Boris was objectively very funny to watch destroying himself. This is like watching a middle aged dad justify his gambling debts it's depressing

There is a small number of internet jokes of which I never tire, and this is one of them.

From “The Simpsons” house genius John Swartzwelder, interviewed in The New Yorker by Mike Sacks

This is the finest ever episode of Yes Minister

If BBC editorial staff were acting on their migration review conclusions, they would be trying to find ways to report a 33% fall, even though it is not as contested + controversial as a 33% rise, because meant to report social trends, not just chase the politics of the issue
bsky.app/profile/sund...

Poor Sleep Linked To Gong Instrument’s Loud, Resonant Crash Can Be Disruptive

Poor Sleep Linked To Gong https://theonion.com/poor-sleep-linked-to-gong/

And lots of university staff will vote for them...

No tuition fees, but no commtiment to incrased public funding either. In other words, institutions can get bent.

Things that would have made no sense 25 years ago: my book and my cigarette use the same charger.

It is inevitable that a HEPI report would advocate for all sorts of regulatory and systemic reforms like student distribution and reducing market incentives *way* after probably irrevocable damage has been done to the whole UK HE sector. Look at their reports from 2018-2020.

It's Hotdog Man stuff.

AI is contentious both for how it could impact society and how it was trained. And there are overhyped claims for its capabilities. But it's not crypto, NFTs, or the Metaverse. There's an underlying tech here that isn't going to go away if ignored.

I do understand this view. Austerity as implemented was a disaster (as I said very publicly for a decade)

But we are not seeing/have not seen a huge increase in inequality and the idea that there's some soak-the-rich get-out-of-jail-free card just doesn't add up

A wonderful thread of how life expectancy with cancer has dramatically improved in the last 20 years.

For instance this type of lung cancer your chance of living a year is up from zero to almost 80%.

I am not remotely convinced any of our politicians have come close to rising to meet the moment, but the opposition populists in particular have covered themselves in their own excrement and paraded their clownish idiocy through the town square

The UK unequivocally condemns the Taliban’s ban on girls' education in Afghanistan: UK statement at the UN Security Council Statement by Ambassador James Kariuki, UK Deputy Permanent Representative to the UN, at the UN Security Council meeting on Afghanistan.

Afghan women have now been banned from applying to study in British universities by the Labour government
www.gov.uk/government/s...

Archives were invented in 1838 by John Archive when he put down a book and wrote down where it was

Let me guess, they've looked at all the evidence and determined the only genuinely imperilled people on earth are white South Africans?

Miscellanea: The War in Iran This post is a set of my observations on the current war in Iran and my thoughts on the broader strategic implications. I am not, of course, an expert on the region nor do I have access to any spec…

Well, I am not sure what my analysis here is worth, but here is my 7,500 word primal scream of a military historian's take on the War in Iran.

My best summary: this war is dumb as hell.

acoup.blog/2026/03/25/m...

The World’s Worst Student Loan System | HESA If you read the UK education press at all, you’ll have noticed a serious uptick recently in the number of stories describing the current student loan system as “a scam” by  Government back-bench MPs a...

ICYMI: why England has the world's worst student loan system.

The Bookshop is proud to announce the fourth year of the Martha Mills Young Writers’ Prize.

Inspired by the curiosity and imagination of Martha Mills, the prize seeks to give young people a chance to get their work published.

More information here: www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/blog/2026/ma...

'I never thought leopards would eat MY face,' sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party.

europeans when asked to help unblock the strait of hormuz

I enjoyed Louis Theroux's delve into the Manosphere, but I have the niggling sense that the whole panic around it is a bit of a fantasma.

The prevalence of misogyny among young men is no higher now than in 2015. The worst you can say is it's stopped shrinking.

What am I missing here?

This tickled me (posted by Rhoda Bracewell on the other place)

The Postliberal University An urgent exploration of the political and social conditions that shape contemporary higher education governanceIn the 2010s, many state governments began to...

At long last, The Postliberal University is available for pre-order! hep.gse.harvard.edu/979889557111...

There’s a lot of noise in politics but if you want to understand why we’ve had 8 Prime Ministers in the last 20 years and no leading politician has a positive approval rating, you might want to check out this chart

Looking for something else entirely, and came across this bit of fan mail from 2014, that I had forgotten about entirely.

The Great University Gamble - Pluto Press A critical and deeply informed survey of the brave new world of UK Higher Education emerging from government cuts and market-driven reforms.

I should probably use this belated opportunity to say I wrote a book on why there would be a student loan crisis of this kind. It appeared 13 years ago.
www.plutobooks.com/product/the-...

See also, ‘higher ed just needs to do a better job at telling it’s story’