@kasiatee.bsky.social @danhancox.bsky.social BIG PEA

£1 in every £11 spent on UK public contractors goes on private equity - a galling statistic in this excellent bit of reporting from my colleagues @michaelgoodier.bsky.social @c-aguilargarcia.bsky.social and others www.theguardian.com/society/2026...

‘Financial pandemic’: £1 in every £11 spent on UK public contractors goes to private equity

Almost £24.4bn of government money went to private equity-run firms in year to April 2025, Guardian analysis shows

theguardian.com

After six consecutive Oxford-educated Prime Ministers, Britain may finally see some real diversity in the top job: a Cambridge-educated Andy Burnham

This is great timing - today's episode of @cursedobjectsuk.bsky.social with @elidavies.bsky.social may well be of interest! Picky bits / girl dinner gets v much.. unpicked open.spotify.com/episode/1MOo...

Girl Dinner ft. Eli Davies

Cursed Objects · Episode

open.spotify.com

Ogoni activists in the Niger Delta have asked me to run a small crowdfunder to pay for Hell t-shirts that can be given to participants of the Niger Delta Climate Change Conference later this month (& billboards!) Trying to raise £2k, I've put in £300 to start it. Donate below ⬇️

"In recent years the number of nurseries backed by private equity and investment firms has doubled. For every £5 spent ... more than £1 ends up as profit – double what other private nurseries make and seven times more than non-profits." www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

A Britain where people cannot afford to raise children? We see that risk, and won’t let it happen | Bridget Phillipson

We are spending billions to help families with childcare, but I fear profiteers are denying them the full benefit. I’ll put a stop to that, says education secretary Bridget Phillipson

theguardian.com

The birth rate in the UK in the mid to late 1930s was almost as low as it is today and I can assure you that it wasn’t because Stanley Baldwin’s teenagers wouldn’t get off their phones. www.thetimes.com/comment/colu...

Love-starved must first get off their phones

Birthrates will continue to decline if young adults persist in preferring social media to the joy of physical interaction

thetimes.com

Just now in conversation with @kasiatee.bsky.social I was reminded that over a series of tweets during the pandemic I turned the LOTR trilogy into a tale of modern UK academia. So… here you all go

Very pleasing to get an email yesterday from @kingscollegelondon.bsky.social to say that, for three years starting in September, I'll be a Visiting Senior Research Fellow in the Department of War Studies. This institutional affiliation will help a lot and I can maybe do some fun stuff at KCL too!

The Quietus is 90% funded by subscribers, and we need another 500 this spring to help us fight the AI-pocalypse – with this in mind, there's a huge sale on our top tier subscriptions. If you like what we do, here's how you can help: thequietus.com/opinion-and-...

The Quietus Spring Sale is Here! Help us Fight the AI-pocalypse | The Quietus

There’s something appallingly physical about the language that’s used to describe the radical changes that are affecting every aspect of our culture. AI slop. Enshittification. It’s all rather revolti...

thequietus.com

Delighted to kick off Friday’s @vittles.bsky.social column with a tale from Westminster: www.vittlesmagazine.com/p/recency-bias

Objectively hilarious

Election Maps UK@electionmaps.uk · 4mo ago

Labour Leadership Voting Intentions: Starmer Vs Burnham: Burnham: 61% Starmer: 28% Starmer Vs Miliband: Miliband: 46% Starmer: 39% Starmer Vs Rayner: Rayner: 45% Starmer: 41% Starmer Vs Streeting: Starmer: 53% Streeting: 23% Via @labourlist.bsky.social - 1,124 Members, 13-14 May.

This is tonight!

hannah@hannahkateboast.bsky.social · 4mo ago

I'm chairing the launch of @rosavcampbell.bsky.social's new book at @lighthousebks.bsky.social on Wed! Recommended to all interested in feminist politics, social history, and anyone who likes turning heads on public transport. Come along: lighthousebookshop.com/events/the-b...

Thought this was a model response from @celiarichardson.bsky.social to a pretty harsh article in the Spectator about the National Trust

3 actual quotes from this piece: “Can I afford the tax? Yes. Is it going to deter me? No. But I think it’s shameful. I provide a lot of money to people who are blue-collar workers who work for me, servers in restaurants." giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

New York’s rich lash out at ‘shameful’ Mamdani plan to tax second homes

The city’s wealthy property owners say they are sick of being vilified

giftarticle.ft.com

Next Tuesday I’ll be talking to @danhancox.bsky.social at @housmansbookshop.bsky.social about THE ASSET CLASS - if you’re in London, do come along! housmans.com/event/book-l...

