It's that time of year again, annual elections for election to Council of the National Trust. Lots of candidates to choose from. Read carefully and vote wisely if you don't want the direction of travel to be backward.

The Conservative MP for Huntingdon is vocal against racism. I continue to anticipate a member of the Labour government will challenge overt racism sometime soon after a month of inexplicable silence

For friends in Beijing who are interested in the music scene, beginning today we are starting a new weekly series at My Dramamine, featuring many of the best composers and experimental musicians in Beijing and China. The series kicks off with performances by Zhang Shouwang and Wang Xu.

📣 OUT NOW: Our new briefing explores the practice of humanitarian evacuation in conflict settings, which is often seen as a last resort due to ethical dilemmas and risks involved. HPG researcher @verobarbelet.bsky.social unpacks in detail, with examples from Ukraine and Syria ⤵️

This, from the Quakers, is a pretty good example of how to resist pressure from bigot lobbying groups. Effectively “we legally can allow trans people to use the loo, we morally should, and we tried it and nothing bad happened”

When the Beano starts taking pops at you then it's probably time to question your amazing comms and policy strategy.

Just for perspective, a few weeks ago roughly 100,000 turned up for the London Trans+ Pride march. By contrast fewer than 3,000 ACROSS THE WHOLE COUNTRY, have turned up to anti-asylum "protests". Yet we are meant to take the latter as "the voice of the people" and the former as "the minority".

Continue to find inclusion of Square and Compass in best of lists baffling. Never enjoy drinking at places that find every opportunity to remind you that you're an outsider and your presence is, at best, tolerated.

Another approach for Labour than full-bore retreat to 'yes, immigration is a problem, yes it is a squalid experiment, we hate business and commerce' is available and has worked in the past. www.theguardian.com/politics/200...

Obviously the smears against this man are incredibly libellous - and it says a lot about access to the law that he wouldn't be able to afford to Lord McAlpine these fuckers - but at what point does the government clock that it needs to get a grip on this raging online fire of fascist hate?

‘Partition removed the Irish question from British politics. A referendum will not solve the British question in Irish politics.’ This essay by @philipstephens.bsky.social is striking in reminding us how rare it is to get pieces covering the British/Irish relationship these days on.ft.com/45T8p0g

Just back from a meeting in a Harry Potter themed co-working space. This stuff is so weird because i) it's now inseperable from JKR's transphobia, ii) books unlocking imagination giving way to a standard aesthetic (house crest designs now canon), and iii) because said aesthetic is so...cheap?

the home office are not fit for purpose. I will say this every day if I have to. A completely dysfunctional government department that has contributed to the fracturing of our social fabric. And it has zero morals.

The director of our US grad programme in China in a speech at Christmas dinner, 2008: "there are no jobs. I don't know what else to tell you."

That Melanie Phillips is a lunatic conspiracist bigot and racist is not remotely shocking. But the fact that the Times continues to employ her should be.

Also good to see @katewagner.bsky.social doing their thing, probably the only place you'll see Wout and Hölderlin mentioned in the same paragraph this week escapecollective.com/two-immolati...

Bit late to this, but @defector.com Tour de France coverage has been some of the best I've read in years and more than worth the cost of entry. More of this please defector.com/the-tour-de-...

I don't understand why one would buy and read approximately 45 heavy, tree-eating books when one could just read all the paragraphs, in a slightly different order, copied and pasted into a single, barely-edited, 12 million word Warhammer 40k Wiki page

Hello, I am a humanitarian aid worker in a film. My khaki shirt drapes hotly over my toned, bronze frame. I wear a thoughtful, pained expression at all times. I am excellent with children, by whom I am always surrounded. I have never touched a donor report or heard of the ECHO Single Form.

Some of the media want to portray the thousand people protesting on asylum as being a proxy for general public opinion. They wouldn't want to say that about the much larger trans rights + allies protest of up to 100 thousand people www.thepinknews.com/2025/07/26/l...

WOUT!

Technological progress is often equated with shiny gadgets: rockets, robots and AI. But many of history’s most important innovations have been 'boring', and that has big implications for those working on innovation for social good. Nesta's Laurie Smith explores how dull can change the world:

Hey does anyone remember where the police shot Mark Duggan back in 2011 and there were a bunch of very angry people out protesting (alongside a bunch of opportunists) and how it all kicked off? Remember how we were constantly asked to sympathise and engage with people's legitemate conce- Oh.

