Starmer: one alpaca Carney: all ostriches Macron, facing the prospect of yet another vote of no confidence in his PM, now commissioning a memo on surplus species.

🎉 Thrilled that the first ever issue of the Scottish Journal of Open Research has published today, #DiamondOA of course! This will be such a great venue to share good #OpenResearch practice. Plus I had my first experience of editing a journal article! 👉https://doi.org/10.36399/f74t5k88

Had wondered *why* Starmer sacked Lucy Powell from the cabinet and starting to think this sort of helpful policy intervention, if it mirrors contributions to Cabinet discussions, might provide a clue.

21 years ago today I thought, huh, looks interesting, and created a Wikipedia account. Things sort of snowballed from there. It's been fun. 21 thoughts on Wikipedia, in no particular order: 🧵

Pleased to see that a film I saw a test screening of earlier this year is confirmed for a cinema release, meaning I can see if they acted on my Important Audience Feedback (pointing out a typo 90 seconds into the closing credits).

I had been wondering whether accidental releases actually overall increase public confidence when the police quickly find the person concerned, giving you high-profile coverage of the system working. Did not actually contemplate that you might lose that benefit by someone handing themselves in.

Voters: “we are really worried that housing has become unaffordable” New York Post: “good news: one candidate can reduce the ferocious demand pushing NYC rents ever higher”

A traveller in an ancient land Once saw a visage drowned in sand It sneered upon the passer by Legless yet mocking to the eye It bade one look upon his ware And counsels thee now to despair He’s now a meme, but for his sins He goes on being King of Kings

Lady Rose's James Wood Lecture, delivered at the University of Glasgow yesterday: supremecourt.uk/uploads/spee...

One thing colouring discussion of this report may be that there have been other reports of people caught by this who have found it very difficult to get HMRC to fix things. But this report seems a bad example because it looks like there was an error and it was fixed, which is much less of a story.

Good piece in spite of where it is. A lot of people need to understand that, in most of Eastern Europe, the only political ideologies with any relevance at all are, for lack of a better term, 'Europeanism' and right-wing nationalism that sometimes deploys Soviet nostalgia

Wrote about the dominance of "victims" in our political discourse, which included this fab chart @owenwntr.bsky.social www.economist.com/britain/2025...

Fully aware this is Reeves’ own responsibility, but: unless for some inexplicable reason you are using a letting agent that does not operate locally how on earth does the agent not tell you something as basic as this? www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Take this quiz to die instantly www.americansurveycenter.org/quiz/

If you think this story looks ridiculous on the face of it, it gets even better when you read it and discover he got a refund on the desk and bought three at £150 each from Ikea instead.

My column in the @ftweekend.com: Keir Starmer is in trouble because he has not been serious about governing, and the best way for him to turn things around is for him to become serious:

Pensioner with dementia living in a care home is convicted in our broken court system over a £43 car bill www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/p... I’ve been writing versions of this story for more than two years now. If politicians were interested in helping vulnerable people, they would act

I guess I don’t think she’ll be a disaster, in that the office provides limited scope for disaster (and Lord knows Michael D has tested the boundaries) but I can’t get past the fact the new president voluntarily went to Syria as a guest of the regime in 2018, when we knew all to there was to know

Downloaded a foreign language Oxford Dictionary app which I would have happily paid for but it wants a subscription - claiming the starting price is £260/year! - so instead I have the version full of cheap and tacky ads which I am not sure is what you really want linked to the Oxford brand name.

Thanks MUBI but I had an ok week at work; is everything ok with you?

I’ve only been loosely following the contest but it did (apart from bizarre comments by Philipson suggesting electing Powell would tear the party in two) feel like “would you like the deputy to be a critical friend or a friendly critic?” in which case I can see why voters might just not bother.

Scroll down to the Major Events Timeline, and nothing will prepare you for what you'll see. I cannot believe it is real. www.whitehouse.gov/about-the-wh...

