Whoop, whoop! 🥳 My book has just been sent to the printers! It also features in @yalebooks.bsky.social's Autumn Catalogue, in some very illustrious company . . . #excited All shares and preorders much appreciated! 🙏 yalebooks.co.uk/book/9780300... #booksky #queer #lgbtq #queerhistory #histsci 🌈📚🗃️

Genuinely, how long are we going to let Twitter play this game with regulators? Being taken for rubes, with no real action in prospect. It was *literally* generating CSAM for days without action and it gets... a voluntary agreement

For some reason the term liberalismo manchesteriano has had a much longer shelf life in political speech in Latin America than the Anglosphere. President Gaviria was referring to his economic liberalisation policies by that name in the 1990s

Which is bloody worrisome! The cordon sanitaire against the hard right which allows liberal society to exist requires a robust centre right which ostracises these ideas. If it’s just the left holding out, then the battle against the hard right is already losing

#StatsPubs No matter how many times you read it, this paper on hierarchical GAMs keeps giving. Clear model explanations together with R code (mgcv). So useful! doi.org/10.7717/peer... Thanks for writing @ericjpedersen.bsky.social, D. Miller, @gsimpson.bsky.social @noamross.net

“…a past strong El Niño event wiped out 77 percent of the islands' penguins. In addition, the climate pattern destroyed 97 percent of shallow water coral.” If this El Niño turns out as predicted, it will have devastating effects on biodiversity across the globe. www.newsweek.com/super-el-nin...

My self perception is that I’m primarily a non-fiction reader but somehow I’ve read 50/100 of these. Not that I’d put all of them in my personal top 100 mind www.theguardian.com/books/ng-int...

Hell I’ve had relatives concerned about my safety in the U.K. who live in Bogota. Its hard to overstate how badly the UK’s reputation has been damaged by these online content farms

Exactly. Also true of the Conservatives. And, under FPP, Reform can get a majority on 28%, or could win under 100 seats on 26% - fragmentation plus volatility = chaos under first past the post

The problem for Blue "Labour" is that in destroying the economic base of the metropolitan elite it is also wrecking the economy. But not to worry, backyard pig iron furnaces should solve the problem.

The government needs to start treating GB News and the wider toxic media environment as a problem it has the tools to tackle

I keep telling everyone that with our excellent craft beer, variety of ethnic restaurants and temperate summers that never go above 40°C we are like Italy with better food and weather.

This result took 40 years to emerge. Not 3. Not 5. Not a funding cycle. Four decades. We’re trying to understand planetary systems with attention spans measured in quarters and election cycles.

Cant wait to buy 2056’s Ben Pimlott’s equivalent’s biography of Starmer, and compare that assessment to what I wrote in my diary at the time

There literally is no alternative for making policy at scale that has any hope of even begin effective at egalitarian goals than bureaucratically legible quantifiable indicators. Like that’s it, that’s all we’ve got. Extremely imperfect, by no means infallible , but it is by far the least bad way

Off the coast of Western Australia, a humpback #whale is “pirouetting”, sweeping its pectoral fins through the water, its massive jaw hanging wide open. The animal isn’t lunging for a meal: rather, it is putting on a mysterious behavioural display. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Truly the Alien vs Predator of copyright disputes.

Excellent as always. Whatever his supporters on here think Starmer is disliked, often hated, on the doorstep. It's hard enough to come back from that if you're delivering a policy platform that you know will produce results in 3 years time, but when you're 'governing' like he is *there is no chance*

This kind of crap from the BoD really undermines those of us who are trying to push against antisemitism across the political spectrum. Infuriating.

Look, if you don’t do shit like this, why even be an ancient historic college?

Voters in Sunderland were, on the doorstep, insisting Reform had done a good job in neighbouring Durham even when they plainly isn’t so. Without a media environment that hammers Reform failures they’ll remain invisible to the electorate

This is because "ruthlessly focused on winning" is really about machismo, and "caring about electoral reform" is sadly effete-coded

Yeah this is ugly. Biggest outbreak of this sort of politics since the BNP in Barking & Dagenham 20 years ago.

