London is absurdly warm

Beyond the job losses (!), what do the students think about being ‘relocated’?!

you're four days early with this npr! it even says so in your skeet! this is too early for the gales of november to come slashin!

NEW - The Trump admin has disbanded its federal cultural property investigations team and reassigned the agents to immigration enforcement, delivering a blow to one of the world’s leaders in heritage protection, according to multiple ppl familiar with the changes. www.denverpost.com/2025/11/06/u...

History PhD student Louise Rodwell is presenting at the Cambridge University Modern British History Workshop TODAY at 5:00pm with a paper titled 'Imagined Landscapes of the First World War.' See details below or join online here: bit.ly/47saG3x

One (obvious) thing with mega-projects like these is that whether they actually happen is always secondary to their major goal: moving money, resources, and people.

Above and beyond my concern for fellow academics and their students, as the mother of a language- and music-loving 14 year old I'm also concerned what her chance of a decent university education is going to be.

Absolutely ridiculous. This is vandalism, pure and simple.

This article would have been significant enough by itself, but the story behind it makes it an urgent read. Racism has not only become mainstream, it's becoming some kind of requirement to be mainstream therumpus.net/2025/11/05/z...

Put simply, this government’s policy seems to be ‘who needs education?’. I predict this is going to lead to some problems.

Seems useful to think about the social media era as politically deranging in the same fashion as widespread photographic and film propaganda made people insane when it first appeared in the 1920s-30s

My name is Ozymandias, king of kings! Look on my UNESCO World Heritage list works and advance neoliberal governmentality!

Coverage in The Times of our concerns about how languages will fare under the proposed changes to the national curriculum www.thetimes.com/article/9b0f... @britishacademy.bsky.social @cforsdick.bsky.social

The one thing with Reeves and tax rises: where is the sense that this is being done for a positive reason? The narrative is still crisis.

One of the most vivid memories of my life was the evening of March 6, 2020. That night I walked down Divisadero Street in San Francisco, looking into all bustling the bars and restaurants, and I remember thinking to myself, "These people have No Fucking Idea what's about to hit them."

“authors & publishers who filed a lawsuit against the Sam Altman-led firm have secured access to internal Slack messages… discussing the mass deletion of a pirated books dataset… A NY district court ordered OpenAI to hand over the communications regarding data deletion” futurism.com/artificial-i...

"everyone knows the project won’t work; it is now just a matter of letting MBS down gently" Deep dive on Neom focuses on The Line - a building planned at a scale that would run from London to the Norfolk coast but in the desert. Absolutely wild, absolutely doomed ig.ft.com/saudi-neom-l...

This analysis is perfect.

may hire a plane and fly that post over Westminster 24/7 for the next few months

New online: Nikhil Pal Singh on Zohran Mamdani. www.dissentmagazine.org/online_artic...

“Four years ago, we suffered an earlier redundancy programme that we were told would secure the future of the university. That clearly was not true." #UKHE www.leicester.news/university-o...

Once again, we have completely lost the thread on how a college education is supposed to work. It’s not major=>job, it’s major=>opportunity to learn critical thinking and expression=>job. Double majors do not produce double opportunities. www.washingtonpost.com/education/20...

Help

Amazing how many people in universities have imbibed metrics as the only marker of value. It needs to change.

Given that about 10% of Covid cases lead to "Long Covid" maybe making vaccinations free again* might be a thing to try. * Or at least the same price as the fly jab, that would be something.

Turns out this news was in the public domain yesterday but no one has covered it as far as I can tell. Does no one care about our national library anymore? It was much the same with the cyberattack. If this was a bit of 'science' infrastructure can you imagine? www.pcs.org.uk/news-events/...

BL & GDP in FT

What is good about Mamdani is that he doesn’t come across as self-righteous

“London and New York, two of the west’s largest, richest, and most diverse cities are now run by Muslim men, both of them elected on the ticket of left wing, pro-LGBT, pro-multicultural parties…The victory is a reminder of the fundamental weakness of Trumpism, Faragism, and the politics of hate.”

I actually think kids are already better at this than their older relatives

'The UK has a national history museum, it's just spread across 14 separate national institutions and innumerable local ones.' (Kikuchi). Discuss.

Genuinely difficult to imagine anyone in Labour running a campaign like that

Good things do happen

"Abandoned and failed projects, ca. 1998-2025: an incomplete, chronological list" -- worth your time, from Adam Smyth, who lists all the stuff he dropped or which didn't work adamsmyth.substack.com/p/abandoned-...

the "If Zohran wins I'm moving out of New York" crowd should have 30 days to post the zillow listing

Save 50% on #NewBook "A Thousand Paper Cuts" by Anjali Nath, which considers the paper worlds made and destroyed by US imperialism, offering a pre-history of the redacted visions of the Homeland Security age. buff.ly/zLMsbwf

What happens when nationalist history meets the horrors of empire? For @jacobinmag.bsky.social, I reviewed a new exhibition on British counterinsurgency at the Imperial War Museum jacobin.com/2025/11/brit...

Side-note, faintly surreal to see airports turning into archives of forgotten chains - want to revisit the 2000s? Go to Heathrow, where you can still shop at WHSmith and eat at Carluccio's or Giraffe

Egyptians will head to the polls to elect a new Parliament next week. The vote will decide whether the country moves toward a constitutional extension for the presidency or prepares for a post-Sisi transition. TIMEP's Halem Henish analyzes what's at stake. timep.org/2025/10/21/e...

🚨BREAKING NEWS🚨 6:23 Dick Cheney, influential Republican vice president to George W. Bush, dies www.cnn.com/2025/11/04/p...

I’m sure Matt Goodwin will be along shortly to tell us all whether LNER Customer Service Host Samir Zitouni counts as British or not. news.sky.com/story/train-...

Amazed that people who’ve been saying this is exactly what she should have done now seem to be criticising her for doing it: it is, clearly, not too late, and people are highly likely to put up with it because they can see and feel the degradation everywhere.

Tell that to half of SE London, apparently

Rachel Reeves is, plainly, doing the right thing

Occasionally I like to recall the FT’s finest hour: www.ftadviser.com/opinion/2021...

On the John Lewis ad

Most university branding is just so aggressively mid: bland, interchangeable, says nothing about what institutions do. Who does it even appeal to?

When did people stop going to the pub as much? I’d be surprised if it didn’t tally somehow.

Zohran Mamdani survived the intensity of the Middlebury Arabic School, which is recommendation enough.

So, anyway, I got an article acceptance a few days ago and it’s nice to remember after all the precarity that I can still do this