brb just checking which bits of London are in the Western hemisphere and which in the Eastern

Checking in on the flagship policy ambition of Starmerism www.theguardian.com/business/202...

we are nearing the point when we will be banging on about some 'global financial crisis' that happened before our students were born

Lucid and concise anatomy of fascism by @mattpolprof.bsky.social . For the UK, it helps explain what is happening with formerly conservative politicians such as Jenrick and formerly conservative newspapers such as the Telegraph www.currentaffairs.org/news/why-fas...

Non-expert prediction: the US will not ‘seize’ Greenland, it will not ‘go in’ in a military sense, and European leaders will still be able to talk about ‘NATO’ this time next year. But the US will get everything it actually wants from Greenland.

This piece from last May was interesting www.ft.com/content/1503...

Good point, and it's beginning to get discussed in eco-ethics lit. See eg www.nature.com/articles/d41... and work of Jeff Sebo.

This is good by @sarahoconnorft.ft.com on wrongly ascribing 'empathy' to bots. Part of the problem is that, decades prior to LLMs, cognitive psychologists were deriving their theories of mind from computation, so there's a vicious circle at work www.ft.com/content/ef77...

ew

🤔

Fair play to the guy for managing to push the pay-out up above the ‘five years’ mark

eu and whose army?

If there is an argument then this is the argument. But lol I can’t find where this obviously false stat is coming from. And if the government does believe more than half the families in the UK are using it as their primary news source then woah maybe time to up the scrutiny of it!

Oh wow, someone's posted a collection of their favourite pieces of writing from 2025, that's so cool... [clicks] Hang on a second, that same person *wrote* them all?

at risk of becoming a Russiagate/Cambridge Analytica bore, must admit that Putin's had a good ten years www.theguardian.com/world/2026/j...

Utterly delusional, but quite interesting in a 'new spirit of capitalism' kind of way, that progressive Silicon Valley is seeking to absorb the critique of Sillicon Valley into itself. Ive has always struck me as a kind of tragic figure www.ft.com/content/6a33...

Nomination for new Chelsea manager

I would characterise this political philosophy as neoconservatism on crack

“… FIFA peace prize…”

But also… guys, it’s an op-Ed in a paper none of us reads by someone only 5% of us have heard of

I have read the article about the ‘Stakeholder State’ and have no clue what any of it means. It seems to imagine a state that converts executive diktat into outcomes, without any ‘stakeholders’ being involved along the way.

Seeing Toby Young’s name around again reminds me that Britain’s Generation X metropolitan elite has never (yet) been properly satirically skewered, as far as I’m aware.

Tfw you just logged into your USS account

The algorithm is taking no prisoners

I know what you’re wondering and the answer is you can read all of my 2025 articles here williamdavies.blog/category/unc...

Silly season has rarely been sillier www.standard.co.uk/sport/footba...

Manic Street Preachers fans fortunate to never witness Richey Edwards in the age of Twitter (from Keith Cameron book)

Entered the Declan Rice at fullback phase of the season

This Man City away shirt has a ‘youth offender being visibly made to do community service’ feel

The ‘central paradox’ in this quote becomes less mysterious when you remember only 1/5 electorate voted for Starmer in the GE

Don’t make me explain Christmas

Oh god forgot about the cricket

AI is producing reams of enthusiasm that nobody is actually feeling. Not clear if it will ever be able to communicate actual ennui.

Not sure how I'd get through tomorrow without all the op-eds telling me how to speak to my own relatives

To the winner, an additional two-leg fixture against Chelsea in February, and to the loser… umm hang on

it's a vibe

Insurance companies: don’t forget to wish all your ex customers of the past five years a Very Happy Christmas via email. A little thought goes a long way.

Dennis Bergkamp’s biography in 2013.

Having spent the day watching 7, 8 and 9 year-olds playing a football tournament, I have reached the conclusion that we have gone well beyond the Pareto optimal quantity of football coaching, and adults now need to back right off and chill the fuck out

One takeaway from that is that Gabriel Jesus is much, much better at football than Viktor Gyokeres

This is not news, but the mess of England’s Ashes tour is what happens when a very resource and time-intensive sport is only valued (in attention and money) at the very very top end. Ever-shorter, less intelligent forms and styles of cricket are a failed attempt to manage that contradiction.

By this definition, a lot of academic writing is ‘slop’ in that it feels geared entirely towards being *technically unrejectable* by the journal publishing it

“slop” as the new “nonplace” maxread.substack.com/p/what-is-sl...

Excellent empirical analysis from @jburnmurdoch.ft.com which, amongst other things, explains why resentment is not necessarily an irrational political phenomenon www.ft.com/content/30a4...

Fascinated to learn that a libertarian-nationalist hedge fund manager, and main conduit of MAGA-style politics into British media, believes Britain needs to slash taxes and regulations to become more like America. Truly revelatory journalism www.ft.com/content/42b3...

After this, I never want to hear the word ‘Bazball’ again. The England team don’t use it, just a bunch of Freakonomics-brained journalists who cant resist any opportunity to psychologise everything, as opposed to concluding that one team is just obviously better than the other.

'What Is It Like to Be a Bot?'