Dinner with a view. This is just where she likes to hang out

What’s your favourite low-effort costume? I wanted to go as a geography lecturer, though the 8 year old made me dress as the Mad Hatter match her Queen of Hearts

Ireland has a new president, who happens to be one of my local deputies (we have multi seat constituencies). I just published the short article about the office of President in Ireland. theconversation.com/catherine-co...

Maybe I am simple minded but I think a populist for whom the Other is the foreigner is ‘bad’, and a populist for whom it is say, oligarchs is at least potentially ‘good’. ‘Populism’ is a political style and strategy that can be put to different uses.

Have to show off my fussy precious little stuffed pasta

This is the context in which I and all my colleagues are being told that we must bring in a minimum of £25k in external funding per year. We get 100 hours of research time per year. The bid-writing process will take up most of it.

The funniest hypocrisy of the dominant rad Lib faction in academia is the contradiction between their generally egalitarian social critique, and their acquiescence in the careerism and hierarchy of academia itself

I was able to visit the 6 year old’s classroom during the week and I discovered she has a special ‘processing chair’, a nice little armchair in the corner where she sits for ten minutes every morning to process her change of surroundings, before she starts any school work. Isn’t she lucky

My party piece is having on average six strong coffees per day and still managing daytime naps

The drive for rearmament in Europe comes from an ‘extreme centre’ that wants us to believe simultaneously that Russia weak enough to be defeated outright by Ukraine , yet strong enough to pose an invasion threat to EU/nato countries

My daughter (8) told me she and her friends have a chant: ‘Girls go to college to get more knowledge. Boys go to Jupiter to get more stupider.’

A ceramic mug of hot coffee survived a 1km journey on the roof of my car this morning, which I am taking as a good omen

School pickup times are difficult for a congenitally neurotic person like myself when you see things like people parking on top of the little circle in the roundabout

Academia is when you keep going back and forth apologising for not replying to each other’s emails, until someday you retire

Deadly strikes on boats in the Caribbean under what legal authority? The White House never stated one, but it leaked. Apparently the answer is a lawyer wrote down something that amounts to drugs are weapons so the president can kill whoever he says is moving drugs, without evidence or review.

I had a big birthday. My daughter (8) got me this specially made hat and said (affectionately) ‘it’ll help to hide your receding hairline’

When literally nobody is trying to censor you:

I was gifted a bottle of this Icelandic spirit and I looked up how to drink it and the results are… candid

Only three fairly mainstream candidates having secured nominations for election as (largely ceremonial) Irish president bucks the general trend of the contest having becoming progressively fruitier and wackier each time

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