Friends, can I ask you to spread the word that we have a THREE-YEAR postdoc in American history at Cambridge up for grabs - ANY field, but applications are due March 1 so don't delay - apply, apply, apply! networks.h-net.org/jobs/69790/u...

For Americans struggling to understand how Keir Starmer is on the brink of resigning, this piece by @owenjones.bsky.social offers a concise and bleak summary of how we got here www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

The Times belatedly covers the huge Mandelson-Starmer scandal in the UK, but omits the crucial fact that 18 months before Starmer made Mandelson US ambassador the FT reported that he'd stayed in Epstein's NYC mansion *while Epstein was in prison for child sex abuse* www.nytimes.com/2026/02/05/w...

Frost making the point that the entire cabinet backed Mandelsons appointment as ambassador Starmer is going to be the fall guy for this (& lots more), but everyone at the top of Labour is implicated, including people who might have resigned in the meantime!

Probably no bandwidth in the US media right now for international news, even before we factor in the mass firing of journalists, but the latest Epstein document dump really might bring down the UK prime minister before the week is out

"Keir Starmer's government will last for six more weeks!"

Given Epstein's sordid relationship with Trump, it seems incredible to think that this scandal may bring down the UK government before the US government www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Even in the 'unipolar' years of the 1990s, US presidents were exasperated by their inability to control the United Nations; the idea of replacing the unruly Security Council with a pliant 'Board of Peace' is really a sign of US decline in the world, not of Trump's strength

A really excellent analysis of imperialism, gangsterism and regionalism under Trump 47 - and some sobering thoughts about the connections between violence abroad and the white nationalist agenda at home thedigradio.com/podcast/maga...

So much for the Trinity Hall reboot! www.theguardian.com/education/20...

Madness for the UK government to get involved in the increasingly unhinged and dangerous foreign policy of the Trump administration, but Keir Starmer seems determined to outdo Tony Blair in becoming lickspittle-in-chief to a rogue U.S. president

You probably don't have a lot of bandwidth for recreational reading about a divided America, but just on the off chance I have a piece on the Mason-Dixon Line in the latest edition of the New York Review of Books www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

Pure cowardice on the part of every European leader who refuses to call out the Trump administration for what it is: a criminal and utterly lawless extortion racket which poses a grave danger to the security of the entire world

In the upside down world of the Daily Mail, If you're opposed to the US invading another country, kidnapping its president and then telling the world of its plan to "run" that country indefinitely, you're a "Maduro apologist"

that is what Bush said about Iraq - $7 trillion mistake

A gangster regime, with cheap dialogue to match

So many lies in Trump's rambling speech, but his easy segue from the illegal use of the military overseas to the illegal use of the military in US cities is really chilling

Hard not to wonder whether Trump has been using his recent hours-long phone calls with Putin to barter over Venezuela and eastern Ukraine; would be entirely on-brand for Trump to tell the Russian president about his invasion plan long before anyone in Congress gets the memo

Feels as if there's a real gap in the market right now for a peace prize for people who actually promote peace

The media reaction to Trump's plainly illegal invasion/abduction this morning has been mostly shock, but Venezuelan opposition figures with "close ties to the US security establishment" have been boasting about this outcome for months (this from the FT in October)

Happy new year, everyone! Seeing in the new year by burying our 2025 lemon pig with full honours, helluva year to be a lemon pig

Since the "tech prosperity deal" was engineered to give Sam Altman, Satya Nadella and Jensen Huang even more encouragement to build AI data centres and produce yet more AI slop, the UK may have dodged a bullet here

The madness of our civilisation, in which the super-rich are throwing money at AI which the rest of us don't want, and are meeting the ridiculous power demands of data centres mostly by burning gas and cooking our planet

I have a perverse admiration for the way in which Gianni Infantino has made FIFA an even more despicable organisation than it was during Sepp Blatter's constantly-disgraced tenure www.bbc.co.uk/sport/footba...

