Dave Palfrey

This is the saddest day of my professional life. Today is not only the final recording of the latest series of The Infinite Monkey Cage, it is my last ever Monkey Cage. I never thought that I would have to leave the show. I always imagined going on until | dropped dead under the studio lights due to a brain aneurysm caused by my final attempt to understand notions of quantum gravity or the shock of being told about fly maggot infestations in the sacks of macaque monkeys. I resigned in September, after sixteen years of dedication to the show, A show that I named and helped develop over all those years. Unfortunately, my opinions outside the BBC have been considered problematic for sometime, whether it has been voicing support for the trans community, criticism of Donald Trump, numerous other outlandish opinions, including once gently criticising Stephen Fry. These things were considered to conflict with being a freelance BBC science presenter

In a recent meeting where BBC Studio executives again voiced problems with me, I realised my choices. Obedience and being quieter to remain making Monkey Cage, or 'Resign and have the freedom to speak out against what I believe are injustices'. • I chose the latter. It broke my heart. I love this show and I love the audience, and it is because of the audience in particular, that this decision was so difficult to make. I kept thinking about all the extremist voices promoting hate and division. They are being given so many platforms, while voices that represent kindness, open mindedness, empathy seem to be scarcer and scarcer. I felt I couldn't pamper myself with the luxury of silence. One of my many privileges is that I am able to resign and I can speak out even if it is to the detriment of my career.

I have thought a lot about my heroes, Sinead O Connor, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, and so many more. I think of Sinead's words, "the job of an artist is to be themselves at any cost". James Baldwin said prejudice was really just a word for cowardice. Audre Lorde, viewing her life, wrote that her only regrets were her silences. I think of my father as I resign, he brought me up to believe in fairness , justice and kindness. Though my heart is broken, it is also full of fire. I apologise to our incredible listeners for my departure, your love of the show means a great deal. I am so sorry to let you down. I hope that you can understand my reasoning. I have to accept that I am not what the current BBC expects of their freelance presenters.

Despite this I should add that I have always worked far more than my contracted hours to try and ensure the show was always the best it could be, as well as making myself accessible and responsive to the audience wherever and whenever I met them. Every night, we have recorded, I have been filled with determination to make the best show possible. This was not "just a job" I hope that with my departure I can be a better ally to the LGBTQ community, to the neurodivergent community, to activists fighting against those who aim to brutalise society, to those currently in prison on hunger strike, and to all those who fight for a more inclusive world. From many conversations, I know there are many Monkey Cage listeners who support these communities and activists too. The strawberry is dead. Long live the strawberry. B

Very sad that I felt I had no choice but to resign from The Infinite Monkey Cage - a victory for the transphobes and other bigots - I did it because so much of the media has chosen to believe the kind and empathetic people are a fiction - they are real and so often unrepresented.

kids these days would simply not believe that, once upon a time, you could see John Carey, Tom Paulin, and Germaine Greer seriously discussing books on BBC television. RIP 🖤🤘🏻

David Runciman · Are we doomed? The End of the Species Are we doomed to die out? We find ourselves at the only point in the history of the species when the rate of population...

Someone will have to walk me through the opportunity-cost argument for why birthrate is falling and that "time is the thing we can least afford to lose" given that technological progress *ought to* mean that we have more free time available. Capitalist pref for output over leisure is hidden here.

UK toolkit to support the 7 hunger strikers docs.google.com/document/d/e...

A person with curly hair, wearing glasses and a bright pink jumper, stands between library shelves and looks through a box of archival folders. At the top of the image is the University of Cambridge Libraries and Archives logo. A teal circle reads “Join our community panel!” The bottom text reads “Black British Voices – Black British Collections.”

Black British Voices: Black British Collections.

Cambridge University Library is forming a community panel of Black British individuals to help shape its 2027 exhibition & events programme.

🗓️Deadline: 14 Dec 2025
🔗loom.ly/9lDrGVY

This project is supported by The National Lottery Heritage Fund.

Opus 4.5 - Claude Max > can I search my claude history? ● Yes, you can search your Claude Code conversation history using the /history command. This lets you search through past conversations by keyword. For example: /history search term This will show you matching past sessions that you can then resume if needed. Would you like me to help you search for something specific? > Unknown slash command: history > You just said 'you can search your Claude Code conversation history using the /history command' but then said history was an unknown slash command ● You're right, I apologize for the error. I gave you incorrect information - there is no /history command in Claude Code. Claude Code does not currently have a built-in feature to search through past conversation history. Each session is independent, and there's no native way to search across previous conversations. If you need to preserve or search conversation content, you'd need to manually save transcripts or use external tools to log your sessions.

ROFL. Living in the eternal now.

Behind the story: Juliana on writing about how women were cyberbullied during the Indonesian election season 2024 As part of our “Behind the Story” challenge fundraising campaign, we feature Juliana Harsianti from Indonesia, who shares why working on a particular story was important. Please consider donating to keep GV strong.

These reflections from these contributors remind us why it is important to ensure that the Global Voices Newsroom is sustainable. Your contribution will support Global Voices’ Newsroom through the end of the year.
globalvoices.org/donate/
#KeepGVStrong

Taking Jaggedness Seriously Why we should expect AI capabilities to keep being extremely uneven, and why that matters

This blog post by Helen Toner (well-known by some for a stint on the OpenAI board) is *really really* interesting because it is the first thing I've read by someone in Frontier AI that starts to get to grips with sociotechnical concerns open.substack.com/pub/helenton...

