Well this is fascinating giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/... From @jburnmurdoch.ft.com

With Penelope Keith’s passing, I got to thinking about Paul Eddington, in his final days, facing the camera that one last time, despite the shitty hand life had dealt him, and the courage it must have taken to do so. Given the chance to spin some grandstanding bullshit, he chose to say this instead:

It just doesn’t add up 😵‍💫

For what it’s worth, I think this is extremely generous. I don’t think Gary Stevenson cares remotely about inequality because if he did he’d show even the slightest interest in putting the time and effort into understanding it.

I don't usually write personal stuff, but a few words about my experience of being interviewed by Gary Stevenson. It started with a nice chat, comparing taste in hoodies... then the tone changed. He demanded to know why I'd deleted a tweet criticising him.

I mean this explains quite a lot about experiencing social media in the 2020's www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

Again, I beg MPs and the government to actually look at the policy they may or may not be implementing and think through both the human consequences and their willingness to have 1/6 of all care staff be deported.

Did Steve Coogan write this statement?

If you're wondering why I've gone insane, it's because I've just seen a local Facebook thread about a proposed AI data centre, where one opponent has created a list reasons to oppose the project generated by... Copilot.

It is once again worth stressing that FIFA is no more than the sum of the teams that consent to be governed by it.

NEW YIMBY POD! - @mjrobbins.com and I discuss the problem with the new war on delivery robots - And we speak to @jeevunsandher.bsky.social about how to actually achieve "good growth in every postcode". Listen/subscribe: www.abundancepod.com/p/the-new-wa...

youtu.be/Wb3HIw_YU4E new Bobby Fingers trailer? Yes please tyvm

“This is what we’re up against”

If anything it's worse than Jim says. A big theme of my upcoming book is there are growing pockets of the UK where the government has essentially packed up and gone home. Mail isn't delivered, roads aren't repaired, services are withdrawn, patients can't access blood tests, crime/fraud is rampant.

This is an absolutely wild thread that has blown my mind. Half!

Why do people reach for unfounded conspiracies about energy prices? No, it’s not because of a “greedy little spiv”. It’s because natural gas makes up a much larger share of the UK’s energy mix than Switzerland’s.

These are not serious people

Had one recently where it hallucinated an NHS API existing, and repeatedly told me it was able to access a web page that gave me a 404, even telling me it was clearly an issue on my end until I pushed it to explain its caching which… was probably also a made up explanation.

Roses are red, a stanza ‘s in order

Also another good example of the British cultural refusal to take management (or even ‘trying to be good at things’) seriously.

The human who was driving the car

Although to be honest the fact that there is no way to be involved in the process other than through lodging an objection is a perfect microcosm of what's wrong with British planning.

Honestly I don't think Polanski has an '-ism', he reads like those middle-managers who go around excitedly repeating whatever horseshit they read on LinkedIn that morning. There's no synthesis to adjust.

Today is ‘National Picky Bits Day’ so enjoy this extended rant on why it’s time for Britain to grow up.

I did!

Air con isn’t banned” is true in a narrow legal sense. But the rules make proper fixed cooling impossible in many homes, while letting anyone buy inefficient portable units online. People do not need smug word games. They need homes they can actually keep cool. open.substack.com/pub/catching...

Hugely going to regret doing an essay based on a @stephenkb.bsky.social rant.

It’s part of a growing trend in a British culture where ‘being an adult’ is seen as ‘cringe’ and any attempt at seriousness or formality has to be buried in layers of twee irony.

The brutal truth about ice cream is that nobody has ever beaten vanilla, served without garnishes, as the ultimate flavour.

Love watching entirely novel readings pop up on the weather station in the garden. 🫠

The best thing about this will be the geriatric millennials posting on social media insisting they had 45c summers all the time when they grew up and never made a fuss about jt.

This but the entire decision-phobic bureaucratic class.

Starmer governed like a man who when faced with half a group that likes spicy curries and half a group that doesn't like Indian food at all, orders everyone a korma. He then tells the curry-haters he's listened to their concerns, and the spice-lovers that they're wrong for enjoying a jalfrezi.

My boring uncool opinion is I think it’s a massive, massive problem that this kind of public behaviour is normalised, and reviewing how politicians use social media should go far beyond X.

They’re in a category of ‘solved foods’ where the solution can be done by anyone with common, cheap ingredients in about 10 minutes, and almost anything beyond that is a gimmick that detracts from the experience.

The fact that the BBC think Bedford is *60 miles* north of the M25 says a lot about the dismal standard of reporting on anything outside London these days.

See e.g. Harold Shipman. It's not hard to see taking lives and saving lives as two sides of the same coin if the motivation is e.g. 'exerting power over life and death'. I think people struggle to parse value systems that are orthogonal to their own, rather than simply 'opposite'.

See also weirdly how anti solar farm protests draw on early 00s anti-GM protests

It’s like whole swathes of the Labour Party have been sucked into the cringe vortex and cannot now see the people who actually vote for them or the strengths of Britain as an actually existing country.

my god, it's real

Natural England in full Caligula mould: KILL THE PONIES, MORE FISH DISCOS AND BAT TUNNELS www.thetimes.com/article/ba52...

My problem is I can think of lots of smart arguments against the ban but none of them surpass my gut feeling that we should stop kids swimming in toxic waste.

NL is doing this. I think it’s a great idea. nltimes.nl/2026/06/09/d...

There's a fascinating kind of hyper-literate illiteracy online these days, where people are so busy trying to detect a second layer of meaning in what they see that they just completely miss the intended message.

The concept of ultra-processed food "invites misclassification and debate, yet the framework remains practical for surveillance and policy." No! You can't regulate something if you don't know what it is.

7/ The THIRD article looks specifically at exposure. It argues that we’re seeing a sort of ‘Moynihan’s Law’ with trust. An age of ultra-scrutiny means failure and misconduct is unearthed more often. But this causes trust to fall. Read here: parables.substack.com/p/notes-on-t...

Please don’t make me root for Starmer

The stats on major infrastructure projects are grim: 📉 166/213 (78%) are officially in trouble 🟡 135 projects (63.3%) are ‘Amber’ - needing action to avoid cost/time overruns 🔴 31 (14.6%) are ‘Red’, “unachievable” 🟢 Just 30 (14.1%) are Green - successfully on track inews.co.uk/opinion/lowe...

As someone who used to be in charge of the global navigation of the BBC website, is the current Head of AI at Full Fact and is soon to start working on the NDL, I found this pod relevant to my interests.

Evening crew, have a listen to this week's pod!