This weekend is St Andrew's Day and @edinburghup.bsky.social have a 50% sale. Why not treat yourself to a copy of Just Enough? It would make a great Christmas gift for the sufficientarian in your life: edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-just-en... The Paperback is just £12.50!!!

For those who have heard us on #speirgorm wax lyrically about the spice bag, here's all you need to know

Whatever else this government do (and there's plenty of issues with this budget) ministers will always be able to point to this as an incredible important contribution to the country's future. Almost half a million kids taken out of poverty.

Yeah, they're fucked. Proportionately, BCP has a bigger DSG deficit than anyone other LA in England, by miles But these guys seem to have fucked up in a uniquely bad way, in comparison to close statistical neighbours: BCP is under a DfE statutory direction to improve its SEND services

You can now preview the book, which means you can look and search inside, and I think read the acknowledgements (the most personal part of it by far) and the preface - there's a 'preview book' button below the cover:

I've just signed a contract with @princetonupress.bsky.social for my book When Things Get Personal: A Philosophical Guide to Conflict, and am getting down to my final round of revisions. Philosophy got really exciting for me when my research met real life, and I look forward to showing you how.

Never mind the unrealistic Russia/Trump peace proposal. Keep up the pressure on Russian export earnings. In my column today I try and flesh out Jack Watling’s idea of using environmental measures to crack down on Russia’s shadow fleet of oil tankers conservativehome.com/2025/11/20/g...

It’s publication day! Spread the word. The perfect Christmas gift for the pessimist in your life.

It is freezing but it's a beautiful day Birds and spiders alike, Revel in a flood of sunshine Softening the biting air

University of Warwick VC hits out at international student fee levy as voluntary leavers scheme launched at midlands institution. www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-u...

“It’s time for the ‘publish more’ mindset to perish.” Mandy Hill, writing in the Financial Times, calls for reform in academic publishing: Read the full letter (paywall) 🔗 https://cup.org/3WRVlDm

Perfect crackling Salted in fridge over night, upside down on kitchen roll. Mop that up in the morning, salt again and turn upside down on kitchen roll. Then before you put it in the oven, dry it off again, salt again and pour on hot oil. Oven temp of 220c for 45 minutes then 160c for each 500g.

A government that did a wealth tax that literally brought people to the streets to protest against it, but is, somehow, having its lunch eaten by people calling for wealth taxes!

How do you encourage people to have more children? I think the only strategy known actually to work is to make them multimillionaires so they can employ a platoon of workers to take care of their children while they accumulate and enjoy their wealth.

For this week's issue of @economist.com I got to think hard about something I've not had to think about for more than 20 years: the world of dating and singles. What I found shocked me. Rates of singlehood (singledom) have been rising for decades, but have suddenly accelerated in recent years. 1/

Canada announces new incentives for international recruitment of master’s and PhD students monitor.icef.com/2025/11/cana...

Compulsory team teaching on every module is perhaps the biggest ever threat to the quality of teaching in UK universities. It causes chaos on the ground for timetabling, ruins course coherence and turns lecturers into permanent supply teachers. It is pedagogically incoherent… 1/

Hard to think that anybody with experience of UK university senior managements would have confidence that, left to themselves, they'd back academic freedom over an income stream.

Around a 150 years ago many working class people got together to form sports teams, as the rules of various types of football were starting to firm up. Just think of all the football and rugby teams that were know today were established from 1874 to 1900. We owe a lot to such pioneers.

Fascinated by how widespread “I think it was a conspiracy theory re: Rudakubana” is. No, they really did find huge amounts of violent material and he really wasn’t psychotic: the clue is that his defence did not reach for “he is psychotic” at all!

‘ERC grants aimed at early career researchers saw a 22 per cent increase in applicants compared with last year, with a record 4,807 proposals. Nearly 250 of those came from outside Europe, including 169 from the US — nearly triple the 2024 figure.’ on.ft.com/490NR8k

We're now at "black people aren't British". Open sewer racism. Look forward to seeing him on QT again soon.

People are more willing to ask AI to do something unethical than to do the unethical thing themselves, new study finds.

I was just asking Google to with it my average speed, as I always do when I cycled, and something odd happened. The first answer of a pretty straightforward calculation was wildly incorrect. I refreshed the page and got the correct answer. You must check your answers.

