The politics of despair have engulfed Britain. But Zack Polanski is offering a way out | Owen Jones

Football is like life: we meet with both triumph and disaster. True character is about treating both the same, with class and dignity. This new-look team will be special. Patience. Some folks need to check themselves, remember who we are, and who our boys lost over the summer.

You know we’re through the looking glass here in the UK when the radical right wing has ties to and defends Putin’s Russia, but tries to accuse the left of ‘communism’ for proposing such moderate conservative views as taxing billionaires and dismantling the rentier economy.

This #WorldMentalHealthDay, a poem that metaphorises one of the many guises in which depression might manifest itself. ‘The Bull’ features in my second collection of poems, 𝑆𝑎𝑚𝑒 𝐷𝑖𝑓𝑓𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑛𝑐𝑒 (Seren Books, 2022). #MentalHealthMatters

‘“Keeping It Together: How Not to Get So Burned Out That You Walk Out in the Middle of Class” will now be a slideshow presented in the haunted auditorium by Jim “Flip” Philips, head coach of the varsity TP team.’ www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the...

Alan Carr just casually giving Toad of Toad Hall disguised as a washerwoman, escaping gaol in the Wind in the Willows. O Traitors, you’ve only gone and done it again. #CelebrityTraitors

Why does the Conservative Party hate Shakespeare, the Romantics, the Brontës, and all the world-renowned richness of British literary culture? Students who study English gain a whole raft of life skills: verbal and written communication; creative and critical thinking.

Totally behind everything Gary Neville says about using flags as a symbol of division and hate, and the need for unity and solidarity. I’m from an ordinary background, state schooled, and have worked hard all my life. What’s stood in my way has always been been privilege and greed, never diversity.

“Keeping It Together: How Not to Get So Burned Out That You Walk Out in the Middle of Class” will now be a slideshow presented in the haunted auditorium by Jim “Flip” Philips, head coach of the varsity TP team.

Well said, Gary Neville! 👏

Literary prizes are a cheap distraction from the true purpose of reading great books, which is making people who haven't read them feel bad about themselves

Always reassuring when a prize shortlist consists of an appealing mix of established as well as newer voices (the latter poets with one to three collections, by any sensible definition). A new collection by Tom Paulin! I’ve some books to buy and reading to catch up with.

The fact that the first AI actor is an archetypally attractive young woman who cannot and will not object to any cinematic scenario she is placed within says everything about the forces driving these ‘innovations’.

A walk from Leeds to Goole, via the River Aire, the Aire and Calder Navigation, the Knottingley and Goole Canal, the New Junction Canal and the Dutch River, 6.45am to 9.52pm Friday 26 September. An improvised, illustrated thread of indeterminate length, part reflection, part reconstruction. 1/

If you’ve flu-like symptoms at the moment, test for Covid. My year-long experience of long Covid has been utter hell; my advice to anyone is to rest up as much as you need before your body makes that decision for you, and do not gaslight yourself into trying to push through it.

‘“I am a genius of a writer”, Plath had written to her mother. “I am writing the best poems of my life; they will make my name.” She gathered up the neat typescript in a black spring-binder, discovered on her desk after her suicide just months later.’ www.the-tls.com/literature/p...

Ah, National Poetry Day. A worthy endeavour and well meaning, but it does tend to conjure poetry as a charity case, poets running after you imploring ‘come back! It doesn’t have to rhyme!’ When all’s said and done, I’m with Frank O’Hara: ‘if you don’t need poetry, bully for you.’

Ah yes, Tony Blair: a political figure famed for his grinning diplomacy, and not at all for war crimes in horrific Anglo-American pseudo-religious crusades. Trump says he’s a good guy, the best. I’m reminded of this furiously perfect sonnet by Don Paterson, which conjures Blair in Stalinist mode.

As for many poets uneasy in their class consciousness, Tony Harrison’s brilliant controversial long poem V. (1985) blew me away when I first read it. But his short lyrics were sharp, wise, and deeply moving, too, cut from lived life. Saddened to hear the great man has passed. RIP.

One of the defining errors of our age is the insidious notion that all opinions are equal and valid. They’re not. Undermining corroborated expertise in a dubious overextension of alleged ‘democratic’ values, we end up with a political leader spreading dangerous medical misinformation.

Put it on the banned list with shards, gossamer, and petrichor. Immediately.

My letter to @theguardian.com about the spiralling use of AI by undergraduates to write their essays, and how students are simply taking their cues from a world losing touch with the irreplaceable value of human creativity and critical thinking. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Very grateful to have been offered Arts Council England funding to develop my creative practice towards a sustained work of narrative nonfiction. Running For My Life will be a meditative, discursive memoir that explores distance running, mental health, literature and creativity.

