An inspiring commute for the first week of term, watching the UCL student in front of me repeatedly paste module questions into deepseek chat and then type the instant answers back into his assessment form.

It just straightforwardly *insane* how much political chatter in the United Kingdom is about the next general election, an event that is a long way in the future, and how basically none of it is about 'uh, this policy agenda doesn't look adequate to the scale of the inherited problem'.

Honest question: why do you need a deal with ChatGPT-5 to digitise Bodleian Libraries’ collections? www.ox.ac.uk/news/2025-09...

“The trouble is on the ground; the actual state people are talking about is shrinking by the minute,” he said. “Since Oct. 7 on the West Bank alone, the amount of new territory taken by Israeli settlers is about three times the size of Gaza.” www.nytimes.com/2025/09/20/w...

Fantastic piece. This graph particularly caught my eye. What is going on here?

why would liberal arts college students do this?

This isn't funny. There's something very wrong with the UK government attitude to higher education & it survived a change of gvt. Also - more broadly - it's yet another piece of evidence that Labour government ministers and their advisers live in a weird right-wing Americanised information space.

Can’t be overstated that the audience for Young Conservative bullshit is not actually young people, but old people who want to believe there is an authentic young conservative base.

In order to deny the most likely truth - that the infamed Prince of Darkness was chosen because of, not in spite of, his sordid connections - No. 10 seems willing to make the Foreign Office out as incompetent, even though there is no Ambassador left to defend. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

A poor show, but then you have to wonder at the cynicism of the people who sent this particular member of the government out to defend No. 10.

My view is that you can tell what someone’s legacy is by looking at their legacy

The discourse is all around deradicalising young men and the crisis among young men. The discourse would be much better targeted if it was about deradicalising boomers (and increasingly Gen Xers).

Reporters talking with everyone who has ever met the shooter asking if the shooter knew any trans people. Healthy society we have here for sure.

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, by god, it’s journalism! www.ft.com/content/7068...

In the last REF, 41% of the work submitted was judged “world-leading” and a further 43% “internationally excellent”. Despite the harm done over decades the UK still punches far above its weight in research. Ministers may well want to shift funds, but it’s not because our work isn’t good enough.

Notably, none of these are "transgender symbols"

We want robust, enormous research that is SUCH good research, you already know how important and right and insightful it is before you even start it. We want research so predeterminedly world-changing that there is hardly any point actually doing the research at all.

The argument for progress on casualisation may be hypothetical but the argument for strike maximalism is unfalsifiable.

Unending contempt, welcomed by a Labour government as "innovative" and by the Office for Students as a new model for UK HE.

every birthday message to epstein is like "dear jeff, you're so rich and so handsome but probably the thing about you i love most is that you're a prolific child predator. never change <3"

One reason I am gloomy is that the big picture is that the social and political outcomes of “an ageing society sets itself against high levels of immigration“ are bad for everyone.

When talking about the next election, it's important to remember that we are currently roughly half way between this tweet and when the next election will actually be held. Good luck predicting anything

Tapping the sign

So long ‘progressive realism’, we barely knew ye.

We built a calculator that doesn't work, but don't worry, it's also a plagiarism machine that will tell you to kill yourself. It runs on the world's oceans and costs 10 trillion dollars.

And so it begins. That 65% increase in recruitment has harmed other universities, and is harming staff and students -- whoever gets this 7 month post will be utterly brilliant, but won't have the bandwidth to be fully present AND can't support students throughout a degree.

Being a transformationally progressive economic advisor might not make you a good university administrator, but being a crappy university administrator also doesn’t make you a transformationally progressive economic advisor.

New article out in the Journal of Gender Studies “We are our fathers’ improved versions”: changing fatherhoods and hybrid masculinities in Cyprus doi.org/10.1080/0958...

Sam Altman keeps saying the quiet part out loud - valuations are too high, there's no biz model w/copyright, there's not enough electricity, LLMs aren't the path to AGI - yet govts and AI cheerleaders seemingly bend over backwards to ignore that fortune.com/2025/08/20/u...

In 25 years, every business school in the country will be doing case studies about how a long defunct company known as “Google” once had an unbeatable lock on online information retrieval and then started doing shit like this.

Not coincidentally Ghislaine’s defence is that nothing inappropriate ever happened anyway, and that the people who say it did have false memories.

If you enjoyed the bullshit machine you’re going to love the bullshit calculator!

The people dominating our political landscape, culture, and economy are just so stupid and full of shit it's almost impossible to describe

An explanation for the dissension at least, though ironically also a blow to the legitimacy of the International Court of Justice to have judges whose ‘reasoning’ has nothing to do with the law. www.monitor.co.ug/uganda/news/...

Under no conditions should Robert Jenrick be called a xenophobe, certainly not on the BBC in free speech Britain. standuptoracism.org.uk/robert-jenri...

DIVISIVE CONCEPTS: ideas Republicans don’t like, designated as second class so they can be banned in violation of 1A’s freedom of speech SINCERELY HELD BELIEFS: religious dictates Republicans like, designated as special so they can be imposed in violation of 1A’s separation of church and state

This is why conquering autocrats try so hard not to divide those they subjugate, they know that would only make the conquered stronger.

The government’s logic is undeniable. 382 MPs, having surely carefully weighed the evidence and risks, proscribed Palestine Action. Only 26 disagreed. The Home Secretary alleges past violence and future terror attacks. It makes no difference whether the terrorists are 80yo women or 18yo men.

To be fair, “actually very far you poundshop arsonist hack” is a possible answer to “how close are tens of millions of Britons to wanting a full-blown revolution”?

The arc of the universe is long, and it bends towards laziness.

All aboard the bullshit machine!

Dumb insofar as the relevant political and legal elites have their own copies; cunning insofar as a world of trolls and marks asking Grok about the Constitution will seed mass confusion.

Thanks AI, this historical timeline is incredibly useful and will really help my students...😑

this is part of why AI stuff is getting put into everything by force btw

ACADEMIC READING ALREADY COMES WITH A SUMMARY IT IS CALLED THE ABSTRACT

Quoted in the Independent today: “The global coalition against sexual violence in conflict is already reeling from the destruction of USAID. The UK government has compounded the crisis by neglecting PSVI during its first year in power… www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/poli...

The very least we can do is to see clearly what is happening. To grasp the grotesque irrelevance of diplomatic gambits and alibis. What counts is not symbolic votes in September but red lines enforced today. www.justsecurity.org/117962/mass-...