THREAD. A collection of photographs of excellent sheep I have met on walks. You will find the captions to each photo in the alt text.

If you care about proposed government changes to UK immigration policy I urge you to fill in the consultation response before the deadline tomorrow.

What Replaces Deported Immigrant Workers? Not Americans. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/09/o...

I urge you to fill in this consultation if you can - with this very helpful support from Amnesty International - although AND because ! it is heart-breaking that this country has sunk so low that Amnesty suggest in a number of cases to provide no answer as the terms of the question are so evil

Pop star Bad Bunny needed a Puerto Rican history scholar. UW–Madison had just the one. news.wisc.edu/pop-star-bad...

Benito is a threat b/c he makes art so alluring and enjoyable you want to understand everything about it and then you end up learning about sugar and slavery and colonialism and the Taínos and Hawaii and then you probably have some thoughts of your own, and that's why art is powerful and dangerous

I absolutely *love* Bad Bunny, and can’t wait to see this. youtu.be/SFKLTYwS9Fg

Full interview here.

This is why Shakespeare is the greatest genius who ever lived. And this is just from a few pages he wrote in someone else's play.

Just a reminder about the new grant we (@universitypress.cambridge.org) are offering. Deadline is mid-April. Please spread the word.

I can’t say that I take World Nutella Day seriously in any way, but it does give me an excuse (not that any is needed) to make this absurdly easy Nutella Cheesecake #RecipeOfTheDay! www.nigella.com/recipes/nute...

Tempted to apply. Seriously, if you have such interests a great opportunity at an opportune time.

There's more. On 31 March 2010, Lord Mandelson's principal private secretary sent him a note of a meeting between the Chancellor of the Exchequer and Larry Summers, US Treasury Secretary. Lord Mandelson forwarded it to Jeffrey Epstein five minutes later.

BREAKING on ft website: Lord Peter Mandelson leaked a sensitive UK government document to Jeffrey Epstein while he was business secretary that proposed £20bn of asset sales and revealed Labour’s tax policy plans www.ft.com/content/fdf7...

📢📢Research Policy 11th online conference for Early Career Researchers! Mon 27th April 2026, 2-4pm (UK time) Submit a 3 page abstract by Sun 22nd March Link for submitting: forms.gle/bkMBQLia6Fhe... Link to RP page: www.sciencedirect.com/journal/rese... #EconSky

One overlooked aspect is that graduates are now forecast to cover 83% of higher education costs – the funding system has been almost entirely privatised.

Guyana 2026: Along a forest road, we watched a pair of White-throated Toucans flying to and from their nest cavity. Sometimes we'd see them peeking out before they took off again. It was only later, when we examined the photos, that we realized their chick was also looking out the window!

CRASSH is inviting scholars from the Global South to apply for funded Visiting Fellowships in Cambridge in Spring 2027 The fellowship theme is 'Enslavement: histories, legacies and afterlives' ⏳ Apply by 16 Feb 2026 www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/global-south-fellowships

The GREATEST democratic backsliding than ANYONE HAS EVER SEEN. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

We’re hiring! 🎉👇and the EI is a genuinely wonderful, friendly place to work, and not least because the students are fantastic - quite miraculously great, in fact 🌻…

New trick discovered today: an LLM-generated essay, saved as a PDF, with a tiny white space between each letter. This makes it impossible to paste quotes into a search engine, prevents text-matching in plagiarism checkers, & means URLs in bibliographies can't be clicked on. A lot of my time wasted.

Trying to read a (very dense) chapter for the reading group tomorrow, but the dog has other ideas.

Put community repair shops on every high street. Our work shows people love it, increases community interaction & helps people keep essential goods going for longer giving them more money to spend on food & utility bills It reduces waste and so reduces local authority costs. It is a win, win, win.

#econsky et al. I am happy to announce the #call_for_papers for the 2026 Economics of Mental Health Workshop! The workshop is hosted by @peibich.bsky.social at Paris Dauphine and takes place from June 22-23. They keynotes are @jcmecon.bsky.social & Marco Bertoni. 1/n

Most households currently subject to the two-child limit have at least one adult in work. Of the minority of households not in work, more than nine-in-ten have a child under three or a disabled family member with additional care needs, making any return to the labour market challenging.

