237 pages later: 'Oh look, now it's a cute book.'

Great cover! The book looks even better.

Back to books - Sweden's schools give up digital learning Swedish classrooms swap laptops for books, pens and paper, raising concerns from the tech sector.

Saw a story by Deutsche Welle on this the other day and now the BBC.

'Sweden's government is championing a renewed focus on physical books, paper and pens in classrooms, designed to reverse falling literacy levels.'

Not surprising: opposition from tech companies.

www.bbc.com/news/article...

New York governor pitches a new tax on pricey pied-à-terres For months, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has resisted calls to increase taxes on the wealthy, beating back progressives who have hounded her from Manhattan to San Juan bellowing chants of “tax the rich....

A number of countries and jurisdictions already have levies or taxes for secondary homes.

Here is a short story on the proposal.

apnews.com/article/mamd...

Bring. It.

Time for all governments to follow suit.

'Pied-a-terre Tax' for properties worth >$5M whose owners do not live full-time in the city.' Estimated to generate $500M/year from the 'richest of the rich' to fund healthcare and child care.

Absolutely love this. I have been arguing for this for low-/low-middle-income countries for years - applies everywhere.

Great piece:

'Governments exercise power visibly, through laws, shutdowns, and force. Philanthropy exercises power more quietly, through risk thresholds, compliance requirements, and concerns about reputation. In practice, this determines which work moves forward and which stalls out.'

Visas for international students were down 40% last summer, thanks to a slew of policies designed to throttle visa issuances and scare off students. Students from 40 countries are now outright banned.

I've written before about how USAID was the first government agency killed by conspiracy theory. This confirms it.
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-death-...

I agree.

In any other time, this would not be the budget from this party.

Umm... maybe just have face-to-face meetings like they do... you know, in real life.

'But behind that is a “resurgence of focus around the private-sector agenda,” she said, and that includes the “white whale of development finance”: mobilizing private capital.'

"Unfortunately, the types of people for whom such fellowships might represent the greatest departure from their everyday experience—and whose career trajectories might be most dramatically shifted given freedom from their usual constraints—are infrequently their beneficiaries."

A new economic superpower could spark a global retreat from fossil fuels | Mark Hertsgaard and Kyle Pope Eighty-five countries have sought a roadmap to phasing out fossil fuels. A conference this month offers hope they could unite

Colombia will host the First International Conference on the Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels, at the end of this month - a move which could be hugely important for climate justice, and also has wider significance (including for tax)... 🧵 www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Huge.

Thank you! If you have recommendations on omniscience generally, happy for that too. Hope you're well.

Freelance jobs are not the same as permanent or continuing contracts. They don't provide benefits or accrued pensionable income, which have a big cumulative effect during the lifespan, and especially into retirement. The issue is the effect on casualised precarious labour.

Philosophers please help. Please can you point me to readings or people who are doing cutting edge work on applied omniscience especially vis-a-vis AI?

@devezer.bsky.social any pointers or places I can start to look?

#Philosophy

www.canada.ca/en/services/...

Two Trees: now so different, so very human. Here's why Universities are grappling with effective approaches to guide students about GenAI use. My answer has been practiced by my people for tens of thousands of years. I am a Worimi man, and I grew up learning through story on our Country. Bush walks with my grandmother at Karuah; my father’s voice at night; my aunties ...

If you ask GenAI about Aboriginal culture and history, you always get a confident, fluent answer. Jordan Perry explains how GenAI flattens both cultural knowledge and the intellectual labor of Indigenous peoples. https://loom.ly/8LYqh0M

REMINDER: Call for papers for a special issue on relational pedagogies in an age of #GenAI! 🚨 Deadline for abstracts on 20th April 2026. See the post below for details and share with your colleagues!

UNICEF statement on intensified strikes on Lebanon and the devastating impact on children: www.unicef.org/press-releas...

OMG - yes. They had dictaphones! That's why they're called dicatphones! There's a scene in Sabrina with Humphrey Bogart dictating into his car dictaphone while being chauffeured to his building on 5th Av.

Nope. That's why shorthand. Journalists still learned it as part of their basic training until the 1990s.

Also, my dad ran a university lab. He'd notes in short for the secretary to type and whenever he wrote an article, he'd edit in shorthand on the manuscript. The secretary would retype the MS.

Yup. That's why...shorthand. Which journalists still learned until the 1990s as part of their basic training.

WTH. OMG.

Today’s preliminary aid stats by the OECD show how wealthy governments are turning their back on the lives of women, children and men in the Global South. oxf.am/oecd-2026

"New research from the Center for Global Development shows the clear link between aid cuts and conflict. Within the last year, conflict and conflict-related deaths have risen 5%. Part of the solution must be to restore aid cuts"

time.com/article/2026...

Seriously - what does any of that actually mean?