Youth clubs, trade unions, pubs: here's how Burnham can fix Britain's social recession | Gordon Brown

Youth clubs, trade unions, pubs: here's how Burnham can fix Britain's social recession | Gordon Brown

From volunteering to the WI, we have lost so many ways to meet our neighbours. Making that easier can only be good for society, says former UK prime minister Gordon Brown

theguardian.com

seb made a useful eclipse-view-tester sebbacon.github.io/eclipse-find...

@moongolfer.com @lloydshepherd.com have you seen this? readingmaps.com

Reading Maps - Maps & Travel Routes from Books & Films

Reading Maps plots real-world journeys from classic novels and films - Around the World in 80 Days, Heart of Darkness, James Bond, On the Road - on an interactive atlas.

readingmaps.com

Wrote two lines of Javascript to make news websites actually look like what they *feel* like to me

I like the granularity of this calculator by @dantaylorwatt.com of your personal AI environmental footprint. I find the moral panic about AI on ecological grounds a bit tiresome so it's good to have some apparently well-sourced data to work with: www.dantaylorwatt.com/ai/ai-enviro...

binface vs farage vs lawrence fox is like el classico for “different ways your mate’s dad could end up taking the divorce”

I love British politics sometimes.

🧵 New working paper out today: "Measuring the Regional Economic Cost of Brexit: Evidence as of 2026" with @jacobedenhofer.bsky.social @trfetzer.com & Shizhuo Wang Here's what the data say about who paid the price in these 10 years from the referendum 1/…

And we are live! Follow the global launch of the Digital News Report 2026 in the link below Speakers include lead author Jim Egan, our director Mitali Mukherjee and media managers Emily Kent Smith, Kamal Ahmed and Simon Robinson #DNR26 reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/digital-news...

Today's announcement of social media bans reminded me of the excellent work Fiona Romeo and Hannah Richardson did for my BBC team on scenarios for childrens' online safety in 2004. I revisited the scenarios in 2015, and looking again today, there's a lot they got right: test.org.uk/2015/01/15/b...

BBC scenarios from 2004 about kids’ online lives in 2014

My company, Storythings, was lucky enough to work with the brilliant Fiona Romeo, Director of Digital Content & Strategy at MOMA, last year. Fiona worked with me briefly at the BBC in the early…

test.org.uk

Americans would rather crowdfund an airline than try socialism: letsbuyspiritair.com

Theatre Europe: whyisthisinteresting.substack.com/p/the-theatr...

The Theatre Europe Edition

On nuclear war games, escalation, and making the call.

whyisthisinteresting.substack.com

Chad Loder@chadloder.dev · 4mo ago

Anyone who used computers before 1992, what's a video game you still think about all the time?

Every time I read AI leaders predicting a world in which everyone loses their jobs but them, I think about Carolyn Marvin’s excellent phrase “Cognitive Imperialism” in her book ‘When Old Technologies Were New’:

If you honestly believe the only reason problems haven’t been solved is because you weren’t in charge, you need a therapist, not a job in Downing Street. Thoughts on civil service reform. howtorunacountry.substack.com/p/going-for-...

Going for gold

Thoughts on civil service reform

howtorunacountry.substack.com

@lifewinning.com for consideration as a Perfect Sentence - it's in a piece that compares LLMs and tokens to the economy of Chuck E Cheese: stevebryant.substack.com/p/d-claude-e...

{D} Claude E. Cheese

Vol. 6, Issue 177 // pics + links // maybe try clicking the pics too

stevebryant.substack.com

Fascinating indication of the rise in political frustration. Use of the phrase "for too long" in Hansard in my lifetime.

Nice write-up of our women and the future of AI panel at the Royal Society last week www.newscientist.com/article/2519...

