Not a fan of Burnham anyway, but seriously, what is the point of changing leader if they are going to keep the same inhumane and hostile policies Starmer supports which have pushed so many voters away from Labour. Whoever takes over needs to u-turn on them, fast. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Go home @yougov.co.uk you're drunk

"Tell us one specific thing [Burnham] will do" Simons: ".. one of the things he's really committed to.. energy, water, social housing.. have gotten so expensive.. & one of the reasons why.. is that we've privatised a lot of them" "So with Burnham, nationalise water?" "No" lol

here's the Sky story: news.sky.com/story/nigel-...

A highly enjoyable bit of cultural convergent evolution is that His Dark Materials has the same narrative structure as a 90s JRPG: First level: you, your childhood friend who will ultimately die have childish hijinks! Final level: you, your love interest and a motley crew fight God

The ideological cousin of “the media isn’t telling us about this” which may actually drive me mad one day, bc it’s usually said about something reported on by multiple huge media outlets and means “no one delivered this to my social media feeds in way that captured my severely diminished attention.”

- Some of the strongest links to Reform vote share 🚗 Drives to work: r=0.80 💻 Works from home: r=-0.63 Commute vs WFH - an underrated fault-line of British politics?

Thing I like about the map of Greater Manchester is that Bury has two little horns.

The entire 2026 council elections wrapped up in one neat map.

When websites ask me to Accept All or Reject All cookies, I tend to accept all, as a little thank you. The ones that default you to Accept, no Reject All, and make you untick every one individually? I'm unticking every one, every time

That's fine, but so far it seems to be slower than the old Google Assistant was at handling the really basic stuff like alarms and weather, and worse at not losing my place in podcast episodes

As far as I can tell the Arts Council does not have an X account, although Number 10 Downing Street does.

Post your (slightly meta) warning sign

absolutely nothing so infuriating in modern consumer society as when two companies each agree something isn't working as it should, each blame each other, and each insist you act as the go-between

I was always impressed with how a band I love called The Lawrence Arms managed to take this very hopeful concept, and work it into one of the bleakest songs they've ever done, subverting it terribly. open.spotify.com/track/2eNGyC...

Marketing emails that assume you're a psychopath

Ooh I've never had one of these bizarre substitutions before

Red jumpsuit coincidences in my recent film viewings. (Except one, dammit Keaton!)

"We have to separate the art from the artist," I tell you, explaining the goal of this heist.

Can't believe none of you told me that Mubi is finally available via the PS5

At the cinema and 90% of the ads are for investment apps of some kind Is this a good sign or terribly ominous

The lesson that Rolls-Royce takes from the conflict in the Middle East is that it should move AWAY from electric vehicles and back towards fossil fuel powered ones? Right. www.theguardian.com/business/202...

YouGov encouraging us all to play the role of a mean-spirited Disney villain with today's question

I have a small but measurable amount of love in my heart for websites whose Download Invoice function provides a file whose name contains the company, the invoice date and the amount. And a small but measurable amount of hate for those whose systems spit out a filename of gibberish letters & numbers

(sea monster bio) You've probably seen my writhing in The Atlantic

Who's that gut-lord marching

My column in this week's @newstatesman1913.bsky.social, on bad data used in bad faith. FOI-ing the stats myself, I didn't find a great deal of difference in sex offending rates: 5 per 10,000 Afghan men, 7 per 10,000 UK men:

Absolutely cracking work here from Jim's team. I defend the BBC a lot, but when a small team is doing really solid work like this while BBC London is doing puff pieces about the Wicked films, it really does make you wonder what's gone wrong with the big news outlets.

you know this guy is a FOR REAL photographer because he's telling the story of his brutal, unconditional arrest by federal goons and can't help but slip in a gear review

Can't help but think that Civ 6 is slightly taking the piss out of Canada, here

I grew up near Ingleby Barwick which was traditionally pronounced Ingleby Bar-rick. They changed the official pronunciation to Bar-wick in WW2 because they didn't want Germany to bomb it thinking it was a barracks (it wasn't). Even in the 90s, it was 50/50 which pronunciation people used.

So many Substacks where I'd be happy to pay something, but not as much as the author charges, so we both end up unhappy. Must be a perfect-market solution to this (though sadly, that'd probably require every Substack author + user to keep every individual's subscription cost a secret, forever..hmm)

For an awful lot of the global right the UK must be a crime ridden hellhole otherwise their entire theory of culture and society is wrong.

EXCLUSIVE: Leaked WhatsApp messages show Labour MPs urging govt to leave X, arguing that it should "show direction to others in the UK" The MPs said X owner Elon Musk is "fascist" and that the platform's AI tool, Grok, had put "children in harm's way"

For some reason I'm sceptical that Motor City Plymouth really is your source for this, Mr AI

Oh yikes I am vastly out of step with the British public, again

News outlets need to get a grip on this. X and X-ai are avoiding offering responses, so they end up quoting the AI generator of contradictory gobbledegook because it will respond, but the responses are not meaningful

I remember, age 14 or so, thinking The Matrix was the coolest thing I'd ever seen. Rewatching it at 40 and... Yeah, it's still the one

"We don't have the resources to enforce the current law, so instead we'll make a new law" Funny how much this sums up the British state at the moment. It's like shutting down public loos because people occasionally do drugs in them. Ignore the issue, deal the with the proxy.

A fascinating case of "what variable have you actually accidentally measured?"

Absolutely delighted to discover, if this Michael Powell film is accurate, that people in 1960 pronounced memo to rhyme with Nemo

Amazingly, reaction times using screens while driving are worse than being drunk or high—no wonder 90 percent of drivers hate using touchscreens in cars. Finally the auto industry is coming to its senses.

Essentially, I think that LLM-generated dialogue only makes sense if you believe that the product of writing is words. But the product of writing isn't words, any more than the product of justice is prisoners, or the product of love is weddings. The product of writing is meaning.

Spotted in a Mumbai restaurant: “London corner shop style samosas” and “Birmingham Balti”.

Welcome to Britain, a country so short of dentists that an MP's 87-year-old mum pulled her teeth out with pliers. Also a country with thousands of foreign-qualified dentists who can’t work until they pass an exam so oversubscribed it’s like trying to book Glasto tickets. www.ft.com/content/f4e5...

I hear your dad's been in the papers

He wasn't actually due to resign until an hour later

new favourite New York Times term for a British thing just dropped

This chap suggests tax should go up on incomes, not on the 'accidentally' asset-rich. What do wonk-land & economists think these days? That we need to tax wealth more and income less, because of inequality and UK's nightmare housing market? Or that taxing wealth = complicated / poor outcomes?