We’ve opened the call for @britishacademy.bsky.social Postdoctoral Fellowships. We provide 3 years of funding to early-career researchers in the humanities and social sciences wishing to pursue an independent research project. Apply by 30th September www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/funding/sche...

This is lovely on process knowledge. And has the German word Fingerspitzengefühl in it. Also, if you like process knowledge read Nathan Rosenberg on the history of tech.

Senator John Sherman's dog is spinning in his grave.

There’s been a lot of buzz around the Borjas/Breznau (2026) paper (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...) and potential ideological bias in research. We took a closer look at the data. Could there be a "bias in bias research"? Here is what we found: www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10...

Pay peer reviewers $290 per submission, see review times go down from 38 days (with a long upper tail) to 5.5 days (with v. few 'late' reviews), and watch quality go up to boot. Who knew? #IncentivesIncentivize www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Every journal submission now has to include a note from your Mum swearing that it’s all your own work.

"public trust in science and scientists is high...The idea that there’s a pervasive lack of trust is completely unfounded...But trust has dropped in certain groups...politically right-leaning groups" Maybe it's not science/scientists that's to blame... 1/2 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

I'm really sorry to hear this news. The Research Professional team are excellent and have helped the HE and research sector keep up with what is happening. We will be less intelligent without it. Good luck to individual staff members affected, who are excellent writers and journos.

What if Andy Burnham could raise £15bn – without a tax rise? There's one catch. He'd need to solve the UK’s biggest and least-discussed tax problem. Almost half of all small business corporation tax isn't being paid - and nobody knows why. Thread:

The OPCW has released its latest monthly progress report on the elimination of the former Syrian CW program. This report adds some details to the big reveal in May regarding the discovery of a cache of Assad-era chemical weapons. Here are the highlights: www.opcw.org/sites/defaul...

Elon Musk asked for a name of a person he has killed. He got a list.

academic.oup.com/pa/article-a... It’s tough to overstate just how much 1) Labour relies on degree holders and the London metro 2) how much manual workers and union members have declined as a share of the population.

This is interesting and surprising. Rising regional economic differences in the UK haven't led to the supposed political value changes we've been told to expect. (Is this the impact of economic sorting leveling things out?)

This is a serious issue. Data is infrastructure - essential for modern life, largely behind the scenes, and very visible if it fails (like clean water, electricity, etc). It's generation and use involve lots of trade offs and require someone with expertise and accountability to make them.

The state of nuclear power in 2026

You can't make this up....

With Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS); Ministry of Justice (MoJ); Local Policy Innovation Partnerships (LPIP) Hub, City-REDI, University of Birmingham; Government Office for Science (GO Science); Digital Regulatory Cooperation Forum (DRCF); Department of Work and Pensions (DWP). 1/2

"Between 1880 and 1920, more than 20 million immigrants settled in the United States. We study how this migration wave affected innovation and growth." NEW in @nber.org by Costas Arkolakis, Sun Kyoung Lee, and Michael Peters: www.nber.org/papers/w35392

Nice approach to understanding the complexity of Chinese industrial policy. voxchina.org/show-3-414.h...

Twitter is going kind of crazy about crime and genetics right now (What's new?). My next post is a deep dive into a paper behind a widespread claim that brutal execution in Medieval Europe selected for reduced aggression, allowing civilization to develop. The title says it all, really.

Policy wonks looking for Manchesterism's distinct intellectual roots might enjoy this by Stan Metcalfe. Foundational to the Manchester innovation policy approach. Don't pick winners. Don't leave it to markets. Create the conditions for winners to emerge. research.manchester.ac.uk/en/publicati...

Interesting argument that we are now at a potentially positive rupture point in the UK. The PM promised change and adopted policies that made change impossible, strengthening the (failing) status quo.

👀🇬🇧✈️ “The Mail on Sunday has established that at least 18 British pilots were recruited to train China’s People’s Liberation Army Air Force. Of these, six were involved in teaching air combat skills, six were teaching submarine hunting techniques and six were instructing future Chinese test pilots.”

"Fiscal consolidations lead to a significant increase in extreme parties’ vote share, lower voter turnout, and a rise in political fragmentation [...] Austerity-driven recessions amplify the political costs of economic downturns considerably by increasing distrust in the political environment."

Latest post covers the continuing pressure on Crimea and fuel shortages in Russia, Moscow’s anxiety about Trump tilting away from them and back to Kyiv, and Putin’s determination to insist all is well and that his forces are on the advance. (£/free trial), open.substack.com/pub/samf/p/h...?

