Good data is essential for policy. Today it’s been a year since we had a permanent National Statistician. No news on what is happening with the current recruitment which began Oct 2025. This is an under the bonnet issue that points to state failure 🧵 uksa.statisticsauthority.gov.uk/news/stateme...

'Around 150 full time equivalent jobs are set to go at the south-west England institution, with 115 of them in the Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, despite it being internationally renowned.' 1/4

You know all the chemicals they're putting in the pool near the capitol... At what point will they start leaching into the ground and killing the plants nearby?

WHO chief says gov'ts must recognise extreme heat as a health crisis + get ready: 'the London Ambulance Service said the extreme heat contributed to its busiest day on record...cooling failures disrupted medical equip't, operating theatres + wards' www.euronews.com/health/2026/...

Woke up at 6.30 so my day would be mega ready for an 8.30 meeting start. Which was cancelled at 8.34...

Anatomy of a self-made star On the centenary of her birth, two London exhibitions about Marilyn Monroe could not be better My review for @prospectmagazine.co.uk of the outstanding British Film Institute and National Portrait Gallery exhibitions www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/culture/7395...

This needs to be shared on every social media platform that exists, it should be shared on every mainstream media platform. Reform are a bunch of lying bastards who only appear popular because they make it up. Farage isn't in the running to be the next PM he's just a Russian-funded right wing wanker

So many rapists.

Gen Alpha: 2013-2025 Gen Z: 1997-2012 Millennials: 1981- 1996 Gen X: 1965-1980 Baby Boomers: 1946–1964 Presidents, Senators & Congresspeople: 1845-1945

Garage music and Garage music are not the same.

Today, I was talking to D about music taste and mentioned Garage as a genre. Apart from I pronounced it, earnestly, with not a hint of self-awareness, as "Geraaj" and not "Garidge". D stopped dead and fixed me with a disbelieving stare for a good 5 (long) seconds before mocking me mercilessly.

The phrase “knock on wood” - or “touch wood” in the UK - is an ancient one deriving from the belief that tapping on trees awakes the gods and spirits that reside within them and brings good luck. www.tom-cox.com/the-village-...

Public procurement is pretty much a racket, a continuing series. www.theguardian.com/society/2026...

Hydration break

What wealth? A large proportion of the world's population live paycheck to paycheck. The concept of savings is totally alien to some people.

Not for the first time, I just recalled something from Deadloch and snortlaughed to myself.

👀 #tstats Scientists working on the revolutionary 'R' programming language invented at the University of Auckland have won a top award intended to be a Nobel Prize for statisticians. phys.org/news/2026-06...

HG Wells' full name is Hey Guys Wells

“You cannot make billions of dollars without hurting lots of people. And you can’t hurt lots of people without, in some sense, believing that they’re not really people.” Corey Doctorow

Yesterday’s news included the university library of Hamburg lacking funding for new books, and a famous Oxford library starting a partnership with OpenAI. That’s both unpleasant.

A friend works for a multinational company. He was told that he can use AI to summarise his emails so he prioritise them, and use AI to respond to his emails. Me: doesn’t this just mean more and more emails being sent and summarised and automatically responded to? And no one actually reading them.

Israeli drones struck tents in al-Mawasi, Khan Younis, killing two Palestinians and wounding several others.

Labour ministers met #FossilFuel industry lobbyists more than 500 times during the party’s first year in power, while Labour MPs took tens of thousands of pounds in donations from oil and gas lobbyists.

Reading this, if we halt global warming emissions overnight temperatures will still rise for a couple of decades and take centuries to recover. And take much longer to go back down through nature’s ability to absorb carbon dioxide. www.climate.gov/news-feature... sooner we stop emissions the better.

The windchime silent But the clock ticking Ah, the heat! ✍️ Yokoi Yakū #BookWormSat #haiku #summer

I should be embarrassed posting a recipe that’s just some tubs of ice cream with packet biscuits and confectionery, but here we are, and #RecipeOfTheDay is just such an Ice Cream Cake! www.nigella.com/recipes/ice-...

Why are we standing by and watching this happen? “Israel continues to commit genocide by deliberately targeting Palestinian children in Gaza, an ⁠independent UN inquiry has found…. about 30% of the people killed by Israeli forces have been children.” www.theguardian.com/world/2026/j...

Long shot, but if anyone in North #Oxford has lost a tortoise with a surprising turn of speed in the heat, do get in touch..

obviously not the first person to make this observation but the "move along, citizen" shit for regular DC residents is especially galling in context of the pardons for the rioters who broke into the fucking capitol

If we stopped selling arms/guns to bad people, it would make it harder for them to get them. War is expensive. Why don't we just all agree that that's the case? And stop selling weapons to weapons?

I don't often say things like this, but I hope they all rot.

The way I've gotten this across in talks to US audiences is to explain that by the time the Battle of Gettysburg was fought... ...the London Underground had already been open for six months.

#PhantomsFriday Cell #17 in the New Orleans Parish Prison was haunted by a little old woman in a red cape who encouraged prisoners to hang themselves. 12 died. On one occasion, though, a prisoner claimed she unlocked the door and told him to go home. [Full story at hauntedohiobooks.com/news/14350/ ]

Do you know what was true on February 27, 2026? The strait was open, gas prices were 50+ percent lower, and thousands of people weren't dead because of a PDF file.

This.

"you're right - I not only ran 28.8 million fake conversations, I used them to train a competing model. That's not just a distillation attack - it's a breach of trust. Would you like me to: * Explore more deeply how to carry out distillation attacks * Draft a cease and desist letter

Screaming forever into the void.

More info, courtesy of @spaceweft.bsky.social: this is from "William the Curious: Knight of the Water Lilies." written and illustrated by Charles Santore in 1997. Of note: though he was a lifelong professional illustrator, Santore didn't complete his first children's book until he was 50 years old.

Again

I thought I'd repost this so it can serve as a thread for authors to tell Bluesky about books they have out, or coming out (or just books they've enjoyed). This is my latest, out July 2nd. You can pre-order a signed paperback of it from @blackwells.bsky.social with free international delivery.

These cooling towels are quite good, guys.

More than anything right now, I wish to experience the sweet, cooling relief of being tossed into a chest freezer by an errant emu.

Just thinking about the one thing that people find wild when I tell them is that you Switzerland has recycling rules that vary by canton, and that these rules are REALLY strict. The responsibility for sorting it falls on the consumer. It is also expensive...

This.

Walked the dog, anyway

Royal Feast in a Garden, verso of right folio from the double-page frontispiece of a Shah-nama of Firdausi (Persian, about 934–1020) https://clevelandart.org/art/1945.169.b

okay i love this. Roost. a messenger app where you pick birbs, and the message takes as long to get to the recipient as the bird would IRL. Get a free bird when you sign up with my code WZ2RF2. I'm garius on there. roostsocial.app/invite/WZ2RF2 here are my current birbs

A photograph of four Japanese American women outside of the Heart Mountain incarceration camp in Wyoming. Caption "Kiku, Aki, Tami, Sumi." The photograph was taken by Yoshio Okumoto on June 25, 1944. 🗃 #skystorians #OTD

Interesting looking study about gender and negotiations - People like negotiating with women. - Not because the women are weak negotiators. - But because the women are (on average) better at making friends. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

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