As I’ve said for a while now, the destruction of the UK’s higher education system is a genuine all-party affair: the Tories, the Liberals, Labour and the Scots Nats have all chipped in, on the same side.

Chris Smith@spyhistorian.bsky.social · 2mo ago

I hate to say it, but Labour are actually worse for UKHE than the Tories. It seems they actively want pretty much all but a handful of HEIs to go bust or merge. 30k jobs have already been lost over three years. The Government are actively making this worse. www.theguardian.com/education/20...

english isn't for cowards. if you're not saying 'torpify,' that's a skill issue. there's no Académie Française telling you what to do. if you try to type 'pallific' and freak out when you see a little red underline, maybe you're not ready to roll with the big dogs.

Another 'people are not saving enough for retirement' article Like everyone is just sat on piles of cash they aren't bothering to put away for that bright, rosy future we're all looking forward to www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Three quarters of workers not on track for 'moderate' pension income, report suggests

A newly-published report suggests a moderate lifestyle in retirement costs £32,700 for one person and £45,400 for two.

bbc.co.uk

This is good on the conflict between validity of a measure of wellbeing (which favours a dashboard of many indicators) and usability (dashboards are expensive for poor countries and hard to use in budgeting). I used to think the former was the preferable horn of the dilemma. Now not so sure

G.D.P. Is a Flawed Measure of Prosperity. Alternatives Are on the Way.

nytimes.com

Thanks Mr Blair but a baselessly confident 6,000 word diatribe telling the UK to move right on every issue while embracing Trump and Silicon Valley wasn't even that cute all those times Dominic Cummings wrote it.

If I was Tony Blair I don't know if I'd have picked a week when the UK population was melting from record temperatures to call on the UK Gov to move back towards fossil fuels

2% of LE26 Labour voters consider voting for Reform at the next election. Less than 1% of Reform voters consider Labour. Yet, Labour continues to target exactly those voters. Literally, politics for the 1%. Meanwhile, 42% of Lab voters consider the Greens. After already having lost tons to them.

Nice to see a use case of “ryssiä” in General J. Lindberg’s description of 2022! “Russia's inefficiency began to accumulate: the operation had no centralized command, communications equipment did not work, logistics did not supply the troops with fuel or ammunition, and morale was in short supply…”

Sarah Kirchberger@sarahkirchberger.bsky.social · 11mo ago

Fun fact: the Finnish language actually has a slang word - ryssiä - derived from the noun Ryssä (Russian) that means „screwing something up“. 🤷‍♀️ www.finnishwords.com/verbs/11/rys...

I know the local elections were seven hundred years ago in Labour-time but I thought I'd share a little app I made that lets you look at the English ward results on a map and compared to various Census demographics. Warning the map takes a while to load. 1/n benwansell.github.io/local-electi...

Important data from @persuasionuk.bsky.social showing how Labour's vote fragmented in the England local elections last week. Of those who voted Labour in 2024: 🟦5% voted Reform 🟨10% voted Lib Dem 🟩22% voted Green persuasionuk.org/research/may...

Good morning. What do we know so far about patterns of voting in the local elections in England?

My biggest conspiracy theory is that telling working class people that engagement in the arts is a middle / upper class thing and to do so makes you a class traitor is a psyop to make them disengaged with themselves and the world and the beauty of being human, so that they accept worse treatment.

Paul Boldrin@paulboldrin.bsky.social · 3mo ago

I read a history of early 20th century socialism and it's crazy how much of it is just clubs doing art or reading books and trying to get miners and factory workers to do art and read books.

Chinese researchers have created a bamboo-based plastic as strong as petroleum-based plastics, which can fully biodegrade in soil in just 2 months phys.org/news/2025-10...

Bamboo-based plastic can be made to biodegrade quickly, but still holds up in tough conditions

A new method to produce strong, biodegradable plastic from bamboo is reported in Nature Communications this week. The bioplastic resembles oil-based plastics in strength, shapability, and thermal stab...

phys.org

The usual proof that you can't have a democracy if you let the richest man in the world poison the well with lies. Western govts asleep at the wheel in the face of one of their biggest national security challenges.

I genuinely think some people do not want to look this in the eye/think about it because it is so awful. We wrote what I thought was a pretty eye-opening story about all this and I was surprised by the lack of engagement tbh

Elon Musk Is Playing God

The tech billionaire wants to shape humanity’s future. Not everyone has a place there.

theatlantic.com

David Roberts@volts.wtf · 3mo ago

Still feel like "Musk and his crew of incels destroyed a bunch of stuff they didn't understand and thereby hastened the deaths of millions of children" did not get the public attention it warranted.

My latest, for the print magazine, explains how the tech world went from charming garage tinkering to blood lust, insatiable greed, and megalomaniacal bullying.

How the Tech World Turned Evil

Once upon a time, they were counterculture idealists bringing power to the people. Today they’re greedy monopolists who’d sooner destroy our democracy than be reined in by government in any way—and th...

newrepublic.com

Social media is no longer social. Most of it is passive viewing of videos and pictures from people we've never met. But we're still studying social media like it's 2010. We've entered the post-social media era — and research needs to catch up. osf.io/preprints/so... preprint w/ Richard Rogers

www.nytimes.com/2026/04/22/o...

Keir Starmer famously said there was "no such thing" as Starmerism. He was half-right: there is no such ideology. There is however an approach to managing and running the country that is core to so many of the government's difficulties that we probably should call 'Starmerism'. In tomorrow's paper:

The Mandelson fiasco reveals the true nature of Starmerism

This is a prime minister who does not understand the difficult trade-offs involved in governing

ft.com

Last week: Read @mariusostrowski.bsky.social's surprise turn to pop psychology And also @msumption.bsky.social making sense of migration policy aveekbhattacharya.substack.com/p/readwatche...

Read/Watched/Listened/Ate

15: April 2026

aveekbhattacharya.substack.com

Something like this will have to happen in this country once Trumpism is defeated. In the absence of accountability, the world will rightly assume that it will happen again.

Since graduating: 1. GFC 2. Austerity 3. Brexit 4. Covid-19 5. War in Europe 6. Oil/gas crisis 7. Global trade war 8. War in the Middle East 9. Another oil/gas crisis

FinTwitter@fintwitter.bsky.social · 5mo ago

*UK 10-YEAR BOND YIELD RISES TO THE HIGHEST LEVEL SINCE 2008

these graphs should scare the shit out of you

Sharon 🪳🌹@sharonk.bsky.social · 5mo ago

It's release week for HOW WE THINK! So I thought I'd share an extra special little treat with you all. Here's a sneak preview of the audiobook, which is out THIS THURSDAY along with the hardback! It's the opening section of the introduction – give it a listen, hope you enjoy!

Beautiful from Private Eye on the massive toddler-tantrum that Matt Goodwin and Reform are having, because they got whooped in Gorton and Denton.

oh my god www.nytimes.com/2026/02/24/o...

Referring everyone who asks me who’s going to win in Gorton and Denton to this chart

Today the "E5" (🇩🇪🇫🇷🇬🇧🇮🇹🇵🇱) agreed to launch an initiative to produce their own low-cost aerial defences - drones and the ability to shoot down drones - without American support. The E5 is a relatively new term that we're going to be hearing a lot more of going forward.