The purpose of a policy is the outcome it obtains. You know the TERFs are all high-fiving each other over this, saying things like "Mission accomplished" and "Parents who allow their kids to have such fantasies deserve what happens to them."

this is a subject that's near and dear to my heart 1. no you didn't, you retconning fucks 2. your decades of anti-governance "free market" "government never functions" propaganda paved the way for the complete authoritarian decimation of labor, consumer, environmental protections

There was a #StarTrekProdigy Art Book in the works. I was going to co-write it. It went into limbo when it was removed from Paramount+ with uncertainty if Season Two would find a home. Then more uncertainty when Paramount was merging with Skydance. If you want it — Trek fans should rally for it!

Sad to read that Robert Tinney passed away on the 1st Feb. His Byte Magazine covers were legendary. I can still remember holding the April 1981 issue and looking at this cover. Still want that watch.

My latest cartoon for @theguardian.com books

100% this. This is a brilliant metaphor.

reflecting on a piece I wrote for OpenDemocracy in 2017, about what it was like to grow up & live in a demographic reliant on labour-run council services, as those councils gradually fell under the spell of mandelsonianism

Re-upping this for the Monday crowd... I think my favourite, most revealing detail is that the guy seems to not realise he's in trouble because London Centric's reporting didn't hit anything like his view counts, so therefore it can't really matter.

A senior MoD official helps shape defence strategy, then joins Palantir. Months later, Palantir lands a £240m MoD contract without tender. No laws broken – just the revolving door doing what it does best.

Just beyond parody at this point

why do you keep suggesting to authors that they get their newsletters off substack, Mary? why have you been collecting tips on how to do it since late 2024? oh, maybe because substack funds nazis and some of you keep joining substack and sharing substack links

BREAKING: Morgan McSweeney quits as Keir Starmer's chief of staff amid fall-out from the Mandelson scandal

SHE’S FINISHED! My 5-foot-long Enterprise D oil painting is complete after nearly 100 hours of work! I remember being 13 years old or so and trying to draw her and it was so hard, and all I wanted was to be able to do something like this. Truly a dream come true. 🥰🖖

Alt text: A black, insectoid Shadow vessel is an ominous near-silhouette over a shadowy yellow planet wreathed in orange nebula. Captioned: Z'ha'dum.

Reform’s former Deputy Leader of Worcestershire County Council Councillor David Taylor resigned from the party live on BBC Politics Midlands.

How to be a Writer. 1. Stare out of window at rain. 2. Experience a certain lassitude. 3. Contemplate the infinite. 4. Tea.

I was on precarious, short-term, hourly-paid teaching contracts for 12 years, to the (ongoing) detriment of my mental health, and I can't stress enough how awful and unethical casualisation is. But here are five simple and effectively free things universities could do to improve matters.

Exquisite work in this thread

Hate-filled fake videos about London are everywhere. We've obtained a recording of a TikToker confessing to secretly filming Londoners in their homes for clicks. He says it's not political. He just wants to make money from far-right anger. Read what he says: www.londoncentric.media/p/london-tik...

I needed a banner so I figured I might as well draw all of my favorite things ☁️🏠✨

One of the wickedest things Wes Streeting has ever done is push politically convenient falsehoods about suicide rates amongst young trans people. We have new data from the National Child Mortality Database that exposes the truth he tried to cover up.

"We thank too many people, often mindlessly. Thank you, shop assistant (whose job it is to help you shop). Thank you, bus driver (who is getting paid to drive the bus)." I get that it’s clickbait but it’s a wretched thing to say when these workers have to deal with all sorts of rude bastards daily.

**NEW BOOK DAY!** A quick'n'dirty #newsletter about Aestred Thurga: Pyre of Faith, up for pre-order his morning! ⚜️ danacea.ghost.io/n/ #warhammer #warhammercommunity

UK pals, you can preorder JITTERBUG via Forbidden Planet for £6.99, saving 30% on the RRP forbiddenplanet.com/462525-jitte...