New post just out: "Who might replace Starmer?" With pressure growing on the PM, there are a lot of conversations going on in Westminster about who could take over. Who are the contenders? Who's best placed to win? Would it make any difference? (£/free trial) open.substack.com/pub/samf/p/w...

Just made a huge error and put Sunday with Laura K on.

That's a much better half of rugby from England. Much more aggression, better kicking, and the stadium is making a big difference. Could we win this?

I love a lamb hot pot

Tough day calls for a special dessert

Younger people who voted Labour are going Green, young people who couldn't vote or didn't vote are going Green. Many uncertainties in politics but here's one sure thing: this group will be bigger at next GE than now - voting age going down and more people becoming eligible.

Keith Andrews looks like a young Lindsay Buckingham.

Absolutely loving that the rugby league ashes is back. Let's hope England can be competitive for the full 80

Who curates Now TV's bucket list movies?

My word but the BBC used to make some really good programmes. Here on the BBC iPlayer you can get Bryan Magee's 1987 'The Great Philosophers' series, where you can (as I currently am doing) watch Sydney Morgenbesser talking about Peirce, James and Dewey. www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/epis...

You may have heard about UK ministers' plan to double to 10 years the time needed to reached settled status in the UK. But did you realise that it threatened access to pensions for the 180,000 people who came from Hong Kong on the UK government's visa scheme? My dispatch: www.ft.com/content/8b91...

Image from the below article, indicating that between 1966 and 2021, UK Cabinet members had the following educational qualifications Oxford: 26.5% Cambridge: 18.1% LSE/Edinburgh/Durham: 10.4% Other universities: 34.1% Did not attend university: 10.8%

Very pleased with this new technique for naan. I mix equal parts self raising flour and yoghurt then fry the bottom, then grill the top Much better than putting it in the oven

Could someone at the FT just remind the subs that there is no such thing as a "bat tunnel"; there is an above ground structure. The tunnels which added so much to the cost of HS2 are entirely because of Chilterns homeowners and their elected representatives, not bats www.ft.com/content/d319...

“These findings follow previous research which concluded that the more people learn about how AI works, the less they trust it. The opposite was also true — AI’s biggest fanboys tended to be those who understood the least about the tech.”

Today's new installment in the Philosophy in China series: Non-Action in the Laozi (Daodejing) The concept of wuwei or “non-action”: does it mean that the perfect sage or political ruler simply never does anything? www.historyofphilosophy.net/laozi-non-ac... #podcasts #daoism #daodejing #philsky

Ah wonkhe.com/wonk-corner/...

Went out for a ride this morning at 6. By 6.30 I was regretting it and thinking about coming home: lots of fog , freezing toes and fingers, and poor night's sleep. But I'm glad I stuck with it. My hilliest route yet and great views.

I am delighted to share that Nobel laureates Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee will join our Department of Economics @econ.uzh.ch at the University of Zurich on July 1, 2026, as Lemann Foundation Professors of Economics. 🧵 1/7

Big turnout of staff and students for day ten of our strike. We've forced management to negotiate for the first time since July.

www.politico.eu/article/denm... This is interesting. I co-wrote a blog on smartphone bans from the perspective of the political philosophy of childhood: www.publicethics.org/post/social-...

Oh: @clairegiangrave.bsky.social with an exclusive: Pope Leo, in addition to urging U.S. bishops to speak out about mistreatment of immigrants, also told a group of U.S. Latino Catholics who work w/immigrants their job is important — "perhaps especially" in the U.S. religionnews.com/2025/10/08/i...

Just spoke to @euronews.com about the Trump deal to end the Gaza war. Here are the main points I made 🧵: 1. Trump should have formally brought in the Palestinian Authority as part of both the negotiations and the implementation. >>>

Something grimly predictable about the way that the conversation about 'ripoff degrees' in the UK is always about degrees that aren't rip-offs, but are instead fairly obvious 'this student has chosen something unlikely to pay off economically' rather than the short tail of crap business degrees:

ME/CFS is a devastating condition that has long been denied, dismissed, psychologised and underdiagnosed. Research is at last starting to catch up with it, with glimmers of hope for those who have been left untreated for so long. There's a huge BUT coming ...🧵 www.theguardian.com/society/2025...