Give it to Big State til the end of the season.

A supercut of No Context Adam Curtis Intertitles m.youtube.com/watch?v=jAno...

Japan also interesting. (From US Naval Institute, 1949): www.usni.org/magazines/pr...

The new world record was like doing 100m in 17 seconds, 422 times

London marathon. Nothing like it.

"China exported 68 gigawatts worth of solar panels, cells and wafers in March, which was double the capacity shipped in February. For perspective, 68 gigawatts is roughly equivalent to the entire solar capacity of Spain." ember-energy.org/latest-updat...

"China exported 68 gigawatts worth of solar panels, cells and wafers in March, which was double the capacity shipped in February. For perspective, 68 gigawatts is roughly equivalent to the entire solar capacity of Spain." ember-energy.org/latest-updat...

The best keep secret in social impact? www.firetail.co.uk/news/sportfo...

It is exactly that. Dead Internet Theory is that social media has very few humans, and is overrun with bots. Bots respond to “charlie kirk shoots”, even when wildly out of context.

This is Dead Internet Theory in practice. Look at the engagement.

This is Dead Internet Theory in practice. Look at the engagement.

A close reading of Mr Beast, as turbo-Abramović. “This is the kind of personality that invents vaccines and proves impossibility theorems, but the things he got insanely invested in are (1) youtube (2) ethically sourced chocolate bars.” rottenandgood.substack.com/p/math-scien...

Apparently the band were named after this board game

I loved discovering this when I wrote an essay for the National Concert Hall ahead of his residency there in 2019. Along with this great little supplementary anecdote from his time as a white goods repairman.

TIL that Philip Glass and Steve Reich had a furniture removals company called Chelsea Light Moving www.laphil.com/musicdb/piec...

First time seeing a Waymo in London

A really well packaged handbook on strategic foresight by the Singapore gov'ts Center for Strategic Futures, reflecting their latest thinking and findings from practice www.csf.gov.sg/thinking-abo...

We're recruiting two research assistants to help us deliver "The IRL Trial" - a world-first randomised trial of social media limitations among 12-15 year-olds, and the effect on mental health. You'd be part of the Born In Bradford family. For more info and to apply: www.jobs.nhs.uk/candidate/jo...

Changing things up at @firetail.bsky.social www.firetail.co.uk/news/leaders...

Love the @banffcentre.bsky.social film festival and this film was amazing. Jasmin Paris is a legend: m.youtube.com/watch?v=PgTE...

Some thoughts on becoming a #bcorp www.linkedin.com/posts/andyma...

"But here’s the catch" in the middle of an article is just about the cleanest sign something has been written by AI.

For over 20 years, SETI@Home crowdsourced computer power to look for aliens. After a decade of analysis, the most promising signals are being studied by a huge Chinese telescope. I can't stress enough that the Three-Body Problem was not supposed to be an instruction manual. phys.org/news/2026-01...

Reality TV has trained us to blame people, not systems. Every problem is presented as a failure of character, and the only response we have is to vote them off the island.

Reality TV has trained us to blame people, not systems. Every problem is presented as a failure of character, and the only response we have is to vote them off the island.

The Candidate (1972) is a great film that ends with Robert Redford realising, a little too late, that winning the campaign mattered more than winning the office. www.youtube.com/watch?v=myEp...

"Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which 'now' was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents' have insufficient 'now' to stand on" William Gibson,Pattern Recognition

Every Winter Olympian‘s bio during this opening ceremony is “The child of diplomats, he learned short track skating during his parents UN posting in Geneva. He switched to luge after excelling on the internal JP Morgan track during his internship.” #openingceremomy #winterolympics

Building out AI turns out to be so capital intensive that it needs to access debt finance. Diversified conglomerates are good vehicles for raising debt. That‘s the whole story. www.bloomberg.com/opinion/news...

Once you‘ve noticed this use of the word “wrong”, you see it everywhere: open.substack.com/pub/thedraft...

Early social media and blogging made room for the pleasure of observation as an end in itself. Today we have hot takes, hustle culture, performative outrage and AI slop.

The LinkedIn algorithm wants you to post three times a week, but the humans don’t

The term "big beast" is now far too casually applied in politics to both medium-sized and even smaller beasts. Stop the beast Inflation, or at least introduce a Beast* category.

Forecasting is hard...

"UK Wind Power has saved consumers £100bn by displacing gas and lowering rates" (from excellent www.nathanielbullard.com/presentations)

It's like throwing someone out of the Lib Dems for pointing at potholes

Incredible to learn you can be thrown out of the Conservative Party for "secret plotting"

“This is whalefall — a world living off the remains of what once was, as everything slows down, decomposes, and becomes something that merely sustains life, but doesn’t give birth to anything new.” This is becomnig a Chor Pharn Lee stan account thecuttingfloor.substack.com/p/whalefall

“Without a forward arc, one cannot outsource meaning to progress. Responsibility becomes local and immediate. You are accountable not to a future payoff, but to the person in front of you, the standard you refuse to abandon even when it no longer benefits you“ open.substack.com/pub/thecutti...

Timely reading, recommended...

Screen time is starting to look like an inferior good. As income rises, people substitute away from scrolling.

"There was a brief silence while Louis XVIII, in handwriting that he made as tiny as possible, wrote a new note in the margin of his Horace; then, when the note was written, he looked up with the satisfied air of a man who thinks he has made a discovery when he has commented on someone else’s idea"

The Earth Rover Program is doing some fascinating science. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

MBS as Cesare Borgia is a great analogy (from Giuliano da Empoli)

Often there isn’t a “different paradigm”; it’s just someone very confident about their new way to be wrong.

When i was young, I thought "this time it's different" might meant that this time it's different. Now I'm old, I know it means "this is nearly the top".

It is fascinating that people screenshot and quote posts they find abhorrent, thinking they are doing anything other than amplifying those views.

<stops dead> <gawps> I mean it feels like a thing I should basically know on reflection but still....

When Tony Blair came to power in 1997, the UK economy was bigger than China and India combined.