AI is nearly exclusively designed by men – here's how to fix it

With the Trump administration’s attacks on so-called woke AI it is becoming even harder to make the technology we use fairer and more diverse. Leading voices are speaking out, reports Catherine de Lan...

newscientist.com

Remember soft power? It went out of fashion. Too “soft” for the right. Too “power“ for the left. But just as critical as ever. A despatch from Serbia, where I’m part of a project to build cooperation on science and tech. open.substack.com/pub/howtorun...

@hollygramazio.bsky.social I got The Husbands for my birthday (it’d been on my list for a while) and absolutely loved it! Read it in a few days, and can’t wait for the TV show!

The one time I saw Habermas speak was at the 2006 ICA conference in Dresden. I remember a few things from his talk, but one detail that really stands out is how he warned us all that “we must not let the public sphere become just another market.” And that’s basically exactly what happened.

I have some reflections on the constitutional-democratic chaos that Britain is encountering, in the age of 5+ party politics. It's hard to see how we get from this to the kind of 'bold' and 'radical' government that (consensus has it) everyone is calling for right now www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

William Davies · Short Cuts: Tactical Voting

Despite the misinformation and alienation that have led so many citizens to regard democracy in general with despair or...

lrb.co.uk

This is where we are with the findings on our foresight review www.lrfoundation.org.uk/news/an-end-... if you're working on sociotechnical assurance or safety by design am v keen to hear of best practice ...

An End-to-End View of AI Safety

In this blog, Rachel Coldicutt OBE, Executive Director, Careful Industries discusses our newly published literature review on the safe adoption of artificial intelligence in engineered systems.

lrfoundation.org.uk

Making enshittification a consumer protection concern: Bravo Norway!

Breaking Free

In the new report Breaking Free: Pathways to a fair technological future, the Norwegian Consumer Council has delved into enshittification and how to resist it. The report shows how this phenomenon aff...

forbrukerradet.no

Why we all need a little more friction in our lives - in a slippery age. howtorunacountry.substack.com/p/in-praise-...

In praise of friction

Getting to grips with an increasingly slippery world

howtorunacountry.substack.com

So I made an app. It didn't go well. tomloosemorework.wordpress.com/2026/02/23/l...

Lessons from making Benefit Chatbots

I got the slow train from Totnes to St Ives on Saturday. To close off my recent vibe coding interlude, I used the MissingBenefit API I built last weekend to make two experimental variants of a Bene…

tomloosemorework.wordpress.com

There is something about the word “middle” that triggers discomfort in political and commercial life. We are hunting for unicorns or cherishing our neighbourhood coffee cart. But the middle isn't middling: the middle is the best bit. My latest piece. howtorunacountry.substack.com/p/this-is-mid

This is mid

The case for getting into the middle of things

howtorunacountry.substack.com

This by the excellent @jburnmurdoch.ft.com confirms my view that political trends are being driven by the halting of the upward economic conveyor belt - striking charts: www.ft.com/content/30a4... Welcome to the age of zero-sum politics

Welcome to the age of zero-sum politics

A stalled economic conveyor belt is behind the rise of anti-system, anti-growth parties on both the right and left

ft.com

New @carefultrouble.bsky.social paper out today with a whole bevy of academic partners, on the impacts of AI in urban environments. As the plan for AI Growth Zones starts to roll out, we find innovation policy is disconnected from the real impacts of AI on people and places

The Careful Consequence Checker, a free, self-directed tool for understanding the impacts of building, buying or adopting an AI-powered product or service www.careful.industries/consequences Thank you @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social

Consequences — Careful Industries

A free tool to help you rapidly assess potential risks and issues with AI-powered products, tools and services.

careful.industries

NEW on our website @rasmuskleis.bsky.social chaired a commission tasked by the Danish gov to design a system of direct media subsidies. In this piece he explains how they conceived their proposal and what other countries could learn from it reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/taxes-n...

From taxes to news: How Denmark is rethinking public funding for private publishers

The Nordic country is creating a model to decide which outlets should receive subsidies, how and on what basis. Rasmus Nielsen explains how it could work.

reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk