Revealing long-read by @willdunn.bsky.social on the casual, chaotic integration of AI into the workings of British politics and why it matters:

This is a story about power, about politicians becoming distracted by a shiny new thing, without stopping to ask what it might cost. www.newstatesman.com/technology/2...

"When pressed on matters she prefers not to discuss, she responds sharply: 'I wouldn’t talk about it. Thank you, though'" The brilliant Faye Curran spent months profiling Alfreda Bikowsky, the woman who led the CIA unit dedicated to bin Laden, and was once described as "the Queen of Torture"

Well @meganjgibson.bsky.social has interviewed Fiona Hill again and frankly I wish she hadn’t www.newstatesman.com/world/middle...

New interview with Fiona Hill on the expanding war in the Middle East: "Once you get into these big system changes, you effectively get a world war...." www.newstatesman.com/world/middle...

"[Canada's] military envisions unconventional warfare in which small groups of... armed civilians would resort to ambushes, sabotage, drone warfare or hit-and-run tactics." Ok then! From here - www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/art...

For years, Fiona Hill has been one of the smartest, most thoughtful people thinking about the state of the world So much richness in this interview with @meganjgibson.bsky.social www.newstatesman.com/internationa...

Sober and compelling, interview with Andrey Kurkov Viva Ukraine! @meganjgibson.bsky.social www.newstatesman.com/internationa...

Ten months before 9/11, a passenger seized control of a Boeing 747 flying from London to Nairobi and nearly crashed it into the Sahara Desert. Everyone survived but no one quite recovered. How do you measure the cost of a disaster averted? www.newstatesman.com/long-reads/2...

Lily Lynch on the Floridization of US politics www.newstatesman.com/internationa...

In this week’s @newstatesman.com – Tina Brown on the abominable showman M Sandel & T Piketty on the left after Trump @sarahchurchwell.bsky.social on the Gatsby myths @yairwallach.bsky.social on the Gaza ceasefire @traceythorn.bsky.social – back to the 80s Cover by @andrecarrilho.bsky.social

Sadly, this gets truer every day

Love this — not least because Joni Mitchell absolutely came to my school when I was 11 www.nytimes.com/2025/01/21/n...

My piece for the New Statesman, on the ceasefire, how we got here, and why the dangers of further ethnic cleansing have not gone away. www.newstatesman.com/internationa...

What is socialism, if not the state owning the memes of production

Of course… www.ft.com/content/5dc9...

More than 64,000 Palestinians may have been killed by traumatic injury in the first nine months of the war in Gaza, according to a new study. It suggests that the Hamas health ministry tally, a figure the UN relies on, is a significant undercount. nyti.ms/4fZxCIv

NYT's report on the Israeli order allowing killing 20 civilians as collateral damage for low level Hamas targets, 100 for major targets, and 500 civilians casualties per day, should be seen as blanket order for mass slaughter. The mass killing was the point. The targets were the legal excuse.

if you’re interested Michel Barnier lasted nearly twice as long in office as Liz Truss. presumably the Barnier Lettuce well and truly went off some time ago

Free Palestine

“Things, we realized, did not simply get better.” nymag.com/intelligence...

lol

Not the most important part here but the "DOGE" aspect does also affirm we're entering an era where the worst people you know will constantly be dropping the cry laughing emoji about the least funny shit you ever seen

I still think Biden has a lot to answer for…

Nature in relation to motherhood has long been exploited. But who defines what, precisely, is natural? And who is served by such definitions? www.newstatesman.com/culture/book...

“The West Bank is at boiling point. The conditions for a third intifada are being created.” www.newstatesman.com/world/middle...

“The West Bank is at boiling point. The conditions for a third intifada are being created.” www.newstatesman.com/world/middle...

“But if Israel — a state founded from genocide, a state founded to protect Jews from the Holocaust — is found to be committing genocide, that is a huge stigma and it would put powerful pressure on Netanyahu to finally to relent.” www.newstatesman.com/internationa...

“Whatever it is, you won’t die of it.” This is harrowing. nymag.com/intelligence...

explaining some online beef to a normal person

Very curious now: just how bad could Saltburn be?!

“When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed — that it was a price worth paying in order to hit [another] target...These are not random rockets. Everything is intentional" www.972mag.com/mass-assassi...

“It’s hard to feel that Christmas spirit with the sound of F-35 training drills in the background." I went to Finnish Lapland, the home of Santa Claus, reindeer and, increasingly, Nato training exercises. www.newstatesman.com/internationa...