So, my customary period of absitence from social media begins. I'll just leave this here: open.spotify.com/track/3qF9Ay...

Lost my phone in London, with four credit cards and £150 cash in the case. Returned to me within 21 minutes. This hellhole of a city eh.

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Karita Mattila IS Liza Minnelli IS Klytämnestra

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Jesse Jackson, the Baptist minister and civil rights leader who mounted two groundbreaking but unsuccessful bids for the Democratic presidential nomination, has died aged 84. ft.trib.al/jlMv97E

Love. Unity. Hope. These are the things that will stop the far right in its tracks ✋ Join us in London on 28 March for the Together Against the Far Right national demonstration Save the date and sign-up for updates 🔗 togetheralliance.org.uk #Together #WeAreTheMU #BehindEveryMusician #Unity

The wonderful thing about Tyggers Is Tyggers are burning bright Their tops are made out of rubber In the forest of the night What bouncy, trouncy, flouncy, pouncy, Immortal hand or eye Did frame the most wonderful thing about Tyggers, Their fearful symmetry!

👀 www.lemonde.fr/en/internati...

It *literally* does. Thats what it is. A document which says youre British.

Celtic Sinfonietta here we come!

One of the things I love about the music of Iannis Xenakis is how “Xenaskissy” it can be. Unmistakeable, almost like he’s parodying himself sometimes. Who else would have written this? A little 5-minute cataclysm. Sounds like a fissure opening in the earth. Fantastic. www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJMU...

How I envision the rest of my life

Moderation in all things. Moderationmaxxing.

I gotta say, "the Pentagon uses a high powered laser to shoot down a party balloon" feels like enough symbolism for awhile. all full up thanks

Wait, I thought Anthropic were the nice guys?

The meaning of words is to be decided not by their use, usefulness, or history, but by their commercial benefit to the most powerful lobby groups. I have a recipe for almond milk in a cookbook from 1226. It has been used as a term in English for hundreds of years. www.theguardian.com/business/202...

Friends from Minneapolis reporting to me that things are at the point where folks are being hidden in other people's houses and we are in the "again" part of "never again" which the "never" was supposed to preclude

Knew nothing about Bad Bunny until the Grammy's. Loved his half-time performance - found it powerful and moving. Reminds me of the William Carlos Williams quote that for a poet to be universal, first he must be local.

*singing to the tune of the Sade song*

Plaid Cymru MP Ben Lake has criticised Reform UK for being “absent” from a parliamentary debate on Russian interference, in the wake of the jailing of its former Welsh leader Nathan Gill for “treachery" Lake was speaking in a Westminster Hall debate on Monday re the petition on Russian interference

Ignore the smears: I have literally never been fed, like ever. A. Cat

My outside bet has always been that REF 2029 never happens. At a time of massive financial instability (including redundancies) around HE it simply seems like an obscene waste of money.

The law on universities and free speech prevents speakers from being *disinvited after they have been invited*. It does not require universities to provide a platform to whoever demands one. Let's not mince words: the threat to cut funding to every university who disagrees with them is fascist.

Please do share this doctoral opportunity with MA/MSt students - four years of AHRC funding to work on the history of children's play in Wales, supervised by me and the lovely and brilliant Dr Jacky Tyrie. Any questions get in touch! www.swansea.ac.uk/postgraduate...

Starmer defies call to quit as UK prime minister ft.trib.al/tHd5d7T

By his dramatic intervention calling for Keir Starmer to resign, Anas Sarwar has drawn attention to himself in ways likely to be deeply unhelpful to his own chances of survival in office and to Labour’s electoral prospects in Scotland. Amazing.

arguably the biggest news of the week that Lisa Nandy is currently doing something related to her brief

Tbf it would probably be more effective if someone not already doomed called for Starmer to go

Bad Bunny’s performance began in the plantation, featured broken electric poles, and ended by centering a hemispheric understanding of “América”—among many other things—and some Anglo journalists are like “his performance wasn’t political.” This is why we need to be telling our stories.

The far right defeated in Portugal - good news to start the week's work

It's not even midnight and we're already at "Deport Elmo."

Applications for Vaughan Williams Scholarships are open! Grants of up to £8K each for postgraduate composition study will be awarded in 2026. Applicants should demonstrate exceptional talent and be planning a professional career in composition. Details via our website.

Nothing makes one prouder to be British than someone resigning in disgrace because we still understand both those words

BREAKING: Morgan McSweeney quits as Keir Starmer's chief of staff amid fall-out from the Mandelson scandal

British values

Evergreen

I do want to shout-out my fellow sociologists, who have collectively created a discipline so woke that not a single one of our introductory textbooks can make it past Florida's censors. Great work everyone.

“Thinking people naturally recoil from conspiracy theories, the favourite hobby of the unthinking. But here is a conspiracy where the evidence is laid bare.”

It is terribly sad that the former PM feels the need to say this in the face of low life blowhards. We cannot allow this to even be a question. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Powerful & comprehensive call to action from former PM Gordon Brown: ‘Every few years, our country has suffered a major scandal that shakes us to the core but from which lessons are never fully learned’ #AntiCorruption #UKPolitics www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

The Murdoch press doing a puff piece on Mandelson this weekend is a stark reminder of how our far right press constantly rehabilitates the rich and powerful no matter how immoral, corrupt or criminal.

UK media is having a moment of self flagellation over their past sycophantic coverage of Mandelson . I don’t want to be cynical but how & why is UK media suddenly going to start holding power to account when they are all owned by a v small group of billionaires 🙄? That would be cannibalism .

Starmer's reported condition - incredibly unpopular, shorn of authority, probably un-reelectable and yet will stagger on for want of an alternative - is just the new normal of how Britain is governed. It was also true for two-thirds of May's premiership, half of Johnson's and all of Sunak's.

The Obama video is the most obvious dead cat I've ever seen. Also: DJT is a heel, understands the value of 'heel heat' and doesn't care why people are talking about him as long as they are.

Why are the men’s names redacted and the victims names exposed?

This sort of feigned shock to the Mandelson shenanigans has been driving me insane so I had to write about democracy being structurally vulnerable to bad faith and that we're being let down by the institutions that should protect that vulnerability.

I realized that a lot of the guys who have been found in the Epstein files are probably really struggling because the guy they would have gone to for advice about being discovered in the Epstein files was JEFFREY EPSTEIN