BOOK LAUNCH: THE ASSET CLASS: HETTIE O’BRIEN IN CONVERSATION WITH DAN HANCOX

‘PART WAKE-UP CALL, PART FINANCIAL THRILLER’ (SHAMI CHAKRABARTI) The Asset Class is an equal parts thrilling and enraging work of vital financial journalism, lifting the lid on the rele…

housmans.com

Me: (Smart, looking at the most devastating evidence imaginable that my smart plan is an incredible, historic disaster) I was even more right than I suspected

twenty years ago people attacked universities by deriding “Mickey Mouse degrees” like media studies in favour of “proper” subjects like history, and now universities are skipping that step and simply abolishing everything that isn’t economics

Ceri Houlbrook@cerihoulbrook.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Why would we want to learn from our pasts, or ponder the power of the written and spoken word, or explore the deep questions of humanity? According to the University of Hertfordshire, we wouldn't. They've just cut all of our undergrad Humanities programmes

Re-upping this for the Tuesday crowd: My latest weekly roundup of reading and listening recommendations, taking in legacies of conflict, new trends in international law, and the role of genre in cultural production, among other themes. All reposts (and subscriptions) much appreciated. x

Stop, Look, and Listen #56

A round-up of what I have been reading and listening to this past week.

academicbubble.substack.com

New article! Chains of closure: how collections move and change when museums close www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10..... Why did the Commonwealth Institute and the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum (and several others) close, and what happened to their collections after closure?

Chains of closure: how collections move and change when museums close

Hundreds of museums have closed in the UK since 2000. Some closures have led to the transfer of part or all of the collection to another museum which has later also closed, causing collections to m...

tandfonline.com

Still time (just about!) to support this crowdfunder for a radical bookshop in Newcastle. An excellent cause:

Ben Bowsher@benbowsher.bsky.social · 5mo ago

www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/booksfromb...

I passed my PhD viva 13 years ago today. Even ignoring my horror at the passage of time, it's still very difficult to figure out how I should evaluate the years since then.

First UK tour dates for THE ASSET CLASS! I’m really looking forward to talking about the book in person over the next few months at a bookshop / gallery near you. We'll be adding more events in the UK and internationally soon

Profoundly stupid, just a stunner of a choice

Financial Times@financialtimes.com · 6mo ago

England set to charge foreign tourists for entry to major museums ft.trib.al/S6xEBl2

I was at the @ihr.bsky.social tonight for the ‘Pitch my Project’ contest that they’d been running in conjunction with the @royalhistsoc.org & Chalke Valley History Festival. The finalists were all terrific - really genuinely interesting & enthused. The judges had a very tough job picking a winner!

This looks like a brilliant resource. learn.lsbu.ac.uk/hubfs/Women%...

Caitríona Beaumont@caitbeaumont.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Thanks to all who joined us this evening to launch #womensgrassrootsactivism #Activism100+ Toolkit. It's out in the world 🥳 & download your copy 👇. Incredibly grateful to members of @soroptimistgbi.bsky.social @womensinstitute.bsky.social #ICA & WI Northern Ireland who made this project happen 🙏.

Graduate salaries 'are not really telling us about the innate value of studying a particular subject at a particular institution. Instead, they are telling us about the value of those qualifications in a particular economy at a particular point in time.'

Tim Bale@timbale.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Turns out (says @jburnmurdoch.ft.com) it's not so much an oversupply of graduates in the UK (the same would be true of other similar countries but it's not) as an undersupply of the kind of jobs that a better-performing, more productive economy would supply.

'Stuart Hall, Ideology, and Neoliberalism’s Reactionary Drift', by @lcornelissen.bsky.social for the @jhideas.bsky.social blog.

Stuart Hall, Ideology, and Neoliberalism’s Reactionary Drift

by Lars Cornelissen This essay is part of a JHI Blog forum, “The Return of Political Economy in Intellectual History.”

jhiblog.org

to be clear, Matthew Goodwin has one (1) child and should thus be penalised for failing to meet the replacement rate under the incentive scheme that he’s established here

Another new @cursedobjectsuk.bsky.social episode, with a very special guest on a very timely subject: Davos, its weird global elites and weirder freebies cursedobjects.podbean.com/e/davos-hand...