Today is a day when arts degrees are worthless, but the product of those degrees is so valuable it would kill an entire industry if they were made to pay for it.

Glad I made the decision to leave mine for later so I can happily embrace that sugar coma after The Traitors...

One day, The Rest is History will stop.

Please, God, may there be a ceasefire agreement soon, and may it be the beginning of a new, more whole future for everyone in the region.

May new leadership rise that eschews slaughter and helps to chart a new course.

May there be repentance and repair, insofar as it may ever be possible.

The @telegraphnews.bsky.social, @dailymail.co.uk and @thespectator1828.bsky.social have all promoted Nigel Biggar’s latest book as the definitive riposte to reparations claims. But what exactly are its arguments and how do they stand up to scrutiny?

alanlester.co.uk/blog/the-ant...

I grew up not knowing anyone Jewish and when I made Jewish friends at uni I was so surprised at first at just the amount of security they had to have even for low key events. I think at some point in the last ten years I stopped being surprised.

We were just finishing Yom Kippur morning service when our rabbi announced this had just happened. We’d been reflecting on the atrocities in Gaza & praying for peace. Our tiny community is horrified & heartbroken

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/live...

I think we should take it as a welcome victory every time Starmer comes out and says something to the effect that ‘this is racism and that’s bad, actually’, as well as rightfully criticising him when he inevitably goes back to immigrant-bashing.

The article on this so badly needed to be written, and I'm glad that it has been.

you cannot sit motionless in the heart of these perils

BLAH: "I have more of a comment than a question"

YAH: "This is more of an invocation of a foul tentacle-brained world-devouring underbeast than either a comment or a question"

“I don’t want asylum seekers to live on my street” is genuinely a wild thing to say as a notionally progressive politician

Yep! Loved the book, but then didn't watch the early 00s BBC adaptation because I knew the lad playing her younger brother and that kind of thing gave me a kind of weird vicarious social embarrassment...

Actually, Frankenstein is a doctor success at the Venice film festival

In 2021-22 I wrote an essay called “The Holocaust and the Challenges of Representation” for the Cambridge History of the Holocaust, a 4-vol. collection masterfully ed. by Mark Roseman (& Laura Jockush & Devin Pendas) that has just appeared. I’m honored to be included in very impressive company. 1/x

This is wickedness. It flourishes.

Just had a literary festival try to assuage my concerns about their workshop with a “decolonially trained AI” by assuring me the AI isn’t getting paid for their session, as if my concern was grounded in the pay scale for the robots

They shouldn’t have apologised.

When I say “digital humanities,” I mean that I use my fingers to turn the pages of the book I’m reading.

Now reflecting on how 'Embiggening The Smallest Man' would be a perfectly cromulent title for Hicks's book too.

I will now have to reread the book to remember which one he is and what he does 😄 It's been a long 18 months.

It's a powerful piece of work. I think it needed another round with the editors, if I'm honest, and her prose style takes some pretty wild swings. But I love its scope and seriousness - how it manages to be rigorously, unfussily queer-friendly while taking a whole range of views on their terms.

Kinda hilarious that my two favourite works of 2025-so-far non-fiction have almost exactly contradictory titles.

Maybe it's where I am right now but I *laughed like a drain* when I got to the underlined phrase in this essay (on Don Cupitt by Rowan Williams).