Just heard Rachel Reeves on ITV News attribute this cyberattack to Russia. This is significant and signals that all our industry and public services are liable to attack. I assume she has evidence?

One of my favorite things about being an editor at Vaccine is that I get to read really cool papers like this about the history of vaccination in different social and cultural contexts around the world 👇🏻

An important read. We continue to conduct research on various types of risk and insurance coverage.

"The realists, it transpires, have merely swapped wishful thinking about humanity’s ability to kick its fossil fuel habit for magical thinking about our ability to upend the laws of physics and chemistry." www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/culture/7105...

Opinion in the FT today… “For the financial sector, a net zero ambition is not virtue signalling, as many Trumpists would claim. It is smart long-term business strategy. For the insurance sector specifically, it could ultimately be existential.” on.ft.com/4pAvFbj

Short🧵on transport. The UK has the world's most expensive public transport. It's not even good, and it's not a large country. A return rail journey, ~200 miles each way, between England's two main cities, London and Manchester will set you back £100 for discounted prices on selected off-peak trains.

The OpenAi preprint on arXiv arxiv.org/pdf/2509.04664

"In a landmark study, OpenAI researchers reveal that large language models will always produce plausible but false outputs, even with perfect data, due to fundamental statistical and computational limits." www.computerworld.com/article/4059...

Diageo’s plan to demolish its Talisker distillery on the Isle of Skye and replace it with one that would be twice the size and run by robots is meeting fierce local resistance from the local community. @vickyallan.bsky.social

“Tens of millions now use tech platforms to find jobs for fleeting periods; fully 200m, or 40% of the urban labour force, depend on some kind of flexible work.” economist.com/leaders/2025...

“With the support of Germany, the EU is moving to exclude Meta, Apple, Google and Amazon from a new system for sharing financial data that is designed to enable development of digital finance products for consumers.” on.ft.com/3IuTXTr

UK sustainability finance rules must go further, says Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland. ICAS's Fiona Donnelly said “More comprehensive & holistic reporting would be achieved by expanding these standards to include reporting on the impact of organisations on the environment and society”

New and reopened rail lines tend to be massively popular: 🚅 Half a million passengers have travelled on the Northumberland Line since it opened in Dec 2024. 🚅 Amazingly, 1 in every 7 national rail journeys are now made on London's Elizabeth Line! #ReverseBeeching

“RTX, the US aerospace and defence company that owns Collins, said: “We have become aware of a cyber-related disruption to our MUSE software in select airports. We are actively working to resolve the issue and restore full functionality to our customers as quickly as possible.”” on.ft.com/3IkPhQ2

People should ask whether automated decision-making provisions in Europe's GDPR and AI Act offer protections equal to human decisions, and whether AI explanations are reliably fit for purpose, writes Peter Douglas.

The most pressing set of questions for financial analysts concerns the tech giants’ assets—specifically, the longevity of all those fancy AI chips they are installing in their data centres

Radio 4 still going strong on Long Wave. I get the feeling this is how the BBC imagine we listen to their news coverage on the wireless

“This is the world of Davos and TED talks – motto: ‘Ideas Change Everything’ – and anyone outside the magic circle may feel that the main change has been how comfortably rich it’s made a lot of the wizards on the inside, while outside things go from bad to worse” www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

You may not have heard of BDCs — leveraged vehicles for US private credit — but they're big and are growing fast. Are they a systemic risk? What could go wrong? on.ft.com/46IV6zU

Workers broke open the first tunnel connecting Austria to Italy under the Brenner Pass.

Can large language models stand in for human participants? Many social scientists seem to think so, and are already using "silicon samples" in research. One problem: depending on the analytic decisions made, you can basically get these samples to show any effect you want. THREAD 🧵

The mooted levy on international student fees risks knocking down the UK higher education sector’s fragile “house of cards”, experts have warned. @patrickjack.bsky.social reports #academicsky #studentfees www.timeshighereducation.com/news/interna...

