Not content with shooting people, abducting and disappearing people, and depriving people of healthcare, the government is now mandating for as many preventable deaths as possible. I guess this is what happens when the rich decide they no longer need slave labour

His LITTLE FACE! His MASSIVE PAWS!

Wyatt has promised to hunt everywhere in the house to help us find the mysterious person who keeps knocking everything onto the floor

The Jehovah's Witnesses came round to ask me if I thought it possible to have a life without pain and suffering. I said no, but also promised them that I think about this stuff a lot. I may have claimed to have "read" the bible Anyway they went away, thank the void

My cat is wearing my other cat as a scarf

As a medievalist reading modern theory and philosophy of love and desire I am frankly MASSIVELY WEIRDED OUT by the authority granted to Denis de Rougemont's utterly bonkers theory

Merrill says whatever you've done, you're still worthy of love

The US has become a vast experiment in moral luck (am I a good person? I don't know; I haven't been tested). I don't know what I would do if the gestapo were at my door. I am overwhelmed with admiration at what thousands of Americans are doing.

A brilliant showing-not-telling-by-telling line in Hollinghurst's Our Evenings: "but there were whole years when I barely thought of him at all"

Absolutely top level trolling

So I genuinely in good faith said to a roomful of people "I can't remember how jazz hands go; what are jazz hands?" And I am now determined to do this on every single possible occasion

The reason lots of people stop outside our window and look in (one bloke even took a picture the other day)

Absolutely inspiring stuff from Carney

It's surely not *beyond* Keir Starmer to realize that this isn't a Neville Chamberlain moment, it's a Winston Churchill moment (The irony! How derangedly upset the hard right would be if we took back our moral patriotism!)

This is a fantastic article with a lot of simple explanations in it of everyday counterintuitive bullshit, just as you’d expect from Cory Doctorow. Yeah AI is a bubble. But what sort of bubble? Who puffed it up? And what do we do? www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

"Just a little nibble?"

Snooker was made for cats

Ready for whatever the hell news comes out of America next

You know when people say "You're just paying extra for the view"? Yes. Yes I am. That's exactly what I'm doing

Wow so yeah I loved America's early work on coffee, Italian food, optimism, and power showers, but unfollowing now

Dawn run round Rome marked by many opportunities to stop and try and take a cool photo. Gap between "run time" and elapsed time NOT A THING SHUT UP.

Here's what we could have had instead of Christianity: wrestling bulls while wearing a scarf with a wind machine

www.theguardian.com/world/2026/j... Just the perfect heartwarming bonkers story and video we need. A real world problem only soluble by Wallace & Gromit

So I am cat-sitting an elderly & depressed ex-feral cat (he wants love but JUST CAN'T ASK & periodically hisses like an elderly con who threatens to sort you out) & I really miss my sweet youthful gatti but am also REFLECTING ON MORTALITY & the essential love & responsibility that connects us all

I am being interviewed by sparrows

They excavated a bunch of stuff in the nineteenth century and at some later point stuck bits in the wall at random and it looks amazing, like found poetry or a ridiculously overblown metaphor for history and posterity

Rome: looks great even when the weather is terrible

Hmm so that thing when the young hot waiter flirts too much for too long & you suddenly realise he really might think you're within ten years of his age but you really aren't & now you're properly proleptically humiliated that he might realise this at any moment Do the Germans have a word for that?

Frozen canal and St Barnabas, Jericho

In what's now become an annual tradition, I've written another piece for The Gist about how and why I hate A.I. On a bubble about to burst, a future rotted to its core, and the limits of the Mrs Doyle Theory of artificial intelligence. www.thegist.ie/guest-gist-2...

Wyatt wants to hunt the foxes on the telly. Rather glad he's an indoor cat 😬

Happy new year

Tory leader with unerring instincts for publicity absolutely definitely not threatening to shoot a soldier

[Baz Luhrman R+J voiceover voice] THE BOYS, THE BOYS

Wintry view towards my island in the Thames

I am reminded of how reminiscent the snowman in Frozen is of the T1000 in Terminator 2, in their challenge to our illusions of bodily integrity and ambivalent definitions of life. In this essay I will

Niece reads kiddy version of Romeo & Juliet. "Did it make you sad?" "No. I liked it when Tybalt got killed, he was mean"

We have the cat who's happy on top of the blanket and the cat who always wants to be underneath

Christmas Eve Christ Church Meadow

people always laugh when bears run away from housecats because they're so much bigger but like. imagine you were in the woods & you ran into a weird little guy that looks kinda like you but like 1/5th the size & his head is shaped weird & he is running toward you full tilt yelling. what would you do

Just when you thought 2025 couldn't get any worse, Chris Rea has died just before Christmas

Guess who won Christmas Bingo you losers

This is actually a deeply charming story, especially when they give the goose a little blanket and some porridge oats

Gorgeous run round Aldeburgh and Thorpeness today

Oxford afternoon run

This is normally a bridge over the Thames. We deliquesce

Secret Santa posts are reminding me of the time in my first real job when the amazing and lovely administrator in the department bought me nipple tassels. And it was quite an eye-opener onto the impression I was inadvertently making on my colleagues.

😧 Oh no … Forget about it 😼

I mean I didn't think fonts had strong political overtones but now this happens I realise I years ago switched from TNR (basic conservatism) to Garamond (look at my individuality, just like all these other cool kids!) to Calibri (I am now an adult; please read the words) and, well. Feel a bit smug

Excellent piece by @gideonrachman.bsky.social - which frames the NSS correctly and walks through the three plausible implications for Europe. All of them are worrying, and will be a big part of our research coverage at Eurasia Group going forward