One supervision in 2.5 years sounds bad but I was once told a tale of a PhD submitted in a foreign language and, when the administrator objected, the student said that his draft chapters had been in that language and the supervisor had said they were fine. His supervisor did not read that language.

Emma Yeomans@yeomans.bsky.social · yesterday

Calls for the Office for Students to investigate Liverpool John Moores University, after it passed Jason Arday's PhD thesis despite plagiarism and the thesis being 38,000 words over word count. He says received just one supervision in 2.5 years. www.thetimes.com/uk/education...

Yes I acknowledge it makes sense in context but “I need my car to meet criminals” is now my favourite basis for an attempted exceptional hardship plea. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

This is pretty damning, particularly the Gallery’s statement that they surveyed the security staff and they wanted a vending machine rather than canteen access (having both being impossible, presumably?)

National Gallery security staff segregated like ‘second-class citizens’, curator claims

Exclusive: Outsourced guards, largely from minority ethnic backgrounds, barred from staff hub for mainly white employees

theguardian.com

I know that everyone loves anthropomorphisation but I just walked past an empty unit in a shopping centre with a sign explaining it was “enjoying some me time” and surely there are limits.

New post: those wanting Jason Arday to face 'justice' of some kind are not going to get what they want willd10.substack.com/p/how-the-ja...

How the Jason Arday affair will fizzle out

Truth is a social system. Sorry.

willd10.substack.com

Seen people commenting that there will be no lockdown in the next pandemic because of elite hostility that has developed to the idea. I suspect that’s wrong: we probably *will* get a lockdown, because most people don’t like the idea of catching an infectious disease and will start self-lockdowning…

Letterboxd@letterboxd.social · 5d ago

Happy #LetterboxdFriday! Time to post your #LastFourWatched 🤳

This is a very good, balanced - and extraordinary - piece; worth reading in full.

Playbooks, plagiarism and a pig’s head: new claims surrounding a star Cambridge professor

Jason Arday was regarded as an academic superstar, but then questions about his work prompted scrutiny of his backstory and counterclaims of racism

theguardian.com

I unlocked a new level of pedantry by getting Snopes to correct a fact-check (back in its early days when it was one of the internet’s unalloyed Good Things and basically just two people, one of whom sent me a lovely email)

Anna Kornbluh@annakornbluh.bsky.social · 6d ago

what's your emily wilson onion accomplishment, mine is a peer-reviewed scholarly article with footnote to Dwayne The Rock

This is a line I’ve heard in the UK as well, and when you ask “so hold on, they’re paying for the really expensive land rather than cheaper land to do this; that sounds mad, do you know why?” the response is just bafflement.

Sarah Taber@sarahtaber.bsky.social · 6d ago

Ok so this lady says solar panels are getting built on "the most productive farmland" in her area. Which just ain't true at all. It ain't true here in NC either. Where I ALSO hear that talking point over & over again. Smells like astroturf! So let's get the dirt on solar farms & dirt ✨

Got to photo 3 and thought "oh that's a squat rack in the corner, a home gym would be great" and then I realised no that is something else entirely.

Madame Pinkness@madamepinkness.bsky.social · 7d ago

Any time I see a noteworthy house listing, oh has @oldenoughtosay.com seen it yet? "Extensive entertainment facilities" indeed. www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/9...

oh my god

Ross McKay@rossmc11.bsky.social · last wk.

Jim Callaghan appointed a 'Minister for Drought', and it rained within 36 hours (and led to widespread floods, but a win's a win).

At the risk of cynicism, I suspect that if we had, say, a system of periodic mandatory retesting for everyone over retirement age, this problem would have been fixed years ago.

Tim Leunig@timleunig.bsky.social · last wk.

Last night I looked at the availability of driving tests at the 100 nearest test centres in the next six months. Number of centres with an test available? Not one. Our country is failing!

Just saw another screenshot of The Tiger by Nael (aged 6). Apparently it’s a decade old now and it’s fun to think that he’ll be old enough to log on to Bluesky and see his own work as a meme just 19 years from now.

The @uofglaw.bsky.social Emma Ritch Law Clinic has published a new guide that seeks to address the lack of accessible and trauma-informed information for victim-survivors – the first resource of its kind in Scotland. Learn more 👇

UofG publishes Scotland's first guide for Victim-Survivors of Sexual Crime

A new guide that will address a gap in trauma-informed information about High Court sexual offence cases has been published by the Emma Ritch Law Clinic.

gla.ac.uk

This is a very odd story but I find it difficult to jump to the conclusion that the French navy has decided it should try to scare the Shadow Home Secretary away from talking about small boats. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

If you’ve had your fill of discourse on Wilson’s Odyssey review, cleanse your palate by reading the greatest movie takedown of all time.

‘Bigalow’ reaches new giga-low movie review

"Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo" makes a living cleaning fish tanks and occasionally prostituting himself. How much he charges I'm not sure, but the price is

rogerebert.com

I have a modest proposal for a new tax. It involves a deck of cards and a monkey throwing darts. Here are the rules:

It’s newsworthy (if not hugely so) that something Burnham vaguely talked about looking at in the future is not on the immediate agenda, but it does not seem especially healthy that “look! a shiny U-turn!” is the default mode of much UK political coverage.

I wonder if the first paragraph of Claude’s first date feedback was “great! Let’s walk through this. Your first - and likely your biggest - mistake was recording the entire date. Human beings find this ‘weird’.” Presumably followed by “don’t give me any feedback on that part ever again”. “OK”.

Josh Sternberg@joshsternberg.com · 2w ago

we're so cooked www.wsj.com/lifestyle/wo...

You fool! You rube! We hadn't even funded that policy!

“You can’t fool me with ‘culture secretary’, that’s not even a real job, I’d have heard about it if we had one.”

must be a weird day becoming PM. you wake up at home, briefly meet the king, go into work for day one in front of a cheering (ish) crowd, the office door shuts behind you, they make you write a nice letter to the Nuclear Deterrent and tell you about the aliens, then it's all sort of up to you

The funniest "why isn't it more faithful to the text?" complaint I saw was the classicist who seemed to want the movie to end with Tom Holland hanging dozens of slave girls. I think that would have been a tough watch tbh

This New Yorker piece about the Austrian mountaineering homicide trial is excellent: www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

This may turn out to be nonsense but I’m increasingly unsure what it is that Burnham thinks Starmer was getting wrong.

Adam Bienkov@adambienkov.bsky.social · 3w ago

The Times reporting that Andy Burnham succeeded in persuading Shabana Mahmood to become Chancellor because it would give her more control over cutting immigration

Letterboxd@letterboxd.social · 3w ago

Happy #LetterboxdFriday! Time to post your #LastFourWatched 📲

This is the most extraordinary judgment I’ve read all year. If there was not about to be a reshuffle - I suspect it might have been a resigning matter for the Attorney General. www.judiciary.uk/judgments/r-...

Well that leadership contest was pretty uneventful but the 2028 race could be interesting.

Total woke cultural victory. We're bringing pronouns back. It is now illegal to be a white male. We're doing May Day parades just for HR ladies.