🔊 My latest piece for @thejournal.ie: ‘Dubai influencers - The entitlement, denial and moral vacuum in the so-called 'safest city'’ Caoilfhionn Gallagher KC writes about how some are responding to the unfolding crisis in the Middle East. www.thejournal.ie/readme/influ... #UAE #Dubai #Iran

"L’intero regime iraniano è guidato da chierici radicali che non prendono decisioni di natura geopolitica. Le loro decisioni si basano sulla teologia, sulla loro interpretazione teologica, che è di tipo apocalittico." - Marco Rubio Gli USA invece laici, lucidi e razionali. 👇

Prof. Robert Pape: "I have studied every air campaign since WWI... I've modelled the bombing of Fordow and regime change in Iran for 20 years... We are now in the grip of the escalation trap... This has never worked in over 100 years... Trump is up against the weight of history".

One of my favourite sides of politics/media.

in case anyone ever needed confirmation that it's not about building a democratic Iran, it's about collapsing Iran and turning it into a land of rubble that can be bombed every six months

Now that Khameini’s death is confirmed, will the regime collapse? I would bet against it. Khameini was v old, and both he/his lieutenants had been planning for the succession for some time. He had also delegated much of the gov work to others before the strikes in case he was killed/incommunicado

Paul Conroy — a brilliant photojournalist who documented wars & human chaos for decades — has passed away. He was injured in the same attack in Homs that killed Marie Colvin & he just carried on travelling to conflict zones. May he rest in peace.

NOW THIS IS FUNNY Donald Trump’s oil embargo reveals a solar boom in Cuba Chinese solar panels are flooding into the troubled island nation www.economist.com/the-americas...

Ireland moving rapidly towards 1/3 of all grid power being used by data centres. This is complete madness, and iirc way beyond any other country in the world. www.rte.ie/news/ireland...

Ancient #polychromy is rarely more vibrant than this type of Greek painted pottery from Centuripe, Sicily. Both vases here are funerary and have architectural elements at top, looking like small tholos-shaped temples (lion head waterspouts!). The colors are blazingly vivid. 🏺 1/ 📸 me

Russian TV from 4 years ago looks comical now. Oh, how the mighty have fallen. It’s delicious!

Militry-Civil Fusion: 'Hegseth told Amodei in a tense meeting ... the Pentagon will either cut ties and declare Anthropic a "supply chain risk," or invoke the Defense Production Act to force the company to tailor its model to the military's needs.' www.axios.com/2026/02/24/a...

I‘ve been banging the drum about the Solow Paradox for at least a year. The complete lack of results was predictable.

Profs, Grammarly is NOT the benign writing assistant you may have thought it is, but a powerful cheating machine that includes tools explicitly designed to help students hide the cheating done with it...

‘Why an artist of such outstanding talent and originality should have been ignored for more than three centuries is obvious – because she was a woman.’ Luke Uglow visits a revelatory show of Michaelina Wautier’s paintings in Vienna, which ends this week before moving to the Royal Academy, London

Whoa: young scholar searching Florence libraries for how the ancient Ptolemy informed Galileo found a copy of Ptolemy's Almagest with marginalia in what looks a lot like Galileo's own hand. Like a frozen moment of torch passing, when a carefully tended fire from antiquity ignited something new.

y i k e s

OpenAI ”acknowledged in its own research that LLMs will always produce hallucinations due to fundamental mathematical constraints that cannot be solved through better engineering, marking a significant admission from one of the AI industry’s leading companies.” You can’t trust chatbots.

I remember being hungover, sitting at a café near Sodeco Square waiting for my coffee. My head was already pounding when I heard that buzz again. “Man, that noise,” I told the owner. “Umm Kamel!? Where is it?” he asked, all excited. “When I can’t sleep, I put it on my phone.”

This is an extraordinary piece about the grind and hopelessness of life in present day Cuba, by Ruaridh Nicoll who manages to be by turns romantic, wistful and clear eyed. It is a piece about loss and gross incompetence in the face of that loss. www.theguardian.com/world/2026/f...

Study after Eckersberg 2026 oil on panel 108 × 81 cm (42.5 × 32 in.) #art #painting #peinture

In what is arguably the World's Best News, it looks like India is going to spend much less time in the "fossil fuel detour" than the US or China. It is moving much more directly to clean electrification. ember-energy.org/latest-insig...

