Anyone interested in the green transition ought to check out this brilliant new article by Chris Saltmarsh, published today in @ripejournal.bsky.social www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Quote of the day courtesy of Bismarck.

One of the strangest things about my time in HE is how REF has gone from universally loathed by academics to seemingly our best hope for justifying (and therefore maintaining) the research component of our jobs.

“Electric cars can be remotely controlled. Again, not a conspiracy theory. These cars can be shut down… There’s a reason why this neo-Marxist, communist, shambolic government wants us in electric cars. It’s so that we have no freedom whatsoever…" (sic) hopenothate.org.uk/2025/09/10/i...

A question about Mandelson: if Starmer sacks him, then does that risk pissing off Trump by implying that fraternising with Epstein represents a red line that should not be crossed?

the free press trying to make a scandal out of reading robert dahl is very funny (shoutout to dahl, one of the best to ever do it)

Updated theory of British political decision making

As a frequent reader of kids books, I wouldn’t have guessed frog as the most he/him gendered animal

It's happening! My book on financial nihilism is set to be published in March next year with Stanford UP. It has been many years in the making and I look forward to seeing it in print soon. www.sup.org/books/politi...

I found this Panic World podcast on Sydney Sweeney to be insightful for what this moment means for political culture: far right vibe shifts, outrage cycles on a dying social media platform, and just the bare cynicism of the whole episode. podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/p...

The University of Warwick has paid a lot of money, I'm guessing, for their internet banner ads on the Guardian and elsewhere. But they can't spell "curiosity". This isn't a US-UK variant. They just, genuinely, have a massive spelling error in their banner ads.

This Kafka quote is like a punch to the gut

One of the right's most popular fascists is revolting against Trump's economics www.vox.com/on-the-right...

There's a conference next week on "Liberalism for the 21st Century: A Global Convening to Defend and Reimagine Liberal Democracy". The programme offers insight into who is considered liberal: Francis Fukuyama, David Goodhart, Daniel Drezner, Derek Thompson, Steven Pinker... conference.ismaglobal.org

So this allotment story is absolutely blowing up everywhere and the government will prob U-turn soon due to UNEXPECTED VIRALITY IN THE BAGGING AREA. But because I'm a sad git I spent 5mins chasing the aggregated Nottinghamshire Live story back through the Telegraph and the Express and found....

American Eagle is actually very "woke." They have DEI and donate to "woke" causes. They also produce their synthetic-blend jeans offshore, sometimes in factories associated with labor abuse. But all is forgiven if buying their jeans pisses off libs.

Normal people: this paper is divided into four sections Academics: this paper is divided into four substantive sections

“kitchen table issues”

This anecdote about David Duke’s 1991 run for Louisiana governor might as well just be lifted directly from the Simpsons

Something interesting I've noticed in a paper I was just reading in a prominent journal in my field: several of the citations that contain URLs end in "utm_source=chatgpt.com", which means that the source was found via ChatGPT.

This is a remarkable report on one of the young male coders who joined Musk at DOGE. It is a despairing and complex read, with the sense of a talented life misguided, with likely no road back. www.bloomberg.com/features/202...

Incredibly instructive reporting on what appears well on its way to becoming the biggest, most concentrated, most energy- and resource-intensive, and most speculative wave of capital investment ever. ig.ft.com/ai-data-cent...

I've started a Global Corridor newsletter on Substack providing a round up of some of the most interesting news, stories, data, opinion + academic work on global infrastructure. Looking forward to sharing more in autumn but for now enjoy the first one globalcorridor.substack.com/p/global-cor...

This is really excellent on our understandings of - and the reality of - intergenerational inequality.

The moment I knew Remain campaign was in a bad way when I was invited to a “get out the youth vote” meeting in Downing Street with tech bros/yoof media. Cameron walked in to ask ideas and an older person started shouting in a very posh voice… “GRIME ARTISTES! DOES ANYONE HAVE ANY GRIME ARTISTES?”

