The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.

THE ASSET CLASS, my first book, will be published by @wnbooks.bsky.social on 9 April 2026. It’s a narrative investigation of private equity, a secretive and relentlessly destructive wing of finance that penetrates almost every aspect of our lives - and it’s available to pre-order now!

Downstream: Is Liberalism Finally Waking Up to the Crises it has Caused? w/ Adrian Wooldridge

Absolutely excellent exploration of political liberalism!

The EU flag. The field has been turned from blue to orange. In the center of the circle of stars is Trump's open, hooting gob. Behind the orange field we see the faded traces of a printed circuit board.

Crises precipitate change. That's no reason to induce a crisis, but you'd be a fool to let a crisis go to waste. Donald Trump is the greatest crisis of our young century, and the EU looks set to squander the opportunity, to its own terrible detriment.

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Valuing Creative and Cultural R&D and Innovation | The Audience Agency This paper, produced by The Audience Agency and Careful Industries working alongside Arts Council England, aims to build the case for the importance of RD&I in the creative and cultural sector.

New paper that I co-authored last year is (finally!) out in the world, on the value of creative and cultural R&D and innovation. The paper addresses the fact that limited SciTech-focussed definitions of RD&I minimise the UK's capacity to invent and innovate theaudienceagency.org/en/valuing-c...

Larva lamped: Colin the Caterpillar loses to eight lookalikes in cake taste test Which? testers complain M&S sponge is ‘too dry’ as Waitrose’s Cecil tops the tree with ‘best buy’ gong

Haven’t read the article but just want to celebrate the desperate genius of the headline

Maybe @jemgilbert.bsky.social might do another interview with the author.

This is incredibly cool.

Loved Between Two Fires by @buehlmeister.bsky.social very much indeed! Have been inspired to start Paradise Lost which I’ve always meant to read.

Enjoyed this so much!

This is a fantastic article

Teachers! Are you intrigued by our ‘Explore the Orchestra’ schools’ concerts – which are specially designed for Key Stage 2 pupils – but unable to travel to Bristol, Exeter, Poole or Portsmouth to enjoy them in person?

There's growing evidence of safety risks of bigger cars.

Heavier with higher bonnets & worse vision, bigger SUVs are:
⚠️14% more likely to kill you than if you're hit by a smaller car
⚠️increasing to 77% for children
⚠️and 200% more likely to kill a kid under 9

#VisionZeroLDN

Our Public House — DASH ARTS

This play is born out of some work I & colleagues did teaching rhetoric to…anyone. It’s about politics/political speech. Each night different non-actors will join in & deliver their own speech as part of the action. Still looking for volunteers in Cornwall!

www.dasharts.org.uk/our-public-h...

A Day in the Life of an Ensh*ttificator YouTube video by Forbrukerrådet - Norwegian Consumer Council

What do Big Tech companies do to raise their revenues? Enshittification, the thesis of @doctorow.pluralistic.net portrayed wonderfully by the Norwegian Consumer Council.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Up...

✨Visit the Russell-Cotes Gallery & Museum for free this weekend ✨

🎉 Salisbury Museum has renewed its Full UK Museum Accreditation from Arts Council England!

This national quality standard recognises our commitment to professional collections care, transparent governance, quality visitor experiences, and community engagement.

The Conservatives are, after all, well placed to know a lot about this morass, since they introduced it. In 2012, the coalition government launched the Plan 2 system of student loans and raised university fees across Britain to £9,000 per annum. To put Plan 2 in simple terms, loan repayments were laid out via a seemingly innocuous series of calculations. The first to consider is the threshold at which repayments begin. If you left education with, say, £27,000 worth of debt, you would only start paying it back once you met a predetermined salary. On its face, this might not seem like a particularly onerous demand. “Low-earning” graduates would avoid being saddled with repayments before they were financially able to begin making them, while their “high earning” peers could start chipping away at their debt, and provide an income stream for the state.

