The main opposition to their own success.

Wonder if anyone would have guessed at this time last season, that Rashford would today be a La Liga winner and Alexander-Arnold wouldn’t.

I have a 20yr old who thinks ai is just unfantastic, like I do.

Honestly, I don't need to use GenAI. Every day, I have fascinating conversations with real, intelligent human beings. In PhD supervisions & project meetings I am "prompt engineering" those intelligences, and they are going out into the world, gathering views of other experts in a real neural network

💯 🎯

The Blue Nile - Flags and Fences youtu.be/arOG2_QG4ls?...

Strange how all of these Reform characters keep turning out to be racists. Of course, it’s too early to say if there’s a pattern developing. Just bad luck I suppose.

An important reminder. 👆

These children from Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger are in school and learning. Insecurity, climate shocks and socio-economic crises have impacted education across the Central Sahel region. Over 8,400 schools became inaccessible in 2025 alone. UNICEF is on the ground supporting essential needs.

See also: school teachers. Like, wtf have we done now?? (Whatever it is, we’re clearly in cahoots with Zack Polanski and scientists… so whatever it is we’re doing, and whoever it is we’re upsetting, it’s right! 🤓)

I entirely disagree. If they legally need to talk to Reform about parliamentary admin. But there can be no treating fascists like any normal party. Discussing policy, voting etc would be more counterproductive than the threat of making them look like sexy outsiders

Fascinating stuff. Only thing I'd add is that ability of list to compensate for disproportionality in const depends on limited split ticket voting. Prelim SES data suggest *split tickets at an all time high* this election, thus further weakening Lab and Con chances esp Quebec proposed a model of ...

The assumption that the govt wants to win the next election might not be correct. As I wrote here, "the Labour right is behaving as if its incentives are not to win the next election but to get cushy jobs outside politics after it." chrisdillow.substack.com/p/bad-incent...

I visited the Pentagon recently and remarked to my escort there were lots of bathrooms. He said it’s because the Pentagon’s in Virginia and when it was built Jim Crow laws were in effect - the separate bathrooms were for blacks. As we saw in Virginia today, the past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.

Open always wins. reclaimthenet.org/google-broke...

JK Rowling is now represented by a trans person in the Scottish parliament. Absolutely incredible.

Undoubtedly two points dropped.

Wonder which Labour MSP will be picked by Starmer to be leader in Scotland?

ITV News just vox-popped an older northern woman who said that she had switched from Labour to Reform because she was angry that illegal migrants were “getting hotels when British people can’t get hotels”. At some point Labour surely just has to say these people are completely politically illiterate

Yaas!

My new Coppola Comment post reflects on inflation control in the Roman Empire. Just like today, it's all about the labour market - but the labour market in a slave economy works very differently from ours. open.substack.com/pub/coppolac...

BBC Scotland are tying themselves in knots trying to make the the case that this isn’t a massive win for the SNP. Especially if they don’t get a majority in a system set up to make a majority really difficult.

now thats an anecdote with a punch, from Gillian Tett www.ft.com/content/c0ae...

‘Strong’ as in you can smell their stench from miles away.

Seconded.

It'd be nice if the BBC celebrated the life of old Wyggestonian David Attenborough by repeating one of his achievements - commissioning programmes of the quality of Civilization, Ascent of Man or Alastair Cooke's America.

BERA have begun retracting AI-authored articles and will need to retract many, many more. But still they publish more. They keep making the story bigger, while taking away their own room for manoeuvre. It increasingly looks like this will not end well.

No one expected Keir Starmer to solve our pressing problems overnight. But what we did expect – and had every right to expect – was that he would lay out a clear vision and roadmap for doing so. Instead, we’ve had drift, appeasement and a startling absence of ideas, values and ambition. 🧵1/6

We hope everyone has voted today! For hope and not hate!

I voted for hope.

After about 8 years of trying desperately to get people to believe fascism is here in Scotland and in the ascendant, and people confidently telling me it was impossible because this is Scotland, we are staring down the barrel of a fascist party being the second biggest party in Holyrood. 1/

A warning for those who haven’t yet voted

Thanks to @robfmac.bsky.social for letting me use his excellent 'Clean Up Your Mess' presentation as the basis for my input on presentations, cognitive load theory & adaptive practice at today's in service day. See the full splendour of Robert's slide deck here - www.slideshare.net/slideshow/cl...

The Donald J Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room, housed in a Tribeca gallery, is a physical, undeniable record of corruption, cover-ups, and crime. It contains all 3.5 million pages of the Epstein files released by the DoJ earlier this year, compiled into more than 3,437 volumes.

😍

Today I'm remembering my father, who passed exactly a year ago. Though he spent his career as a writer and pioneer of eating disorders prevention and treatment, in his later years he was an impressionist oil painter. So I wanted to share his work here in his memory leighpaintings.com

Yes. My attitude too. Prison for Israelis, while I'm sure not pleasant, is a thousand miles from the experience of incarcerated Palestinians. And quite a lot of young Israelis have the choice to emigrate. I'm not sparing sympathy for a genocidal occupying force. FIN.

The IHRA definition gives as an example of anti-semitism: "Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis". Either the former head of Mossad is an anti-semite or we stop using the IHRA definition to gag proper, necessary, criticism of the Israeli genocide.

Sharing, without comment, British newspapers’ depictions of the only Jewish person currently leading a UK political party . Times. Mail. Telegraph. Sun.

Attention all men. More of this, please.

Taking a sledgehammer to another person just shows you're a bloody violent thug.

Must admit that an Arsenal victory seems inevitable and would be deserved.

Children move across borders for complex reasons — conflict, poverty or other needs. As countries review progress on the Global Compact for Migration, UNICEF calls for urgent action to ensure every child is protected, included and supported. #IMRF2026 Learn more: https://unicef.link/3OVA3UV

In which Graham Hunter suggests in passing that Jose Mourinho could be labelled the Special Once… apple.news/AYBl1T1LeSU6...

Amazon has a global technical issue; my paperback is still stuck. But! The eBook & hardback are available. If you want to read beyond telling and retrieval get a copy: mybook.to/teachingmean... I'd really appreciate the support (and an honest review to help this calamitous launch).

Anything longer than “Corrupt Tory dead.” Is a waste of ink.

You don’t help the fight against antisemitism by engaging in Islamophobia. You don’t help the fight against Islamophobia by engaging in antisemitism.

Have you seen the Literacy update to the national Anti-Racist Education resource antiracisted.scot? Join us for this online session exploring how to take an anti-racism approach to reading, writing, listening and talking at First to Fourth Levels. 📅 Wednesday May 20, 4PM - 5:30PM

I'm Lead Judge of the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction, awarded at University of Edinburgh since 1919 and due to be announced this month. But the university is currently withholding 100% of my pay for participating in a marking and assessment boycott. So, at present, there will be no prize.