This is very interesting. It also shows the value of analysing the same question using different (quantitative and qualitative) methods.

Important ethnography by Diana Enriquez, putting some flesh on the survey findings reported by Lindsay Ellis in the WSJ. Fascinating that these organizational pathologies are currently so widespread.

Last week to submit to the 4th Junior Workshop on the Economics of Migration ! Details below ⬇️

Remarkable work documenting a year of escalations, from @chrischirp.bsky.social. “a chart of actions over the last year – I’ve logged almost 200 and so have only been able to label the most significant”: christinapagel.substack.com/p/the-ice-st...

Amanda Gorman, the youngest inaugural poet in US history, pens poetic tribute to Alex Pretti. ‘Fear not those without papers but those without conscience…’

🧵 @jburnmurdoch.ft.com is spot on about the conditions in his FT piece. Liberal democracy held it together thanks to growth, good demographics, and the promise of a better future. Those days are gone, and that’s the "why" behind the erosion. However...

just to make that clear for the rest of the world, that's -9 degrees *fahrenheit.* -23 degrees *celsius*.

This interview is very funny. www.thenation.com/article/soci...

"What do universities’ commitments to inclusion actually achieve? - LSE Impact"

Very strong demand at this morning's gilt auction - bids worth 3.66 times the £4.75 billion on offer for a 4% gilt due in 2029. It ranks as the 9th strongest out of the 1,208 auctions held since 1998. DMO said to be ecstatic, someone has broken out a packet of Blue Ribands.

"should we have a meeti-" NO. No, we should not have a meeting.

🇵🇱🇺🇸 Nawrocki faces his first, major, entirely self-inflicted conundrum: should he join a thing that Putin and Lukashenka were invited to? If he says "yes", Tusk gets a free penalty kick that he won't miss; if he says "no", what if he loses his coveted "Trump whisperer" status?

Cow Tools! We have lived alongside cows for nearly 10,000 years. We breed them and exploit them It is now, only now, that we have discovered THEY CAN USE TOOLS Here I describe our study (paper) www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... in @currentbiology.bsky.social with @auersperga.bsky.social

In fact the EEC (as it then was) banned imports from Argentina during the Falklands conflict, to support the UK - eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/1982...

Fonzie in the place that he loves best (Ilkley Moor).

US consumers bore 96% of the cost of the 2025 Trump tariffs. Impeccable timing for this paper by @julianhi.nz and colleagues at @kiel.institute. www.kielinstitut.de/de/publikati...

For those in Cambridge - The Darwin Lecture series for 2026 is taking Song as its theme. www.darwin.cam.ac.uk/lectures/cat...

9/ But if one party is playing a different game entirely - say, the game of chicken, where bluffing and brinkmanship are features, not bugs - then your carefully calibrated deterrence strategy might just accelerate you both toward the cliff edge.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is now making an explicit link between the US desire to annex Greenland and the continuation of US support for Ukraine. "What would happen in Ukraine if the US pulled its support out? The whole thing would collapse," Bessent told Meet The Press.

What is the Anti-Coercion Instrument (ACI) that European lawmakers want to activate in response to Trump's 10% tariff announcement? Adopted in 2023, the instrument was designed to hit back at foreign acts of economic coercion. It was inspired by China's trade restrictions on Lithuania. 🧵

Can the US impose tariffs on some members of the EU and not others? Yes (and there is precedent). Would those tariffs be difficult to enforce? Also yes.

This photo was taken in 1911 using glass plate technology by Herbert Ponting who was part of Scott's Antarctic expedition, The composition and detail are exquisite with the band of white snow/ice creating a perfect frame around the two people and the ship in the distance Iconic imo

Just imagine - you’re a cat, with presumably a house, but you ignore that house and come instead to *my* house, and you walk in like you own the place, and come and go as you please and do whatever you like whenever you like. Just imagine how smug you’d be. Pretty smug? Not as smug as this bastard.