I don't think any university teacher is ready for the next academic year.
It's a crisis without precedent.
‘There needs to be a co-ordinated strategy that tackles not only acts of violence but also the narratives that make them possible.’
Essential reading from Luqman Saeed in Belfast.
One of the oddest things about Tony Blair is that he has turned into the cartoon image drawn by Steve Bell since the 1990s. It’s spooky.
‘The task facing a mature society is to adapt its methods of financing universities to sustaining the purposes for which such institutions exist – rather than, as at present, the other way round’.
Essential context for Britain’s university crisis.
Acrid smoke now in East Edinburgh.
WHO recommend a PM 2.5 limit of 5 µg/m3, tonight it’s over 82.
That’s Arthur’s Seat ablaze again.
2026 bushfire season starting in May not August.
The rapid erosion of the mainstream political taboo on Powellism and Mosleyism (etc) is one of the most striking and alarming features of the present moment.
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
"wild swimming ... causes issues with private ownership" is genuinely a sentence written by the national park authority for Kinder Scout, the locus classicus of public access protest in England
First time I've seen a Cinnamon Bug (Corizus hyoscyami), seems unusual for Scotland but seems to be spreading north. Striking colour against spinach.
In highly unusual intervention, ex-PM says his party’s ‘almost infinite capacity for self-delusion’ makes it likely to lose next election
That’s Arthur’s Seat ablaze again.
2026 bushfire season starting in May not August.
At the end of the term I asked my college creative wriing students to submit anonymous thoughts on AI. No real surprises: Mood ranges from resignation to despair, capitulation from embittered erosion of standards to total, feelings of betrayal from deep to furious. 1/
‘We are living under a kind of house arrest, unable to go out, with an oppressive sense that an assault could occur at any moment.’
New from Luqman Saeed in Belfast:
www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/ju...
Scotland has not adjusted to the reality that we now have a bushfire season.
So many implications, not least for air quality.
