Adrian Vermeule reads Herodotus - rather eccentrically… thesphinxblog.com/2025/11/13/o...

Sophocles (fragment from The Sons of Aleus): “It is money that finds friends for men, and also honours, and finally the throne sublime of royalty, nearest to the gods. And no one is an enemy to money, or if they are, men deny their hatred of it…

“The Classics are still relevant!”

Once again, the Labour Party shows just how out of touch it is with ordinary people by launching a campaign website in Latin! We didn't all study at Orxford you know

We have chaos and Ed Miliband, they're just not evenly distributed.

“We have created the Single Point Of Failure from the famous organisational PowerPoint slide ‘Beware of the Single Point Of Failure’.”

What does Herodotus tell us about mad tyrants’ sexual desires and judges’ betrayal of the law? Nothing! Actually it’s all about the moral bankruptcy of liberalism… thesphinxblog.com/2025/11/13/o...

Elon Musk: da nine books that everyone should read are 9) Brainology: The Secret Science of Ensmartification 8) Numbers: What Numerals Get Wrong about Integers 7) Future Time Now: How Silicon Valley Makes Yesterday's Present into Tomorrow's Past

It is crazy that there is no testing or licensing regime for these things, dozens of deaths later. A drug which had such serious mental side effects would have been withdrawn instantly

This does feel rather like an update of Alan Coren's Golfing For Cats.

Narrowing this down is incredibly difficult, as teen me was all about the books… 1. Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet 2. E.H. Carr, What Is History? 3. J.G. Ballard, The Voices of Time 4. Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time 5. Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch

Autumn bounty.

Repost with an iconic fictional band.

Butterflying sardines is a useful skill at which I need much more practice.

“The only examples it provides among high-priority sources, apart from X users, are ArXiv (itself contending with an influx of LLM content) and PubMed for scientific/technical topics and Kremlin dot ru for historical events.” Uh huh.

Definitely overcomplicate it. Tom Holland steps out of the car, says my name's Bondjamesbond, raises an eyebrow, says "were you expecting someone else?", embarks on complex chase sequence ending in him being torn apart by crocodiles. Idris Elba steps out of the shadows…

Higher education has been in crisis since students stopped wearing hats.

A relentless series of programmes implying that slavery is bad, without giving pro-slavery views the same prominence. Failure to do exactly what Reclaiming History demanded on all occasions. Persistent platforming of claims that all human beings have equal rights and deserve respect. #BBC

It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel that some people feel a bit too fine about this… thesphinxblog.com/2025/11/09/a...

This didn’t go at all as expected - two minutes before the opening discussion of cultural depictions of civilisational collapse I was still trying to make up my mind between Gustave Doré’s The New Zealander and Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s The Dead Flag Blues… www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

This needs saying again & again: UK unis are knowingly accepting 1000s of students without the necessary English skills to fully engage with their courses they'll be studying on. And *that's not those students' fault*. Why wouldn't they assume these institutions know how to teach them effectively?

This is a really fascinating discussion of changing linguistic conventions and how women are expected to write differently. debuk.wordpress.com/2025/11/06/e...

Ah yes, the Burgess review. Like Tomlinson on re-thinking A-Levels, far too well-informed and sensible to have had any hope of being adopted.

National Trust council elections saw a defeat for the Restore Trust campaign. 35k members voted to re-elect a slate of council candidates endorsed by the nominations committee 12k - 13.5k voted for candidates on Restore Trust slate Non-slate candidated www.nationaltrust.org.uk/who-we-are/a...

The point of politics is to do what individuals can’t do for themselves alone. Nobody wants to be sitting in traffic all day but in the absence of political action all we can do as individuals is sit in traffic in a nicer car. Primitive self-defeating behaviour that politicians are supposed to fix.

Oh dear. “Cynical efforts by political leaders to harness and exploit religious sentiment are as old as human society. Through his conversion, the fourth-century Roman emperor Constantine co-opted the rising power of Christianity.” www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Back home in Somerset, worrying that I may have been somewhat indiscreet on the radio last night with regard to post-apocalypse plans. Did I mention the need to collectivise the local big estate? They may be developing their defences…

If you see this post an album cover with a motor vehicle on it.

Belated realisation that there were some interesting parallels to explore between the surreptitious hanging out of flags along streets across the UK and the surreptitious mutilation of the herms in the streets of Athens in 415 BCE.

Someone really ought to have developed some J.G. Ballard scenarios for an rpg system.

On the key elements of the new future-facing university strategic vision (full version). thesphinxblog.com/2025/11/07/t...

OVER A MILLION USERS DISCUSS SUICIDE WITH CHATGPT EVERY *WEEK* what the fuck are we DOING here

I am having my first ever glass of bourbon - still trying to calm down after discussion of apocalypse and Peter Hitchins’ obsession with government debt levels - and it’s not half bad. I mean, I still prefer Islay single malt, but not bad.

Rosalind Franklin Leaving her notes in a pile That she keeps by the door Who is it for? Awful James Watson Stealing the credit And snaffling all the awards Misogynist bore

a mental health crisis among British students whilst universities are pushing faculty to accept or even encourage students using generative AI is a catastrophe waiting to happen

there's an entire sub culture of middle age men who are so impervious to other views that at no point have they ever read any of the many comments pointing out that an obsessive interest in student politics is deeply fucking creepy? anyway, this is worse.

The car’s on fire, and there’s no driver at the wheel… We’re trapped in the belly of this horrible machine, and the machine is bleeding to death. www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

While I have long since deactivated my Ex-Twitter account, the Thucydides Bot continues to correct misquotations there; and it is striking how far Notifications, let alone Following, is full of culture war crap from people in whose opinions I have no interest (currently, a lot of Dawkins).

In many ways it would be preferable to think that GenAI is actually trying to kill us all, albeit very slowly, than that it’s a mindless black box mirroring our darkest and most destructive thoughts back at us.

To that there London! For an exciting and fun event on Decadent Politics this evening, which obviously has no contemporary relevance to anything. bads.gold.ac.uk/decadent-pol...

Since the 1980s we’ve been trying to convince ourselves we’re a bit like America whilst point-blank refusing to accept the kind of extreme economic insecurity Americans have to cope with. We’re not America, we’re a European country with an identity crisis

“The substitution of AI for human will affect and alter the results. It changes the process…from inputs to outputs to reactions to the changed process. The notion that you can just swap out teacher judgment at this one point in the process and nothing else will be altered is naive and foolish.”

“Please think about students using chatbots to ‘augment’ their learning and thereby becoming conditioned to expect that their interactions with their educators, whether human or digital, should start from a foundation of obsequiousness.” - @benjaminjriley.bsky.social

I wrote this yesterday about what to tell young people who are worried about what work will be in the age of AI: naomialderman.substack.com/p/preparing-...

This imagined defense by Cheney ("What I Got Right About the Iraq War") from The Onion in 2023 ought to run as a sidebar to every obit that's published this week: is.gd/mzdB9j

Pop quiz: who wrote this? “Those who understand the past are well qualified to predict the future.”

Ipse dixit.

Received a very fancy email from a predatory publisher this morning. This one’s a doozy. 🧵

A couple of interesting articles on sortition (although the first should have had the same word limit as the second; I found the bits about the metaphysics of knowledge less pressing than the bits about, well, sortition). prometheusjournal.org/2025/11/04/s... prometheusjournal.org/2025/11/04/a...

It occurred to me in the shower this morning that ‘There Are Worse Things I Could Do’, the Stockard Channing song from Grease, works really well when gender-flipped - without changing the lyrics.