Judging by twitter’s unhinged reaction to the proposed lifting of the child benefit cap there’ll be an army of babies around 2026/27 from right wing commentators eager to look after a kid for the absolute bonanza of £26/£17 a week

Niche hypothesis: the rise of AI has increased the number of students rocking up to a supervision with new material the lecturer is supposed to I guess speed read live and kick out five recommendations (rather than emailing a draft in advance)

'If both sides are criticising me, I must be doing something right,' I warble, as I run babytalk opinion on the BBC News website.

Started the week with a trip to the dental hygienist. I've been good with my teeth for about a decade but it turns out that if you just don't do anything beyond brushing and grind your teeth at night without preventative action for the previous thirty years then you're fighting a losing battle.

I'll be honest, example one sucks. 1) why are we doing this again? I reckon the student working out what modules they want to do on their own is kind of a minimum bar 2) in the current and evolving financial landscape, what module choices and complementary extra-curricular activities anyways?

Always a rules for life type schema for these folk

Six year old party bag fillers: it’s on

Lecturing 2025 is thirty eight people from different arms of the university each making from their own perspective semi or fully reasonable requests until the straw breaks the camel’s back

If people are going to straight steal from my REF impact statement they should at least say

Completely agree. As previously discussed, I'll #don a tweed jacket or knitted jumper if it helps for visual academic style shorthand for any invites. The trade press is also really bad at representing these voices though I guess this is it's own thing.

Nearly two years of showing the realities of the gambles taken by these managers, ministers, and their consultants on the people who do the work of keeping the sector afloat: qmucu.org/qmul-transfo.... Yet outlets still fail to even consider that they might need to include staff in their coverage?

ChatGPT again not huge on facts

Educators are being made to feel inadequate for not realising AI’s potential. They must submit, adapt, augment themselves, and become ‘AI literate’ or risk obsolescence.

No deal! I’m doing this all for the logo or not at all!

Living on the edge by seeing if this is spicy or mild

Or you can marvel once again at Patrick, who lived at Ballarat Wildlife Park in Australia, becoming both the oldest captive wombat ever recorded, and – to use the correct naturalists’ term – an absolute fucking whopper

Honestly teaching these modules is horrendous as a lecturer and so I can only imagine what the experience is like for students trying to get to grips with (when we're talking about cross-subject generic modules) horrendous X 4 or whatever

Compulsory team teaching on every module is perhaps the biggest ever threat to the quality of teaching in UK universities. It causes chaos on the ground for timetabling, ruins course coherence and turns lecturers into permanent supply teachers. It is pedagogically incoherent… 1/

Ballon d’Orange

British press reaction to the end of the “war” also interesting. Initially: “we’ve won. We’ve easily won this!” Calm sober analysis (along the O’Rourke line) begins to filter through that, well, maybe not. Pro-Chamberlain press: “this only proves how magnanimous the PM has been here!”

One of those motivational high performancey and ideally non-right wing but I'll take what I can get podcasters but for really simple #lifehacks that students now don't do as much. That Tom Odell song but with 1. Pen and pad; take notes please. 2. Phones away 3. Journal articles are great etc etc

We all fumble live interviews I guess but BBC, Guardian, Times etc front page does feel one of the big stories tbqh

"I'll be honest, 10/20/30/40 etc % of the way through I just got bored and switched to rapid skim mode." All read throughs of other people's work should have this option for feedback and I very much include my own in this.

Martin Tyler voice: “LABOUROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO”

I’m sure Matt Goodwin will be along shortly to tell us all whether LNER Customer Service Host Samir Zitouni counts as British or not. news.sky.com/story/train-...

Routledge are having a Black Friday sale so use the code ‘BF2025S’ to get 25% off my books! www.routledge.com/The-Far-Left... www.routledge.com/The-British-...

A total and utter hero

Osborne deserves a lot more condemnation, for not just doing austerity but doing it so cackhandedly: 1. Not borrowing to invest when borrowing costs were at essentially zero 2. Cutting spending by salami slicing every part of the public sector with no real analysis of where could take it

The British public (according to the business plan)

Delighted to be at the proofs stage with this. Out in April with CUP!

Recently discovered that there were twelve opeds a month by various Director of Ilku-duties about the conversations we need to be having

Nigel: I agree with Nick!

Cut the red tape holding back a wealth tax!

Ok, we’re getting somewhere

Of course. Do this and you’re basically looking at a new Beeching Report as the rural network just shuts down

Post half term inset day today. I just always think I’d love to see the two or three families who forget, turn up, and do the “oh for fucks sake” thing.

Will the RW media remember the driver and conductor of the Huntingdon attack, and how many lives they saved, the next time train companies try to eliminate staff and they strike, citing passenger safety?

Very important article: Elon Musk’s attempts to hijack the world’s knowledge base and make us all think like fascists. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

There’s some totally reasonable stuff in this report but I was struck by this - also replicated in a recent WonkHE podcast. Every uni has redesigned its modules/outcomes to chase the employability tail but the reality is that given every student wants a different job this is tricky/not desirable.

A new low, even by Goodwin's increasingly awful standards. Anxiety (no scare quotes are needed) takes many forms. And using his social media bully pulpit to punch down is despicable.

Not exactly magnificent proofreading for the Express account of the Huntingdon attack

Let's just take a moment to reflect on the self-sacrifice and hope this person embodies - not the evil, hateful monsters thirsting for violence.

Sticking it to woke with some Sunday chicken cacciatore

Off to the UK again (boo) but what a view of cobh and spike island on the way out.

The by the numbers three point rhythm and exclusively putting this on X are both not good.

Huntingdon - This comment from Simon Calder is worth repeating. My thoughts with all involved

I still think we should be allowed to make this list our REF Impact Casestudy. Used by the Department for Education, by Parliament, by every journalist, UUK acknowledges it is accurate & even conservative, + footnoted in academic articles. Ideally, we'd get government to change the system, but...

Rice/Gyokeres have ignited my FPL season (which has been - by a measure - my worst ever)

speaking as a (not really) dispassionate observer for a second, one of the things that's fascinating about LLM marketing is that they keep selling it as "let us help you make sense of this *already extremely structured* data":