Post-Brexit sales of British farm products to EU fall by 37%

‘I’ve lost my friends’: advocacy groups warn Australia’s social media ban risks isolating kids with disabilities | Social media ban | The Guardian https://alecmuffett.com/article/144675 #SocialMediaBan #australia #censorship

Katalin Karikó co-discovered that modifications to mRNA could prevent an immune reaction, allowing it to be used to order cells to make any protein. Her work laid the foundations for the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine. adalovelaceday.subst...

A scammer just tried exactly this on me via WhatsApp. Glad I saw a post here recently outlining the scam - it would be very easy to fall for. The “hotel” account had an unconvincing name, but they had my name, number & reservation dates. lifehacker.com/money/hotel-...

All early career researchers know the ending : years of precarious labour, followed by joblessness & expectation that they should be grateful for the experience Pipeline isn’t leaking. It’s being deliberately drained People pushed out are the future www.theguardian.com/science/2026...

the Spectator accidentally recycled a subhed from a previous day’s article about Tehran

No joke: I got angry hate mail today for writing an obituary of a Black woman scientist—because the person felt she did didn’t deserve the recognition. Which just makes me want to share it again: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Epstein managed different networks. The UK media has rightly centred the powerful pedophile ring. It has maintained an uncanny silence about the global, anti-democratic, far right political network. Farage is up to his neck in it. If it weren’t for unprecedented double standards it’d be career over.

My standalone Arthurian novel, The Cleaving, is a frankly incredible 73p in ebook this week from Amazon. I explore this familiar story from the perspective of the women involved. It's a chance to try my work without committing to a series. Offer ends Sunday 8th Feb www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0B96NL726/

💥 GOOD. Because that £240 million contract gifted to Palantir, with no competition… …after Starmer had an off-the-books meeting with Mandelson and Palantir… …while Mandelson was officially LOBBYING FOR Palantir and so personally financially benefiting from such links and contracts… Stinks.

Okay but Zack Polanski has been coming out with bangers

Absolute chills

This is a great time to get off Substack. Beehive and Ghost are good alternatives. As an added benefit, your blog won't be driving traffic to Nazis and their sycophants.

Endless retreat >> BBC to shutter Investigations Unit to prepare for Reform UK

At this point, I think the entire publishing industry needs to have a serious conversation about the degree to which the last 15 years have increasingly seen book promo become an online venture, and what that means now that entire social media and digital platforms are getting torched overnight. 🧵

The CIA just stopped publishing their World Factbook and took every page, including the archived copies of previous versions! This sucks. It was public domain, so I recovered the 2020 edition (the last one published as a zip file) and shared it to GitHub simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/5/t...

How to name a Dalek in Linnaean style (aka with some Greek) courtesy of @davehone.bsky.social with the help of @alexpodyssey.bsky.social. It amuses so much that political commentator @sturdyalex.bsky.social is now dr who canon. 🤣🤣🤣

just walked out of a dainty little west London café as their "fancy bacon roll" costs 18 (eighteen) pounds and for that price I'd need the "fancy" to mean "contains both caviar and cocaine"

"You're right, I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars *next* year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I'll have to close this place in... sixty years." Citizen Kane. Bezos has 2000 years.

Bollards save lives AND bring immense joy and happiness to the world. #WorldBollardAssociation

Are female economists treated differently than males in academic seminars? These authors wanted to know whether gender shapes how scholars are treated when presenting research. So they built a massive dataset of 2,000+ economics seminars, job talks, and conference presentations from 2019–2023...

We're asking MPs in the Thames Water area to sign an open letter to Ofwat telling them to reject Thames Water's rescue bid - a bid that if signed off would permit them to pollute our rivers until 2040. 2,000 of you have written to them. But >100 MPs have still not signed the letter. 1/2

The key point here is that NHS England is forcing conversion therapy on trans youth (and NHS Wales has no service for trans youth).

contrast with the Parisian prosecutors office, which used the same tweet to announce a raid on X as it did to announce that it would no longer be posting on X

for connoisseurs of local journalism traffic farming, this is the latest frontier – you reprint ancient facts from Wikipedia and present them as news, in order to create curiosity gap headlines that appear in Google Discover / Apple News