Robert Nicholson

Doubling down. It is not a controversial take to give respect to AP and Reuters journalists in Venezuela, most of who are local or from Lat Am, currently risking their lives, and who are paid for their work — so everyone else can benefit from their reporting.

It’s old-fashioned to defend mainstream journalism these days but some of the most reliable reporting from people actually on the ground will be the AP and Reuters the next 24 hours. Your Substack journalist writing takes will be using frontline reporting from them.

I never used to believe in Pavlovian response, but now every time my dog salivates I get a strong urge to ring this tiny bell.

A real Good Samaritan One act of kindness that befell Leeds writer Bernard Hare in 1982 changed him profoundly. Here he tells his story.

i post this story every christmas, and will keep doing so until it stops making me cry

merry christmas xx

Things that will interest Bluesky; Misha Glenny, author of McMafia, replaces Melvyn Bragg as host of In Our Time.

Ordinarily I am team tank, but the QBs in this draft are going to suck, and the Jets need culture building wins like this for Aaron Glenn

I have absolutely zero sympathy for Glasner on this point - brilliant though he has been. Palace have several good players available and he simply isnt using them. Why would the board invest in depth for a coach who wants to operate without rotation?

When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be all alone, on an empty shore.

Then we will dance

- Arcadia.

RIP Tom Stoppard. The greatest.

The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.

We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it.

ChatGPT encouraged college graduate to commit suicide, family claims in lawsuit against OpenAI | CNN A 23-year-old man killed himself in Texas after ChatGPT ‘goaded’ him to commit suicide, his family says in a lawsuit.

I cannot inagine how it feels to be this boy’s parents. What on earth are we doing, with everything we know about the ways unregulated social media have changed us, letting it happen all over again but worse with chatbots? www.cnn.com/2025/11/06/u...

BREAKING: THE NEW YORK JETS WON A FOOTBALL GAME.

Commons people: when politics and music collide Podcast Episode · Westminster Insider · 08/22/2025 · 42m

Musicians can sometimes be the government's most vocal critics. Who could forget Stormzy calling out Theresa May over Grenfell or Elton John calling Keir Starmer’s government “absolute losers”?

On Westminster Insider, host @saschaosullivan.bsky.social digs deeper:

BBC podcast Derailed reveals HS2’s future is still uncertain A new BBC Radio 4 podcast reveals that the future of the Manchester and Leeds legs of HS2 remains “under consultation” according to the Department for Transport.

A new BBC Radio 4 podcast reveals that the future of the Manchester and Leeds legs of HS2 remains “under consultation” according to the Department for Transport.
podcastingtoday.co.uk/bbc-podcast-...

On BBC Sounds in full now, on podcast apps in two tranches of 5 as part of "Understand", and on air on Radio 4 every weekday from now until next Friday, a new series from Whistledown: "Derailed: The Story of HS2"

Tens of billions of pounds in budget overruns piling up, over a hundred miles of rail tracks being laid, dozens of viaducts and bridges under construction, dozens of ancient woodlands damaged, and one infamous bat tunnel later, we ask, what went wrong?

Featuring the engineers who dreamed it up, the politicians who tried to get it done, and the ordinary people who stood up against it, our new series, "Derailed: The Story of HS2", gets under the skin of the ambition and the fiasco that followed.

Kate Lamble has done an extraordinary bit of investigative journalism, unearthing the true - and very human - story behind Britain's most ambitious infrastructure project this century.

But we went back to the beginning - and found a far more complex and interesting story than we ever expected. HS2 is not a simple set of failures, or a classic tabloid scandal. It's a story that, as it has unfolded, has exposed deep national dysfunction.

When the UK looks out at the world - Japan, China, France, Spain - and their high speed rail networks, it feels like we're making something simple look very, very difficult.

Understand - Derailed: The Story of HS2 - 1. The Railwayman - BBC Sounds HS2's story begins with a blank piece of paper.

HS2 is - everyone admits - a mess right now.

A big idea with cross-party support, it's become a decade long embarassment. Controvery, scandal and taxpayer cash are leaking out at pace, with no apparent way to stop the flow.

www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

BBC Radio 4 - Understand, Derailed: The Story of HS2, Trailer The inside story behind HS2. Has a high speed dream become an almighty mess?

Kate Lamble investigates the extraordinary inside story of Britain's most ambitious and controversial rail project. Listen first on BBC Sounds from Monday 14 July 2025

#HS2

This is a really excellent podcast.

Hot Money: Agent of Chaos Business Podcast · Series · In 2020, the Financial Times exposed a €2 billion fraud at Wirecard, a high-flying German fintech. Many thought that was the end of the story. But for reporter Sam Jones, i...

2️⃣ Hot Money: "Agent of Chaos". Brilliantly produced story of how @financialtimes.com reporter @samgadjones.bsky.social investigated former Wirecard COO Jan Marsalek - who turned out to be a Russian spy.

A BBC news headline which says “Penguin says it did “all necessary due diligence” with The Salt Path

I’m no expert but I would’ve got a person to do it.

What is the charge? Walking a path? A succulent salt path?

Exactly. The claim The Observer challenges/questions is that Moth was diagnosed definitively with typical CBD in 2013. The letter is a tentative diagnosis of unusual, "very mild" CBS in 2015. Which seems to be fairly consistent with the opinions of the experts cited by the Observer.

But the key claim previously made by Winn is that Moth was diagnosed with CBD in 2013, right before embarking on their famous walk. These letters do not evidence that claim.

This also doesn't line up time wise. The observer say the book claims a diagnosis of terminal CBD in 2013. This letter is from 2015.

The publication of the letters along with the statement has created a positive news cycle - a reader of this passage in the independent would likely come away with the impression that the letters effectively refute the Observer piece.