missed this: the Met promising to put its facial recognition tech onto officers' phones to be used on the spot. how long until every conversation with the police involves getting your face scanned? www.nytimes.com/2025/09/17/t...

- you clean up that banksy? - sure did, your honour, leaving a perfect, permanent outline, imbuing the work with real fuckin gravitas while making its point better than the artist did himself just like you asked

I have a name, Jim! ;) open.substack.com/pub/danhanco...

Don’t ignore that the bbc asked a racist question here

It has been an astonishing realisation / waste of my valuable time to learn that Lucy Mangan's review was if anything too kind to Destination X - aka GeoGuessr for people who have never ever thought about the outside world - hallucinatory is bang on though www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio...

me on @cmatbaby.bsky.social’s EURO-COUNTRY and why it gives voice to a distressingly normalised post-recession malaise. i hope you read!

Can’t remember if I shared this already, but I recently did a live episode of @cursedobjectsuk.bsky.social with @luketurner.bsky.social, fab curator Kate Clements and of course @kasiatee.bsky.social and @danhancox.bsky.social. You can listen here:

A great read this book by @danhancox.bsky.social. Thank you Dan. An excellent closing paragraph too: ‘One of the greatest mistakes we have made in recent decades is to accept the idea that freedom is a quality that can be found and enjoyed only by the individual acting alone. #Booksky 💙📚 #AmRrading

Just learned a new expression which is fascinating but does resonate a bit with the first time I went to London alone as a callow 17 year old in 1980! ‘One was now in the urban danger zone where visitors from the country were thrown to the wolves,' the Swedish academic Orvar Löfgren #Crowds

More love for Cameron Winter/Geese here from @danhancox.bsky.social open.substack.com/pub/danhanco...

‘‘Totalitarian movements are mass organisations of atomised, isolated individuals, Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism.’’ From @danhancox.bsky.social’s Multitudes. Are we here now too? Reference is made to this in Adam Curtis’s #Shifty - did neoliberal capitalism create this too?

Good morning, I've written a piece about the prime minister. I spoke to several dozen sources, including government insiders, former legal colleagues and campaigners to ask: what happened to Keir Starmer the heroic human rights lawyer? www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Great piece by @cianginty.bsky.social about the fascinating history of the bicycle as a liberating invention in Ireland (as it was in so many places!) www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Ladybird book in the Spotlight ‘Public Services: Water Supply’ 1969 [Deep sigh] Artist: John Berry

sure, but details of which of his identities? www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

“British food is too heavily seasoned” is exactly the nineteenth-century perspective that we need to counter all those tedious American takes that British food is bland

Hard to find the words to sum up David Lammy on R4 Today this morning, doing and saying precisely nothing to stop a British ally pursuing genocide, starving and massacring innocents, plotting concentration camps. Go on, write another sternly worded letter

A horrifying statement published today by the Editorial Committee of the Agence France-Presse (AFP) news agency. "Without immediate intervention, the last reporters in Gaza will die" Translation from French to English by @cnorristrent.bsky.social:

What is unprecedented about these times are not the events so much as the context within which they occur. Domestically, the first part of the 1980s were far, far more turbulent than what we’re living through now. But if you weren’t actually experiencing it, it was all very remote.

The chilling thing here is the statement from Kent Police in the last par: they are unrepentant and do not think their officers misinterpreted the law. Saying "free Gaza" or waving a Palestine flag is enough to warrant "reasonable suspicion" of support for PA www.theguardian.com/world/2025/j...

“ - and such small portions!”

Keir Starmer's spokesman asked if the Government plans to remain on X, given its AI bot has been making antisemitic comments and endorsing Hitler, replies that this is an "internal" matter for the company

This has really resonated to be fair & links with @danhancox.bsky.social’s Multitudes that featured on Thinking Allowed www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/... & a discussion on Community as part of the Free Thinking series. www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

i remember very vividly walking along the embankment on 15 february 2003, with 2million other anti-iraq war protestors, and saying to my friend, "surely this transparently bullshit war is only going to make a terrorist attack in britain more likely" www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

Learned a lot from this great piece by @will-davies.bsky.social @lrb.co.uk on Farageist Tiktok www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4.... Really useful insight into the rage and despair of alt-right 'Yookay' declinism

excellent, enraging piece by @archiebland.bsky.social, with the faint but vital hope in the kicker: the media/political class that keeps telling us black is white, that there is no genocide, that civil disobedience is terrorism - they're rapidly losing their grip www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Genocide in Gaza, 46C in Europe - and the Labour government's response is to criminalise non-violent protest groups Palestine Action and Just Stop Oil

Peter Geoghegan reviews my latest book in the TLS: "Multitudes is lively and compelling, and its reframing of crowds as imbued with agency, even freedom, is a welcome corrective" app.the-tls.co.uk/212297/conte...

