Pete Hegseth is violating international law the right way. by Ezra Klein

I wish I didn’t have to share this. But the BBC has decided to censor my first Reith Lecture. They deleted the line in which I describe Donald Trump as “the most openly corrupt president in American history.” /1

"My NHS colleagues & I weren’t willing to let the bodies pile high in their thousands. Boris no longer mentions them at all." My piece on the responses to the UK Covid-UK Inquiry report that try to airbrush the dead away. Sincere thanks, @theobserveruk.bsky.social. observer.co.uk/news/nationa...

Boston's Mayor Wu playing with Yo-Yo Ma at Symphony Hall

I despair to see the Labour Party die before my eyes. I am Irish, but am of the European social democratic family. I have always felt a close bond with UK Labour. Now, it is diving down reactionary racist rabbit holes, betraying ts basic values of social solidarity. If this is Labour, let it die.

Morally awful, administratively impossible & expensive.. and politically, the reverse of Starmer's panicked conference speech. A govt completely at sea, terrified & incoherent, throwing basic principles overboard in desperation www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

You can tell phrenologists are all lazy by the shape of their skulls

A List of Things Said to Have Been Ruined by Women 🧵

As a first order issue, management that decides it can deploy AI as an efficiency tool is already leveraging themselves into some combination of job cuts/lower hiring (at least relative to some counterfactual) position. So there's an ex ante incentive problem where the job cuts are proof of concept.

Hear me out Slow Horses but Muppets, Jackson Lamb the only human

Here are my worst socio-political thoughts. I hope I am not really the person who believes these things. sootyempiric.blogspot.com/2025/10/misa...

"From our vantage point as a fundamentally innumerate body of milquetoast thinkers who are wrong about everything, holding fewer sincere beliefs is the key to electoral success."

A (dedicated and professional) Deputy Headteacher: ‘it’s really increased the number and length of letters from those parents who are total pricks’

The Conservative Party cannot be considered a responsible party of government again until and unless Ms Lam is forced to drop her Idi Amin migration proposal and apologise to those it threatens, or has the whip removed. It is as simple as that.

Breaking promises made to people the government thinks unpopular, and saying bad luck with health or unemployment is as reprehensible as criminality, is bad not just for those facing deportation but for all of us who care about Britain as a country that believes in fair play, decency and honesty.

The politics of the far right does not magically become acceptable when delivered by a young Home counties woman with the right accent and friends.

You do not, under any circumstances, gotta hand it to Fransisco Franco.

Just want to give a shout out to my 83 year old dad- normally conservative, a former SCOTUS law clerk for Rehnquist- who protested out in the rain this morning in St Louis. #NoKings

Our government is currently run by 12 year-olds and extremely divorced middle aged men and, somehow, extremely divorced 12-year old middle aged men.

Something very weird has gone on to persuade so many organisations to roll with this half-baked software. It's like someone invented concrete that's 30% cheese and every other building collapses and everyone just shrugs and carries on.

The deep irony is that Labour is paying the political price for failure of the signature project of its opponents.

If the Altman be Bob, Great work, good job If the Altman be Sam, Good grief, goddamn

BBC4 is repeating Bryan Magee’s 1987 series, The Great Philosophers, and I introduce it next Monday 13th at 22.30. I remember being very impressed when it went out that my wonderful PhD supervisor, Myles Burnyeat, was in the very first episode!

I don't think Robert Jenrick realises that the people clapping along to him when he talks about Handsworth would clap along if he said the same about Stamford Hill. I'd hope that would give him pause for thought.

"Can you have a racist policy without being racist yourself?" is an example of high-level outlets like Radio 4 preferring 'gotcha' questions in political interviews. This question has a premise and inference about what racism is, much narrower than the one which the BBC needs to apply to itself

The people they are talking about deporting include, to pluck one example from the air, my 59-year-old sister who has lived here since the age of six and is on a low income due to being a nursery school teacher. These plans are utterly scandalous and anyone who supports them is a disgrace.

In 2016 Geoffrey Hinton said “we should stop training radiologists now" since AI would soon be better at their jobs. He was right: models have outperformed radiologists on benchmarks for ~a decade. Yet radiology jobs are at record highs, with an average salary of $520k. Why?

"Common decency stigmatizes people that do not participate in it—removes them from voluntary association. We indeed have to live with one another, but terms and conditions apply." me on why Ezra Klein should be ashamed / why shame is Good Actually www.bostonreview.net/articles/how...

Maybe - just a crazy idea, but bear with me for a moment! - the reason why the Lib Dems should not “get serious“ is that the UK’s most important media organisation covers politics in babytalk so much of the time?

Analysis | To get himself back on the air, Jimmy Kimmel must call for the execution of homeless people.

If you hear or read this in terms of almost any specific comment or "MAGA Republicanism" targeting individuals or groups — of which there are many — the horror of Klein's emptiness becomes clear.

Comes to something when the worst Kruger isn't the fictional mass murderer.

Darth Vader was a husband and a father

Kash Patel Yapped His Mouth with a REAL Feeb www.emptywheel.net/2025/09/11/k...

Webb routinely has to be corrected by the BBC’s excellent correspondents, has been censured for his anti-trans bias, writes right-wing columns for the Times and regularly repeats right-wing talking points from X. Today is not fit for purpose when he is hosting

Tapping the sign

look, it might not have worked with the public, but at least it was the wrong thing to do morally

These prosciucuttors must be furious

Omg, JD Vance getting heckled by people yelling ‘COUCH F*CKER’ as he visits Union Station to survey Trump’s militarization of D.C.

From the archive

“magical realist Zohran Mamdani” would be like if everyone on his team was human except for his ghost campaign manager and you could see a bodega cat levitating in one of his ads

I'm glad Tom Lehrer got to spend over a year in a world without Henry Kissinger

Honey, wake up New "he should have gone to art school" just dropped

Is it a turd? Is it a stain? Yep, it's Diaperman.

tee hee

Despite being the only white man in his 30's without a Substack, I still wanted to write something long-form about why I think the Trump administration's trade strategy is struggling to extract meaningful ransoms. Hope you find it interesting! www.explaintrade.com/resources/tr...

And so we consign the Freedom Caucus to the ash-heap of history along with the Tea Party, the Gingrichites and every other Republican movement after Eisenhower that has falsely claimed to be fiscally conservative.

I don’t think anyone is prepared for what they just did w/ ICE. This is not a simple budget increase. It is an explosion - making ICE bigger than the FBI, US Bureau of Prisons, DEA,& others combined. It is setting up to make what’s happening now look like child’s play. And people are disappearing.

I feel like I'm losing my mind. Here is the transcript of what Zohran Mamdani actually said about the phrase "globalize the intifada." This is his "refusal to disavow it." This is what has people terrified. Just fucking read it. Source: podscripts.co/podcasts/the...