Hannah Davies

BBC International Editor Jeremy Bowen has confirmed that the entire Al Jazeera team in Gaza City has been killed.

Britain’s social fabric has been torn but it’s just easie... The real causes of serious problems are ignored and those responsible are let off the hook

“It is a portrait of two Britains, one of which barely comprehends the challenges facing the other.” My ‪@theobserveruk.bsky.social column: observer.co.uk/news/opinion...

This is so true. After encountering a very aggressive - and visibly distressed - young homeless man on the Elizabeth Line, our 9 year old has become really anxious of public transport. As you get older and metabolize the inevitable friction of urban living you can become insensitive.

The emerging contours of UN policy under Trump 2.0 Reading the tea leaves

In the most recent edition of my weekly musings, I explore what the recent USUN confirmation hearings and the withdrawal from UNESCO tell us about the emerging contours of U.S. policy towards the UN.

casquebleu.substack.com/p/the-emergi...

Correct. Aspire to have a house people want to be at. To be able to knock up a dinner people remind you of in the future. To be able to, without planning, say ‘seeing as you’re here, would you like to stick around for dinner’ and throwing something really delicious.

What has it been like shifting from reporter to media executive, managing a staff instead of filing stories yourself? And do you write any of the jokes at The Onion? Or are you strictly managing the business? The Onion’s process is deeply, beautifully inefficient. Every day, our writers take 150 headlines into a physical writers room in Chicago and whittle them down to maybe one or two. These people throw away the funniest sentence I will ever write in my life six times by noon every weekday. The point of taking over this place was to preserve this process, which I learned this week is almost assuredly more rigorous than The New York Times. That’s why I don’t touch any of it. I just try to get more people to pay attention to the output, and get our work into different mediums and new places. We brought back the paper, reinvested in the Onion News Network, bought a full page ad in The Times for something they were going to write anyway. The role is to make the world-class work they’re already doing seep into everyday American life more frequently, and that’s working. You actually can do this, you know. You can just try to highlight the beauty of things you like and not try to vampirically extract value at every step. If people get one thing out of this whole Q&A, I hope it’s that. You do not have to make an A.I. version of your own employees that operate at 1.5x speed but produce purely iterative garbage, especially in media and journalism. People don’t actually want that shit. Make a good, human thing and people will bend over backwards to support you. This is a valid way to run a company.

Also talked about The Onion being inefficient on purpose.

www.status.news/p/the-onion-...

There's a kind of male violence that is often misinterpreted as being in defense of women when it's actually in defense of who has the right to harm women (in a "we do; they don't" mode, see KKK, southern lynching, etc.)

If Jesus had focused more on kitchen table issues and less on unpopular outcasts like lepers and prostitutes, he might have won more support from white working-class Judeans.

More than 80 per cent of 55- to 64-year-olds said they regularly played out on the street and had freedom to explore when they were young, compared with only a quarter of children today, according to a 2022 survey.

Why are children not playing in the street? An FT piece analysing the - very concerning - decline in outdoor play manages to look at every possible cause: screens, spaces, school timetable changes. Apart from one.

Cars.

It is simply not safe for kids to play outside on streets.

YouTube video by Balsillie School of International Affairs The Trump Administration and the UN: An Initial Damage Assessment

I offered an "initial damage assessment" of Trump policies at the UN in a virtual talk @balsillieschool.bsky.social this week. You can watch it here:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFmE...

Untaxing - 2. The Beatles Clause - BBC Sounds Tax: complex, surprising and more powerful than you think. Dan Neidle unpacks its impact.

If you missed today's Untaxing, on the unintended consequence of 1965 tax avoidance by the Beatles, you can catch it here: buff.ly/fu7OqQz

Excited to be joining Faiza Shaheen this evening to talk about how our immigration system has got it so badly wrong!

Residents of Chingford & Woodford Green area do come along & say hi 😊😎

If you live in London, are PMC and have some liberal axe to grind, the Observer will basically publish it for you. It’s Reddit for the Hackney dinner party circuit.

... in a world where the frustrations of day-to-day life are made worse by download-this-app and your-call-is-important-to-us machinery, anything that appears to continue this trend is not welcome. Where is the political programme that promises to make life easier? (2/2) #AI

No one carries double denim as well as Shakey #totp1981

There are a million ways social media has rotted our brains & drained our energies in society.

But one of the biggies for me is the way it’s convinced us we are politically active because we tweet. It excuses us from real action & makes it scarier cos someone is bound to a thread of criticism.

Press Conference: António Guterres (UN Secretary-General) on the launch of the UN80 Initiative Secretary-General of the United Nations, António Guterres, briefs on the launch of his UN80 Initiative

The Secretary-General is about to give a press conference on the launch of the UN80 initiative (09:00 AM New York time).

webtv.un.org/en/asset/k1b...

If you're at the point of anti-woke moral panic that you're questioning whether NORTHERN IRELAND needs public investment in equality and inclusion initiatives, it's safe to say you're out of your fucking mind.

A gloriously shining beacon in a dark world. Keep shining that light!

Chas and Dave were the true precursors of Britpop.

The UK farmer protests you probably haven’t heard about Farm workers milk cows, drive machinery and pick crops – yet their grievances are seldom heard.

You've heard all about the farmers' protests...

But you haven't heard about this one theconversation.com/the-uk-farme...

also means you have all these politicians going "agh immigration is getting less and less popular what can we do, what's going on" when like, yeah, if you've got lots of people making the case against something and none making the case for it, what did you think would happen?

The funding cuts to the UN by Trump 2.0 have thus far mostly been felt in voluntary funding. But cuts—or even a pause—to assessed contributions are likely. In this new piece, I look at what this could entail, and measures that can be taken to mitigate the impact. [1/2]

cic.nyu.edu/resources/pr...

And the sad thing is many of them probably aren’t even that old. Aged by poverty and homelessness.

@overunderpod.bsky.social another excellent podcast this week. Worth the monthly Patreon just for Gary singing Chas and Dave alone. Keep up the good work

Maybe it’s because I’m married to an American but I’ve been surprised by the number of quite casual (non political) acquaintances want to talk to me about it. My dentist this afternoon was worrying about Trump and the prospects of war. I also live in n. Ireland so that might also be in play.

1. A few years ago, people like me were widely attacked in the media for “declinism”. How could we fail to see that we were heading into a capitalist utopia, in which everything would keep getting better?
This is a thread about what we could see that our critics could not. 🧵

Yeah. But as Lizzie intimates, he could also get over himself a little and try harder.