It was odd that Ukraine’s main response to the mass destruction of its large conventional power stations by Russian strikes last year seems to have been to repair them so they could be destroyed again

Great and brave reporting by the upstart startup Sheffield Tribune. A reminder that the internet is still available for the proper reporting of ‘local’ news if you do it right

Nigel Farage, man of the people. (Courtesy @chrisgiles.ft.com)

On the left, the refurbished Lincoln bathroom. On the right, picture I took in Saddam Hussein's palace in Basra in 2005.

This story is jaw-dropping. "Chinese-run facilities have recently been discovered in the Philippines and the desert outside Dubai. In 2022, Chinese scammers took over the shuttered Seaview Hotel on the Isle of Man...". @alexclapp.bsky.social www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4... @lrb.co.uk

Trump style makes me think of its antecedents, which makes me think of Napoleon III, which makes me think of Flaubert, which makes me think of this from Julian Barnes in the new LRB

My creative process www.worldofmoose.com/collections/...

Having read this none the wiser why the Met chases these petty crims in helicopters instead of following the stolen phone which is literally telling you every second where it is

Ed Luce watching democracy die in the United States of America

"If you wanted to design a policy that would cause human misery and be about as popular as typhoid in a jacuzzi, it is difficult to imagine how you could do better than this. This is a more extreme policy position than, say, the BNP’s 2005 manifesto"

Milei looks like all the cast of Are You Being Served in one

Omg Portland REALLY understands the mission. Pass this on. We need this movement nationwide 🔥🔥

I don't know where this revisionism has come from about the suffragettes - people saying "if the suffragettes were around today, they'd be considered terrorists." The suffragettes were arrested and tortured, sexually assaulted and beaten by the state. They *were* considered terrorists!

Are the childhood transgressions of bullies, dodgy business people and trolls not classified as 'neurodivergence' because society deems it normative, or is it that educators are cowed by controlled, self-possessed, confident aggression and deceit in a way they aren't by autism & hyperactivity?

I wrote about Artificial Desire www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Great description of the anarchic consumerist authoritarianism of our day

Essential reading from @petergeoghegan.bsky.social

The outrages and atrocities fall like leaves, uncountable, ungathered; we're left with a residue of powerlessness and shame Pic by Abed Rahim Khatib. In Gaza, the body of one-month-old Majed Mohammed Zarab, thought to have starved to death, is brought to his funeral

All political tribes can be hypocritical but the right's current level of hypocrisy on free speech is deliberate. It's an assertion of power not a blindspot.

Morning everyone.

Loath though he is to alienate floating racists, perhaps Starmer could rouse himself to condemn a violent fascist rally teeming with people who want him overthrown and/or killed

Today people went around my neighborhood in north east London spray painting St George’s crosses onto people’s homes. Many of these houses have non British people living in them. This is getting very dark, very quick.

Democrats Cannot Just Buy Back the Working Class www.nytimes.com/2025/09/14/o...

look, it might not have worked with the public, but at least it was the wrong thing to do morally

On the same day in the Telegraph:

Such a wonderful fragment. Rewatching for the infamous coffee twist 3 mins in and it sparked so many thoughts. There was an idea when McDonald's opened in Moscow that it showed why democracy was best, turns out it just showed the tyrants the missing piece they needed www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLsJ...

Funny how the US can run out of eggs without breaking sweat but can't seem to run out of drugs even when it literally bombs the supply chain

One of the unintended (and unremarked upon) consequences of the mass privatisations of universal networks has been to divide tax-raising agents into two groups, a private one where it's 'normal' to raise taxes/prices and a state one like the NHS where it's 'normal' not to.

Those pesky clues

“I don’t want asylum seekers to live on my street” is genuinely a wild thing to say as a notionally progressive politician

one of the most concerning things about Reform's polling is that we'd be looking at dozens of other MPs of the calibre of James McMurdock, a piece of human pond scum who served a custodial sentence for assaulting his ex-girlfriend and is now laughing it up with the Nazis over in the other place

Yet another Brexit-sceptical publication - I've seen it in the Guardian, the BBC and the New Yorker, this time it's the Economist - repeating the false notion that the EU didn't tie subsidies to nature-friendly farming. Truth is Britain, inside the EU, made it happen, decades ago

The Ukrainian branch of Just Stop Oil continues its not-fucking-around campaign

In Chichester, one lamppost when we walked through the town centre today. I wonder if at a certain point the question will change from ‘why flags on lampposts’ in places to ‘why not flags on lampposts’ in others

There’s no public pressure in Europe to help Ukraine for real, only pressure to be reassured something’s being done. Hence this absurd spectacle of European leaders saying they’ll do something with US cover and Russian permission when it’s plain the US won’t cover and Russia won’t permit.

HOPE not hate can reveal that Lee Twamley, photographed at the front of Britain First’s “March for Remigration” in Manchester this month, has served prison time for trying to smuggle Vietnamese migrants into the UK. hopenothate.org.uk/2025/08/19/e...

Madame Tussaud’s getting worse and worse

The point at which Dem governors seek to use their powers to formally obstruct Fed overreach - like, physically, by state agents - gets squeezed impossibly thin between ‘too soon’ and ‘too late’.

Gavin Newsom is holding a press conference today on redistricting and DHS agents have arrived masked up and in full gear. Many are armed with guns.

Is this the civil war starting, or is it just bog standard authoritarian intimidation?

Stunning! An 8-hour time-lapse to show the Earth is rotating while capturing the Milky Way.

I kinda love that Alex Beard's argument is explicitly 'but look, you have to understand. When we said that, it was really easy'.

The only Russian proposal I can imagine that would make the slightest sense from their point of view would be if they are proposing that Ukraine should give up actual Ukrainian lands in exchange for Russia giving up its claims to other Ukrainian lands.

@michaelkofman.bsky.social is the essential source for the war side of the war against Ukraine and though he’s on here he unfortunately doesn’t cross-post much from x - here are a few key bits of his recent thread

Politico narrates Mamdani as the Hercules of mixed metaphors. After he’s faced a gauntlet of pitfalls, watch as he tackles the gamut of snares and combats the raft of obstacles.

This sets out the wickedness of Israeli government policy very plainly. You do not treat people this way, based on their ethnicity, unless you consider them less human than you. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/j...

‘Israel’s allies are still buying time for Israel to change course or come to a deal with Hamas over how many trucks to allow in, as though food were a legitimate bargaining chip. Gazans cannot afford to wait for either.’ New on the blog: Amjad Iraqi on Gaza. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/ju...