Men in balaclavas set fire to a mosque in East Sussex last night. It's only appearing on the BBC's local coverage, rather than its main national headlines, despite coming just a week after the (also under-reported) firebombing of an asylum hotel in London last week www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

The fact that Arteta has not yet had to declare it “eeencredible we didn’t win that game” is a sign of how different this team is from last year

"Our credible plan is also an acrostic." (This is, genuinely, the actual Conservative press release.)

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I have a piece in The Ideas Letter on how the covering/uncovering of the face has become such a fractious political issue, in contexts such as protest, Covid, ICE agents etc www.theideasletter.org/essay/facial...

I have a piece in The Ideas Letter on how the covering/uncovering of the face has become such a fractious political issue, in contexts such as protest, Covid, ICE agents etc www.theideasletter.org/essay/facial...

Interesting claim from Dylan Riley: by attacking the politically ‘irrelevant’ civic nodes of academia and NGOs, MAGA could unwittingly unleash a more truly potent Left newleftreview.org/sidecar/post...

Even having read (and reviewed!) @melindacooper.bsky.social book, I found this hugely illuminating, especially on the confusions and fantasies of class identities that underpin reactionary populist movements podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/t...

“… and what is Woman’s net worth?”

This is really insightful and impressively done: Will Davies (@will-davies.bsky.social), "Stupidology: The outsourcing of judgment" (@nplusonemag.com): www.nplusonemag.com/issue-51/pol...

jesus christ, Mac OS Tahoe is abysmal. Why do they hate their own computers so much?

We are delighted to welcome four new members to our Editorial Board: - Kimberly Chong (UCL) - Sarah El-Kazaz (SOAS) - Paul R. Gilbert (Sussex) - Joy Y. Zhang (Kent) Their disciplinary expertise and research interests will broaden and deepen our editorial collective.

My essay on stupidology (originally published in N+1) is in today's Guardian www.theguardian.com/news/2025/oc...

They are desperate for some of the post-Kirk energy

If Labour really wanted to go for it, they could bring up this story in a context when Russian drones and jets keep ‘accidentally’ crossing into NATO territories www.bbc.com/news/article...

Given 50% of school leavers currently choose to go to university, as a matter of (ahem) investor choice, without any targeting by government, Starmer has effectively just set a target of an additional 1/6 doing apprenticeships

In the mid-80s, I attended a friends birthday party where the ‘activity’ was going on the DLR

The 'Soy Right' arrives in Britain cf @maxread.info maxread.substack.com/p/soy-right-...

Given 50% of school leavers currently choose to go to university, as a matter of (ahem) investor choice, without any targeting by government, Starmer has effectively just set a target of an additional 1/6 doing apprenticeships

More evidence that Arteta is into cybernetics www.goal.com/en-gb/lists/...

A factor in this triumphant return is how platforms (Spotify) dissolve historical time, with the effect that a) nobody needs to remember that this was a band whose 'good' patch lasted circa 18 months and b) they provide the backdrop for inter-generational bonding

New book 📚 // In #TheMeaningOfGrowth, CUSP researcher @maitrereynard.bsky.social investigates the roots of political resistance to environmental science and policy in Western societies, and suggests a new approach to overcoming it. With a foreword by @timjackson.org.uk → cusp.ac.uk/themes/m/rd-...

The former UK prime minister has welcomed Donald Trump’s 'bold and intelligent' peace plan, but there was disbelief among some members of Blair’s Labour party on.ft.com/3WgLMgE

'Abraham' joins 'groceries' in Trump's lexicon of words that he likes

London people come discuss and celebrate with us! A launch event for The Politics of Feeling on 25th November at the October Gallery, with @will-davies.bsky.social and @jemgilbert.bsky.social. Eventbrite link below! 🥂 www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-politi...

Recently got scammed by an online service, and the quality of the 'online reviews' (trustpilot etc), subsequent 'customer care' emails, responses to my own emails etc was a contributory factor. So there's another thing AI is destroying: all manner of reliable online recommendation/reputation.

[looks at Global Financial Crisis, drivers of mass migration, Brexit, Covid] “why would The Left do this?”

My not-very-fan opinion so far is that Arsenal fixating on the referee could end up costing them 3 points. Why does someone the size and speed of Gyokeres keep looking at the ref every time he gets touched?

If Liverpool were to lose at Chelsea next weekend, the wisdom of spending half a billion pounds on any attacking player just because you could, all at once, would suddenly start to look a little like Chelsea circa 2023

Not a conspiracy theory expert but hasn’t the Fabian society thing been around for ages, like the Frankfurt school one (minus the antisemitism)?

Salah pen any second now

FT: Crystal Palace 1 (Sarr) - 2 Liverpool (Salah 90+4 pen, Salah 90+17 pen)

"While Trump’s first term looked like an aberration, a morbid symptom of a dying world, his second looks more like an attempt to enforce a new paradigm." - @will-davies.bsky.social www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

The author of 'what did we learn on our summer holiday.docx' checking in on the bluesky discourse right now

The paper literally argues that the only way to stop racism is to let Farage win - and the defeating him would unleash "dark forces"

Bizarre that someone can throw together a 5 page word document of Spenglerian apocalyptic prophecy, remove their name from it, and the Times will republish it in full

Watched this whole thing last night, and it's really superb. Klein has been taking a lot of criticism recently but there aren't many 'mainstream' commentators who could engage in a 90 minute conversation of this quality www.nytimes.com/2025/09/24/o...

Looking forward to discussing @benandersongeog.bsky.social & Anna Secor's brilliant new @goldsmithspress.bsky.social book, The Politics of Feeling, with the authors and @jemgilbert.bsky.social on 25th Nov - all welcome, register here www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-politi...

When the AI hallucination is deemed more true than empirical reality www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/se...

There is no such thing as ‘illegal immigration’, there are people who overstay their visas, which prompted the Hostile Environment, which caused the Windrush scandal

This is getting silly

It's almost like Andy Burnham has looked at the Labour leadership election rules or something

Not a pollster, nor some Starmerite, but it seems fairly clear that you could stick anyone in the job of 'Labour Prime Minister of country whose sole source of economic growth for past 18 years has been immigration' and large numbers of people would quickly blame them for everything

the correct Manc reference was staring him in the face ffs

Now out in @cpsjournal.bsky.social. In our new article, @denis-cohen.bsky.social @thmskrr.bsky.social and I show that where local rent prices increase more, residents with lower incomes become more likely to support the radical right AfD. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Is this still about Greta Thunberg ?

To the extent that this article is onto something, that thing is the declining appetite for the 19th/20th century humanities, which has been pushed and applauded by cognitive scientists, the OECD, Silicon Valley-brained tech wankers, and lapped up by schools and parents anxious about 'outcomes'

Leaving aside Kissinger/Star Wars, what does Sunstein think his project is even about? There’s a kind of Goodbye Lenin (Goodbye Clinton?) element to the whole thing, of doing whatever it takes to sustain some idea of an overlapping a priori, regardless of all evidence that no such thing exists.

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