Makes sense: for the last couple of years we had students that spent high school at home. Now we have students whose COVID experience was early enough that they had a chance to have a normal transition to young adulthood..

I’ve had two colleagues remark separately on how engaged and present students are this year, and what a pleasure to teach - both undergrad and postgrad. It’s only week 2 but a high starting point. Some kind of pandemic long tail?

Tarka line?

No one still alive has seen as much of the Tory party as Heseltine. He was involved in Concorde negotiations… When I research More Jam Tomorrow, he keeps popping up.

Watching the Conservatives’ extinction must hurt him profoundly in ways it’s hard for Bluesky to imagine.

Peter Capaldi as the Dr: “these are attack eyebrows”

John Boyd Orr by the way is a new one on me and apparently the most Scottish-looking person ever to exist

Or even those that do. I suppose you could say I have been intellectually brought up within humanist rationalism, and I’m quite happy here and clearly fit in, but tbh it doesn’t inspire me to march very much, or whatever we’re going to need to do.

The hope for me is animism/indigenous cosmologies already being a model for how to deal with this. Religion/spirituality is an already proven concept for mass motivation. Obvs a lot of people are going to have to let go of their skeptic ego but that’s a tiny problem compared to the Armageddon fash.

“we must first understand this simple fact: we are up against an ideology that has given up not only on the premise and promise of liberal democracy but on the livability of our shared world… The forces we are up against have made peace with mass death.“

This does actually end with hope.

Nobel-winning economists to move from US to Zurich.

Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee moving from MIT to create new research centre on development.

www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-euro...

This is like when people who win Oscars and Grammies and are at the top of Best Sexiest of All Time lists etc are described as nerdy

Well now that’s in my head all day

'When authoritarians seize power, it is crucial to recognize courageous defenders of freedom who rise and resist,' the Norwegian Nobel Committee said as it announced Maria Corina Machado as the winner of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize

The Mark Bray situation is so completely fucked right now and if you're a journalist you need to start saying how it's fucked because you're fucking next. They won't stop at academics.

I know this case is all over - & it should be - but Turning Point USA has waged a harassment campaign against faculty for more than a decade. I know of at least a half dozen other faculty, personally, who have received death threats and several of those who felt so unsafe they too left their homes

Ah I’m so sorry. She’s adorable. The back and forth also sounds like an entirely normal way to grieve.

US anti-fascism expert blocked from flying to Spain at airport www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

It really can't be said enough: the goal of the "anti-woke" movement was always to destroy social norms against bigotry. And it worked. And there's a whole lot of purportedly "left" thinkers & commentators who helped it -- indeed, it couldn't have been done without them.

They should feel bad.

Oh yes these two truths @beijingpalmer.bsky.social

Good grief. Also Croydon road is closed but that seems to be unrelated.

Addendum: just got back to find the high street cordoned off because the Poundland has burnt down, if that’s bleak enough for the Daily Mail

Apologies but I’ve only just seen this.

It’s about Penge.

That graffiti collective has been “painting murals everywhere” for the entire ten years I’ve been living there. Maybe they now feature more avocados or something.

LD membership increased and stayed high partly because of big events (Clegg speech, Brexit) but also because the party incentivised local parties to recruit by letting growing local parties keep some of the membership dues. Membership started dropping as soon as they cancelled it.