Seems that I re-skeet this earlier and earlier each year …

Universities: Britain’s secret border guards.

To be fair, if there is a formula for academic success, as I have observed it, it is basically this: Do decent quality research. Parcel that research into as many strategically positioned papers as possible. Never put in more effort (or expend more material) than is necessary for any given paper.

I mean… it's wrong, but it's not irrational. If your decision making process is basically a risk/reward calculation designed to maximise your chances of professional success, then cutting corners (actually reading your sources/actually writing your manuscript) is probably beneficial, up to a point.

These people must just waft through life, surrounded by peers and sycophants, their self-assurance matched only by their ignorance.

Their party is losing, but their side is winning.

I was in Budapest four years ago, on the day of the previous election. I saw Viktor Orbán leaving a fancy restaurant at lunchtime, looking very pleased with himself. It seemed unthinkable at that time that he could be out, but here we are. Congratulations Hungary.

Thought of a funny bit. DuckDuckGoed it. Already exists: em-dash-appreciation.org

It would be so easy to tell a university-based story that is both dramatically interesting and realistic: Dishevelled twenty-something wakes up in stealthily parked car; gingerly exits. Sneaks in back door of public gym; showers and brushes teeth. Walks out onto campus. “Oh, hi Dr Smith!” Etc.

Our podcast has landed! Electric World Order: ep 1 - looks at the second wave of the energy transition, and why & how China is making it happen

Abolition is the floor. The minimum. A reasonable compromise.

I wrote about being unemployed, middle-aged, and trying to find a creative voice in a world ever more dominated by self-satisfied mediocrity polycritical.substack.com/p/letter-to-...

I just joined 👍

The “good enough” attitude —valuing productivity for its own sake, pursuing quantity over quality, and generally having low intellectual standards — has long been a path to academic success. AI merely supercharges this. Amazing to see people so openly proud of their own mediocrity though.

World powers are deep in a fight over critical minerals. But for a clutch of lawmakers in Britain's quiet Cornwall, they mean something else: Votes.

New piece for @phenomenalworld.bsky.social, written with @jacktaggart.bsky.social and @tomchodor.bsky.social! It's an attempt at grasping the dismantling of multilateral global governance, in light of intensifying geopolitical rivalries, resurgent state capitalism, and hegemonic crisis. Link below:

There’s this big yellow thing in the sky that’s making everything hot. What the hell is it?

“Lynn, idea for Farage meeting. Jim Davidson hosts the 9 o’clock news. Stop migrants taking taxis.”

It’s difficult to express in words the contempt with which the McSweeney cabal deserve to be regarded, but Ian does a good job in approximating.

Why is every scandal existential for Starmer? Because he has actively worked to eradicate his own support base. And that, along with the Mandelson decision, can be laid at McSweeney's door iandunt.substack.com/p/starmers-m...

He's finally done. They'll hang him out to save themselves, now. But I think it's important to emphasise that Mandelson had and kept power *because* of being a creepy, corrupt spittle-licker. That was his job, and he excelled at it. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

It's just me-dia.

Have to say, I’m getting such Hackers (1995) vibes from our political class these days. They haven’t got the faintest idea what’s actually going on, but they’ll believe whatever some billionaire in a leather jacket tells them. So desperate to be seen to be on the cutting edge. The perfect mark.

The great political contradiction of Trump: he gets a knee-shaking ego-thrill from posing as a callous, imperturbable tough guy, but he also deeply, viscerally needs his people to like him.

Every day it becomes clearer and clearer that the actual political convictions behind what became demonised as “woke,” from 2020 onwards, were pretty much spot on, and those Very Serious People who participated in its demonisation owe us all a series of grovelling apologies.

Caught up with the last season of The Righteous Gemstones: Utterly bonkers (indeed, Bible Bonkers). Large parts make absolutely no sense. The satirical edge is dulled with sentimentality. And, I repeat, it’s bonkers. But when you’ve got John Goodman doing John Goodman things, anything seems possible

I guess Nature publishes Yelp reviews now.

I’m doing this. It’s fun.

open.substack.com/pub/lauriepe... My new writing seminar is really picking up. And current events are making an appearance. Because creative work isn’t about shutting out what’s awful and overwhelming in the world. It’s about taking charge of your reaction to those things.

One day, perhaps in the not so distant future, this man’s heart will give out, under the weight of McDonald’s hamburgers and narcissistic malice. There will be dancing in the streets, people will hug their children, and his name will go down in history as a byword for all that is pathetic and base.

How many op-Ed’s will be written on “here’s the solution to the male loneliness epidemic: protecting neighbors from ICE”

Tooze knows that you don’t have to be a dogmatic Marxist to be a Marxist. This is a journalist’s paraphrase of some offhand comments. He isn’t a Marxist because he’s a left-liberal economic historian turned public intellectual, obsessed with “conjuncture.” He’s really a Hallian. Post-post-Marxist.

Just did that thing where I accidentally knocked a jar out of the cupboard and managed to catch it before even realising what was happening 💪

Debates continue to circulate—as they should—about the utility of neoliberalism as a category of analysis and political practice. Myself + three other historians wrote a brief overview of how it works in our field for the Royal Historical Society @royalhistsoc.org www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

The danger of a Harris-type is that they won’t do anything to reverse the fascistic developments, once they have a chance. But that doesn’t mean they would—or could!—ever have intensified state violence like this in the first place. That’s kind of their whole thing: all talk, no gumption.

Very Serious political scientists who ignore feminist and critical race scholarship are just taking L after L these days.

This piece fits my impression of the road that anti-“Woke” has taken: It may have started for some as a semi-self-conscious ruse by which reactionaries can imagine themselves as brave truth-tellers. However, it has since become their entire reality. In extreme cases, the result is clinical paranoia.

It’s not that he’s become more racist in himself so much as that racism itself has intensified, and he reflects that. He’s a narcissist. A fragile ego in the shape of a human. He does whatever makes him feel superior. Racism makes him feel superior. So, as racism becomes more extreme, so does he.

“It big. Big good. Me want.” He genuinely is this simple. With all the Discourse in recent days over Venezuela and Greenland, it’s really striking how commentators of every political persuasion *still* try to make rational sense out of this guy’s fascistic whims. It’s ego *all the way down*.

Amateur hour. I download all the articles I won’t read and load them into DEVONthink Pro. That way I can tell myself I’m creating a database.

Britain is economically stagnating, not collapsing. But this seems beside the point. Social cohesion has long depended on a sense of progress. Sure, you hate your job, and your boss is a prick. But your kids will be better off than you, so you grin and bear it. And who believes that anymore?

I’ve often thought that, if the academic profession really gave a damn about teaching (structurally rather than just individually), there would be journals for publishing teaching materials that are peer-reviewed for accuracy, quality, and level-appropriate accessibility.

I've just started working on a new article. There's a non-zero chance that this'll be the last academic text I write (because academic careers basically aren't a thing anymore). However, I'm not here to sadpost. [1/6]

great news, everyone! turning a 5 into a 6 because you forgot the year is one of the easiest ones to fudge! turning a 6 into a 7 won't be so simple

most depressing billboard I have ever seen

Layers upon layers, here. DOGE dimwits not being able to see beyond their own noses. No one involved apparently aware that redaction fails are common and need to be checked. Underneath this, Adobe’s enshittification of their software to justify more expensive enterprise licenses. Glorious.

Older family member the other day, looking up from watching YouTube on his iPad: “Apparently climate change is a load of bollocks and AI is going to prove it!”

Good lord, if this “partner content“ isn’t a symptom of our times, I don’t know what is.