Another day, another stupid Excel chart.

Shame can be a destructive emotion, but this is what a culture without shame looks like. And it's consistently rewarded and indulged.

PoliticsUK, owned by former Tory MP Ben Howlett, is keeping overheads to a minimum I see (h/t Politico)

it's not that I think this is the worst thing happening right now or the one that's genuinely causing me most psychic pain, but the profusion of gambling ads on streaming is really making me both very angry and very sad. the fuck are we doing

Narratively having Ever Given getting stuck in 2021 to set up Hormuz in 2026 is great foreshadowing. You want your audience to understand the basics of international shipping in a lower stakes context so you drop the real plot without a lot of saggy exposition about the minutiae of cargo logistics.

"The Tube was obviously not the work of one man; but if the entire concept of an underground railway has a progenitor, it’s this guy." Wrote about the radical campaigner Charles Pearson, the most eminent Victorian I'd never really heard of

Found it!

The last government produced a lot of chancers with inflated ideas of themselves, but there are few where the gap between self perception and actually observable reality makes me quite as sad as Tom Tugendhat. Is there anything more tragic position to occupy than "poundshop Rory Stewart knock off"?

A British journalist trying to get Donald Trump to attack their own government for clicks is the sort of thing that could be described as “treasonous”, if you were minded to believe in such things. And yet, if I’m being brutally honest with myself, I can see how those who did it get there

The impulse to become invested and take sides is not merely normal: it’s one elevated by being the sort of person prone to arguing about such things on the internet. We define our “us” in opposition to “them”.

I'd not articulated it like this before, but I've always been uncomfortable with the idea that both "British" and "English" are inherently regressive identities, and it's this, isn't it? Whatever happens to the UK over the next few decades 60m people will end up with one of them.

Someone is panicking

The Lords really has behaved abysmally this parliament so far

*wakes up, rubs eyes, excitedly runs to bluesky* He's been!!

...is this good

A big part of the story of politics in the UK over the last two years is that the entire political right reacted to comprehensive defeat by immediately throwing an endless tantrum

@stephenkb.bsky.social you okay? just seem a bit quiet that's all

trying a new bit for size, about the difficulty of understanding the inscrutable occidental mind. the leadership will say one thing in the morning and its opposite in the evening; to rational europeans, the two stances seem irreconcilable, but domestic media nods and interprets

This is so true. It’s also beyond enraging that a bloc with *more power* than fossil fuels does exist and could be mobilised. The companies that have to deal with climate impacts and volatile fossil fuel prices far outnumber the fossil fuel majors, they have just never lobbied as effectively.

the thought occurs that Charles Guiteau wouldn't need to shoot the president today because Trump would simply have made him secretary of defence

Consider the number of times Bugs Bunny fooled humans in to thinking he was a sexy lady and compare with the number of times Droopy or Pluto managed to do the same and it’s undeniable

I have just learned that humans are more closely related to rabbits than the dogs or cats and I don't know why that should unnerve me, but

"It is not that one expects these guys to actually *like* Starmer: few of those who actually voted for him do. Nonetheless – when did denizens of the British right convince themselves that backing a foreign leader over their own countrymen was in any way patriotic?" On "patriotic" "conservatives"

couple of weeks back I did one of the those NHS tests where they only contact you if there's anything in the results to freak out about, with the result that every time I get a text message now I start hyperventilating until I remember that, say, I've just booked a table for lunch on mother's day

"It is not that one expects these guys to actually *like* Starmer: few of those who actually voted for him do. Nonetheless – when did denizens of the British right convince themselves that backing a foreign leader over their own countrymen was in any way patriotic?" On "patriotic" "conservatives"

🔥🔥NEW EPISODE🔥🔥 The Government’s migration and asylum plans have had a way of annoying just about everyone. Labour MP @stellacreasy.bsky.social joins @zoegrunewald.bsky.social & @jonnelledge.bsky.social to discuss what she thinks is going wrong ➡️ linktr.ee/ohgodwhatnowpod

On the @ohgodwhatnow.bsky.social podcast I spoke with @jonnelledge.bsky.social & @zoegrunewald.bsky.social about monsters and politics! Starts at the 35-minute mark after an interview w/ @stellacreasy.bsky.social about the UK Government's migration & asylum plans. 1/ kite.link/OhGodWhatNow

Belatedly got round to Death By Lightning, the Netflix show about President James Garfield and his biggest fan, Charles Guiteau (NO SPOILERS), and I'm loving it, but it is incredible the influence West Wing still has on political drama, Brad Whitford's in his doing one liners

Feels like a Monday. But... since it has no obvious astronomical existence, who invented the week anyway?

It does sometimes feel that a lot of people in Westminster are just in denial about how much the world has changed over the past decade

love this but... how do you...age... a bat

truly incredible ad I just spotted on linked in

it just hit me that "no longer writing a book" means no more "oh I can't worry about that, I'm writing a book". shit. fuck

it's actually pretty easy for me to explain why I don't feel the need to extend rights I think humans have to things I don't think are human

There are many points at which you feel you have, on some level, finished a book. The last change is often so undramatic you barely register it is the last one. Anyway, this is the first moment at which I feel I can legitimately say I've finished the new book. No more chapters to write.

"The pollster Peter Kellner has calculated that if the referendum were rerun today, instead of a leave win by 1.3m votes, remain would win by 8m. There’s no historic parallel for the injustice of that"

Not to be Mr Revealed-Preference again, but if you are a white collar man who dreams of manual labour, you can just go do a course and try and get a job. People don't because they don't want the reality of it - either because of the money, or social performance reasons.

I think tomorrow i might... finish this? for the first of about nine definitions of "finish this". only half a chapter left to write, then it's just a million edits before working out a conclusion of some sort

I really do dislike this aggressive informality in corporate comms sometimes We're 18 months off 'uwu it seems you've been a smol bean and not paid the mortgage. We're evictereening you in 14 days'

4pm today on BBC Radio 4 Extra it’s the repeat of my adaptation of Iain M. Banks’ The State of the Art, with Sir Antony Sher as the ship. So proud of this amazing production by @nadiamolinari.bsky.social

We imbue the days of the week with personality, so that they serve as cultural reference points. Every day is like Sunday. Garfield hates Mondays. TGIF, amirite? Which is odd, really, because - unlike day, month or year - the week is entirely made up jonn.substack.com/p/its-the-we...

I dunno, if I were Jeffrey Goldberg, author of "How Did I Get Iraq Wrong?' (2008), I might pause for a moment before cheerleading another war in the same region.

Fun with papal numbering. Or, two thousand years of literally just losing count. This week's newly free post on the silly old substack

Nothing they talk about more in "left behind communities" than reinstalling the Shah.

was this "off screen", really

Trump shatters international law, triggers a conflagration across the Middle East. Also: Shabana Mahmood doubles down on immigration after the Gorton & Denton disaster. The Fall of the House of Brewdog and more with @jonnelledge.bsky.social & @nndroid.bsky.social ➡️ linktr.ee/bunker_pod