Chapter 2 of the book is called 'Asking for the Moon', and it's the most depressing thing I've ever written

"I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo. "So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."

If you like Mazzy Star/Cocteau Twins influenced 'shoegaze', this is very nice (as is the title track from the album, 'Only Hinting')

#OpEd: "We can’t bury the deeper, driving forces behind why this is happening. This phenomenon is only possible because of the outsized power that state agents — ICE, police officers, prison staff — have always had to abuse and control women and victims' bodies." Read the full story here. ⬇️

Landscape with Big Trees https://botfrens.com/collections/49/contents/17189

The truth: we need migration. The problem: too many politicians are terrified to say it. Why? They're led by a) toxicity of the charlatans & b) wealthy media organisations who demand these useful distractions rather than us talking about inequality. Reject it. Draw the line.

Our special issue of Marine Policy on coastal communities and their local knowledges is now out. You can read our introductory essay below. Many thanks to my wonderful colleagues Abbe Brown and Marcel Jaspars for the collaboration and to the Royal Society of Edinburgh for support.

My cartoon for this week’s @newscientist.com

This is fairly close to the view I grew up with

Any journalist quoting this absurd, invented £234 billion number cited by Farage/Reform should make absolutely clear that it has been withdrawn by *its own authors* (the Centre for Policy Studies) after they admitted it contained several major errors (1/3)

That Farage is treated seriously shows how degraded the politics in the UK habe become. Barring absolute far right racists, anyone with half a brain cell can see this latest raft of proposals would utterly destroy the UK, as well as the lives of migrants. 1/ www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home...

I’ve been training my whole life for this moment

Unclear how far back this would go and if would attack settled status for EU nationals. But clear that we must oppose this because mass deportation is a crime and an attack on basic rights rather than "unworkable" or "bad for the economy". It is your family, friends and neighbours he's coming for

Looking up the Clyde just after sunset towards the centre of Glasgow from the Riverside Museum. I love this view, and I photograph it a lot, but this one from September 2023 is my favourite shot of it. #glasgow #reflections #cityscape #theclyde #riversidemuseum #glasgowatnight #nightphotography

Featuring the catchiest guitar hook of all time

Ane Engelstad has a cool new paper in Hypatia on epistemic hopelessness as a vice oppressed people in particular may be liable to develop: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Another plug for the most recent HVOB single - it's a gorgeous song, and the video is made up clips from the documentary that HVOB have scored, about life in Beirut following the 2020 explosion. The combination is pretty stunning, I think:

NEW: Air Force jets are doing ICE flights to Africa with transponders turned off, making them nearly un-trackable. This includes the third-country removal to Ghana and another secret flight. We figured out where it landed. From me for @rollingstone.com: www.rollingstone.com/politics/pol...

Still Life with Black Knives, 1896 https://botfrens.com/collections/48/contents/14835

There is a crack (a crack) in everything That's how the stuff leaks out

More Covsky - this is a track I missed when it came out, but I love it. Incredibly moody and lovely.

"First students evacuated from Gaza to study in UK"

All of the best Australian producers now have at least one track with Wilma, and it's a sure-fire sign of something good - she's a cellist, and so her name means the track will have a cello part on it, which is never a bad thing. This is a beautiful example:

'Sunset, near Cley, Norfolk.' (1910) Like John Ruskin, Albert Goodwin responded to landscape with an almost religious fervour and understanding; he interpreted it with greater eclecticism in the style of Whistler, Ruskin’s great adversary in the field of aesthetics.

Pierre Bonnard painted this view of Paris from his attic studio in Montmartre in 1897. He depicted the rue Tholozé on a rainy evening with a horse-drawn carriage and dark figures under umbrellas hurrying past brightly lit shop windows - it is typical of his early style.

In Denmark, if you’re pregnant and the government thinks you will be a bad parent because you were abused as a child, they can give you a test asking “what’s glass made of?” and “what’s the big staircase in Rome called?”If you fail they take your baby after birth. www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

Snow Effect with Setting Sun - 1875 https://botfrens.com/collections/41/contents/8630

Absolutely gorgeous track from a few years ago

Woman at the Piano, 1924 https://botfrens.com/collections/48/contents/16732

Latest papers: Anna Drożdżowicz and J.P. Grodniewicz illustrate how epistemic injustice can arise in psychotherapeutic encounters, and explain how this can threaten one’s ability to achieve self-understanding through psychotherapy in this open access paper doi.org/10.1080/0951... #philsky #philpsy

The Tractatus:

New open access paper on collective self-knowledge: link.springer.com/article/10.1... #philsky

Are you a woman in midlife (or older) who has struggled with an eating disorder as an adult? A new anthology, “This Is Not Your Mother’s Eating Disorder,”is looking for your story in the form of a personal essay!  You can read more about the anthology and submit your writing here!

remarkable to me that philosophers could look around the world right now and conclude that the best use of their time was to write public arguments against trans inclusion. how must the world look to render that reasonable? truly remarkable

The Tractatus:

1 Onion Subscriber vs 20 Non-Subscribers on our new series: Encircled. Subscribe at https://membership.theonion.com/?campaign=701a500001bfegPAAQ to get the paper delivered to your door.

It takes both real effort and enormous bad faith to turn the openness of universities to a wide range of perspectives into evidence that progressives have a bunker mentality but these two lifelong pundits have found a way to do it

If someone invites you to contribute an essay to something and then you just don't hear from them for months/years, is there a point at which your commitment lapses or do you always need to be on stand-by to be called up, like that guy at the start of 'The Godfather'?

#ThrowbackThursday Still a personal favourite, a mix of organic/progressive house with tracks from Silinder, Yoram, Noraj Cue, Volen Sentir, B.A.X., Monojoke, Erdi Irmak, and more:

id be worried if theyd been banning books the last few years, throwing aside vaccines for survival of the fittest and/or talking about government sponsored murder of the destitute

the kimmel thing is bad but as long as they arent rounding people up indiscriminately based on race, building concentration camps and talking about eradicating those they deem sexual deviants, i think we’ll be ok

Look who came with

All political tribes can be hypocritical but the right's current level of hypocrisy on free speech is deliberate. It's an assertion of power not a blindspot.

The problem with cooking in bulk is if you make something not-great, you have to eat it knowing that it's going to loop around and get you again periodically, like the space debris in 'Gravity'

I confess that when I signed up (being desperate to download something), I didn’t use my exact real name. That didn’t stop them trying to sell me a pretty website.

Writing philosophy papers be like

I got off academia dot edu 5 or so years ago, when I discovered it was sending automatically-generated emails in my name without even telling me - I found out when a very senior member of the profession replied to one. It's only gone further and further done this path since, as far as I can tell.

Coming soon –– The Penguin Book of Existentialist Philosophy edited by me :: available now to pre-order from all good bookshops (and that bad one) :: –– contents pages are in the thread below. #philsky

My youngest niece is learning to talk now, and she's started saying "all done that" as a way of signalling she wants you to stop doing whatever you're doing, and I think I've found my new email sign-off