The wonderful @scotunipress.bsky.social has some vacancies on the Editorial Board, which I chair - if you care about Open Access scholarship, academic accessibility and not-for-profit academic publishing, come and join us. T&Cs, details and processes 👇 #OpenAccess

NEW: Nobody in Britain is going to see the new Melania movie – I've crunched the data to prove it (FREE TO READ) takes.jamesomalley.co.uk/p/i-really-d...

My Twitter account had the gold-standard explanation of why WASPI women enrage. Definitionally they cannot produce a sympathetic case study. Follow along with me: > The supposed injustice and grounds for their campaigning are that they were not informed, not the change in age itself. So:

What is going on here? If Vue had a policy of showing 99% of BBFC approved films I would be delighted but I do not believe it does. That’s well over 1000 films a year!

I do not say this lightly when I tell you, as a proud Scot, that this is the funniest thing Keir Starmer has ever done.

I have no problem with the idea that Burnham might be better than Starmer but everything about this was stupid: forcing a mayoral by-election; turning the Gorton by-election into a psychodrama (and possibly losing Labour both); implausible claims about wanting to back the government by doing this.

Ok, this is bad if you know what it’s referring to but what on *earth* would you make of that graphic if you didn’t?

Wondering whether glasses with very thin/minimal wire rims will become de rigueur in future years as people try to reassure those around them that they’re not being filmed. (Possibly not; for all that people are rightly worried about these products on here I suspect the wider public may just shrug.)

During the 2015 Labour leadership contest I did a series of posts where the candidates reacted to the news of the day and given AB is back in the running I'll re-up a couple here. Cecil The Lion

This is a fun thread, and I particularly agree with this: I am very sceptical of gifts which are effectively a request that the recipient use their time in a particular way which may not actually be of interest to them.

The bit about running 1.5 miles reminds me of this fact I stumbled across yesterday: in investigating the JFK assassination the Warren Commission felt the need explicitly to record that 0.9 miles was the sort of distance that a person, or at least one specific person, could manage to walk.

and once again: you can pre order here www.amazon.co.uk/No-Second-Ch...

Just came across proceedings in the Scottish Parliament years ago where an MSP felt the need to tell colleagues that “Even Professor Chalmers would accept that taking an action that ends another person’s life is already illegal”, as if trying to reassure colleagues about my planned reign of terror.

One reason for not allowing world leaders to publish statements directly on their own social media sites is that a civil servant might have discreetly edited out “consummated” here.

He’s clearly just not taking proper advantage of Iceland if he thinks that.

“We obviously want to ask him about Greenland” is the logical journalistic approach but: you’re not going to learn anything and you may just provoke him into a 300% tariff on some random product, so I wonder whether there’s a case for “we’re just going to ask him what his favourite breed of dog is”.

Letter in Times today

Is this the approach they took to winning the 2024 election?

One blackly comic aspect of this is that the literal President of the United States is trying to prove how important he is by showing that world leaders send him text messages and getting a small country he doesn’t respect to give him a shiny medal. It’s ok! You’re the President! That’s a big deal!

right let’s see what’s happening on bl— oh lord

“I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of peace.”

Sometimes I think people can be quick to call for the EU/UK to do X without thinking about the costs (not to say we shouldn’t but you should recognise why politicians are cautious), and then I realise I have no idea what the costs of actions actually *are* because this whole situation is so mad.

Some of this is welcome but the general approach of members of Congress is as frustrating as ever: “this is a terrible idea about which I am very concerned, but I don’t want to rush headlong into anything radical like voting against it”.

Nine years ago a Twitter user was sending poetry to Sadiq Khan about London’s many cultural identities. A decade on, Reform UK’s mayoral candidate doesn’t dispute it was her old account - so what’s changed? Our profile of Laila Cunningham: www.londoncentric.media/p/laila-cunn...

Presumably a decent chunk of people will use this feature out of curiosity because it sounds so mad, wind up ordering pretty much the same thing they would have ordered anyway, and then someone will be able to say “our AI feature sold XXX pizzas!” omitting the words “that we would have sold anyway”.

The wait is over. Democratising spy watching: Public oversight of intelligence-driven surveillance in Southern Africa is out now. 🎉 Get your copy and dive in today: https://www.sup.ac.uk/forthcoming-books #NewRelease #BookDrop

Completely mad that this is even being discussed. Olympic medals occasionally get sold or given away but no-one pretends you can become the 100m champion by application of the transitive property.

!!!!!

Bold to do this without saying what the truth allegedly *is*, like a dumped teenager posting a cryptic status update on MSN Messenger back in the day.

The local farm where I grew up became a major ice-cream brand, which I was amused to discover years later was (allegedly, at least) simply down to a conversation about "loads more people are buying skimmed milk, do you reckon we should do anything with all this left-over cream?"

Tonight's turret meeting will be pretty awkward

“In defence of my colleague, he was motivated purely by considerations of personal advantage.”

In which I discuss the current Criminal Code offences that could conceivably be used to address sexual deepfakes and deep nudes, and the scope of the "new" offence in Bill C-16.

Leaving aside the way this is visualised: of course there are a “top 2000” areas by recorded crime? What does that even tell you? Would it be some kind of policy triumph if crime rates were high but exactly equal by location?

“ending the war on protein”? Did I miss something? 1.2-1.6g/kg seems overly high but is a standard sort of figure for someone doing weight training, which does make you wonder if RFK Jr is picking these numbers himself. (Every American should be able comfortably to lift a dead bear.)

Given that the US already has a military presence on Greenland and seems unclear on exactly what it would *do* with it, I wonder whether they might just raise a flag, say “ours now” and insist Google Maps rename it while Europe says “we don’t recognise that” and everyone muddles through uneasily.

what people perceive as rightwing anti-intellectualism and anti-expertise trends are 100% seeping into the overly-online-left in the form of whatever this is and the related ‘if stories are about a topic or character they are endorsing that and if you try to analyze it you are also endorsing it”

While the Nazi robot is getting a rightful kicking over its facilitation of widespread sexual offending, I would like to plead my case for this unrelated outrage.

Letterboxd just sent me my 2025 summary, and there’s a missed opportunity for a collaboration if ever I saw one.

This made me realise realise I can only very vaguely remember what my institution’s rules about mask-wearing in class were and how long they lasted because - it just wasn’t that big an imposition? Imagine still railing about them years later?

Part of the problem is that so many people are allergic to making a non-technocratic argument. If this citizen, whose claim to citizenship is 'because my mother is', why not anyone else? The question that broadcasters need to ask and the argument the government needs to make.

"The perfect conclusion to a wonderful trilogy, and like its predecessors it will lift spirits and warm hearts." Many thanks to "Scots Whay Hae!" for naming Upon A White Horse in the top ten non-fiction books of 2025. www.scotswhayhae.com/post/as-a-ma...

Having had a day to think through everything about El-Fattah, here's where I stand. Yes, it's possible to believe all of these things at once! In fact, it really shouldn't be that hard.

Home Alone 2, for a culturally, historically and aesthetically significant cameo. Many people are saying this!

Back home for Christmas and impressed by the local council’s efforts to keep the town’s elderly population mentally alert and engaged [fiendishly complicated multiple bin sorting and collection schedule with special Christmas adjustments]

How I’m turning up to the Bluesky Christmas party.

Being only aware of Chris Rea through a few songs, I was not expecting lines like “2005’s Blue Guitars was 11 CDs and 137 tracks long”.