The 2026 #WomensPrize for Fiction shortlist. Which will you be reading next? #WomensPrizeforFiction

The size and scale of Russia's arms shipments amount to a “sustained investment” in Mali and indicate that Moscow could be looking to establish a long-term presence there, the report said.

🤡 Putin restores Soviet secret police founder Dzerzhinsky's name to FSB Academy

Mad fact... 42% of Labour Prime Ministers have had to fire Peter Mandelson.

So weird that Trump just happens to choose the course of action most favorable to Russian interests and no one else

CARE WORK IS HIGHLY SKILLED WORK and only paid so poorly because of the failure of successive governments to value it properly

Rare sighting of a column chart taking a dip at Hove Beach. #dataviz

At least these are not uncharted waters

The human circulatory system, before and after proper cable management.

There's just no comparison & it's impossible not to notice, even if you're trying to be charitable & trying to squint to see any equivalence between the two approaches:

Telling that the people demanding office working because human contact is vital now want to replace their employees with AI.

Who does this description of Kaiser Wilhelm II remind you of? (Written by Christopher Clark in 2015).

strange these op-eds about women being too angry have all come out the last few days when during the same time there's also been a massive investigation published on an online rape academy with millions of viewers a month and none of them have bothered to even cover it, even as news

It’s exceptionally obvious this is coming and the time to pick a side was yesterday

To understand why the USA is where it is today, all you need to do is see that Trump cannot tolerate even the mildest, insightful criticism from the Pope, but Trump will allow Putin to humiliate him deeply and constantly, while still craving Putin’s approval.

This has made me very happy. Thank you @mattmuir.bsky.social. tubesoundquiz.com

One side obsession from my research into the 1920s is the extensive network of ELECTRIC trains that used to connect cities and towns across the central Midwest called the Interurban. We had this more than a hundred years ago. The things we had and the things we lost.

I recommend this book, about the lost train culture of America, including the interurbans. I took a class form its author 40 years ago. www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt...

On any given day, you might as well roll a die to predict whether Donald Trump is going to claim total victory; imminent victory; a negotiated ceasefire; an imminent ceasefire; new attacks; crucial negotiations or imminent crucial negotiations. The only certainty is that he’ll be lying.

Often think back to something I heard immediately after the lockdowns: there's a historical drop-off in *diary entries* during the 1918-1920 influenza epidemic. I interpreted that both as a trauma response and a result of boredom and having less to record day-to-day.

Can you spot the last 'ceasefire/strait is open' announcement on this graph? Yeah, that's the issue

Groups of people form shared consensuses and viewpoints and beliefs through communication, a very obvious fact that is the proximate cause of most political phenomena that is also somehow left out of almost all political discussion and analysis

Excellent piece this. Reminded me of @markpackuk.bsky.social's I think impeccably correct view that the UK is a country of 650 two-party systems and that the challenge for the Liberal Democrats is to become one of those two parties in as many of the 650 as possible.

I've always found the framing around men and women's dating choices re political "opponents" really telling. Men are supposedly more tolerant - but for the most part they're not being asked to date people who literally view them as second-class citizens undeserving of bank accounts and voting rights

If you step back, it is truly extraordinary that so many people went to such great lengths and broke so many conventions and risked their political careers and the only outcome of all these efforts and risks was appointing a washed-up old spinner to an ambassadorial post

General Devices for Lowering Morale and Creat ing Confusion

I interviewed a remarkable young woman, Florence*, for @tbij.bsky.social who spoke to me about her experience of the family courts and her efforts to bring her own legal challenge after being removed from her mother's care at the age of 10. tinyurl.com/4nxdst55 (1/9)

I was attacked by members of the PayPal Mafia, Auerenheimer, Yiannopoulos, Breitbart, 4/8 Chan in 2014-2015, after I criticized Marc Andreessen in the MIT tech review, ultimately resulting in me closing one of the only independent tech critical magazines that existed at this time.

Thiel's crew in action

Now it turns out that all of it is one single operator: E(x, y) = exp(x) - ln(y), and the constant 1. Sin, cos, π - everything follows from this neatly , just nest it properly. Nature hid the simplest possible description of reality.

"Researchers at Dublin City University created 10 blank smartphones registered as male teenagers, five on TikTok and five on YouTube Shorts, with no history, likes or prior searches. Within 23 minutes, all of them were being served misogynistic content they had never looked for. …

lo-fi but deadly

For DOOMSDAY MACHINES this week, a post that has in some sense been in the making for something like a decade. It is a very close look at the "war plan," QUICK STRIKE, featured in the formerly classified 1958 film "The Power of Decision," produced for the USAF. doomsdaymachines.net/p/a-long-loo...

Strategically this is also a bonanza for Putin. His main ally in the Near East defeats the US with his help — and while the US helps him help Iran against the US! And meanwhile the US slanders Ukraine, which was actually helping the US. (6/14)

If Trump were a proven Kremlin asset, what would he do differently?

Really good piece this on an avoidable, but usefully illustrative public policy failure: 'student housing' multiplied because it is exempt from a number of regulations on, you know, housing. If we just let housing be built on the same terms, would have more resilient housing stock:

there's just something insidious about seeing it pop up on your phone. something about our society being so lost that we're being made by our thought leaders to entertain something like this. we've only had this for 104 years

What Do We Know?

Ok on a serious note, it cannot be exaggerated how bad formalized Iranian control of the Strait is for the world. The entire global economy rests on an American guarantee of free commercial shipping. That guarantee is gone. We don’t know exactly what will happen but none of it will be good.

He literally just says things. He believes that if he says them everyone will react as if they're true, and that reaction will boost him along for another day or another six hours, and then when it all falls apart because none of it was true, he'll say something else. Ad infinitum for his whole life

🤔 Investors placed an approximately $950 million bet on oil prices falling just hours before the U.S. and Iran announced a ceasefire, the latest large wager on the direction of the world's most traded commodity ahead of a major policy announcement by Trump.-Reuters

Feels like it should be front page news that Trump switched sides and is now explicitly saying he’ll team up with Iran to shake down the rest of the globe

The former Chairman of Denmark’s Defence Committee Rasmus Jarlov makes a good point: “United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea prohibits coastal states from charging tolls for passing through straits. If the USA and Iran now believe they should charge a toll in Hormuz, others might follow.”

The buried lede here is the loss of freedom of navigation as a point of principle - something that global hedgemons have spent 300+ years using arms to defend. The foundation stone of global trade. I suspect, say, Malaysia will be taking note.

It's @professormusgrave.bsky.social o'clock again, alas

If, after we wake up and read that the US did not drop a bomb of any size or type on Iran, our relief is the thing that lingers in our minds, God help the Republic. There is no relief here. There is only the generational work of affirming that statement was an aberration. We can't uncross this line.

If you know, you know

Amazing to think of where these guys were in 1989. Orban a law student standing up on Heroes’ Square in Budapest to demand Soviet troops get out, Putin a KGB officer in Dresden

This is real

No matter what the historical conditions or the actual state of women's rights and status, at basically any moment over the past century and a half you could make a name for yourself as a writer or intellectual by saying that feminists were overwrought and annoying.