I am sick, absolutely sick, of the retreat of civic society, the media and the other political parties in the face of Reform UK - one of the most existential threats the state structures have faced for decades.

Universities can see what's happened to our US partners and colleagues. There's an example right in front of them of what the authoritarians will do once in power. They can fight back now or lose the ability to do so.

A multimillionaire thinks that paying down the national debt is so important that all the poors should get into the workforce earlier, work in it harder, and stay in it later to help pay it off. It's the only possible way to do it!

Does studying philosophy make you a better thinker? 🤔 A new study finds philosophy majors outperform all other majors in reasoning, curiosity, and open-mindedness—even after controlling for differences at the start of college. What are your thoughts? 💭 #philsky #philosophy #betterthinker

After Border Patrol shot two people in Portland, DHS claimed they were "vicious gang members" tied to a past shooting. But records I obtained reveal a US prosecutor has since directly contradicted DHS, saying, "We're not suggesting he is a gang member." My dive into how DHS' claims have collapsed:

I think often of a tweet I saw that was like "if your kid actually reads books, they're gonna be one of the smartest people in like ten years" arxiv.org/abs/2601.20245

Remember that (1) universities will do absolutely anything to survive; and that (2) they'll make sure other unis close before they'll fail themselves. They will certainly **not** be beacons of resistance - indeed quite the opposite. www.timeshighereducation.com/news/univers...

Beyond a tiny hardcore of rich universities, if you are an employee in UK Higher Ed you will be somewhere on the treadmill/ slippery slope below. You'll recognise exactly which step you are on at this moment. Take a look. 👇

White House with image of a Black man and an emoji of chains. And the chosen image is of Don Lemon doing journalism.

A teenage boy was walking home in Minneapolis yesterday when four masked men jumped out of a van & questioned him - with no parent or guardian present. He was bundled into the van & taken away. Bystanders heard the boy say: “Can I just go home?” I don’t know how America comes back from all this.

There’s a big story everyone is missing—but this article hits on it. We aren’t just seeing public health dismantled bc we’ve been taken over by conspiracy theorists and lunatics. What we’re really seeing is the giant, predatory, underegulated wellness industry come to Washington.

Call me crazy, but I don't think the question of whether or not Bovino belongs in his job depends on whether or not he deletes the tweet he made calling protesters "cannon fodder." Making the tweet (along with many other things he's done) should disqualify him from any law enforcement job ever.

Paul Verhoeven undefeated in creating a movie that flies right over the heads of the people it’s making fun of

The guy in the White House just posted that he's the acting president of Venezuela. Insane.

extracting (huge chunks of) books (verbatim) from language models (with jailbreak prompts) icymi @olivia.science @irisvanrooij.bsky.social @kortizart.bsky.social @emilymbender.bsky.social @alexhanna.bsky.social @victoriastrauss.com @iwriteok.bsky.social

“This is not a hot economy…by multiple measures it’s notably worse than the economy Trump inherited from Biden. And it may be even colder than reported. BLS employment numbers are often significantly revised…employment numbers may have been overstating job growth…” open.substack.com/pub/paulkrug...

When he tells you who he is, believe him. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/11/u...

Too late, this was the reply, translation in alt text.

A woman recording an ICE agent tells him "Shame on you." The agent responds, "Have you all not learned from the past couple of days?" "Learned what?" she asks Then he knocks her phone out of her hand

This is an important and sobering read about a 1943 American pamphlet warning citizens what fascism in America would look like. Every bit of it is happening now open.substack.com/pub/heatherc...

The statement: www.nobelpeaceprize.org/press/press-...

“Het idee van ‘verantwoord gebruik’ is een sofistisch gedrocht, dat een vals gevoel van morele en pedagogische veiligheid moet creëren” apache.be/2026/01/09/a... @apache.be

So a CBS Evening News reporter actually did a pretty solid breakdown of the ICE murder video, talking to a former agent who details all the ways Ross messed up. And yet: It didn’t air on the actual show tonight. CBS did post it to YouTube—and it has nearly 800k views already youtu.be/6ywLEESFDu0?...

I think it is probably a bad idea to put clearly unhinged, angry psychopaths in federal law enforcement positions.

Pastor: I said to this ICE agent, 'Take me, stop harassing her.' The agent got in my face, pointed a gun at me, and said, 'Are you afraid now?' To which I said, 'I am not afraid.'

He’s not wrong

unspeakably pathetic stuff from Trump here as he says he'd be honored to accept María Corina Machado's Nobel Prize if she wants to give it up to him

Something I always wondered is how it would be covered if America became a dictatorship This is it

The way we live now.

Emily Heller, an eyewitness, is speaking out to set the record straight. Officers were screaming at Renee Nicole Good, “Move, move, move.” So she moved, and they shot her multiple times? Then Noem and Trump branded her a domestic terrorist. Does everyone see how absolutely insane that sounds?

People will die because of this www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...

We live in J.G. Ballard's world now. Perhaps we always did.

People fatally shot by UK police in 2024/25: 2 People fatally shot by US law enforcement in 2025: 1280

Same on #Today this morning. It's false balance over and over again. Even when you have a video in front of your eyes .

Jesse Watters highlights that Renee Nicole Good, the woman killed by ICE, had "pronouns in her bio" and "leaves behind a lesbian partner and a child from a previous marriage"

New Year, New Colour Tool for you data visualizers and maybe the odd designer obumbratta.com/colour

Every year I come to understand that the issue of "anthropomorphizing" AI has confused the distinction between language and "intelligence" in ways that have lead people to deeply misplaced faith about what this tech is actually capable of.

As a statistical educator, it had not occurred to me that I need to caution students against regressing a variable on a function of itself. My naivete is unbounded. The Peri & Sparber paper (linked below) looks really good! It has synthetic data analyses and everything.

If a statistical test always gets produces the same result and if its results are often (usually?) described fallaciously, should the test be abandoned? If so, we may need to abandon p-curve analysis: replicationindex.com... #stats #psychology #philSci #metascience #sciComm

A new paper by George Borjas—who served this past year in the Trump White House designing some of its anti-immigration policies—claims to display evidence of ideological bias among researchers who study immigration. doi.org/10.1126/scia... 🧵 Thread—>

"I’m going to pause here just to review: an institution that purports to be a university has told a philosophy professor he is forbidden from teaching Plato." surreal times dailynous.com/2026/01/06/t...

"Ultimately, learning requires friction. It requires the uncomfortable sensation of not knowing, the strain of recall, and the cognitive demand that tech companies are seeking to eliminate."

The UK drinks less, smokes less, is better informed, more highly educated, more likely to survive serious diseases... than ever ever before. Holiday thought: snap out of the gloom guys.

Look at crime fall and fall and fall and fall. There's unlikely to have been much of a a safer time in English and Welsh history.

🚨 New paper alert 🚨 Using LLMs as data annotators, you can produce any scientific result you want. We call this **LLM Hacking**. Paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2509.08825

See @jamiecummins.bsky.social 's work

Yes, there are ethical and useful applications of AI: quick scans of large text files; protein folding, routine coding, all that. But in current higher ed they are MASSIVELY outweighed by the harms: students using “Chat” to skip reading, writing, thinking. And admins are determined to deny that.