A List of Predictions Made in 1926 About 2026 🧵

Ben Duckett and Zak Crawley have the opportunity to do the funniest thing ever (get to 100 without loss)

Thank God for Bluesky: A little love letter to the people who would not compromise with Nazis iandunt.substack.com/p/thank-god-...

If there is a greater joy than waking up to find Zak Crawley still at the crease I don’t know of it

🚨 SHOCKING 🚨 A HUGE illegal waste dump has appeared between the A34 and River Cherwell, linked to organised crime. Every rainfall risks toxins washing into the river. We’re calling on the Environment Agency & Cherwell Council to act NOW. Our rivers cannot wait. 👇👇

open.substack.com/pub/londonce... eye-opening weekend read about a (very large and concrete) path not taken

do you think the nyt puzzles people saw the only connect wall about them

Interesting how colloquial use of non-standard number words tends to alter their perceived size over time. “Myriad” formally means 10,000 but can now mean anything from “quite a few” to “innumerable” “Orders of magnitude more” often refers to quite a bit less than 100x or 1,000x

Out of morbid curiosity I watched the very 1st episode of the Wallace/Torode era of Masterchef in 2005. Besides dodgy music, the nastiness of that era of TV is striking, judges acting like wannabe Simon Cowell/Anne Robinson. Ironic how the show was reinvented as cuddly comfort TV (at least onscreen)

D > G > F (with Peru) > E > A > B/C/H

This has been a rough decade to be a supporter of parliamentary democracy, liberalism, membership of the EU and Manchester United.

Was not expecting Love Is Blind UK to provide such an effective antidote to creeping Island-of-Strangerism, but here we are??

Test cricket is without equal.

RCB!

“Island of strangers” seems destined—if not outright designed—to live in the history books alongside a similar rhetorical construction by a rather different politician in a different era. I can’t think of another PM in my lifetime who would have uttered it; May perhaps got closest.

“Island of strangers” seems destined—if not outright designed—to live in the history books alongside a similar rhetorical construction by a rather different politician in a different era. I can’t think of another PM in my lifetime who would have uttered it; May perhaps got closest.

Etymological root I realised today: “preposterous” literally means “before/after” as in topsy-turvy, inherently contradictory. Confirmed via the excellent etymonline.com www.etymonline.com/word/prepost...

If I was designing a majoritarian electoral system from the ground up it would look a lot like Australia’s

Aide memoire for a busy election week

Sad news about the Happy Heat Pump Podcast. Sorry to say, that after about 20 episodes, we’re drawing it to a close at the request of the BBC which worries it may be seen as steering into areas of public controversy. 1/2 youtu.be/RJPKgngqoX0?...

“Britain is shackled to a corpse.” Gosh this is good

Don’t know about yours, but my Following feed has reached a happy equilibrium: enough posts per minute for a good skim of what’s important (with outlinks!) as well as decent amounts of marginalia without being overwhelming. (Of course it’s a purposive not representative sample, but that’s the idea.)

In the hallowed pantheon of season 2 finales, Severance’s eclipses Breaking Bad’s and is up there with those of the The West Wing, The Office and Dark

Should AGI-preppers embrace DOGE? There's magical thinking about the magical thinking. www.programmablemutter.com/p/should-agi...

Breaking news indeed

Apropos of nothing, here are some apps I use regularly that should be more mainstream than they are

Starting 2025 in the spirit of togetherness and faith in humanity (watching Squid Game and The Traitors)

I still think about this sometimes www.poynter.org/reporting-ed...

BBC News is clearly suffering from the shuttering of BBC World this morning. Sky News has had more or less wall-to-wall Syria coverage with extended interviews with experts; Beeb’s Breakfast show has had to combine short updates with domestic weather updates and pre-rolls

As popular posts here begin to hit 40k or 50k likes, it’s worth remembering that Obama set the record for the “most popular tweet ever” in 2012 with a tweet that garnered a mere 70k favs: www.theguardian.com/world/2012/n... This place already is closer to old, pre-algo-juiced Twitter than it seems

If you are in need of some wonder, do what I did and learn about the lifecycle of a queen bee en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_bee

The exit row on a plane is a kind of fascinating bargain: almost always it’s just extra legroom, but there’s a one in a million chance you’ll be legally responsible for helping everyone evacuate

GeoGuessr = enforced, focused escapism. Recommended.

At what point do we get custody of Stanley Tucci as a national treasure?

Bluesky now has over 10 million users, and I was #127,278!

As good as time as any to recommend the excellent podcast on exploration Time To Eat The Dogs

In retrospect I have no idea how we millennials navigated teenage life without emoji reacts

As a teenager in Neustrelitz (East Germany), I painted small stones purple and left them all over town. Did it for years. It drove the police and Stasi nuts. It meant nothing. It just felt good to do something they couldn't control or understand.

Nothing better than friends doing and making cool stuff

As phrases like “the affirmative action of generational wealth” reminds us, there’s no one better able than an Obama to turn a policy frame upside down in a single breath

Tired: Eurovision results Wired: DNC roll call

Is there a Bluesky account that posts polls in a rapid/semi-automated way? One of the few things I miss from the bad place

“-pilled” has been on an interesting journey: from vaguely subversive origins in The Matrix in the 00s, to alt-right term of art in the 10s, to ironic reappropriation by the centre/left in the 20s, and now stabilised as a post-ironic and actually quite useful term for being sold on someone/something

Team GB well on course now to surpass their Tokyo total (62 now guaranteed with a decent amount more to come)

The Olympics is better for the addition of sports—climbing, skateboarding, surfing—with extremely chill athletes

I like how the secret fourth discipline of the triathlon is rigorously policed tidiness

One more amazing Murray moment for a grateful nation

Instant all time cauldron lighting

Having spent decades trying to speed up the opening ceremony by having athletes walk in faster it’s kind of a genius move to just put them on boats and set the pace for them

ABC is calling their special news report “President Biden: The Decision” but I’d be surprised if Biden will be taking his talents to South Beach