It's the perfect technology for this post-political age.

The driving range near my mum hit it out of the park with this one

This week we wrapped our nearly four-year run of @politico.eu's Living Cities, our long-running exploration of Europeans' relationship with the cities in which they live. In our final issue, we reflect on the state of Europe’s cities and how they can be even greater. www.politico.eu/newsletter/g...

Trump's attitude to war and violence is driven by his narcissism. It's not surprising that many political commentators fail to spot this because they hold strongly to the belief that in the west politicians are still driven by an ethic of public service.

Most of the pushback I've seen on these posts has been from academics, patiently explaining why the claims are silly and wrong-headed, while the original poster doubles down on them.

Well, this is an utter disaster for science. This gutting of peer review is very likely driven by Project 2025/OMB/Vought, very likely is about funding junk science, and very likely is coming for #NIH and biomedical research next. 🧪

New Absolute Units episode is here! We’re back with Professor Paddy Bullard (University of Reading) and Isabel Hughes (The MERL), with a bonus episode marking 250 years since Jane Austen’s birth. Listen below or wherever you get your podcasts: merl.reading.ac.uk/explore/abso...

It used to be the case that centrists would claim, "things can only get better". Now they tell us to be thankful for what we have.

A completely unhinged post from the head of Norway's oil fund: to hunt down the "leaders" of groups resisting AI implementation in companies and "remove" them archive.ph/r0u2r

You know you're raising an ethically sound kid when they turn to you one day and say, "dad... Elves are idiots aren't they?"

This. This was the formative event of my generation & our entire politics in 🇺🇸. The structural break after which we were no longer a full democracy, when 5 Wizards In Robes decided they were a super-legislature & counting all the actual votes didn’t matter. The rest has been 25 years of commentary.

How funny would it be to find out in a couple of years that Labour's policy positions throughout this period were devised by generative AI?

There was a critical juncture at which it became morally indefensible to stay on Twitter. I think we've reached the same point with this football World Cup.

The getting rid of juries has, in my opinion, a darker rationale. It means protestors, who are more likely to get let off when juries are involved, will now all be found guilty. Part of a sinister cross party agenda of slowly criminalising protest.

GB News is a convenient antagonist in the culture war because it allows many people to imagine this discourse as an extreme outlier while the reality is that this exists on a spectrum and the entire media ecosystem is culpable.

There was a post on the Board Game Reviewers & Media Facebook group about a big channel taking a stance on not covering games with generative AI art. Most replying said 'Hey, good on them, that's a great stance to have", and I have the same stance. Some of the replies though... 🧵

The real question is not "Why is Bluesky so left-coded," the real question is "Why can't the right exist in a social media environment without algorithmic assistance, where people can ignore them"

I feel jury trials falls into the same category as the 'first past the post' electoral systems when it comes to British political discourse. It tends to demonstrate a stubborn unwillingness to look beyond the UK (England actually) and the US as a base for claims.

Erm...

White Lotus, surely

I'm still incredibly proud of this book. The idea to do an edited collection came when I was still a baby PhD student and I pushed a group of six colleagues to join me at a (now sadly defunct) ECPR Research Sessions in Essex in 2014. The final book was published 4 years later.

I expected the lurch to the right and the rising authoritarianism long before they came to power. I did not expect, to anwhere near the same degree, the blatent dishonesty of this Labour government.

Labour stripping away rights in the name of efficiency.

It's weird to not only have lived through an information revolution but also now living through its undoing, all within less than a generation.

I am beyond excited to announce that the applications are now open for the third Amsterdam Complexity School on Climate Change! Come visit a beautiful city, hear from world-renowned experts, and work with passionate individuals on challenges related to climate change. More info: acscc.nl

💯

Well played to the UCD Observatory of Masculinities. Top graphic design.

Hi, I’m a website, product, or service you’ve relied on for years without incident. Great news: I’ve now been revamped with a mandatory AI component that makes me unusable.

*taps the sign*

Lazy Sunday with books

Extraction w/ Thea Riofrancos Featuring Thea Riofrancos on Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism. The green energy transition requires a vast array of inputs: copper, cobalt, rare earth elements, and the focus of this discussion, lithium—all of which must be mined from the earth. This is

A hill I will die on is that most Portuguese men don't actually like football, it's basically a soap opera for them.

Why would anyone who has paid the slightest bit of attention to American politics over the past 15-20 years assume that this would end the Trump presidency? I'm genuinely curious as to what people imagine that process would look like in concrete terms.

Trump is a felon, perhaps the most corrupt president in 150 years, he's been caught on video saying the most disgusting things about women. None of this is a secret. It's almost cute that many otherwise serious people think a couple of emails are going to 'bring him down'.

Labour is a deeply racist party. We've known this for years. The Forde report made this clear. It was convenient for political media/analysts to ignore this for a short while. Labour has done more to normalize the racist discourse in the UK than most. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

“Across the world, strong and stable majorities continue to back ambitious climate policies…The problem isn’t a collapse in public support – it is the growing disconnect between people and politics, .. www.politico.eu/article/cop3...

Climate action has public support.

The UK has a Secretary of State for Culture Media and Sport who is quite happy to distort the truth when it comes to presenting the reason why fascist football hooligans were banned from a match. The idea that bias or ideology in reporting is a new issue or limited to the BBC is fanciful.

Tonight I'm giving my favourite class of the year, in the Masters in Innovation and Research for Sustainability. We all sit around and play the board game Daybreak.

On this 🌍 World Science Day for Peace and Development, let’s remember that science is instrumental to #TransformativeChange. Science is capable of redirecting development towards regenerative practices aligned with nature-positive goals. 🏡🧪 📚 https://www.ipbes.net/transformative-change-assessment

Good piece

Remember: universities are not run by scholars. They are run by real estate speculators who always wanted a pretext to do these things.

Just in time for #COP30: my analysis is of what's wrong with global climate policy and what to do about it.

There is an excellent multi-part series on Thiel on the Behind the Bastards podcast. Well worth a listen. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/p...

Unsurprised to hear any politics that looks to address inequalities, looks to centre the poorest in our societies, anything that challenges the unsustainable status quo, dismissed as 'radical socialism'. Political analysis/commentary is pretty poor globally but in the UK it is in the sewer.

AI kills joy

This is not a dunk, and the whole exchange about the sandwich is genuinely pretty funny but I think many of the responses to this fundamentally misunderstand humour on the right. They *know* it's ridiculous but that ridiculousness obscures a chilling exercise of power.

IPCC-envy is a great term for a trend that inspired our 2017 piece, where IPXX is seen as a desirable template for knowledge production (at that time, in antimicrobial resistance) www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...