WTF are we doing here, BBC?

😍We are rejoining Erasmus. Official announcement tomorrow😍 www.theguardian.com/world/2025/d...

Well this is nice. This is the only way to do this I think. Little baby steps here and there.

Really struggling with this. What on earth is /controversial/?? about Jane Austen??

Another datapoint for the argument that we are living through an increasingly ludicrous market bubble

Hendrik Wüst auf die Frage, ob er im Sinne von staatspolitischer Verantwortung ins Risiko gehen und als neue CDU-Spitze um das Kanzleramt kämpfen möchte: „Jetzt lasst sie doch erst einmal alle richtig ankommen. Da sind ganz viele Leute bei, die regieren zum ersten Mal in ihrem Leben irgendetwas.“

This is *hilarious*. I actually barked an angry, triumphant laugh.

DE is remarkable but I did think A Plague Tale was very special. But what about Pentiment? Was it that year? Who am I kidding anyway, I know fa about games

This will be interesting to follow. Brussels/ Europe sees the relationship with China increasingly through the lens of Russia's war against Ukraine - and if Beijing does not change course (and wording) here, it will harm the relationship even more sustainably.

Since the US commitment to NATO is rapidly waning anyway a bolstered EU Article 42/7 is likely to become the future foundation of European collective security anyway

And then there’s the story about Alex Karp’s not-at-all-weird interview (for lack of a better word) with Oswald Mosley’s grandson for a senior position at Palantir.

The devastation I feel about this attack on science in particular is hard to cope with. It’s like watching my dad die all over again. I would do anything to spare someone a death via pancreatic cancer.

I’m touched but the Swiss bank that keeps spamming me with ads for family office services really isn’t targeting very well

President Donald Trump's administration wants the International Criminal Court to amend its founding document to ensure it does not investigate the Republican president and his top officials, a Trump administration official said, threatening new U.S. sanctions on the court if it did not.

So a dry martini - it’s basically a dressed-up excuse to drink neat ethanol, isn’t it?

Not bad at all. An editor could have worked wonders

Spose it’s preaching to the choir to post it here, but this by @robin.berjon.com on the would-be platform occupiers is very good “you cannot change the system by participation. There is no limit to the editorial influence that the people running these media have” berjon.com/fascintern-m...

Share with a colleague still stuck on X! Really important point here, about how our common mental model of participation in the physical world can’t equate to digital participation (where algorithms and suppression mean you can’t reach legit followers anymore, you just enable dangerous platforms)

God the idiocy of serious journalists posting ON TWITTER about a resource they’ve discovered (authoritarian-stack.info fwiw) that they consider an indispensable guide to the bros and their dislike of the EU

es gibt KEINEN Grund, #X zu nutzen, denn ex-Twitter gehört #ElonMusk, dem irren Milliardär mit rechtsextremen Werten, der sie als Waffe gegen die Demokratie einsetzt. Als Erstunterzeichnerin bitte ich: zeichnet u teilt diese Petition: weact.campact.de/petitions/ke... #SaveSocial #RuntervonX #LeaveX

The problem (not just with the Commission but with all corp, gov X accounts) is that they are all on transmit only. They don’t use X except to transmit. They don’t see the cesspit it has become and so don’t care & just carry on doing what they’re used to doing, not understanding that they enable it.

If European Digital Sovereignty is to mean anything, it ought to mean NOT posting on a platform owned and run by a fascist intent on undermining the EU! And don't give me the bullshit you have to be there for "balance" or "reach" - the rules are stacked against you from the outset

My dad abhors any negative comments about immigrants. Asked him recently why he’s so strong on it: ‘Because we’re always happy to take the rich and clever ones. Which means it’s not about disliking immigrants. It’s about disliking the poor and vulnerable. And that’s a bad human instinct.’

And, of course, both @ec.europa.eu and @europarl.europa.eu are still creating content for Elon Musk's site. Rule of thumb for representatives of democratic institutions: If you wouldn't give an interview to an ultranationalist far-right newspaper, you shouldn't be on X either.

Netflix, which rarely carries a single movie from before 1980, wants you to know how thrilled they are to acquire that classic piece of franchise IP, Casablanca

Swedes live 1.6y longer than Danes. The difference is probably one third alcohol, one third smoking and one third bacon

In 2010, I was in Beijing to witness the inaugural "Confucius Peace Prize" set up in response to the Nobel awarded to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo. The Confucius Prize was a hilarious farce of a thin-skinned authoritarian regime.

The German Democratic Republic: The Rise and Fall of a Cold War State made the History Today Books of the Year 2025 list! www.historytoday.com/archive/revi...

Lots happening here but “the *healthy* nations of Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe”?

Quite possibly the most absolutely grudging attempt at an apology I have ever seen in my life; and this is not actually hyperbole

“the greatest technological revolution in human history” 🤨

Once again a good time to consider the many voices who said the only reason for the rise of the AfD was that Merkel was a centrist squish and that the CDU just had to bring in a hard right culture warrior like Merz to restore the natural order.

"Am Dienstag war ich vor Ort. Ich sah viele ins Konrad-Adenauer-Haus hineingehen. Aber ich sah niemanden es verlassen, um sich den Bronze-Lübcke wenigstens anzuschauen. Ich verstehe das nicht." Seit 10h steht er vor der Parteizentrale und niemand von der CDU war bislang bei ihm!

the role of belgian cops in europe's evolving constitutional architecture in this paper i will www.reuters.com/world/belgia...

not having the culture war point - this is in many ways the dominant theme of 19C/20C politics throughout Europe and I think it demonstrates just how seriously people took religion. anti-clericalists were also operating in an apocalyptic, mystical mode which looks wild today

Something I find fascinating to ponder: did people get inured to grief, even slightly? Or did they feel it just as acutely every time – is that even possible?

yes, I think this is about right - it's not that people didn't care or didn't love their kids, it's that they *took the idea of an afterlife seriously*

Just imagine how much grief literally every single person was carrying

Really interesting article. cepr.org/voxeu/column...

I forget the poor man’s name but I’ll never forget the image of his address book - it was blacked out. He blacked out a name every time someone died. He outlived almost everyone he knew, then he died too. Found in his effects.

I didn't know anyone who died of AIDS. I know it still happens. I'm just slightly too young. But I do have friends who saw their friends get wiped out. The human cost is incalculable, and I'd never pretend to speak to it. But the older I get I'm more conscious of what it did to NY & the theatre.

Only wire service journalists will comprehend the full horror contained in these two minutes.

Archaeologists believe they are a little closer to discovering what went wrong in the early 21st century following the excavation of a complex trove of buried ledes

This and that: how we failed to find a lede

Remember when Britain was about to knock away the foundations of its state and economy, pitch itself into 2+ decades of uncertainty, and the main thrust of the questioning on public media was: “But Prime Minister, how will you bring the Tory party back together after this divisive referendum?”

I just want to re-boost, because I’m the ugliness of generative AI, it’s easy to forget that there are legitimate uses that were ethically modeled —and this is one:

Blocked that anxiety farmer that even sensible people keep retweeting

Extraordinary WSJ reporting today that unveils the extent to which Trump, Witkoff, Kushner and US business executives are salivating over business deals with Russia while Putin’s forces kidnap Ukranian children and bomb civilians in their apartments. 🎁 www.wsj.com/world/russia...