Gerard Loughlin 

@austeni And the presence of Anthropic's Chris Olah? bbc.co.uk/news/articles/…

Magnifica is magnificent: a charter for our times, and the birth of a new era of Catholic social teaching, calling us to take a stand in the workshop of our world: to be Team Nehemiah in a world in hock to the Babel builders.

Farage fibs theguardian.com/politics/2026/…

Competing lights

Let us learn to be rich in a different way: more attentive to relationships, more intent on valuing the common good, more attached to the local area, more grateful in welcoming and integrating those who come to live with us.

He’s gone full Strickland. The Vatican needs to remove him.

That water clarity is an engineering decision, and the math behind it is wilder than the video. Roman aqueducts ran on gravity alone. No pumps, no pressure systems. Engineers carved channels with a gradient so shallow it borders on absurd. The Pont du Gard in southern France drops 2.5 centimeters over 275 meters. That's roughly the thickness of a coin over the length of three football fields. They surveyed that accuracy with plumb lines and wooden leveling instruments. The clarity you're seeing is a direct product of flow velocity. Too steep and the water erodes the channel walls, picks up sediment, turns brown. Too flat and it stagnates. Roman engineers targeted a slope of about 20 centimeters per kilometer, which kept the water moving fast enough to stay fresh but slow enough to stay clear. Before the water reached the city, it passed through multi-chamber settling tanks where velocity dropped near zero. Suspended particles sank. Clean water flowed out the top into the next chamber. Repeat three or four times. Pliny specified the minimum slope in writing. Vitruvius published the exact mortar ratio for hydraulic cement: one part lime to two parts volcanic ash for underwater work. The pozzolana from Pozzuoli reacted with water to form a calcium-aluminum-silicate compound that actually gets stronger the longer it sits submerged. Modern concrete degrades in water. Roman concrete bonds with it. Scale the whole system and it gets harder to process. Eleven aqueducts fed Rome at its peak. Combined output: roughly 1 million cubic meters of water per day. That works out to about 250 gallons per person for a city of one million. Modern New York delivers about 125 gallons per person per day. Ancient Rome had access to double the per capita water supply of the largest city in the United States, running entirely on slope and stone. The Trevi Fountain in Rome is still fed by one of them. Two thousand years, same source, same gravity, same water.

JH Prynne | 1936-2026 theguardian.com/books/2026/may…

Trump only makes bad deals theguardian.com/world/2026/may…

I hear there's a Cardinal who doesn't much like the Synod Report of Study Group 9. Poor Utrecht.

The annual Pentecost tradition (today!) at Rome's Pantheon is a moment of extraordinary beauty. It occurs every year on the seventh Sunday after Easter. At noon, after the Holy Mass, thousands of rose petals are dropped through the oculus of the mighty dome. As the petals fall, a choir sings "Veni Sancte Spiritus," known as the Golden Sequence, a masterpiece of sacred Latin poetry. This is to celebrate the descent of the Holy Spirit on the Virgin Mary and the Apostles. The rose petal ritual likely dates back to 607 AD when the pagan temple became a Christian church.

Reform is proposing the deportation of 2 million people - including people legally here. "Politically it feels quite clever doesn't it," says Trevor Phillips, and leads a discussion that revolves entirely around whether it is affordable and practical. These are people who sweep our streets, look after disabled people, keep the care sector functioning. People who work incredibly hard and are invariably very badly paid. People who have families, lives, hopes, dreams. Without whom the economy simply wouldn't function. This country has arrived at an appalling place.

Literal definition of Orwellian

To hear the CEO of Palantir using the serious matter of sexual abuse by Met officers to attack the Mayor of London for rejecting his company and so cutting his profits shows exactly why Palantir are not fit to lecture anyone on values. Louis Mosley should be ashamed of himself.

You'll want to be sitting down for this bit. Water companies are currently £82.7 billion in debt, have paid themselves £85 billion in dividends, leak over a trillion of litres of water per year, dump sewage for almost 4 million hours per year, have been convicted of over 1,200 criminal acts since 1989 and an average of 35% of your bill goes on nothing but paying more interest and yet more dividends. And not a single company has ever lost their operating licence. 👇

We need an end to tinkering around the edges. The public have had enough of this rip off. Andy Burnham must commit to taking water back into public ownership.

Trump never has money for healthcare or VA staff or anything to actually make Americans’ lives better — but somehow found $1.8 billion to reward his allies with your tax dollars. That's corruption, plain and simple.

Peter Aldington | 1933-2026 theguardian.com/artanddesign/2…

“To hear the CEO of Palantir using the serious matter of sexual abuse by Met officers to attack the mayor of London for rejecting his company and so cutting his profits shows exactly why Palantir are not fit to lecture anyone on values.” theguardian.com/technology/202…

No one should have to suffer Farage turning up, announced or unannounced. theguardian.com/politics/2026/…

Another day, another scandal.