As any of my fellow literature or history graduates will tell you, however, the devil is in the details. For one thing, the threshold at which someone becomes a high earner was never particularly high and, following years of inflation, is now preposterously low. Rachel Reeves’ announcement that the government are freezing the threshold at April 2026 levels (£29,385) for a further three years only makes this worse. The real living wage for London is currently calculated at £28,860, which means that any London-based graduate making just £40 more per month than the minimum needed to live there will automatically begin paying their debt. In real terms, this means practically any graduate in any form of full-time work will be paying as much as 9 per cent of their income to the state, and for a very, very long time. Worse still, the amount owed by those graduates below the threshold does not remain static – it accrues interest, year on year, whether you’re working for low wages, volunteering, taking a career break or on maternity leave, ensuring that if you do pass the threshold some time later, you will be returning to find your original £27,000 much enlarged.

If the state’s attitude to what constitutes “high earnings” makes you think it’s oblivious to the concept of inflation, let me put your mind at ease. When it comes to the calculation of student loan interest, they are very conscious of inflation indeed. Each year, the interest charged on student loans is calculated by two components. The first is the Retail Price Index (RPI), which generally records a higher number than the Consumer Price Index (CPI). Governments prefer the latter, lower figure for many of their other calculations, just not when it comes to adding extra debt to every graduate in the country. To this is added a second component, a percentage tied to each graduate’s earnings, meaning that as your salary increases so too does the interest you’re paying on the loan you took out. If you think this seems like a predatory and punitive way to bilk students for as much money, and over as long a period of time, as possible, then you’re just about up to speed on this scandal, which amounts to a regressive stealth tax on every graduate in the UK. One which, it’s calculated, you would need to be earning £66,000 per year to pay off in anything like a timely fashion.

The debt burden of UK students is one of those things where, the more you look into the details, the more insane and predatory it is. So I tried my best to explain the numbers involved without making my, or your, head explode.

With the Gorton and Denton win, our opponents have been working overtime to misrepresent Green Party drugs policy. Heroin in corner shops? Crack for kids?

Let's clear this up. 🧵

BREAKING: A wonderful speech from Green Party's Hannah Spencer after winning the Gorton and Denton by-election.

Congratulations!

A.I. Isn't People How many Reddit posts does it take to learn to read?

Yesterday I wrote about what AI is (math) and isn’t (people) and someone in the comment said it’s the best thing anyone ever wrote about AI. I’m just gonna take that at face value and so should you. www.todayintabs.com/p/a-i-isn-t-...

MÁM - Teac Damsa

Go and see this! It is excellent. Just caught it @mayflower.org.uk and it’s on tour including to @trplymouth.bsky.social at the beginning of March

A thoroughly useful day in Torquay and Paignton with colleagues from Heritage Fund, Homes England and Historic England. Thanks Torquay Museum for hosting, and Torbay Council for being so generous with your time and insights.

The System That Punishes Beautiful Design YouTube video by Design Theory

This is really lovely on why things look ugly and the same and why a harking back to the past should be treated with caution.

Just remembered this from @greatdismal.bsky.social Count Zero which as always is dispiritingly evergreen.
"And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human"

Spotlight - The New Real - BBC Sounds David Edgar’s sharp political drama explores the faultlines threatening modern democracy.

Enjoyed this David Edgar play very much, neat and gripping summation of complex themes

Underrated ways to change the world, vol. II OR: why you should sell onions on the internet

This is so lovely

Blue Moon is pitch perfect

Gloucester's empty shops to be transformed into art spaces A free programme of art projects will be created in Gloucester's 'meanwhile' spaces.

It’s been a busy week…

A brilliant moment for Gloucester 🎉

ACE funded “Meanwhile in Gloucester” will see local artists from GAS Projects working with communities to transform the city’s high street. 🖼️ @artscouncilengland.bsky.social

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Nice thread. Happy birthday, Once In A Lifetime. What a song.