I found this the most revealing exchange in the (excellent) conversation between Ezra Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates. TNC makes this really important (and subtle) point: www.nytimes.com/2025/09/28/o...

As the great man said, "A simple way to take measure of a country is to look at how many want in and how many want out.”

Yesterday was an eye-opening AI day for me. There was no single, mind-blowing "this changes everything" moment. On the contrary, it was precisely that there were a dozen completely unrelated things, spanning the personal and the professional.

Should anyone 😬 be interested in a very readable single volume history of Liberia, I can recommend James Ciment’s “Another America” www.abebooks.co.uk/978080902695...

I don't disagree with the thrust of Sam's excellent piece but I'd argue that when considering ANY organisational change it's very seductive a) to focus on the diagnosis of all the things that are wrong and b) to think that a new structure will fix it (1/x)

Yes, total bullshit. WTLBH and TS&TW deserve their place in the top 5. Paper Dolls is brilliant on loss, joy and memory and should be way higher. None of the others would make my list. For sheer creative genius I don’t understand how you can overlook Charlie Cook’s Favourite Book.

I ❤️ this paper, and not just because it touches on our work @risingacademies.bsky.social in Liberia. There is a fundamentally hopeful message here, namely: "Electoral rewards for the policy were commensurate with its effectiveness." Bravo @wsandholtz.bsky.social

This reminds me of the spectacular occasional @vizcomic.bsky.social series Half-Arsed Inventions, my favourite of which is the origin story of the sandwich toaster

Can’t help feel the “etc” made it a little too obvious they were phoning it in

Having my first experience of GPT 4o just being absolutely *terrible* at a task it was really good at a couple of months ago. As a Watford fan, this is a quite familiar experience, but not one I have had with AI before.

This is a great bit of reporting and my main takeaway is that the options that made the final cut were, astonishingly, the best of a truly terrible bunch.

I'm not sure it would ever have been possible to hold back the tide given persistent pressure on government spending. I basically stand by everything I wrote here about why that was predictable, and therefore the wrong focus. But I agree the sector didn’t help itself. medium.com/@pauljskidmo...

Startling numbers from Devex on the impact of the USAID funding freeze: $56bn in undisbursed commitments across ~12,000 recipient organisations. www.devex.com/news/how-the...

It is frustrating that every time there is an opportunity to test the more rigorous, more agile, more participatory methods the government championed in opposition, it seems to be ignored.

Good (and brave) piece this www.devex.com/news/opinion...

I have successfully achieved a similar trick in persuading my two that there is such a thing as "grown-up" cereal (i.e. horrendously unhealthy sugary ones) which only I'm allowed to eat.

Big Organisation Syndrome: the tendency for large organisations (that don't have to worry about how to make payroll) to treat smaller organisations (that do) like sh*t. And yes, this is a subskeet.

Great opening salvo from @raviguru.bsky.social. Love the idea about installers. Kevin @mulagostarr.bsky.social and his team like to ask their orgs "exactly who needs to do exactly what differently". This is a great example of how asking that question creatively gets you to interesting answers...

Never look back, that’s my motto

#Ghana showing how it’s done, with current VP and ruling party presidential candidate Mahamudu Bawumia graciously conceding before any results have officially been declared www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Something I don’t understand about twin studies where the intervention is something like this. Are the twins supposed to stop talking to each other, or eating at each other’s house? Seems hard to avoid contamination.

This might be the single worst op-ed in the history of op-eds.

With Rachel Reeves’ first budget around the corner, idea for a retail crowd-pleaser courtesy of Ghana’s ruling NPP. Though I’d recommend changing “Premier League” to “Championship” and perhaps more specifically “Watford FC”

I've seen pieces in the UK press praising the British Nobel winners, but I haven't seen anything highlighting the fact that there were British winners in multiple categories this time (physics, chemistry and economics). Maybe I'm misremembering but isn't that unusual - and worth celebrating?

More mission-driven* doctors deliver better outcomes for patients at lower cost, according to a new US study. 41% fewer potentially preventable A&E visits and 9% lower spending cc @danhonig.bsky.social jamanetwork.com/journals/jam... * Strictly speaking, "more altruistic" but tapping the same idea

A quote I love (from a book on writing) is that "brevity comes from selection not compression". I found that applied to cost savings in my business too. It's hard for govt to just stop doing things. But esp on the centre-left it feels like there needs to be a more public conversation about this.

Counterpoint: making people in poor countries better off does not reduce migration (the opposite is true, as Michael Clemens' work shows), and using that as a rationale for defending the aid budget is tantamount to conceding that migration is intrinsically bad www.theguardian.com/business/202...

Reminds me of this spectacular gag from Top Secret, featuring a very young Warren Clarke and an even younger Val Kilmer www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkWj...

Achievement of the morning: managing to add a tiny Bluesky logo and link to my email signature, and deleting the Twitter one that used to be there. I guess that makes it official!