I know I have been promising this forever but the Oxford Illustrated History of the United States will finally be out in June of next year, just in time to help unite the nation around the 250th

I wish the BBC would simply ask Lisa Nandy directly to confirm the widely-reported story that Keir Starmer dropped Labour's support for the crucial second phase of the Leveson enquiry into press corruption in return for Murdoch's backing in the general election

Not cat-related, but you've reminded me of @nicholasguyatt.bsky.social and the marrow spoons: bsky.app/profile/yvon...

After Trump I don't know how you go back to the presidency being even vaguely dignified and not perpetually batshit-crazy

ICYMI here's the recording of my chat last week about law, politics and autocracy in America with Jim Zirin, author and talk-show host. Some great questions from the audience and a persistent effort from yours truly to find some hope in the current moment www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jj3o...

Surreal to see the media architects of Starmerism, the guys who cheered every one of Starmer's deceptions and assaults on the left, now scratching their heads about why he's become a terrible and reviled prime minister who stands for nothing www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Obviously this is another trumpet of doom hailing the imminent collapse of the AI bubble, but for now it's nice that Microsoft and Nvidia are helping to fund the gigantic settlement for all the authors Anthropic ripped off

“Mr Summers added that he would continue teaching at Harvard”

The AI bubble is now consuming non-AI companies which have been borrowing tens of billions to build data centres they can rent back to the AI companies. So much hubris but of course when the crash comes they will all get bailed out and the rest of us will be screwed

When you have a viciously right-wing media which has spent YEARS scaremongering about immigrants and insisting that immigration is the nation's most important issue, it's grim to see a Labour home secretary validate that narrative so shamelessly www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

The focus should properly be on Mahmood’s grim willingness to lead McSweeney’s anti-immigrant crusade; but the central and enduring role of Murdoch’s Times and Sunday Times in laundering the McSweeney/Starmer project is a wonder to behold

it's often very hard for extremely successful and powerful people to understand that mild criticism from those they have power over is not equivalent to actually being oppressed.

It’s hard to even know where to begin with this. Professor Falk is in his 90s and one of the world’s most prominent international legal scholars. It beggars belief that he could even remotely be considered a threat to Canada.

Wow this is proper John Adams stuff. Weird that our government here in the UK is supposed to be left-leaning and has a gigantic parliamentary majority and yet spends all of its time doing Nigel Farage's bidding www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Trump was impeached in January 2021 for attempting to incite an insurrection; the Senate was too cowardly to convict him, which would have barred him from running again & spared us the current nightmare, but the claim that the BBC misreported his intention to steal the 2020 election is *fake news*

Truly hilarious that Starmer's best argument for saving his own skin is that ditching him as prime minister would threaten the UK's close relationship with....Donald Trump

The BBC’s core problem is that, like the NHS, it models the benefits and virtues of a not-for-profit public service in a world of rapacious corporate greed and unstinting right-wing hostility to the idea of the public good www.nytimes.com/2025/11/10/w...

ICYMI the Telegraph's reporting on the BBC bias 'crisis' included the fantastical claim that the right-wing and unabashedly anti-woke History Reclaimed website is a legitimate arbiter either of historical fact or political balance

An orchestrated right-wing campaign against our public broadcaster is destroying the BBC while our supposedly left-leaning government with its massive majority either sits on its hands or cheers on the vandals

wondering how many seconds Trump can go without mentioning Zohran

Hilarious to watch Starmer’s allies this morning pretending that they haven’t really heard of Zohran Mamdani

Cannot be overstated that the liberal political and media establishment in the UK has spent the past ten users scorching the earth on the left while insisting that the very very best you'll ever get in elected politics is a Starmer/Cuomo type

No surprise that the establishment media here in the UK are coming for Mamdani this morning. The boldness of his vision shows up our Labour government for what it is: timid, in hock to wealthy donors, and totally devoid of progressive energy www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

If you have half an hour to kill this sounds like a great party

An amazing exploration of the fusion of creativity and progressive politics which has inspired so many people, both within and far beyond NYC

Cannot be said often enough that the political figure who inaugurated our age of lawlessness, arbitrary power and authoritarianism was not Donald Trump but Dick Cheney