This is a very illuminating essay that compellingly situates Starmer in the post-war human rights regime. It’s almost as much about that latter topic as it is Starmer himself.

Most Americans really have no clue how far the US is being left behind.

I've just read a peer-reviewed article that has an AI vibe: sentences that scan well but on second reading do not really make sense; that uncanny AI-style cadence; a slurry of abstract terminology. Of course, there's no way of knowing, but, either way, this unavoidable suspicion feels corrosive.

hello, is building the world's largest dam on Yarlung Tsangpo de-westernization or westernization? or maybe the words don't mean anything?

don't know if anyone has said this yet, but Walter Mignolo's multipolar world order as 'de-westernization' is truly silly.

The Second Cultural Cold War: Old school propaganda meets the networked interdependencies of today

Periodic check what a 22 Grand Job should now be paying.

Starmer's Labour has received £16m in donations tied to the finance industry; their City Minister was leading lobbyist for the City; advisors from finance/consulting/lobbying have been gifted to over half of the front bench thedarkarts.substack.com/p/the-citys-...

After the George Floyd protests in 2020, many corporations made statements in support of racial equity, some of which also pledged funds. I wondered how much this all added up to and the answer it seems is a staggering £340bn.

Prediction: One unfortunate side-effect of the recent boom in autism diagnoses is this kind of cynical ploy becoming far more common

📢📢📢 CfP: What is a Parliament? ***Hurry! Deadline is this Friday!*** Interdisciplinary workshop on 19th September 2025 in London. Full details below. Kindly sponsored by Birkbeck, the University of Birmingham and @psa-parliaments.bsky.social Please apply and/or spread the word!

Some news: In 2026-27, I'll be visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, leading the theme seminar on ‘𝘌𝘮𝘦𝘳𝘨𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘤𝘦𝘴 𝘪𝘯 𝘨𝘭𝘰𝘣𝘢𝘭 𝘱𝘰𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭 𝘦𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘰𝘮𝘺‘ There's no place quite like the IAS to think, together, about big questions. Please share—applications are open 𝚗̲̲𝚘̲̲𝚠̲.

“ChatGPT isn't its own, unique problem. It's a symptom of a totalizing cultural paradigm in which passive consumption and regurgitation of content becomes the status quo.”

LLMs are cultural and social technologies www.science.org/stoken/autho...

Several days later and I’m still thinking about this thread on Trump’s anti-market worldview.

We are excited to annouce that *Renewal - a journal of social democracy* has relaunched with a new publisher, a new editorial team, and a newly-revamped website. Our relaunch issue is now available here to both new and existing subscribers: renewal.org.uk/journal/volu...

Far-right activist Carl Benjamin has said: "Starmer [...] basically conceded that everything the far right has been saying about immigration is completely true. [...] Starmer has actually done something useful, and that is, to validate our side of the argument and move the dialectic in our favour."

This is one of the best pieces I’ve read on DOGE: it’s the “blitzscale” political economy of Silicon Valley applied to state transformation. I wonder if those who are asking whether DOGE has really been “efficient” or not are asking the wrong question. open.substack.com/pub/programm...

good to see that @adamtooze.bsky.social shares the 'transformative tariffs' diagnostic of the Trump 2.0 trade policy, instead of the 'chaos, chaos' liberal chant adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-...

the poor, degraded image has become the aesthetic norm of this administration. they render all serious political desires and imaginaries in a coat of silly aestheticisation to keep up with the zany and the interesting and the cute which Ngai diagnosed as the primary forms of late capitalism.

Peter Thiel, Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy, Stanford Alex Karp, PhD in Social Theory, Goethe University

note on a digital jargon that captures populist sentiments among the 'patriotic' - 统战价值 or 'united front value'. people use this, who are typically Han males from provinces considered politically loyal, to say that because they are loyal, they have low 'UF value' and are neglected by the state

Ganz refers to this as the groypiferication of the right, and it's likely to get worse as the walls close in