More Ta-Nehisi Coates than Ezra Klein.

First porridge of the autumn. Hit it with a little salt and maple syrup, compliment it with some good black coffee, and you can take on the world.

It was never meant to be workable. It was meant to push trans folk to the margins of society.

“They’re, they’re animals anyway. That’s what I would tell my kids all the time,” said the ICE agent, according to body cam footage. spectrumlocalnews.com/nys/central-...

reminder:

If Labour try and win against Reform on technocratic and competency grounds, they will lose like Remain lost in 2016. Farage knows this. They need to come out swinging on values and decency. They need to grow moral and ideological spines.

Hey a thing I really don’t want to get lost here is that while Tylenol doesn’t cause autism, IT’S FINE TO BE AUTISTIC. Let’s not grant them the premise that autism should be eradicated in our way to correct the science, okay? Okay.

People are dying from a lack of vision and hope. The right gives them something to hate. The left gives them pragmatic moderation and hesitancy. We need leaders of vision who can set out the case for a joyful and inclusive democratic future. We need hope.

I don't need the Government attacking Reform's plan to end ILR, and rescind the status of settled folk, because it's unworkable or economically damaging. I need them to say it's wrong, immoral, vicious, and evil.

To be a non-citizen legal resident of this country is now to be frightened for your future.

This coming to pass would be terminal for many UK families of mixed-nationality - a truly dark future.

Reform will apparently pledge today that they'd abolish indefinite leave to remain - including retrospectively, to people already granted it. Obviously this is a moral abomination but it is also a practical and legal impossibility.

So, Reform really are going for the mass deportation of settled legal immigrants approach.

Kevin Young’s new poetry collection is wonderful. You should all know this.

My ask for the next Arcbishop of Canterbury has gone from ‘someone to lead us with courage to a more inclusive life together’ to ‘please Lord, just let them be opposed to fascism’.

Started reading Lonsome Dove. Realising that Taylor Sheridan’s fundamental problem is that he’ll never be half the writer McMurtry was. The landscapes are within as well as without. One tells truth, the other packages nostalgia. One writes men (and women), the other fetishises masculinity.

The failure of ‘post-liberalism’ to form any kind of sustained critique of authoritarian populist nationalism, and its contrary tendency to act as its handmaid, should give people more pause than it does.

Previous generations fought fascism in nearly every corner of the earth. Today it’s on our streets, silencing opposition and attempting to control the airwaves. The GOP has declared all out war on free speech. It’s up to us to fight for it.

I assume this is obvious, but I’ll say it anyway: The advantage of proscribing a non-existent organisation is that no one can prove they don’t belong to it.

Just so I'm clear: TV host says we should kill every homeless person? No big deal TV host says the right must "go to war" with the left? Pfft. TV host says the government is cracking down on critics? Well, the government cracks down on him for the criticism. Free speech, everyone.

"Ordo Amoris is when I gratuitously laugh about killing innocent fishermen via drone strikes in a different hemisphere"

Rep. Ronny Jackson calls to forcefully mass institutionalize trans people and calls them a cancer. www.newsmax.com/newsmax-tv/r...

48 hours in Cambridge after 48 hours in the North, and I am left to conclude that there are just a lot of terrible human beings in Cambridge.

Torn between the necessity of maintaining my peace, and the necessity of staying alert to what’s going on.

Well, I made the 17.10 from Kings X to Cambridge. Shame the driver hasn’t…

You know who was also a young husband and father—not to mention ex-Marine—who died, not attacking others to make himself rich and powerful, but to save the lives of others? David Rose, the officer killed by the anti-vax domestic terrorist who attacked the CDC. apnews.com/article/deka...

A man's ideas and his murder can both be abhorrent. This isn't that complicated.

Should fact-based institutions be more accepting of fiction-based political groupings?

Shooting people is bad. It’s also terrible for democracy and political stability. It will probably empower Trump’s vindictive lawlessness. So, this isn’t good on any level.

New deputy leader candidates, same fucking misogyny. Like, it's a CREEPY sentence for a piece of political analysis to even contain, but to choose it as the TITLE is next-level incel shit.

That picture is horrible, and not worth reproducing. The text about a shared secret encased in the stylised torso of a girl. The suggestion is of underdeveloped breasts, a child’s body. The newspapers just call it ‘suggestive’. What it suggests is grotesque. 

Breaking News: A House committee obtained a sexually suggestive drawing apparently signed by Donald Trump to Jeffrey Epstein, which Trump had denied existed.

It would be better for the Christian church to quietly die than stage a comeback tied to nationalists agendas. The dead can be resurrected, but who can fix an unfaithful heart?

Just a reminder to check for your name in this list of books that OpenAI trained from. If your name is there, they probably owe you several thousand dollars. OpenAI cried that if everyone eligible author files, the company will go bankrupt, so I'm alerting every author I have ever spoken to.

the real glory of world war two was that it involved a warrior cult being ground down and beaten to a pulp by people who would rather have been doing something else.

He cheapens everything. The Lincoln Memorial is practically sacred ground. It’s where MLK spoke of his dream.

I woman in the process of a divorce (often the worst time in people’s lives) trying to make provision for a disabled son wasn’t careful enough around a highly complex bit of tax and property law. I kind of have a bit of sympathy here.

There is a certain psychic and moral derangement to Linehan’s actions that make me think he isn’t the poster child for free speech some want to claim. She was 17 at the time of his actions. This is punching down on a minor.

On the same day in the Telegraph:

The publisher of my book keeps sending me reminders that I haven’t signed an agreement for my work to be used to train AI, and could I please do so. I keep deleting the emails.

One of the cool things about being the dad to a nearly 19 year old with good taste is discovering intelligent, and deeply poetic, rap music. People like Kendrick Lamar, McKinley Dixon, and Denzel Curry are artists and lyricists worth attending to.

They want to turn America into an ethno-nationalist state.

The American experiment is based on the idea that citizenship is not based on ethnicity. We tried to conflate the two with slavery and the constitution failed as a result. The reconstruction amendments made this principle explicit. This shit is fundamentally anti American and anti patriotic.

Those of us involved in teaching and learning should, on a regular basis, sit in the back of a colleague’s lecture or classroom — just to watch what the students are doing on their laptops and tablets. The argument for device free teaching spaces will feel a lot stronger.

It is a crime in the UK to incite violence, whether it be calling for the burning down of immigrant hostels, or telling people to punch trans women in the genitals. If you want to change that, make the case. If you win, I can call on people to burn your house down and punch you in the genitals.

As a child who suffered the, admittedly rare, complication of encephalitis after chickenpox, I am very pro the UK’s decision to vaccinate now.

I turn on my TV and a TV presenter is asking a Govt minister why they are talking about rolling out free childcare when the big issue is asylum hotels. This is objectively insane.

A member of my Faculty dreams his English dream, and offers up a fascist Hobbiton with a veneer of academic respectability. The reality is masked thugs taking people away and troops on streets. bylinetimes.com/2025/08/26/j...

I can