More numbers. Cut 100 grams of cheese from your diet per summer and you’ve offsetted about two weeks of air conditioning (at 8 h/day). bsky.app/profile/jmko...

Here you go.

The shrinking arguments for degrowth - giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/... so much good material in this @jburnmurdoch.ft.com piece. I'm picking on this part - growth no longer has the same disastrous relationship with resources - but read the whole thing.

"Regarding Ukraine, the United States approved, for the first time, a text stating that it is no longer a neutral mediator, but rather supports Ukraine’s territorial integrity, provides military assistance, helps with the energy sector, and imposes sanctions on Russia." - French President Macron.

Europe and North Africa are getting their first undersea power link

Arms control is one of the top 3 issues the world faces... But this guy comes across as a naive simpleton.

#HybridOperations Strategic Corruption and the Future of Hybrid Warfare globalsecurityreview.com/strategic-co... During the Cold War, deterrence centered on missiles, troop deployments, and nuclear escalation. Military power still matters enormously, but modern strategic competition increasingly...

#DualUse #Conference Call for abstracts | Dual-Use Technologies in Academic Research: Interdisciplinary Perspectives www.polito.it/ateneo/comun... The call for abstracts is now open for the first annual THESEUS Conference, “Dual-Use Technologies in Academic Research: ...

This is rather good.

HBS' latest filing in the Gino lawsuit contains a few new details: 1. A committee of 26 professors, admins, and fellows reviewed the allegations, and *unanimously concluded* that there was *clear and convincing evidence* of research misconduct.

🔥 Published today, and just in time for summer conferences, here are your guidelines for presenting badly www.nature.com/articles/s41... rdcu.be/fqa92

China is hard at work quadrupling its nuclear arsenal. With the growing risk of a three-way nuclear stand-off, Rose Gottemoeller of @stanfordcisac.bsky.social makes the case for why arms control agreements are more important now than ever.

Four weeks to prepare a bid for a £60m research call. If only the UK had a case study in how not to invest in AI to learn from.

Microsoft's quantum computing technology called into question, again reut.rs/43W3KZT

Or, if you were feeling a bit more radical, copy Sweden: have a thing called an ISA; you can put anything in it; and you tax the total assets in the account at, say, 0.8% to 1% a year (low tax, not no tax). It's super easy and guess what? More than 40% of Swedish adults have an investment account...

A UK graduate with a student loan and a MSc loan earning £100k plus is paying 77% tax.

Most countries have pretty consistent exports from one decade to the next, but the UK’s trade profile has lurched in the opposite direction to almost everyone else. In our latest substack, @hunsaker.bsky.social looks at what has happened to UK trade in the past 5 years ⬇️

Published: the paper 'On the uses and abuses of Regression Models: a Call for Reform of Statistical Practice and Teaching' by John Carlin and Margarita Moreno-Betancur in the latest issue of Statistics in Medicine onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/... (1/8)

New: Are there truly many, well-paid jobs available for those without a four-year degree? That's the emerging narrative; I looked at the data. Tl:dr: This graph that breaks down occupation by annual wages and the share of workers who hold a four-year degree. www.chalkbeat.org/2026/06/23/s...

Jonathan Haskel has been nominated to be the next Chair of the Office for Budget Responsibility. Currently a Professor at Imperial, he's done lots of research into productivity (including the role of AI), economic inactivity, and various other issues highly relevant to the OBR.

Your regular reminder that Ayn Rand, who was a stupid person with hateful and selfish ideas, died on public assistance that a government social worker helped her sign up for. In the real world, when Atlas shrugs, innocent people die.

Successful Prime Ministers should alienate their opponents, as I wrote earlier: chrisdillow.substack.com/p/the-35-str... The odd thing with Starmer is that he alienated his supporters, & didn't change course even when doing so was obviously failing.

24 billion stolen credentials exposed in an Elasticsearch cluster pose a massive #threat to global security and enable widespread account takeovers worldwide. #Un #UN https://securityaffairs.com/193864/security/24-billion-stolen-credentials-exposed-in-massive-data-leak.html

Ukraine launches TrophyLab: they are opening access to captured russian weapon technologies for our global partners. Every missile, drone, and vehicle seized on the battlefield is now a source of knowledge for the free world.🧵 1/2 trophylab.mod.gov.ua/en/