Radio 4 still going strong on Long Wave. I get the feeling this is how the BBC imagine we listen to their news coverage on the wireless

"machines were far more likely than human agents to carry out fully unethical instructions." rdcu.be/eGY0v

🚨 NEW: Britain’s most powerful people are still 5x more likely to have been privately educated than the general population. Our brand-new research reveals that jobs in the media, business, charity, creative and public sectors remain dominated by those from private schools ⤵️🧵

'All of this is happening as the traditional sources of cross-subsidy are coming under pressure from policy shifts and economic volatility. That is particularly true of international student income: this is now needed to help plug the shortfall in the teaching of UK students as well'. 1/2

Impassioned plea for more mixed-methods research (quant & qual) from @timharford.ft.com "The hard data is never as eloquent as a good story. Humboldt would measure the cactus but also sketch it; drag his barometer up a volcano, but spin a yarn about the epic climb." www.ft.com/content/d419...

I spent last night writing about car parks as part of the PR for an exhibition on brutalist buildings in Bristol that's happening in October. We do have some interesting ones. This one, on Rupert Street, is from 1960 and was designed by Swiss architect Rudolph Jelinek-Karl.

Governments ignore the science and prefer to just focus on climate change as an energy transition: as a spur to kick start a still completely unsustainable capitalism. We’re in breach of multiple planetary boundaries and they - and we - are deeply interdependent. It’s one hell of a category error.

Baroque scenes of late-stage capitalism - on.ft.com/4n6g7dA

We have done a lot of research on agricultural and food supply chains and the impacts of tariffs. The challenges now facing farmers in the US because of imposed tariffs and retaliations hurt - case of soybeans and China www.nytimes.com/2025/09/15/b... We can't afford to lose a generation of farmers!

The end of progress? www.enlightenmenteconomics.com/blog/index.p...

Yup. These sort of changes urgently needed:

Jaguar Land Rover’s output could take several months to normalise, fear suppliers - interesting piece by Kana Inagaki on.ft.com/42zgmWl

In the UK… “…sustained programme of cuts made to the nation’s railway network from the 1950s to the 1980s. It found that the predominantly rural areas most affected by the cuts saw population declines, job losses and drops in the number of skilled workers” www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Weakening net zero policy ‘will spook investors’. #climate www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Concerning, but while the total debt was reported (£13.3Bn) the overall revenue wasn’t i.e., no sense of how leveraged UK Universities are. With total annual revenues of £40-50Bn (?), is £13.3Bn reasonable? Of course, it’s all very uneven, especially cash reserves. on.ft.com/3VfJU7B

Secured loans and turnaround plans among the requirements for new loans from Barclays, Lloyds and other banks. (And we now have a new contender for the most over-used image generically depicting a university). With a sharing link for 3 non-subscribers.

@samuelmarclowe.bsky.social posed an interesting question a few months about the prospect of Chinese EV production reshoring to circumvent rules of origin tariffs. mostfavourednation.substack.com/p/where-is-i...

Many investors and creditors could become less willing to countenance huge AI investments as they lower their expectations for revenues. The flow of capital could slow. What would such a chill look like?

One week left to apply 📅 We’re hiring for a Research Officer and a Lead Researcher. Are you passionate about conducting qualitative research on poverty and financial hardship? Do you have a strong commitment to ethical and inclusive research? Apply here: www.jrf.org.uk/careers.

“The UK's chief automotive workers' union is calling on the government to establish a Covid-esque furlough scheme for the thousands of individuals who face losing their jobs due to the cyber-related downtime at Jaguar Land Rover” www.theregister.com/2025/09/15/c...

Former Chair US nuclear regulation (NRC), Alison MacFarlane : SMR's produce more rad-waste per kWh than 'conventional reactors. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Annoying calculation by @tobyn.bsky.social “But this way of looking at cross-market spreads makes a lot more sense than just looking at the gap between bond yields in different currencies. It’s just a shame it’s so annoying to calculate.” on.ft.com/48fJTIf

Post no one asked for on how to compare bond yields across currencies (more) properly. on.ft.com/48fJTIf

“A fundamental shift is needed in how we approach the development and deployment of AI agents,” argues Meredith Whittaker. “Basic lessons in privacy and digital security are being discarded,” she warns

“One employee at a major supplier based in the West Midlands told the BBC they were not expecting to be back on the shop floor until 29 September. Hundreds of staff, they say, had been told to remain at home.” www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Carbon capture – the get-out-of-jail-free card that does not actually work

England’s farmland is becoming the dumping ground for industrial waste. The rules are outdated. The oversight is broken. And the public is only just being told. 6/ www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Art class From the latest Private Eye, out now.