Tbf there’s maybe a score or two MPs who would somehow be worse than Starmer , but that still leaves us with 360 or so improvements

The Greens are making significant advances into the Labour vote. But that’s not translating into seats. The power of the Greens is that they can hand safe Lab seats (& the UK as a whole) on a platter to Reform. They can’t win, but they can be enough of a spoiler to ensure Lab loses & Reform wins.

There’s no local press and most people don’t know what’s going on at a local level, which means they vote locally based on national politics. Which is a disaster for democratic accountability

The Shetlands have accepted they're in Scotland?!

Happy birthday to Sir David Attenborough, whose life & voice have inspired generations to care for the living world. 🌍 On his 100th birthday, we celebrate his extraordinary legacy as he join the Natural Centenarians’ Club, alongside some of nature’s most remarkable wonders. Swipe to see more 👇

Join us in wishing a massive happy 100th birthday to the man who has inspired millions of people around the world to care about nature and look after our planet - the incredible Sir David Attenborough! 🎉

Whenever the Greens announce a policy, people are always like “but have they thought about…?”or “have they considered…?” No, they have not thought, they have not considered, and they won’t be doing so. The political incentives being what they are, they have no need. It’s slopulism all the way down.

Govt shjould put a stronger civic education duty in the BBC charter. Sharpen it. And make it Ofcom measurable. And ask BBC annually to say how it will meet the civic-democracy remit

Only tangentially related, but in my DPhil I spent a lot of time in village X in Peru. I’d read a paper I thought was …. silly, from 30 years earlier, so decided to translate the paper and see what local people thought of it. It had a mixed reception, to put it mildly.

Bring back Reithian elitism to the Beeb.

We didn’t bring back the past. De-extinction recreates ecosystem fragments out of context. The dire wolf or bluebuck didn’t exist alone. They were expressions of systems now gone. We’re trying to recreate outcomes without restoring the processes that made them possible.

"Whether or not cephalopod brains work like vertebrates, studying them should be a win–win situation." 🐙 🦑 🧠 Recent overview of cephalopod neuroscience research, including ethical concerns. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Exciting to see our new paper exploring how human activities reshape predator–prey interactions featured on this month's cover of TREE! A big thanks to @predator-smarts.bsky.social and the team, and to Angus Emmott for the fantastic cover photo! Open-Access paper 👉 www.cell.com/trends/ecolo...

Is bigger always better? For social animals, group size is a dilemma: big groups face more internal competition, yet hold an edge over smaller neighbors. 33 years of data on 12 wild capuchin groups reveals how these forces shape behavior. Out today in *Nat Eco & Evo*: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

So many good, decent, hardworking councillors from all parties are going to lose their seats to absolute scumbags like this. Civic life is going to get even more toxic and local services even less reliable. An incoming disaster, basically.

Part of the issue is that the Internet is both ubiquitous, and you sound like a madman explaining the deep history of how ideas originate and percolate to a normal person

Our aid cuts have been just as severe. It won't kill as many people because we spent less to start with, and focused a bit less on health/food programmes. But we've got nothing to be proud of here.

Would broadly subscribe to this at university level, too. We can invest in giving people the time and resources to do what we already know works well, and then find ways to experiment around the edges. Or we could change the VLE every 5 minutes and integrate expensive AI contracts, ymmv.

"there is nothing Starmer can do to stop the crypto cash" I'd say there's always the option of criminalising the holding of what is literally the crime currency, and which exists for little other practical reason than that

The most annoying bit is that for a enviromentalist party this should be a perfect moment - the situation basically forces transition and proves on of your core arguements right! And instead... they're desprately trying to subsidise fossil fuel demand.

The burning need of some people on here to explain that antisemitism isn't real, actually, even when there's literal blood in the streets speaks absolute volumes on where we've got to – none of it good.

Crime and Reprimand

One for @sundersays.bsky.social really, but there really is no centre left constituency in the UK for being “Reform-lite”. Nor is there a centre right one either!

"For the first time in his life, my son found himself denying he was Jewish last week" - powerful column here from @robertshrimsley.bsky.social www.ft.com/content/f9ee...

A very readable book on the very subject of the lost word of working class intellectual institutions

I’ve had friends from London who don’t quite believe me when I say that a fast train on the LNER can get them to Durham in just over 2.5 hours