Went to see the Devils Wear Prada 2 at baby cinema today (amazing obviously) which means I now know that Anne Hathaway is two months older than Wes Streeting

Great opportunity for a crossover adaptation of Fever Pitch and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, with Colin Firth and Mark Strong amalgamating their roles from each film.

This is why I keep asking that “so what do older women who lose their academic jobs do” question - and why the answers are nearly always “rely on partner income/family wealth/networking to survive” :/

This is a shocking example of one of the big reasons why, right now, there is no way I’d use AI for any of my historical work. If you don’t look at the documents yourself, and if you don’t know how the AI you’re using was coded, you have no idea what it may be leaving out – or adding in.

Omg this is AMAZING

Omg the auto captions for my lecture #medievalsky

(I feel so strongly about this as a tedious imported take, because it ignores that “British” food was heavily imperial/multicultural since the nineteenth century, that the empire was conquered partly from a love of spices, that British Indian food food *is* British and to argue otherwise is racist)

Reminder that those worst affected by our dismal immigration policies are all too often children, something which the government would prefer you to forget

My four-year-old has absolutely lost it at a YouTube video of the Two Ronnies doing the “fork handles” sketch, if anyone was wondering if comedy from 1976 stood up for Gen Alpha

Labour has pushed for this for months, and finally they achieved it, ending universal human rights by making them conditional upon political will and bringing back a version of the Rwanda deal via the backdoor. 90/ www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m...

I personally would prefer it if Burnham could be swapped in quickly and easily, and it’d probably be better for the nation. But I see no reason why the Greens should now help people who just spent two weeks calling them hateful racist cranks trying to give heroin to children.

What i think is really funny is how everybody in Labour has decided to crack on with a leadership election while Keir is presumably like. Guys. I havent resigned. What are you doing

Indeed. Ultimately the only one of the five who you can even faintly say was hard done by is Theresa May, and we live in a parliamentary democracy and she no longer had the confidence of her MPs.

Um, if Andy Burnham needs the Greens to step aside to win a seat that Labour currently holds, that Labour has held since it was created, what exactly is supposed to be the point of him?

Elite politics until v. recently was all about Oxford PPEists, but today's drama has Josh Simons (St John's, Cambridge) standing down as an MP to facilitate the return to the Commons of Andy Burnham (Fitzwilliam, Cambridge), in order to thwart the ambitions of Wes Streeting (Selwyn, Cambridge).

Academic departments deserve to be saved, supported, resourced, allowed to grow even if they're not "best in the country," "first in the REF," "top-ranked," "at a Russell Group uni," or whatever other austerity-brained nonsense senior managers have been using to flimflam you out of solidarity

“He’s a great communicator!” “He’s one of the best communicators the Labour party currently has. These are not the same things.”

The Makerfield by-election is perfectly set up for a campaign-ready Reform candidate with possible roots in the North West

Worth reminding ourselves, when the Labour leadership speculation resumes, that not only will contenders require nomination by 81 MPs but also by at least 5% of CLPs or at least three affiliates (two of which must be trade unions) which represent a minimum of 5% of the affiliated membership.

The fact that Keir Starmer has drafted Morgan McSweeney back in to save him has to be funniest part of all of this. Truly committed to never learning a single lesson you have to give it to him

‘Yes a further development in this story because it turns out that Wes Streeting is actually one of the least popular of Labyrinth’s goblins and he’s having to try and find a way of navigating the fact that he seemingly has all of the appeal of a soiled towel in a morgue bathroom…’

Wait it’s THIS GUY who is standing down for Burnham?

Amazing the personal risks people will take to preserve archival material www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m...

For further context: almost everyone in the Faculty of Arts is at risk of redundancy. Music, Modern Languages & American & Canadian Studies courses to close completely. History will not close but staff numbers will be significantly reduced. This is what 'right-sizing' looks like, apparently.

i am hyperventilating

"I am going to run, because I'm not the kind of person who runs from gunfire. So if the starting pistol pistol is fired I am not going to run metaphorically, meaning that I am going to run literally. Although when you think about it run in the second sense is also a metaphor. Can I start again?"

interesting rationale from a prospective juror in the Elon Musk Twitter stock manipulation case

frankly I have come to believe techies are illiterate. science fiction isn't about the future, stupid. it's about the current political situation but set in space so no one gets mad. duh!

how have ten per cent of people polled heard of Al Carns

3. his sub-600 majority

Must we keep holding our politicians to such impossible standards?

You’ve probably already seen this, but in case not: Add your name to the open letter, and stand against hate and division. goodlawproject.org/s/4ca10b

BAN THE PERVERT GLASSES

I don't know how many different ways I can say this but I'm not stepping aside for Andy Burnham, and it's both very tedious for me and very demoralising for my staff to keep seeing it reported that I might be about to go when there's never even been so much as a conversation with Andy about doing so

As we are coming up to the anniversary of the Grenfell Tower Fire, I am reflecting on the hardest job I've ever done and nothing will ever be harder. Words can't express what it was like to coordinate this, support the Grenfell community, and watch the defendants receive it. www.testimonyweek.co.uk

Harriman told the Guardian: “We have reached the point where truth itself is being crushed by the very institutions that are supposed to uphold it" https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2026/may/13/greta-thunberg-gary-lineker-sign-letter-defending-southbank-centre-chair

I should call him

Fun fact: the magical child safety solution which Jess Philips cited in her resignation letter is a vendor-specific offering, which benefited from an intense PR and lobbying campaign, and was previously praised by ... Prince Andrew. I always keep the receipts. heatherburns.tech/2026/02/20/t...

It will be an interesting case study in the current place of trades unions in Labour politics to see how this is received in the party/by the leadership. It should cause a big panic!

Every single member of the History Department at Uni of Nottingham is at risk of redundancy. Every single one of us.

It’s the best job in politics and she treated it like it was a punishment for something (when, if it were a punishment, the best response would clearly be to do the job really well)

None of these people are very good at Politics, but they’ve watched so much West Wing and TTOI that they really think that they are

This is a long shot because this isn't the old twitter, but I'm looking for history articles/books that look at cases of British/Irish settlers/squatters being prosecuted for crimes against Indigenous/colonized people. It can be anywhere in the world, but ideally the late C18/early C19.

Motherhood texts: “just fell down a botulism rabbit hole”

where did the myth arise that there is a national pay scale for universities? because… there clearly isn’t?

We are at the mercy of Bridget Phillipson’s ability to notice things and form a credible plan in response. Unfortunately she seems literally uninterested, across her various ministerial roles, in doing anything other than prosecuting a series of vaguely related if basically incoherent culture wars.

There's a damaging tendency in British politics to treat party crises, leadership changes, and other forms of instability as failures of politics, rather than part of the political process. (I know it's not only a British phenomenon, but our majoritarian political culture makes it worse.)

Yesterday Kier Starmer announced Labour will nationalise British Steel, and save 2700 jobs. Today, the Uni of Nottingham put 2700 staff at risk of redundancy. This is just one university. Across the UK 15,000 higher education jobs need saving. Where is the rescue package for our universities?

Absolutely right. It is not “addiction to drama” or “personality politics” - there are fundamental problems of policy or governing that these protagonists either failed at or inflicted on the country and got their comeuppance.