When you listen to a violin concerto written post-1945 by anyone other than Shostakovich after hearing musicologists bang on about the need to deconstruct the canon...

‘NPC politician’ is a fantastic description of Labour’s McSweeney-picked generation labourhub.org.uk/2026/05/06/t...

If you're the really quite online leader of a major left wing party, you better have the discipline of a Mamdani. Or else the media, which is desperate for your downfall, will have a field day. A major danger for Polanski. You get little by retweeting randos but risk a great deal.

When you see phrases like ‘AI boosters’ or ‘stop normalising AI’ all while graphs like the below exist, you’re a witness to how people respond in the face of incredibly rapid, impersonal economic and technological change. Those phrases put AI adoption back in the realm of human agency. 1/2

At least the Dems have learned one key lesson from the ridiculous spectacle of a decrepit Biden

How does Hannah Spencer come across so much more human than the entirety of the remarkably cold blooded 2024 Labour intake? McSweeney has a great deal to answer for

There are many reasons Starmer is profoundly unsuited to being PM. But perhaps foremost among them is his dishonesty. The chief case for Starmer was that, despite his blandness, he represented the opposite of Boris and the rot of the Tories. But his integrity was always a facade. 1/2

It’s looking more and more like there’s actually been underinvestment in AI infrastructure, particularly from Anthropic

I’m sure the replies to this will be incredibly normal…

When our root malaise is economic, you can’t get away with the economic knowledge and outlook of the average Twitter lefty liberal. Corbyn’s vision was far more coherent - at a time of low interest rates, large investment in infrastructure and services. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Are we really framing a *Korean* film as a victory of representation when basically no country globally punches above its weight more when it comes to culture than Korea?

Biographies of Beethoven often note that he sometimes "engaged in sharp business practices." Translation: he wasn't averse to ripping people off. Take that most spiritual of his works, his "Missa Solemnis"; "exclusive" rights to the piece were sold to no fewer than 5 publishers.

Very good moment to be a superpower that has established a lead across a whole host of renewable technologies…

He’s basically right, and it’s true of classical music too. At the heart of the classical tradition was a long line of extraordinary composers that ended with Shostakovich, and will never again be reborn. The historical energy is no longer w classical music. Hopefully this doesn’t happen to film.

Mamdani continually playing Trump in order to get things done rather than screaming about how he’s a fascist - he’s all I’ve wanted in a left wing politician for a decade.

Kore-eda with more films in the letterboxd 500 than Nolan is a victory for humanity

Ppl who keep track of what’s cancelled the same way football fans follow the transfer window…

This gets to the root malaise of the Starmer government. You can’t govern, least of all in these times, if your foundation is basically factional - if your ascent to power was built not on ideas, or even personality, but instead an incredibly effective purge of the left within the Labour Party. 1/2

Corbyn is currently up in his allotment with the biggest grin on his face

This is a key reason why I don’t trust anyone who confidently asserts AI is a bubble or not - so much depends on how rapidly the technology advances. Quick progress in economically useful areas like coding could substantially alter the financial equation.

If you’re gonna recommend a first foreign film to someone, it’s gotta be The 400 Blows - immediately disabuses anyone of the notion that B&W French films must be cold, inaccessible and pretentious. It’s somehow fresher, funnier, and more devastating than any 21st century movie I’ve seen.

Seeing ppl debate whether Sinners or One Battle After Another will be discussed in decades… the clear answer is neither. 2025 was not a good year for film - at least in America. I’m waiting on the foreign releases

No new American frontier AI labs have emerged this year, so cue Moonshot AI. And apparently there are several other Chinese labs in the mix beyond Alibaba and DeepSeek. China’s unique blend of innovation - produce things to roughly the same quality as the West at a fraction of the cost

Zach Polanski is clearly far more skilled than the Your Party lot at articulating the defining problems of modern Britain. But I’m deeply unconvinced that he has any of the real solutions. 1/2

This election is the one time I’ve appreciated the American penchant for endless democracy. Give me another 100 days. I need more Curtis Sliwa. Far more. Even more of Cuomo’s public humiliation kink. And above all more and more and more Zohran.

I absolutely hate that this illness has made me semi chronically online as I have so few other distractions. It’s one of the most off-putting things someone can be. I miss when it felt like I existed as much in the 19th century as our own, in the books I read, the music I played and listened to.

AI is a tabula rasa onto which people can project their views. Like the rise of the internet, AI is so far-reaching that anyone can find a whole range of data points to support their worldview. As a result there is a lot of noise, far less understanding.

If China is a ‘national security threat’ to the UK, then what on earth is Trump’s America?

The one thing I like about AI investment vs the internet - a v large proportion is being spent actually building things. Makes me a little more sanguine about whether we’re in a bubble (which we probably are).

Extraordinary

Too much disability history and theory is written by people for whom disability supersedes impairment. I want histories written by the severely disabled - the people who don’t end up in academia

UBI will continue to be a dull, wonkish debate until it’s quite suddenly the only feasible policy standing in the way of societal collapse. Which isn’t even an exaggeration if we’re talking about a 20-30% unemployment rate in coming decades

Afterlife - a case where the intelligentsia has a radically lower opinion than the majority of the population, and is fundamentally wrong.

Miranda Priestley would fix me

By the time these studies are published, the models are always about 2 years out of date… And 2 years of AI progress is *a lot*

Goddamn does a lot of the literature on disability and capitalism idealise feudalism

Difficult to think of an institution that needs AI more than the NHS.

In the West, we default to interpreting China through the frame of autocracy partly because there’s truth in it but mostly because it makes China instantly knowable and intelligible. When in actual fact most of us know next to nothing. So so so many more interesting and powerful frames.

The rewards are of course distributed anything but evenly, but the propensity of the American economy to just grow, grow, grow is so impressive. The main reason China won’t surpass America in the very near future.

Mamdaniiiiiii. Extraordinary how much better that campaign was than Kamala’s

Zohran ❤️❤️

Clips from The Golden Girls (1989): Dorothy sees a neurologist after months of #MECFS symptoms. He tells her there’s nothing wrong, it’s just ageing — and suggests a psychiatrist. She begins to doubt herself—until Rose comforts her saying “Doctors don’t know everything.”

What matters in terms AI and medicine is not that AI hallucinates or even a raw hallucination rate - but how AI performs vs doctors and when+why it hallucinates.

i would choose alejandro garnacho over ruben amorim

All I want is for footballers to pay me £50,000 a year to advise them not to go to Chelsea or above all United. I’d be worth every cent

The BMJ have a long history of being anti-ME/CFS and the recent opinion piece has been disheartening. Ramsay mentioned this and Wessely in a letter just months before he died in 89. That said, it’s been good to see such strong pushback in the responses www.bmj.com/content/389/...

If United stick with Amorim, back him heavily in the summer, and he doesn’t come good having finished 16th this season, heads should roll. All of them frankly - Berrada, Wilcox, Brailsford. INEOS have been shambolic so far.

AI and medicine - incredibly exciting. The frontier models are already substantially outperforming doctors

Starmer has to be last goddamn man you’d want to hold off the advance of the far right. The radically wrong man at the radically wrong time.

I wonder at what point knowing how to use AI will go from being, like email once was, this slightly funky new thing you can mention on job applications to instead being something so ubiquitous it's a little embarrassing to mention on your CV.