After making a dumb joke on here about the creative side of academic writing as "unfunded hobbit research", I then wrote a serious post about it

'Analysis of almost 45,000 courses in Times Higher Education’s Courses 360 databases found that roughly 3,900 had shut down between 2024-25 and the upcoming academic year.' 1/2

On #SuicidePreventionDay, here’s my poem ‘The Signal Box’. Twice in my life I’ve been to that darkest place of suicidal thoughts; it affects so many, and still kills far too many. But suicide is preventable— with caring interventions and reduced mental health stigma. Talking saves lives.

‘Salah remains an enigma. 𝐶ℎ𝑎𝑠𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑆𝑎𝑙𝑎ℎ lives up to its title: like many a Premier League defender, Hughes is forced to follow in the striker’s evasive wake.’ My review of a biography of the iconic Liverpool winger, in the new TLS (@thetls.bsky.social). www.the-tls.com/regular-feat...

Lmao at this open letter to the Unimelb VC proposing she pay for Meanjin with a 10% salary sacrifice that would still leave her better paid than the VC of the University of Cambridge It was my joy to sign, & I recommend doing so to all in the world of arts & letters

An elegant new look for the now fortnightly TLS, which includes my brief review of Simon Hughes’s Chasing Salah, the biography of the iconic Egypt and Liverpool winger. Score.

Fascinated that In Our Time is one of the BBC’s most popular podcasts among under 35s. The young people demand three academics and a peer discussing Demosthenes, apparently. And they’re right to do so.

Trying to work out how the REF can be tweaked around 'national priorities', if those 'priorities' were never communicated to researchers when they undertook the research. Or are they suggesting it's all a game of retrofitting past activities to the measures?

Let’s call it as it is: AI’s success is based in its dangerous appeal to a childish urge inside each of us. This urge still craves ease and minimum effort (‘but it’s too difficult!’). We ignore the rich rewards of such effort, and of learning to do things well, at our own cost.

Immigrants are not your enemy. Trans people are not your enemy. Women are not your enemy. The old, the young, those with disabilities— all these ordinary folks are not your enemy. The enemy of the people has and always will be the malevolence of unaccountable power and unimaginable private wealth.

Essentially my thinking is that even if it turns out there is value for students and staff in embedding LLMs throughout the university curriculum, I do not believe that those pushing this kind of hasty and universal adoption have the knowledge (of AI or of education) to have made those calls.

It is not news that those who hold university purse strings often turn out to be extremely susceptible to salesmanship, particularly when it's framed in terms of missing out on what everyone else is doing. Will they learn from this? If universities survive, will governance change? I'm not hopeful.

When the dust settles, and if universities have meaningfully survived, it will be worth asking how institutions usually so resistant to thoroughgoing change chose to leap with both feet into an untested technology they didn't understand and didn't know how to use.

‘Open, explicit racism seems to be on the rise in Britain. It starts with refugees like me and other migrants – but they will soon come for other people simply because they are not white, or belong to the “wrong” religion, or their sexual orientation. Unless we act now, things will get worse.’

There’s a strong case, given the magnitude of his achievements, for Don Paterson as one such of our poetic elders. I do so in my @livunipress.bsky.social study of the poetry. His @faberbooks.bsky.social Selected Poems and ars poetica The Poem: Lyric, Sign, Metre are major works of their time.

There's a reason why sports teams don't chant "I believe that we will lose" before a game, a reason so obvious that I'm pretty sure it needs no explanation. Which is why it makes my head explode when people surrender in advance verbally, which they do all the time about politics.

The simple fact is, if your enemy is journalists and honest journalism, your enemy is the truth.

This is not caused primarily by "screen time". It's been caused by the mass eradication of third places for young people in basically every city over the past three decades - and a society that's hostile to the concept of teens socialising in public spaces. www.theguardian.com/politics/liv...

Very grateful to have been offered Arts Council England funding to develop my creative practice towards a sustained work of narrative nonfiction. Running For My Life will be a meditative, discursive memoir that explores distance running, mental health, literature and creativity.

The Lionesses have again proven an inspiration to the entire nation. Such joy and resilience, collective spirit and sheer determination. To achieve one of the pinnacles of your sport in back to back tournaments. If you’re not full of admiration for this group, check for a pulse. ❤️

Over 1 in 4 women will experience sexual assault in their lifetime and violence towards women is overwhelmingly committed by current and former partners and husbands (source: UN), so the odd asylum seeker is really not the problem, and demonstrably a statistical minority.

Football without Agyemang is nothing.

We should have listened when the modems screamed at us.

Héctor Bellerín knows the score. We need more male footballers setting this example for young men. www.theguardian.com/books/2025/j...

Decades of mechanistic talk about university degrees as if they were bundles of 'skills' and 'prep' are about to be proved completely wrong (obviously). Want to get a real boost? Do History or English.