I made a map of 3.4 million Bluesky users - see if you can find yourself! bluesky-map.theo.io I've seen some similar projects, but IMO this seems to better capture some of the fine-grained detail

‘People keep reinventing the same damn movie’: cinematographer Roger Deakins on 50 years behind the camera and his fears for film’s future www.theguardian.com/film/2026/fe...

Un gisement exceptionnel de fossiles vieux de 512 millions d’années découvert en Chine

Wonderful Ice Age art! Some 40,000 years ago, this tiny head of a cave lion was skilfully sculpted from mammoth ivory. It is one of the oldest known works of figurative art! 📷 by me #Archaeology

Just got served this on Instagram👇 Saw this coming a mile off. Facebook has made its feed borderline unusable due to the amount of ads, so it’s obvious they’d start charging for an ad-free membership. Tech bros are not your friends. It’s all about extracting as much profit from you as possible.

Social media companies have faced scrutiny before, with congressional hearings forcing CEOs to apologize, but until now, they’ve never had to convince a jury that they aren’t liable for harming kids.

Just now at the Mount Argus appts. in Kimmage, Dublin. Lads been there since early, said when they arrived the water was up to the top of the grid ie. about 2 foot higher. Been picking out debris all morning that had been brought down the river. #stormchandra #dublin #ireland #riverpoddle

In Danimarca boom di app per boicottare i prodotti Usa

#MagaliLafourcade, Richterin im Fall #MarineLePen, gab bekannt, dass sie im Mai 2025 Besuch von 2 Gesandten #Trump s erhalten habe, die versucht hätten, Druck auf sie auszuüben oder sie in dem Fall zu beeinflussen. Die Einladung zum Treffen kam von der US-Botschaft in Paris 1/2

Brave Ukrainian energy workers,day and night,in severe frost,are repairing Ukraine’s energy networks destroyed by Russia Russia is trying to organize a “cold holodomor” -an energy genocide Russia is killing the weak&the helpless.It subjects them to torture.We are talking about millions of people.

The scale of China's clean energy buildout is difficult to fathom. Check out these pictures.

A cherished Winsor & Newton tube, which I bought c.1984 for my first experiments in oil. Paint still as good as new. #art #paint #painting #peinture

Niall Stanage doing Irish journalism proud here, and the fact that such an exchange is a relative rarity in that room tells its own story.

Gli Stati Uniti hanno così tanto bisogno della Groenlandia per la sicurezza nazionale che hanno chiuso tutte le loro basi tranne una e mantengono solo 150 soldati sull'isola, mentre la Danimarca consentirebbe l'ingresso di tutti i soldati statunitensi che desidera.

Globally, no single day in 2025 was cooler than its 1991-2020 average. climate.copernicus.eu/global-clima...

This opinion is correct.

‘Does painting matter in the face of history, or – given that his career feels somewhat divided by Germany’s reunification – the end of history?’ Martin Herbert on the riddling art of Gerhard Richter

Be aware that there are accounts attempting to steal session keys. This particular method won’t work using the Bluesky app for a couple of reasons, but third party apps may be vulnerable to similar attempts. We will attempt to automatically label these as Platform Manipulation.

Hier zur Einordnung dieser Nachricht die globalen Daten der letzten 2024 Jahre.

The new Norfolk Iron Age carnyx find featured on #DiggingForBritain with @profaliceroberts.bsky.social is beyond spectacular, dating to that crucial period for the Iceni between Caesar’s expeditions & Boudica’s rebellion. Already my find of the decade, today is a day to worship the carnyx… 1/…

"TrendForce says the DRAM contract prices will rise 55 to 60 percent quarter on quarter in the [first] quarter of 2026, and the NAND flash prices will rise 33 to 38 percent." www.canonrumors.com/memory-price...

Tributes have been paid to Holocaust survivor and table tennis champion Josef Veselsky, who was also reputed to be Ireland's oldest man, following his death aged 107

one of the dumbest parts of this is the idea that oil producers actually want their holdings in venezeula back, which they do not. it’s a war for oil no one really wants.

Jennifer Jacobs @CBSNews -- Locations hit in US strikes in Venezuela include: 1. Fuerte Tiuna - military base in Caracas 2. La Carlota - airbase in Caracas 3. El Volcán - signal antenna 4. La Guaira Port - main port of Venezuela via @margbrennan 3:39 AM · Jan 3 source: x.com/JenniferJJac...