Tonight, I picked, so we are watching 'Anyone But You'.

Oh gosh, I've done it. I've turned into a Tory! I agree with this wholeheartedly. It's my entire experience as a professional working with curriculums. Mind you. I do think it's perfectly in order to look at these wisdoms critically.

Radio 3 Unwind is such a wonderful addition to the airwaves.

This is my direct experience and it is why I think that many of the attempts to get *students* to use it formally are utterly wrongheaded, in that thus far, it has changed a lot of things to a job where you need to 'verify and edit' as it were.

Barbara Hepworth ~ Winter Solstice, 1971 #WinterSolstice

"The snow man doesn’t bring the snow. The snow man is a product of the snow. Roy Wood and Wizzard are thinking of rain man."

The number one use for generative AI for these and similar professions - and I am not doing a bit here, and I do think it is genuinely incredibly useful - is in handling a certain kind of 'tedious but important correspondence'.

interesting how the story of andor and rogue 1 was like 'everyone here ends up dead but it really matters how' as opposed to the acolyte where it's like "everyone here ends up dead and i don't give a shit why"

This was the thing I found oddly draining about 'The Acolyte', was this sense of 'this is going to end up being a shaggy dog story leading into the Star Wars prequels, isn't it?'

The relativity thing is interesting There's a 10 yr gap between me + my partner which doesn't seem like much now we're 40/50s but still remember the day I spoke about going to get shitfaced in the Student Union after the Italia 90 semifinal when England got knocked out + he piped up with "I was 8"

Yes, I get this, too. Not with respect to famous people, because I don't know who most of them are. But when I was at school, 1 year was a massive amount of time, and the age difference unclimbable. And now 1 year is like "we're twins".

Weird thing about life is how your sense of how old someone is relative to you changes, i.e. Darren Fletcher having a child old enough to play football makes me go 'how'd that happen, we're the same age', which is not something I thought about Fletcher at any point during his actual playing career.

Unai Emery is I think the highest profile example of something we see throughout the world: the high-performer who can only succeed in functioning institutions. Think ironically if he had come in *after* Arteta he would have been a very successful Arsenal manager.

“The last-minute christmas rush at the bookshop.” - my latest cartoon for @theguardian.com books

STINA!

Correcting typos in captions and subtitles counts as “engagement” and drives the algorithm. Often its done deliberately. Like I just did there. That alone should be depressing enough a fact to encourage you to be more like Bob. You know it make’s sense.

Woohoo! Best Christmas present ever:

Two Jews meet at Ben Gurion Airport. One is arriving with his family to live, the other is leaving. Both cite security concerns. I've written for @theobserveruk.bsky.social about Bondi — and whether there is anywhere Jewish people can feel safe.

I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm trying to delete it

That got better. Hard watch at times but Everton never allowed to threaten and should've had it wrapped up much earlier with some of those chances. Top at Christmas hasn't been good to us over the years but I still always enjoy the milestone.

This is such a lovely Christmas listen:

This is the horror that Woke has driven us to.

Such is our commitment to inverting gender roles, my partner has just suggested that we watch 'Die Hard', while I am preparing tonight's dinner.

Every time I'm in a restaurant I remember Kevin McAleer's reply to a waiter who told him the Soup Of The Day. "Where there any other contenders?" "Um, no?" "A hollow victory, then".

Hell of a yarn, this:

Ashamed at how hard I'm laughing at this.

At least when Keith Joseph didn't believe in the railways he had the excuse that we had had 40 years of decline under British Rail. That Rishi Sunak basically didn't believe in them because he was doing 1980s cosplay is comfortably the worst thing he did as prime minister.

Canceling the northern leg of HS2 was an act of insane self-harm

“Santa’s elf hears that production is being outsourced to Shenzhen”

We discuss Adolescence, Pluribus, Platonic (❤️), posh trash, Mussolini, Too Much, and finale of And Just Like That

I love this. We really did have a good time making it, despite the fact every single photo is like a scene from a hostage video.

this photo of our fun festive FT podcast Xmas quiz makes me laugh every time I see it

Great interview this: Milburn talking a lot of sense about his review, and about what went wrong with welfare reform earlier this year:

You see this especially for contempt of court laws too I think? And definitely fuels conspiracism as to 'the mainstream media won't report this!1'

A new problem with the UK’s libel laws in the digital age is that a fact can become widely known before it is publishable, it’s terrible for trust and accountability. And also ironically allows misinformation to flow freely.

As a former editor of Popbitch – and the proud owner of a legal letter sent by HarperCollins, accusing me of being "highly likely to cause serious harm to [their former star client]’s reputation both as an individual and author” – may I just say: GET IT RIGHT UP YE

This would go hard as an album cover ngl

FT defends London, one of the greatest cities in the world www.ft.com/content/dd79...

that UK debt crisis in full

Agree, but a big problem is that everything that gets taken to No 10 has been shrunk to fit, and then gets shrunk down further by No 10. It’s good IMV that at least one of the Labour-aligned think tanks is just going “look, here’s what the stuff you pontificate about needs”.

Enjoyably measured and understated response from N to Bluesky’s maddest tribe, this.

This newsletter is very good and very good value.

Very likely to be the truest measure of voting intention today given their Methodology and the expense of doing so / record at the general election. Reform surge real, labour collapse at worse end of expectations, big gains for liberals and greens. Tories at higher end of polling

Kind of notable also that the other intra-bloc challenger is led by a former Lib Dem and has an activist and voter base *many* of whom were Lib Dems 2001-10.

100%. And adults need to go back to actually being adults, instead of sensitive/temperamental/obsessive/conspiratorial ten-year-olds in adult bodies

Agree. The Lib Dem / Green discrepancy between polling figures and local by-election performance is one of my biggest uncertainties on what what's actually happening.

Excellent thread this. The NYT interview made me think we need to rediscover shame in the modern world - that is to say, if your reaction to the Coldplay kisscam was anything other than to laugh and go 'wow, what a way to get caught' and thne move on with your day, you should be ashamed.

The internet sucks now because everything needs to result in the maximal outcome so instead of seeing the Coldplay couple and going “lol pretty funny” we end up with this, everything is Qanon, everything is the Inquisition, when the fun of it should be “well, never have to think about this again!”

I genuinely think this is one of the most interesting things about politics in England. The polls and actual elections all tell us 'Labour are super-unpopular and shedding votes to another challenger in their bloc' but they tell us different things about which challenger that actually *is*.

I see we've reached the 'just use a non-usurious lender, not a payday loans company' stage of talking about loneliness.