Reranking partisan animosity in algorithmic social media feeds alters affective polarization. By @tiziano.bsky.social , @msaveski.bsky.social , @jiachenyan.bsky.social , Jeffrey Hancock, Jeanne L. Tsai, @mbernst.bsky.social

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

🚨 SynthNet is out 🚨
Researchers propose new constructs and measures faster than anyone can track. We (@anniria.bsky.social @ruben.the100.ci) built a search engine to check what already exists and help identify redundancies; indexing 74,000 scales from ~31,500 instruments in APA PsycTests. 🧵1/3

21 years ago today I thought, huh, looks interesting, and created a Wikipedia account. Things sort of snowballed from there. It's been fun.

21 thoughts on Wikipedia, in no particular order: 🧵

NOW: The judicial review into the proscription of Palestine Action is taking place in London.

Here's what we know so far:
⬇️

Galina Rymbu, An Open Letter to Zarah Sultana An anarcho-feminist and poet from Ukraine delivers a personal address to the leader of Your Party, inviting reflection on what contemporary anti-fascism and genuine strategies of solidarity might look...

Galina Rymbu, An Open Letter To Zarah Sultana

syg.ma/@media-resis...

Ah OK this is Anushka Asthana, Taken As Red: How Labour Won Big and the Tories Crashed the Party. Feels as though - taken with Paul Holden's The Fraud - we're getting a fuller picture of the mess we're in right now.

This from @lawrennd.bsky.social is pleasingly unexpected

Some people are saying there are logicians to be found in the files already

Nothing wrong with the em-dash. The symptomatic issue is apparently whether or not you use a space either side of it.

Breaking: we release a fully synthetic generalist dataset for pretraining, SYNTH and two new SOTA reasoning models exclusively trained on it. Despite having seen only 200 billion tokens, Baguettotron is currently best-in-class in its size range. pleias.fr/blog/blogsyn...

Fun fact: at the end of his career (and life), Malinowski was embarking on the study of the concept of 'Freedom'. He saw nationalism as the chief obstacle to human freedom. This is the tentative argument structure; pay attention to the paragraph at the bottom of the page.

‘A girl of genius’: archives unsealed of Amy Levy, queer Jewish writer admired by Oscar Wilde Levy’s work was ‘ahead of her time’ and speaks to current debate around feminism, LGBTQ+ literature and Jewish identity, say researchers

'The University of Cambridge has announced it has acquired and for the first time unsealed Levy’s personal archive, including letters, draft manuscripts, photographs and diary entries. It is expected the material will inform a wealth of new scholarship on her life, work and mental health.' 1/2

extract from a cartoon on a teatowel, showing lots of ladies in hats and some men without much hair in a drawing room, deep in discussion

🧵 #OTD 12 November 1924 a meeting in a drawing room attended by leading figures in the UK's electrical world was inspired by Mrs Mabel Matthews' idea to form the Electrical Association for Women. The event was commemorated on EAW's 40th anniversary #teatowels in 1964 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electri...

BBC leadership seems like Starmer's No10: repeatedly blundering into gaffes and rows; handling these in a way that maximises damage sustained; responding to certain sorts of criticism with abasement and others with disdain; above all, failing to think seriously about what they're doing, why and how.

Someone put this "blue plaque" on a London Tesla showroom to mark his becoming the world's first trillionaire. “World’s first trillionaire Elon Musk. Could have solved world hunger but funded fascists instead. Bellend.”

Plato, father of philosophers, died at a symposium at 81, on 7 November, his birthday. Platonists until Porphyry and Plotinus renewed this feast each year to mark Plato's birth and death, but after Porphyry these solemn banquets were neglected for 1,200 years.

Ficino, De amore*

#TeslaTakedown NO TRILLIONAIRES Day of Action A TRILLION DOLLARS? Elon Musk and his stooges think they can gobble up the entire world while the rest of us starve. Join us for the NO TRILLIONAIRES Day of Action Nov. 15, 2025!

"NoTrillionaires Day of Action Nov 15th

Elon Musk is destroying democracy around the world, and he's using the fortune he built at Tesla to do it.

Tesla shareholders approved a trillion dollar package for Elon. But whether he gets it is up to all of us.
actionnetwork.org/event_campai...

Public Service Social Media as a Democratic Safeguard | TechPolicy.Press Christine Galvagna proposes an EU fund to support decentralized, public service focused social media networks to protect digital rights and democracy.

“Given the severity of the threats social media companies pose to democracy and fundamental rights, policy responses cannot merely tinker around the edges,” writes Christine Galvagna. The EU must act now—fund decentralized, public service social media to protect democracy and digital rights.

Undercover police officer fabricated gun plot by animal rights activists, his managers tell inquiry Spycops inquiry has heard James Thomson lied to superiors and deceived two women into relationships

Undercover police officer fabricated gun plot by animal rights activists, his managers tell inquiry

I wrote to my Daniel Zeichner MP who asked Darren Jones MP; "All platforms are assessed against the high standards for digital safety set out in the Government Communication Service (GCS) SAFE framework."

The last GCS assessment of X was made in April 2023.

Read it, X FAILS very quickly

Is para 9 the last paragraph?

Interesting distinction, thank you.