We are given only a limited number of truly perfect summer days in our time on Earth. One of the more insidious cruelties of fossil fuel greed is how it slowly strips those days from us, more and more throughout our lifetimes, perhaps without us even realizing what we have lost.

These images of First Nations community members evacuating Collins, Ontario on motorboats are absolutely surreal www.facebook.com/reel/1548244...

Following the horrifying death of Ann Widdecombe, the former Conservative minister and Reform UK spokeswoman, Professor Stuart Gordon explores what her faith, and her friction with organisations like the British Red Cross, reveal about the deep crisis of trust facing modern humanitarianism.

Woke up & found myself added to this excellent list. Thank you!

this is a great illustration of one of the fundamental insights of democracy — that there is no such thing as "the people" and that majorities are elusive and ever shifting. no election, no decision, is final and treating an election as a final decision is profoundly undemocratic.

If a news platform decides to talk about the climate & heat crisis this way, they are very, very unlikely reporting properly on other topics; you can't be a journalist talking about the "surprising positives" of a heat wave & then turn around and do investigative journalism on the elites...

30, 50, 70, and 100-year sentences for the Prairieland defendants so far. Dark day, man. Truly.

I didn’t want to share it because I thought it was AI slop…

The Onion and McSweeney's didn't want to publish it, so FT took the bait and probably thought "this is so outrageously absurd most people won't find it funny"

Since the launch of ChatGPT monthly submissions to arXiv have almost doubled to 30k & even if the rejection rate has also doubled since 2023, academia is looking at a fundamental crisis of dealing with AI-fueled texts...

A good reminder to call out smart glasses & their owners on every occasion-loud & clear. Let's see how the guys feel when you ask them loudly in public whether filming you & the rest of the bus/tram/train without consent is a good idea...

G7: We need to end development aid so low-income countries can stand on their own two feet! Partnership not dependency! Also G7: No, we will not equalize global financial rules, give poor countries more weight in multilateral organizations, or drop tied aid genevasolutions.news/sustainable-...

Since the launch of ChatGPT monthly submissions to arXiv have almost doubled to 30k & even if the rejection rate has also doubled since 2023, academia is looking at a fundamental crisis of dealing with AI-fueled texts...

Mein „Job“ bestand heute auch daraus auf diversen Plattformen @gnetzer.bsky.social‘s & Gäste @rasenfunk.social Podcast zu Evangelikalen Strömungen im Fußball zu teilen weil fast der gesamte Sportjournalismus die Arbeit verweigert… rasenfunk.de/tribuenenges...

aaaand we are another step closer to the day when American schools, universities & prisons will be basically indistinguishable in form + function...a privatized panopticon that charges you 50k for access to Teams...

Rest Well, Raul Pacheco-Vega Our community lost the inimitable Raúl Pacheco-Vega this week. Someone who knew him better than me should write a more definitive remembrance and maybe they have in some other corner of the internet. But, I haven’t seen a longer treatment yet (here is a terrific one!),…

Why doesn't every hot spring resort have a group of raccoon dog superheros representin' them?!?

Of course University of Tennessee requires you to check with their lawyers if you are planning to include a link to a Bernie Sanders Op-ed from 2021 in your email signature, because it's the country where 75% of Substack punditery lives off "free speech"/cancel culture posts...

Nach so einem Abend muss sich auch der härteste ÖR-stan fragen lassen was zur Hölle die Daseinsberechtigung des ZDF sein soll. Das zweitwichtigste Fußballspiel des Jahres im Free-TV und das ist alles was ihr mit dem riesigen Sport-Etat abliefert?

If you think AI sucks, read who sat on the real life panel (...) author, entrepreneur & former chief business officer at Google X; (...) senior director of AI at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, (...) founder and CEO of London-based AI company Synthesia.

"Why are people so negative about the economy?" Consider this. There are two possibilities: 1) He's right and my livelihood is screwed. Maybe not 18 months but soon. 2) He's full of shit, it won't happen, and AI is a giant bubble that will crash the economy. Why would I feel good about either?

"VFS now holds visa outsourcing contracts with 71 governments worldwide. (...) VFS has built an adjacent business around selling add-ons such as SMS updates, courier return services & access to premium lounges". www.lighthousereports.com/investigatio...

