Lee Ward

I must be being stupid. Surely the ratio of old stuff to new stuff is going up all the time?

@ZoeJardiniere @JaneFanning6 It's also false. It's being paid by current taxpayers. There's no 'pot'.

@JaneFanning6 I’m sorry, but that is irrelevant. Pensions are a benefit, and there’s no shame in that. Lots of people receiving other types of benefits have also paid in to the system at other times.

Seems we’re all talking about pensions today We won’t be able to keep paying them with a shrinking, ageing population. Still, what’s bout them flags, right??😅😅😅😅

Wolf Hall deletes itself

@ianharber Undoubtedly, is it?

Cancelling Harry Potter because of Rowling but remaking/doing spin offs of Narnia and LOTR despite Lewis and Tolkien being two of the most prominent Christian figures of the last century who undoubtedly share Rowling’s views she’s been cancelled for. Make it make sense.

It’s finally rolling out! Meet SongDNA, a very cool feature that lets you literally see the ”DNA” of a song and nerd out completely on it, you can see who wrote it, composed it, produced, mastered and engineered it, who performed on it, who covered it, who sampled it etc etc and then traverse any of those paths through the rest of the catalog. You can spend hours figuring how many steps any song actually is from Rick Rubin!

@Docstockk I'll be honest: I don't see anything wrong with it. Reading about suicide among paraplegics etc changed my mind on this.

The British defenders of assisted death respond to this sort of case by saying it couldn’t happen here. But I’d like to know what exactly they think is wrong with it.

@cmkosemen You left out the daddy

"You shall know him by his kinks": Denis Villeneuve's thing for bug/latex/crush stuff in Enemy (2013), Arrival (2016), and Dune: Part One (2021)... Naughty!

@financial_shaw @Nicoledso @MrSamLJ Yes, but people don't want to live *somewhere in England*

@Nicoledso @MrSamLJ

ITS NOT A LACK OF F*******G SUPPLY

This agonising piece helped changed my mind on this issue astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-re…

@HKSurrey So sorry to hear this, I've enjoyed your pieces for years.

Some news: I’ve been laid off by The Ringer. It was a rewarding eight and a half years and I’m proud to have literally written the most articles in the site’s history. I’d love to keep writing about pop culture elsewhere — drop me a line: msurrey2 at gmail

@AlfieJCarter CLAUDE

If you don't have my "Claude Power User Playbook" yet... The one I built to get 10x more output from Claude every session with a complete system across settings, prompting frameworks, file creation, memory management, and advanced workflows... Just comment "CLAUDE" and I'll DM it to you for free (must follow)

@DPJHodges No - she'd have been better off if she had just kept asking the question, but she repeatedly fell into feeble rhetoric, and then remembered she was supposed to ask a question. Looked faintly ridiculous.

Also good too see Kemi Badenoch had learnt. If he keep asking Starmer the same question he just implodes.

@GaryMarcus Gary, have you read Ben Thompson's new essay on the topic? stratechery.com/2026/anthropic…

Did any prominent doomers publicly call out the Hegseth maneuvers? I tried to suggest to some that we join arms in a joint letter and got basically no reply.

@wallaceme Yes, and with the prospect of further retribution

I cannot regret the ayatollah and his thugs getting some justice meted out to them. But I wish this had been delivered back when the US promised Iranian protesters “help is on the way”, instead of weeks later once tens of thousands of them have been murdered by the regime.

@anarcho_ugly @amoreimari @franklinleonard All the while stretching out JR's mortification

@mrleeward @amoreimari @franklinleonard There’s a bit of difference in whether it was the same word that was edited out, or a different word. A different word opens up some uncomfortable questions about why one was edited and not the other, the same meanwhile word is a little more suggestive of incompetence.

This article doesn't seem to mention what the second slur was.

@BigMeanInternet But... it's not even that the argument of that piece was 'AI is good' and that there are no conceivable negative consequences - just that a lot of prominent sceptics are in denial about the state of what can be done.

How come all these "The left must take AI seriously!" end with telling people to just adopt these tools on their own terms? There's like thousands of words and no substance here at all transformernews.ai/p/the-left-is-…

My little baby pet feature that I and the team have been nurturing for a few months is live - Page match! 📖->🎧 This is really a killer feature for people like me, who love listening to audiobooks when I’m driving or running, but still want to be able to read the physical book or ebook on my kindle at night. Page match lets you sync between your audiobook and physical book by just holding the phone up to a page in the book. It works both ways, from physical book to audio version and back to the physical book again. I use it every evening when I go to bed to sync from my audio book to my kindle, and then every morning back to the audiobook again so I can keep listening in my car on the way to work. Together with the personal recaps feature we launched only a few weeks ago - where you can get a personal recap of the book so far in case you fell out of it - this really creates a complete reading solution for me. Where I can just take a book from my shelf that I fell out of, scan it from where I left off, listen to the recap and then keep going from there, going back and forth between listening and reading. Also, in collaboration with bookshop . org (which I love) you can now actually buy the physical version of the book right on Spotify! Happy reading!

The thing with Bluey is that I feel weird watching it my family, cos I like it way more than they do. But I feel weird watching it on my own cos then it's just me watching Bluey on my own.

@Louise_m_perry @WSJFreeEx Lovely piece (not sure ring wing = small c conservative, but hey)

I cannot tell you how many hours upon hours of research have gone into this column for @WSJFreeEx. Watching Bluey with my children has convinced me of two things: that it is the best kids’ show on TV right now (by a country mile!), and also that it is right wing art. wsj.com/opinion/free-e…

@AmericanGwyn @nealjclark1 I love LD, though I wouldn't read it with the implicit comparison in mind. Wholly different vibe.

@nealjclark1 My knee jerk reaction is to raise hell here, but instead I’m going to read Lonesome Dove and really sit with it for a while.

Larry McMurtry is Cormac McCarthy for actually smart cool and literate people