A giant Captain Haddock with bottles for pupils applies a corkscrew to the head of Tintin who is trapped in a bottle (a dream sequence from The Crab with the Golden Claws)
This was the one that most freaked me out
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun
Conspiring with him how to fuck up my ditty
Season of mists and mellow fecundity
In which @erinmaglaque.bsky.social and I are unnerved by Caravaggio podcasts.apple.com/en/podcast/t...
How do you live with yourself telling prospective students from Sudan, where the UN sees the 'hallmarks of genocide', that they can't study here because they're from Sudan?
‘The Islamic Republic is likely to emerge transformed or weakened in ways not yet visible. But the notion that it would simply dissolve under pressure was always fanciful.’
Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi on the US’s war on Iran, new on the blog.
www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/ma...
Screenshot of Telegraph headline: Eir Nolsøe Labour is finally getting migration under control. It's a nightmare for Reeves Much lower numbers of migrants would cost the Treasury billions Photo of Starmer and Reeves ث
I’m sorry, what now?
Are you f’king kidding right now @telegraph.co.uk??
Rationally, a war that is fought forever cannot be considered successful. But reason doesn’t enter here.
Spend from the Greek for ‘pour a libation’ and penny as in p for piss
As the laid off Middle East News Editor, I concur. Management eliminated the positions of every single staff correspondent and bureau chief in the Middle East.
Maybe Trump just skipped that bit of the autocue while he was talking about the curtains
Regime change no longer among the objectives?
‘pinpoint bombing’
It’s happened in other European countries
The late Jurassic period lasted 15 million years
The PD, in government, cracked down on immigration. With EU backing, it last year negotiated a deal with Libyan forces, supplying them with funds and equipment to keep people from crossing the Mediterranean, knowing full well what detention in Libya would mean for them. The number of people arriving from Africa on Italy's shores dropped dramatically, from more than 180,000 in 2016 to fewer than 120,000 in 2017, and under ooo so far this year. The PD's electoral dividend from this moral capitulation was nil (at best).
On the Italian centre-left’s anti-immigration turn, from 2018. A lesson not learned by Starmer’s Labour Party.
www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2018/ma...
Phew
Quite rare to see a chart that says quite so overtly that no one involved has the slightest clue what’s happening here
So, what have we learnt from this paper:
First, that this "AI stethoscope" offers no apparent benefit in practice.
Second, that you still can't trust a per-protocol analysis presented in a general medical journal.
Third, as with anything AI, you have to look beyond the hyped headline.
🧵 16/
But........what's that demand actually for?
There's a difference between keeping people alive in the heat and cold, cutting bills and emissions through electrification vs panic-building computer factories to mass produce single-use slop.
They also, as shown by Prince Andrew’s now defunct role as the CBI’s overseas emissary and Prince Charles’s green-ink letters to ministers, play a direct political role – one handily de-politicised by the very fact that they play it.’
… By standing (significant preposition) ‘above politics’, they validate what they embody, and in so doing, legitimate it …
Here he is on blistering form in 2013: ‘The Windsors grind on, Eton-schooled, unblack, Anglican, unintellectual, heterosexual, and in so doing impersonate our state as being all these things. They exemplify hierarchy and hereditary privilege …
I miss Glen Newey often but more than ever on a day like today.
I’ve been having similar thoughts. Can’t we just pretend not to be British? Lots to recommend that anyway.
Very pleasing to talk early modern news, information, and communication (and two excellent books by Rachel Midura & Joad Raymond Wren) with @moonjets.bsky.social on this week's LRB podcast. @lrb.co.uk
On the podcast: @earlymodernjohn.bsky.social joins @moonjets.bsky.social to explore how information (and disinformation) circulated in early modern Europe, and whether our predecessors were any better than we are at sifting fake news from fact. Listen here:
podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/t...
As David Trotter and @tricialockwood.bsky.social will tell you www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and...
Still haven’t seen it
Turns out, not the first time, that winning elections and governing may require different skills
