It's very generous of Guy to write a book _specifically_ aimed at me. OMG

Very excited to share that I'm writing a new book, THE GHOSTS OF CHALK COUNTRY - about the loss of England's chalk downland: a tale of flowers, fascism & freedom. To be published by @wmcollinsbooks.bsky.social in April 2027: www.thebookseller.com/rights/willi... Website: ghostsofchalkcountry.org

"Who cuts people's hair in the middle of the night?" "I do! They call me the Midnight Barber." "Yeah well that's an infringement of people's liberties" I only just noticed the pun of "infringement", after all these years

Excited to announce the first London screening of We Are Making a Film About Mark Fisher, a film I have been helping with this past year. I'm in conversation with Andy Beckett (who features in the fim) afterwards. 30 October, Good Shepherd Studios, Leytonstone: www.tickettailor.com/events/weflo...

Funny article, intriguing and obviously gross, but by heck it's very well written! What a joy to read. www.theguardian.com/news/2025/se...

column on why is the far right is obsessed with dubai www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

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'.

Against my better instincts, I have written some notes on how human probability judgements work and what you should expect from surveys that ask people to guess what proportion of the population is transgender. I hope never to speak of this matter again

If they're going to try and retcon Charlie Kirk, then we should try to retcon him too.

I actually feel sick

Kirk’s ‘memorial’ getting a live coverage on The Guardian is a great example of how the right gets automatically framed as the default political movement to be ‘understood’ while the victims of that same movement never will never get the same amount of coverage

This may seem cute but if you do this too much the cyclists may become reliant on cars feeding them, disrupting the delicate roadway ecosystem

🏠 Taking on landlords 💷 ⁠Universal basic income 👶 ⁠Free childcare for all @sianberry.bsky.social takes you through three Green policies to help massively bring down the cost of living for everyone in this country.

speeding west to unexpire a yogurt with timezones

I'm on the train north to Durham for the UK Sacred Harp convention this weekend. It's going to be fun!

📣 #NHS Reproducible Analytical Pipelines (#RAP) Drop In Wednesday 24 September, 10-11am Hosted this time by me! from the @strategyunit.bsky.social #DataScience team. Bring along your questions about RAPs or just take part in the chat. Register at events.teams.microsoft.com/event/e0ee38...

Call me nuts, but it seems a lot like the hacks are *extremely* pissed off, because they’ve been forced to explain the government’s secret power behind the throne is a Kremlin-friendly influence peddler for an infamous sex criminal: a thing that they seem to have known all about, but never mentioned

One thing that is incredibly clear from the last week is that the press will keep the most appalling, atrocious things secret until they decide you need to get fucked over, and if someone talks out of school about one of their pals they get unfathomably mad about the broken norms.

I'll keep saying it - how good is this? The policy and the comms

Something I hadn't thought of before, re election of Polanski: it's not just about reaching voters and countering Reform, vitally important as those are, but also says in a renewed way to disaffected left Labour members and representatives that the Greens are a party it's well worth them joining

Leviticus by itself STILL wouldn’t get them what they want! Leviticus says you can’t permanently own land, and that every fifty years you have to redistribute it!

[me, a journalist who spends all day every day on a social media app where the discovery algorithm is personally controlled by its owner, captain birdseye] you know, a lot of people are talking about fish fingers, we should probably cover that

One of my students pointed out yesterday that jstor now has AI summaries of articles turned on by default & I didn't think it was possible to hate this tech more than I already did but here we are.

Let's be clear. The proposal to deport hundreds of thousands of people born in Britain to parents legally resident in Britain, just because they are black or brown, is not 'right populism'. It's the cornerstone policy of the 1970s National Front.

Just to emphasise the point: The campaign to smear Jeremy Corbyn as an antisemite that led to people describing his pronunication of 'Epstein' as a dogwhistle was spearheaded by a man who was Epstein's "best pal" and who defended him when he was jailed for soliciting minors for prostitution.

I know I'm biased and all, but it does appear that part of the problem is the centre left (at least visibly) hates and undermines the further left much more than the centre right does in the opposite direction.

Online trads going to church for the first time and finding out it's not an IRL version of their personal Based internet club always cracks me up

B. Catling photographed at Wayland’s Smithy by @matthewmshaw.bsky.social

I think if I were a public official, and an insanely racist billionaire called for violent insurrection to overthrow me at a big racist rally, I would not keep putting out messages on the social media platform that billionaire owned

And then there’s this pretty eye opening point

america is like this because you like guns and until you recognise that a normal person should not like guns you will remain like this because fundamentally the guns are the problem

in a bad place right now. both mentally and because i'm in britain

The Voyager 1 space probe was launched from Cape Canaveral #OTD in 1977, a few weeks after Voyager 2. Now it's the most distant human-made object – about 15.6 billion miles from Earth, racing away from us at 38,000 miles per hour with respect to the Sun. 🧪 🔭 ⚛️ Images: NASA/KSC/JPL

HOW is he so good at this? Streets ahead of the rest on comms.

What if they not letting Trump speak because he had a Reverse Fetterman Stroke and hes woke now

Cooper in 2021: "If there arent the safe legal routes for family reunion we end up with more people being driven into the arms of criminal gangs" Cooper yesterday: "we are bringing forward new rules to temporarily suspend new applications under the existing family reunion route"

Updated theory of British political decision making

He's so bad at this

I’m looking forward to reconnecting with old friends 👋 and meeting new faces 😄 Come chat to me about 💬 - 🏥 @strategyunit.bsky.social healthcare demand model - 💻 open-source coding - 🩺 @nhsrcommunity.bsky.social - 🌈 @rainbowr.org #RSS2025 #Statistics #RStats #OpenSource #PublicHealth

Starmer has sold his soul to court these people and they hate him lmao

honestly i don't think Americans care primarily because they view any form of social control/restriction as a personal affront, no matter the human cost. it's why you have the post-COVID anti-vax turn

Oh my gosh, everything from Longbarrow looks gorgeous! I want *all the books*! Some poetry collections here that will definitely be top of my wishlist. (Thanks @shannonmattern.bsky.social for the reskeet that sent me here 🙏🏻)

'writing along an invisible line whose end is infinite' “The idea was to walk the line from Peacehaven to the Humber. I had devised the notion that the physical act of walking would help me to locate what was lost”. 'Meridian' Nancy Gaffield longbarrowpress.com/current-publ...

Imagine getting so completely bodied by a publication that's primary purpose isn't even political satire but just chucked the joke in for the adults reading along.

if we made immigration work how people think it works that would be the biggest liberalization of immigration in American history

maybe some of us have concerns that extend past "winning the next election!" maybe our problem is precisely with "always chasing the next election by over-correcting to the last one" as not just an electoral strategy but a governing philosophy! idk maybe we have substantive goals we want pursued!

re: last repost: Sacred Harp/shape note singing hits SO good right now I was at a community singing a week ago and we about blew the windows out it’s religious music in origin but it’s sung as a secular community thing. as my pal says all the time, it’s music that’s “built for grief” #FaSoLa

"an untroubled mold" is definitely giving #SacredHarp