There’s an interesting discourse on X where blue-checked experts pontificate how humanity will be extinct by 2108 yet also deny the climate crisis, because „who cares if Earth is 3 degrees warmer in the 2060s??“

The discussion around arXiv, fake citations etc is a powerful reminder how large parts of science/academia/research are almost entirely revolving around writing, reviewing, citing, sharing & writing papers. We need to move beyond "the paper" as the holy grail of science, esp as unis are in crisis

I know they don’t care, but every form of US diplomacy has become a global laughing stock by now…an ambassador opening a McDonalds restaurant in Greece in 2026 is beyond Onion-esque parody…

…and at the end of the day almost everything starts to resemble a prison in America…

Wan-Do, a bargain-hunting detective hound who came from nowhere, is the mascot of Can Do, a chain of ¥100 stores.

As rightly as North American or European locations get criticized for being inaccessible to participants from the majority world, simply "localizing" events to e.g. African hosts comes with its own challenges it seems...

Could agentic AI topple grant-funding systems? New article in @nature.com by @profgeraintrees.bsky.social & me, with data from 12 funders showing a 57% increase in grant applications since 2022 (& the launch of LLMs) rdcu.be/ffApn @rorinstitute.bsky.social @magdalenaskipper.bsky.social

In the casino, the house always wins, "prediction market" edition: "(Majority) trades generate most of the volume, but little of the info & their losses flow as profits to the informed minority. Prediction market accuracy thus reflects the wisdom of an informed minority, not the wisdom of the crowd"

In the casino, the house always wins, "prediction market" edition: "(Majority) trades generate most of the volume, but little of the info & their losses flow as profits to the informed minority. Prediction market accuracy thus reflects the wisdom of an informed minority, not the wisdom of the crowd"

The existence of a 31k „executive“ job in Surrey to handle influencers & celebrities for WWF propaganda is sad, ironic & peak „charity work“ at the same time…

"By prioritising individual “excellence,” meritocracy reinforces class barriers, undermines the equitable distribution of human capital benefits, and perpetuates elite dominance, derailing education’s transformative potential." ✍️ From our blog www.developmentresearch.eu?p=2349

billionaire: we need radical solutions for Earth Day. Think bold. Biofuels. Space mirrors. Plankton fertilization. advisor: what about a 2% wealth tax? billionaire: …Cloud seeding. Turbine farms in the Sahara. A Dyson sphere.

This reads so Onion-esquely wrong that it sounds almost funny...and don't give me some "oral history" nonsense...this is part of normalizing total surveillance & possibly using every bit of real conversation as AI "training data"!

NEW—I got an exclusive excerpt from a USAID whistleblower's new book that made me gasp multiple times. It details Trump's dismantling of the humanitarian aid agency & his team/DOGE's shocking ignorance to public health. 'Into the Wood Chipper' by Nicholas Enrich is out tomorrow. Read excerpt here:

UN appointments by passport are increasingly seen as outdated; but a white American MAGA man most likely heading WFP means more trouble for the troubled global humanitarian system.

„It’s the opportunity to learn how to succeed in an environment filled with the world’s most talented and ambitious people“ is what an economist thinks is the advantage of studying at an Ivy that makes their graduates overrepresented in the top echelons of society.

"Christopher Rokos is a British billionaire hedge fund manager"...you have one of the strongest brands in global academia & sell out to a person who epitomizes the crises of the 21st century like few other people www.cam.ac.uk/stories/roko...

I forgot that I had this book but it looks like it’s on the weekend reading list. Available from @versobooks.bsky.social

For this paper, @thibaultc.bsky.social and I did a deep dive into the history and types of #UN financial crises, the solutions found across time and space, and the trade-offs in choosing certain options (technical fixes) over others (political accommodation). Read here: cic.nyu.edu/resources/ho...

THE ASSET CLASS, my first book, will be published by @wnbooks.bsky.social on 9 April 2026. It’s a narrative investigation of private equity, a secretive and relentlessly destructive wing of finance that penetrates almost every aspect of our lives - and it’s available to pre-order now!

Good to see this but the scandal to my mind is that the government let this uncertainty and anxiety about World Service funding drag on right up to the wire. Stupid austerity posturing over what's effectively a pittance. Be serious! www.theguardian.com/media/2026/m...

This is the non-AI version of AI slop. Platitudes, plastic statements & political rhetoric that barely corresponds with the reality of UK politics; a dangerous path to irrelevance that the UN system is on at a time of so many crises and so little true leadership…

I think this will finally break @theonion.com :( variety.com/2026/politic...

Looking forward to the era of AI social science: the data is AI-generated, the paper is written by AI, the paper is reviewed by AI, and summarized for students and researchers by AI.

And here I was thinking that billionaires may be the problem…