressive number of books that shaped you. Even if you are indifferent to or despise them now. No explanations. 19/725 Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front (1929)

"Siobhan leaves, Heidi joins. Still Sugababes. Mutya leaves, Amelle joins. Still Sugababes. Keisha leaves, Jade joins. Still Sugababes. And then, Siobhan, Mutya and Keisha get back together. Also Sugababes. So now, there are two Sugababes!"

Today’s activities: an all-day meeting to decide how specifically to make our surviving degree courses worse, the general outlines already having been imposed (fewer modules, fewer hours per module, fewer assessments, fewer subject modules, fewer academics).

'Have you looked at our logo recently? ... Are we the baddies?'

happy first day of school to semester colleagues please enjoy this jameson syllabus from January 1996

'In total, the 20 universities spent £8.3 million on remuneration for their vice-chancellors. The accounts also reveal they collectively let go almost 7,000 staff in the same year – costing £124.6 million in compensation for loss of office.'

Pretty convincing, but surely it was Coleridge himself, travelling back into his own past to prevent himself from writing the crappy ending he jotted down in the original timeline

Choose a passive-aggressive number of books that shaped you. Even if you are indifferent to or despise them now. No explanations. 18/725 Annette Kuhn, ed., Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema (1990)

Choose a passive-aggressive number of books that shaped you. Even if you are indifferent to or despise them now. No explanations. 17/725 Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and sequel Through the Looking-Glass (1871)

They're calling it urthpunk, it has all of the mystery and benighted wonder of the Book of the New Sun with none of the catholic conservatism

Coming up 5 February. I’m introducing Lewis Milestone’s The Front Page in @slapstickfest.bsky.social as part of a short season of Adolphe Menjou films. Menjou dazzles as sharp-tongued editor Walter Burns in a fast-talking comedy that laid foundations for decades of screwball brilliance to come.

AI users:

Choose a passive-aggressive number of books that shaped you. Even if you are indifferent to or despise them now. No explanations. 16/725 John Hersey, The Algiers Motel Incident (1967)

Choose a passive-aggressive number of books that shaped you. Even if you are indifferent to or despise them now. No explanations. 15/725 Robert Arthur, Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators in The Secret of Terror Castle and the dozen or more sequels I was able to lay my hands on back then.

Delivering his first annual foreign policy speech, Pope Leo did not hold back in his criticism for the might-makes-right mentality of world leaders.

www.thenation.com/article/acti... Hit them where it hurts them - boycotts can work

It's almost as if years of relentless media saturation bombing of flat-out lies, demonisation and blaming don't help the public to understand what is actually happening.

He kidnapped the president of Venezuela for them And oil companies are like Meh

We inherited mum's budgies and since the sweet little yellow one has turned into a fat thug, they've been renamed. First we tried Thuglife and Efil4zaggin but finally settled on 2Peck and The Notorious B.U.G.

Denmark is changing the name of Greenland to Epstein Island—so that Trump will stop talking about it.

This is Zero. She is something of a shapeshifter. Not voluntarily, but still very impressive. 14/10 (IG: zerothesupercollie)

Reform’s new London mayoral candidate, Laila Cunningham, was undone by a rare GB News miracle: a good question. Asked why a party that says the Tories are terrible keeps hiring so many of them, the ex-Tory herself had a rock-solid response: "I can’t answer that."🤨

A deleted tweet by a Toronto Sun national politics reporter.

It’s getting so the only safe place to be is in the Epstein Files. 🔄

A woman recording an ICE agent tells him "Shame on you." The agent responds, "Have you all not learned from the past couple of days?" "Learned what?" she asks Then he knocks her phone out of her hand

"The maximum time a prisoner can spend on remand is 182 days (six months). Yet Muraisi and Ahmed were arrested in November 2024, and are not due to be tried until June at the earliest, which means they will be remanded for 20 months." Shameful. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

How about a FIFA Peace Prize?

Choose a passive-aggressive number of books that shaped you. Even if you are indifferent to or despise them now. No explanations. 14/725 Geoff Ryman, Air: Or, Have Not Have (2005)

Choose a passive-aggressive number of books that shaped you. Even if you are indifferent to or despise them now. No explanations. 13/725 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848 (1962) and …

I, for one, cannot understand why men like Rupert Lowe are opposed to banning X, despite it assisting sex offenders, paying people to invite the foreign powers to invade the U.K, and allowing state-sponsored cyber warfare against our democracy. It's a real mystery...🤔

This week: we execute a U.S. citizen. Next week: we take over elections to stop “fraud.” It's so transparent what's going on here.

@aladyofchance.bsky.social finally!

Literally the first news outlet I've seen directly quoting her wife. Even the NPR piece on Renee Good that aired this morning made no mention of Becca Good whatsoever.

This is amazing humor. A+