Call for papers for a workshop on Economic Aspects of the Constitution: www.gla.ac.uk/media/Media_...

Every so often on here someone posts polling data showing that Trump is actually unpopular and this is why I’m not sure that matters: who is going to respond to that? (And also, you know who was even less popular at this stage in their presidency? Trump the first time round. And yet here we are.)

Seonad I'm not sure this is a great idea either *tap* *tap* is this thing on?

Noticeable that again it’s the Lib Dems providing a response while Labour keep silent.

Improved homosexuality, you say?

Hodges is one of the few people resistant to the radicalising influence of X thanks to his superpower: his complete refusal to change his views, even when he is wrong.

how does this story keep getting worse; how is that even possible?

The difference between US and UK politics is that this will have zero consequences for Trump whereas Keir Starmer could plausibly be brought down by installing a tumble dryer in 10 Downing Street.

Apart from anything else this is just complete "jackets and ties must be worn in the members bar of a golf club that's going bankrupt" stuff. Unshakeable assumption that high earning global talent is mad keen to specifically live in the UK and will eat unlimited crap to do so

This is absolute gold — and as ever brilliant work from Tristan

The lettuce livestream is I think easily longer than any film that has had a proper cinema release, which means that the BFI now have the opportunity to do the funniest thing ever.

EXCLUSIVE: One Saturday afternoon in October, my phone lit up with a notification. I glanced down at the message. “Anna, Lindsey Halligan here,” it began. So began my text exchange with the woman who is prosecuting the president's perceived political enemies. www.lawfaremedia.org/article/anna...

“I knew that homosexuality was a sin - I didn’t want to be homosexual. I went to my G.P and said I had read Freud’s book on dreams, that I suffered from homosexuality, and that I would like to change.” My new article now out in Irish Historical Studies: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

my meanest take is that I will trust academics on radicalism and political organization when they have fixed through collective action the academic publishing system.

On the one hand I see where he’s coming from. On the other hand, literally every single bit of commentary I’ve seen on this has been “woo, heist!”

This remains the funniest way to hear about an internet outage, though.

He *might* have become some sort of serious gamer but I also wonder whether this means “yeah we went to see him and he spent all afternoon on Candy Crush again”.

Apropos of nothing, I really do think UK journalists and politicians need some reminding that mass deportation of LEGAL immigrants, particularly those with permanent status, is far more extreme than even Trump's America and would basically place Britain completely on its own among democracies.

Absolutely none of this makes sense. The experience of her refugee parents taught her to be anti-immigrant? The post-war order was built on the assumption of human niceness?

Reading an article published some months back by a former PhD student from years back and it’s probably not healthy that I have been unable to stop myself underlining each typo I find.

A lot that could be said about this but if you look on Twitter it’s noticeable that the replies and quote tweets are *overwhelmingly* telling him he shouldn’t have apologised and even attacking him for doing so. That’s the feedback loop certain users are plugged into now, and it has consequences.

Learned that an anonymous outside expert on submersibles did an interview with the OceanGate Titan investigation, and they released a transcript, with all the names redacted. The first line of his first answer? "I'm sure you're familiar with my film Titanic."

I would like to read a feature about people who agree to submit their co-living disputes to one of the world’s largest news websites and then - presumably convinced of their righteousness or why were they stupid enough to do this? - log on to find an entire BTL section shouting at them.

An unhinged literary opinion needs to be like Muriel Spark believing T.S. Eliot was sending her coded messages through his plays, not 'hear me out, I don't like Dickens'. That is simply a literary opinion. The hinges are very much intact.

I got very curious about this. You can trace Shearer's unit (21 CCS) and you can see what looks like the echo of his little blaze of fame: in Sept 1916 you get visits from various grandees including ... the editor of the BMJ, who presumably came to see for himself.

Next time an institution tells you how seriously it takes research misconduct, ask them if it's *this* seriously. www.bmj.com/content/297/...