The pushy one , d’uh

Entertainment technology peaked with the iPod shuffle (unironically it was the optimal balance between convenience and being Offline)

I’m turning 40 soon and when family members ask what present I would like, I find myself saying the most ‘turning 40’ things imaginable - like ‘a good clear-out of the attic’ or ‘a bit of peace and quiet’

Jeez I thought after Brexit the Horny for The Constitution thing would die out

The liberal-legalists arguing the problem behind the UK’s authoritarian lurch is the lack of a written constitution: have they paused to wonder what’s going on in America?

unsolicited take on the ‘your party’ situation: fine, it’s bad but we’re all a bit too pundit-brained about politics and accustomed to commenting on and evaluating it as a kind of technical performance in a way that loses sight of stakes. I mean if wow, look they did a slick politics! Who cares?

Absolute scenes on the parents’ WhatsApp as it’s pointed out the answer to someone’s query is in fact in an email from the school

A few weeks ago a man was arrested for wearing a morph t shirt bc police misread "plasticine" as "Palestine"

This looks nice but I’ll never match my late grandmother’s proficiency with apple tarts. At family gatherings she used to present one to a selected male relative, a son in law or grandson. ‘What do we get’, asked a female relative once. ‘The recipe’, she replied 🤣

Very sad to hear of the untimely death of Conor Gearty, a lovely individual, one of our finest legal academics, and a central figure in promoting human rights worldwide.

‘Political violence’ is this incredibly expansive category that might encompass anything from hate crime to overthrowing a tyrant

News is very ‘this is fine meme’

New eugenics just dropped! (They mean ‘autism symptoms’ IN MICE) 🙄

‘Standpoint epistemology’ - mostly an excuse to talk about yourself

One of my more wholesome problems these days is not being able to persuade this girl down from my shoulders

Have you ever seen something as ridiculous as the new AI prompts under Facebook posts? How much energy does it take to produce something presumably nobody actually wanted? Production driven by profit, not need.

The almost 6 year old, who is non-verbal, spent the car journey to her first day back at school, intently studying a laminated picture chart of the new teaching staff 🥹

About the only way to impress my 8 year old was to tell her I’m on YouTube

A little known quirk about Ireland is that the school holidays last about six hundred and forty days. About three weeks ago my daughter said ‘I’ve had a nice long break, but I’m ready to go back to work’

When I was a child and we talked about ‘the year two thousand’, we imagined technologies of transport and physical automation; what we have got instead is a dystopian spectre of monetised surveillance and addiction

August somehow gives both ennui and dread

Isn’t it simply that we’re approaching middle age and that’s always been uncool

'Israel is moving forward with E1, openly mocking the EU.'

Britain is now a state where you are stopped by the police and face possible arrest if you wear a T-shirt emblazoned with PLASTICINE ACTION

There is occasional bellowing laughter from the 8 year old’s bedroom, and she is reading this in case anybody is unaware there are only a hundred and something shopping days til Christmas www.dubraybooks.ie/product/the-...

The UK in 2022 was like: you can’t negotiate with a tyrant, he must be defeated outright The UK in 2025 is like: Ukraine should pursue peace under President Trump’s excellent leadership Whatever the morality, the dynamics of vassalage in the Atlantic alliance have become so awkwardly transparent

Yep, when you raise the time/money/environmental issues remote participation solves you just get handwaving about 'chats over coffee'. It's gatekeeping by people with travel allowances who want to meet up with their mates and competitively perform exhaustion (which Zoom would also help solve)...

A think that strikes me about ‘inclusion’ in academia is that nobody actually means it. A simple example would be remote participation in events like conferences. It’s the most inclusive practical measure you might think of, yet somewhere around 2022 everyone quietly agreed they didn’t like the vibe

If your assessment needs an elaborate system of surveillance and enforcement to uphold academic ‘integrity’, then you need a different type of assessment

I think people should liberate themselves from pervasive screen-addiction and the digital-capitalist distraction machine that sacrifices our sense of time and presence to the pursuit of profit via mass addiction, but I also think they should text me back immediately

Analytical philosophy be like: what if we pretended history and context didn’t exist?

On holidays in centre parcs and the place is laden with blackberries (seems to be a good year for them) so I picked some. ‘I wouldn’t eat those if I were you’, said a random child cycling past. ‘Don’t you need to boil those before we eat them?’ says my own daughter. Honestly😅😅

Looks like the Guardian invented ‘going for a walk’ www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

This might as well be a cautionary tale about how the Irish Green Party in government could not achieve its headline climate goals merely with policy tweaks and without challenging the fundamentals of the underlying economic and ideological model

We need a complete and total shutdown of parents’ WhatsApps until we can figure out what the hell is going on* *people not understanding they can message an individual instead of the whole group

📣 Palm oil is a *terrible* climate solution! I don’t repeat topics in my column, but this month I made an exception. HVO is being marketed even more aggressively as a miracle “drop in” fuel for everything from homes to buses to data centres. www.irishtimes.com/environment/...

Did organised mindfulness in universities (a bit passé?) ever make any link to the spiritual origins of the practice and specifically the spiritual rejection of recognition-seeking and status-grasping? Which in a university would be… interesting.

Younger daughter waking the older at 6am by silently and very expertly climbing onto the headboard of her bed and leaping enthusiastically down, set the tone for the whole day🥴😄

My signature Dad joke lately somehow annoys people - like *really* annoys them. What is Tirimasu short for? - Tirimasusan.

A colleague has to meet with the university’s Office of General Counsel who want edits to their program’s website that basically amount to deleting every instance of the word “Black”

I’m not a natural athlete but worked my arse off for a few years and at the weekend I ran probably the slowest leg as part of an all-Ireland winning 4 x 100 masters (older age) team

I don’t care how many Americans tweet about bad service or not enough ice cubes in Europe, customers trying to keep the patron happy and not offend him/her is actually the natural order of things

I actually felt bad for the older Italian guy running this restaurant when I asked for a pizza without cheese so I waited until his back was turned before chucking a solitary ice cube into the red wine 🙈

The youngest woke up for the day at 2 am and I made a basque cheesecake. Events which are actually entirely connected

Everybody, go read this interview with jean-Luc Mélenchon newleftreview.org/sidecar/post...

A thing autism parenting has in common with lecturing: I am using PowerPoint a lot.

How do I feel about air conditioning? I’m very hot – but it’s destroying the planet | Emma Beddington

I didn’t know Lidl did kink nights