‘Poor management leads to fatal crushes’: how Glastonbury and others are dealing with big crowds Crowd safety management and psychology, with comments from Anne-Marie Chebib @globalcrowds.bsky.social, Keith Still, and me. www.theguardian.com/music/2025/j...

‘Poor management leads to fatal crushes’: how Glastonbury and others are dealing with big crowds

New feature from me in the Guardian on crowd safety, crushes and crowd joys in the summer festival season www.theguardian.com/music/2025/j...

"The texture of grime is there in the real world" - a pleasure to profile Simon Wheatley and his legendary document of the early grime scene in the mid-2000s, Don't Call Me Urban (finally being reissued) www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...

Peter Geoghegan reviews my latest book in the TLS: "Multitudes is lively and compelling, and its reframing of crowds as imbued with agency, even freedom, is a welcome corrective" app.the-tls.co.uk/212297/conte...

Yeah, we did this in the US. Years of telling students that they need to be ready to listen to all sides and then a swift transition to locking them up for writing op-eds in the student newspaper.

There may come a day when the BBC puts on air one of the other 29,999 headteachers currently estimated to be working in UK schools, but that day is not today

Our first exhibition, Cursed Objects in Museum Shops, runs until 26 June, so get down to Bloomsbury while you can! It's FREE, 10am-8pm, Mon-Fri, at the Peltz Gallery. All details here: www.cursedobjects.co.uk/events/mp1jq...

Hatherley has that kind of Mike Davis ability to say more about geography, class, politics in a brief tangent than most academics manage in a paper. Fascinating on the geography of the valleys (and similarity to rust belt), Corbynism and liminal class identities, and what makes pop unique.

Part of a wider project with Emma Edmondson that seeks to re-affirm the social importance of the dancefloor, including a rave installation inside a car in the middle of Basildon. Launch party on 21 June, and me and @danhancox.bsky.social in conv 24 June. Come! www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/clubbing-a...

We sent this off to print today: an anthology of essays published with Estuary Festival 2025 on the legacy of Essex nightlife. Featuring essays from myself, Emma Edmondson, @danhancox.bsky.social , Morgan Quaintance, Sarah Wayman and Michael Fordham

Just stop dithering and put this company out of its misery. Public ownership is the only sensible option - and a majority of voters for every party agree @weownit.org.uk www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Damn. My first job after uni was as SLP's junior arts and entertainment reporter. I learned a lot and was paid very little. Salute to Streatham Hill's finest 🫡

Teenage Fanclub's sunshine harmonies followed by Mogwai's apocalyptic wall of sound in the tent at (iirc) Leeds 2002 was one of the most brilliant 1-2s I've ever seen live. Thank you Glasgow 💚 www.theguardian.com/music/2025/m...

From @ihabhassan.bsky.social (on X). Red are zones marked for evacuation. 2+ m people are supposed to fit into the green zones. It sends shivers down my spine.

“I felt there was a need to bring to third world countries God’s principles of running an economy” is just one of many jaw-dropping lines and plot twists in this gripping @hettieobrien.bsky.social long read www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

For those interested in a more in-depth dissection of Jamie Oliver & New Labour, here’s @jonathandnunn.bsky.social and I on the fabulous @cursedobjectsuk.bsky.social with @danhancox.bsky.social & @kasiatee.bsky.social open.spotify.com/episode/0WuB... Jamie’s ‘Fish Stew’ song must be heard by all!

One again, this is simply not true. Non-UK origin employeea have (slightly) higher median earnings than UK-origin ones -and the gap has if anything widened (slightly) recently.

This has gone some way towards dissuading me from my (I hope) most reactionary opinion that you should have to pass a cycling proficiency test before renting a lime bike...

this is spot on. The worst, stupidest, drunkest Lime bike rider is still much less of a danger to you and everyone else than even the safest driver – and anything that makes more drivers slow down, check themselves or give up altogether is a good thing!

New Substack from me, about why the most annoying cyclists on the road are actually helping make everyone safer open.substack.com/pub/danhanco...