Commiserations in advance to the long-suffering girlfriends and partners of every nerdy centre-left man in London who will have to endure being taken around this. www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/lon...

He's one of Britain's richest men. So why does Asif Aziz's property company keep leasing London gift shops to overseas students based in abandoned offices or flytipped car parks — before vanishing without paying millions of pounds in taxes? www.londoncentric.media/p/asf-aziz-l...

Having (briefly) run a food distribution programme, I cannot emphasise enough how criminally fucked up and against all good practice every single aspect of this is. Inside Gaza’s ‘death traps’ - on.ft.com/4lF0mdd via @FT

Intrigued to know why Chris Brown's grammy gets a mention, but his conviction for the assault of his then-partner Rhianna does not, in this, a piece about him allegedly assaulting someone in a nightclub. It's almost as if Me Too did not, in fact, go too far. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

It's time to abolish the Home Office. It is not fit for purpose & has totally lost the trust of every stakeholder it serves - We knew that already. So I looked into how it could practically be done for @carladenyer.bsky.social My NEW report out today 👇👇

Also, "idyllic village"? give me a fucking break. Bourton-on-the-Water is a) a town, and b) has been a tourist-choked mess as long as I can remember. Just let people enjoy things.

Someone tried to tell a joke about Patroclus the other day but the hectoring delivery kind of killed it

Dude it was I Suck At Fighting every idiot knows that

Really apparent as a cyclist how much the sheer size of the average car has increased in the past few years. Means more tension over who gets to take up space, more close passes, generally feels much less safe

This should also lead to permanent blacklisting of these assholes by any UN agency or INGO claiming to abide by humanitarian principles

Depressing to read a 68% drop in swift numbers over the last few years. My own crew zooming over local rooftops are definitely fewer in number than 2024. If you can, instal ‘Swift Bricks’ for nesting & plant teasel, scabious, catmint & field maples to attract insects www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

🇸🇾 On the latest episode of @odi.global's #ThinkChangePodcast, HPG’s Leen Fouad joined an expert panel to discuss #Syria’s current challenges, the evolving role of international actors and why Syrians themselves must be at the heart of rebuilding their future. 🎧 Listen in full now: buff.ly/TJvZuwK

Britain has no idea - in terms of its self-image, not economists obviously - what economy it actually has One of my favourite facts to point out is: at over £8bn annually, the *videogames industry* is more than twice as valuable to the UK economy as fishing and steel combined.

Forget the railways. Nationalise Sam Smith's.

Always enjoy @jonathanliew.bsky.social's writing but having read this as a 40-something MAMIL I both feel very seen and also I hate it. www.theguardian.com/football/202...

this just started and i'm already losing my mind and screaming Western white folk basically putting an AI avatar on stage and pretending it is a refugee from sudan — literally interacting with it as if it is a “woman that fled to chad from sudan” just fucking shoot me

This is such a clear elaboration of the fact that there are, in fact, other meanings and values involved in sport that are perhaps more important than the (narrow, blinkered version) of "fairness" that the TERFS insist on elevating above all else.

I have relatives in the medical profession who tell stories of going to conferences and white peers clutching their bags when they enter the lift, of going into work and the staff asking if they live in mudhuts. That’s the level of what we are often dealing with here. The stories would shock you.

Am sure a lot of FCDO colleagues will be cringing at the "incredible expertise" line when being a bit more humble about what "we" have to teach vs. what we can achieve (and learn!) by enabling local capacity with a more open mind is where so much of the current evidence points.

Honestly, at this stage, get fucked. Less and less interested in giving this government any benefit of the doubt when they appear to have adobted "ill-informed, racist granddad" as a cross-cutting comms strategy. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Language or norms, the unsettling feeling of things being not quite as they should be makes more sense when you acknowledge it's a properly *foreign* country, in most ways a lot more so than say France or Poland.

I am begging, begging a major political party not of the hard right to start making arguments that policy should support people's ability to lead *meaningful* lives, not just those that contribute to GDP.

At an economics conference and every slide deck has too many bullet points per slide. They're basically walls of text. Everyone can benefit from getting their hands on a handful of BCG, McKenzie whatever slide decks and seeing how they present information.

In the newest edition of Church Climbing we travel back in time as I tell you about Coventry Cathedral, the story behind it, and the reason it's one of my favourite Cathedrals despite the modern design being very polarising. For me, it's a symbol of peace. Read it here: jayhulme.com/church-climb...

Hmm. Hmmmmmm.