"acceptable in the 80s" will turn 20 next year btw

I'm losing 100% of my pay this month, and for the foreseeable future, because of management's punitive response to the marking and assessment boycott launched by @ucuedinburgh.bsky.social to try and stop compulsory redundancies. www.ucu.org.uk/article/1448...

does "darling how could we develop this beautifully" sound less mental in polish

Burnham is so fascinating to watch. His rebrand from fey Blairite wonk to bluff northern dad was cleverly done but as soon as he gets near the prize – and in the white glare of the national spotlight – he starts anxiously triangulating, and always ends up alienating everyone in sight.

sagejournals one day you will know my vengeance istg

did anything else happen around that time

New Gist: Britain, the Ungoverned Country The Labour Party's problem since Kier Starmer was elected was that it fed itself disinformation and pooped disaffection. This is the Gist.

first as tragedy then as farce

americans really do say "aughts" huh

if you don't like the list the thing to do is not post about it. posting about the list is the point of the list

what's that

This is an appalling case and Germany deserves far greater international opprobrium over it and similar actions. It also shows why citizenship-on-probation, and other measures that create hierarchies of rights within the same society, must be resisted without compromise.

holy shit they bred ant and dec

Elite politics until v. recently was all about Oxford PPEists, but today's drama has Josh Simons (St John's, Cambridge) standing down as an MP to facilitate the return to the Commons of Andy Burnham (Fitzwilliam, Cambridge), in order to thwart the ambitions of Wes Streeting (Selwyn, Cambridge).

got to the point where I see the word "entanglement" in a table of contents and immediately close the book

Most medium-sized English cities are going to be left devastated by the HE crisis if government doesn’t do something soon.

This is mad. Paddy Ashdown was only called Paddy because he was Irish. His actual name was Jeremy.

Eleven years ago the UK was number one on this list, leading Europe in LGBTI rights. It's now 22nd. The list is deliberately relational - countries can lose places simply by standing still while others progress - but the UK has actively harmed LGBTI rights as well. It is a shameful legacy.

pisses me off syndrome is absolutely right

2700 academic staff at @uniofnottingham.bsky.social received formal notice today that their job is at risk. Approximately 1-in-5 (22%) will lose their job. In an interview in today’s @timeshighered.bsky.social the university’s VC responded “it’s an exciting time for higher education”.

i know I'm a stupid idiot who believes in things like rule of law and fair trials but I genuinely don't understand how this can possibly be allowed. forbidding discussion of motives too. like why is a judge permitted to do that, he asked naively

andy burnham has turned up in euston with a bucket of fried chicken and a fishing rod.

3 actual quotes from this piece: “Can I afford the tax? Yes. Is it going to deter me? No. But I think it’s shameful. I provide a lot of money to people who are blue-collar workers who work for me, servers in restaurants." giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

british politics is at its purest when people are scheming to knife each other. feels like home

get caught up on the backstory while you can't get caught up on grading theamericanvandal.substack.com/p/historyofc...

reading these election results and thinking about the time i was saying "the thing about the labour right is-" and a friend interrupted me and said "yes yes they're the worst people you've ever met in your life. you're always saying that."

Sneak peek of the cover of SCREENING WOMEN FILMMAKERS — massive new collection of *59* essays edited by @bellecobb.bsky.social @cinemariasf.bsky.social and Dijana Jelǎca under the direction of series editor @garyneedham.bsky.social

a thing i have learnt today is that condé nast was a guy

Labour Friends of Plane Crashes

🤷‍♂️

does anyone know of a good history of the term "midcentury modern"?

finally catching up on season 2 of severance. do they ever figure out why adam scott's hair is like that

I'm Lead Judge of the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction, awarded at University of Edinburgh since 1919 and due to be announced this month. But the university is currently withholding 100% of my pay for participating in a marking and assessment boycott. So, at present, there will be no prize.

Again, cannot be stressed enough, mere months into Starmer’s premiership, hundreds of radicalised right-wingers attempted open pogroms, attacking places of worship and hotels housing people coded as brown and Muslim, and our he has shown zero interest in interrogating what catalysed those actions.

I get a lot of AI slop book marketing emails, but this is the first time I have ever been . . . mistaken for Jane Austen.

i've yet to see a take here that comes anywhere near competing with this

happy may day everyone

happy international workers' day! see you at 6.30 ✊️

I will hammer this point. It took five years for a High Court to determine exactly what I and dozens of others said was happening: this was a manufactured moral panic, based on flimsy (and, as it turns out, nonexistent!) evidence, to remove harassment policies protecting trans professors/students

This is an excellent result for anyone who cares about actual freedom of speech, as well as academic freedom and about not having *the government* meddle in university business.

abolish the "office for students"

ryanair love to tease you with the prospect of boarding and then put you in The Pen

British MP who went to Oxford herself spending several posts explaining to Bluesky users that she does not wish to defend higher education in the UK, because 4 in 5 in her constituency don’t go to university, is the perfect embodiment of a particular kind of British class bullshit too

i have been teaching a module on paranoid and conspiracy media this spring and for this story to break the *week after* the end of term... i am so upset

in case anyone was wondering what it's like working in the uk university sector at the moment

examples of midcentury sad girls in film and literature?

DELIGHTFUL book

HOW had I never seen this