Jess McCabe

just realised how "doing lines" reads haha

my aunt brought them some 90s Dandy annuals, and it's just one explanation after another. this is what may poles are. this is what conkers are. this is what doing lines was. let's skip this racist page.

I've tried to get my kids interested in Just William, because I loved the books (and particularly the radio adaptations) when I was a kid, but the referecnes have gone from "distant but understandable" to "might as well be written about kids on another planet" in that time frame

AI tools used by English councils downplay women’s health issues, study finds Exclusive: LSE research finds risk of gender bias in care decisions made based on AI summaries of case notes

It's not like humans don't have bias, but this just highlights to me the risk involved in use of AI in tasks which need to be done carefully, responsibly and accurately.

www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Back at my desk, did any housing news occur in the last two weeks? 👀

Fiona Gibson on girl power, kissing practice and Position of the Fortnight Podcast Episode · Mag Hags · 06/08/2025 · 1h 3m

I absolutely loved this interview with Fiona Gibson, who was editor of Just 17 and More!, and invented position of the fortnight, honestly this is properly iconic stuff for elder millennials
podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/m...

It would be a very good rate now most publications in the UK, unless you’re very well known. For example the guardian’s standard rate is just under 40p/word.

Evelyn Waugh in 1930, says the going rate is 15 Guineas for a thousand words.

I was curious how this compares to modern freelance rates.

Wikipedia suggests 1 guinea = £1.05 in the early 20th century, so £15.75 for a thousand words, or roughly £850 or 85p/word in today’s money

Haha this sounds horrible and I can’t wait

that it would be wen wor European to organise this side of the business. Tourist baggage is submitted to a very cursory scrutiny. All that is necessary would be to assemble a dozen or so Europeans at Damascus with large trunks heavily encrusted with hotel and steamship labels. These could be half filled with hashish and cocaine, concealed in sponge bags, boots and shoes, soap boxes, hollow books, and the many other undutiable articles

Evelyn Waugh: you know what European tourists should do with their white privilege? Drug trafficking

Wow

Lovely to visit but definitely feels like the UK has something to learn from this about what the good life really is

I’m sitting in a playground in Copenhagen, which has its own little kitchen (one of the parents just made coffee and is offering it around). There’s bikes and scooters for the kids to borrow, my daughter is painting using the communal supplies, there’s sports equipment, and better climbing frames

If the guidance is as reported it's a utter, offensive mess. Ideology over all else.

This basically means that trans men are excluded, practically, from almost all spaces. And that legitimate aim is so broad as to be impossible to challenge

many people - educated, smart people! - seem unable to even fully grasp that it's possible to make a true claim about the world and have the majority of the people in their online social circle disagree with it. the distinction between social consensus and reality has just fully dissolved

One of the unintentionally impressive things about LLMs is that by dint of huge technical innovation, massive compute costs, and quite a lot of stolen data, they’ve managed to make computers bad at maths.

Remembering Wesley LePatner I met Wesley in 1985, during the summer we both turned four. Until last Monday, our lives always seemed to run on parallel tracks.

Last week, I became someone who knew someone killed in a mass shooting. Here's my remembrance of Wesley, across the decades. www.newyorker.com/news/postscr...

Ha! The old penguin enclosure gives a different set of associations.

What a useful technology ai is 🙃

Just a side note about ai research - I couldn’t find this on google and so I checked perplexity, which is sometimes okay at surfacing this stuff. But first it told me there was no such thing then when I gave references it fabricated this total nonsense:

I think the sand went on the rubber. There was another old news story largely about how expensive it was, which described sand being shipped in, and Roman baths being constructed!

Fascinated by this idea of a rubber beach, what on earth could it have looked like? It was “far famed” by the 1940s, alas I couldn’t find a photo

shockingly, a lot of kids these days won't even learn about the Trenic Condoutation Wars, because of woke

Second book in a row I’ve read absolutely trashing Lalique glass - I think it’s quite nice?? Maybe not the tchotchkes so much but???

www.vam.ac.uk/articles/art...

It’s 1929, Evelyn Waugh is flying to Paris and throws a bag of sick (or worse) down the aeroplane toilet, which is just a hole in the bottom of the plane. Somewhere underneath in the countryside it lands…

At least we know Evelyn Waugh would have subscribed to all his friends’ substacks

% PURE WATER ATOLOGICALLY iolllVc SKINCARE PATION LABELS I do not suppose that the self-glorification did me very much good either; that is a part of the business of writing which I have not fully mastered. I suppose that by the time this book is published it will be quite a common and simple thing to go to Russia for a holiday. At the time of which I am writing - February 1929 - there was a Conservative majority in the House of Commons and it was a very adventurous project indeed. Now, one of the arts of successful authorship is preventing the reading public from forgetting one's name in between the times when they are reading one's books. It is all very puzzling because, as far as I can see, there are only two respectable reasons for reading a book written by someone else; one is that you are being paid to review it, and the other that you are continually meeting the author and it seems rude not to know about him. But clearly there are masses of people to whom neither of these reasons apply. They read books because they have heard the author's name. Now, even if you are very industrious, you cannot rely on writing more than two books a year, which will employ your public, as it is called, for about six hours each. That is to say, that for every hour in which you employ your reader's atten-tion, you are giving her a month to forget you. It would be very difficult to organise even a marriage on that basis, still more one's financial career. So you have to spend half your leisure in writing articles for the papers; the editors buy these because people read your books, and people read your 4 books because called a viciou running.) The things which My hope wa: that I was go esting youn Rossetti out happen to : which is g promisins that the v Howe that was every c discom its tem scious sessio set ba was into bee Na Pr FI

The attention economy of 1929

I don’t blame individual EPs, it makes perfect sense. But I don’t see how to resolve all this without greater spending in the short term at least

I honestly think the main way to shift to better outcomes is councils need resources to probably commission the amount of EPs, and other services, that children actually need.
Or possibly a new neutral service could do this job.