Peter Mandler

Oh my. Craig Raine in the Spectator on the latest volume of TS Eliot's letters.

Private eye article about “Austen novel finally being adapted for screen”, “stopped the constant adaptations of Fanny Burney, Maria Edgeworth, William Makepeace Thackeray and Ann Radcliffe”

@sophiecoulombeau.bsky.social Saw this and thought of you :)

As an historian, I think it's bad when "blood libel" goes from denoting a very specific part of anti-Jewish history rooted in particular forms of medieval Christian anti-Judaism, to just meaning any criticism of Israel. A whole generation won't understand just how bad the actual blood libel was!

'Earned on the battlefield' - not entirely clear what he's saying, but if this is the new standard for deciding territorial claims then we're in for a world of trouble.

Pete Hegseth shares a clip saying women shouldn’t have the right to vote, the 19th Amendment should be “repealed,” and women should “submit” to their husbands: “All of Christ for All of Life”

... giving for the third time on television a demonstration of classical dancing. Now increasingly celebrated as a composer, with two of her short compositions played last week at the BBC Proms, Coleridge-Taylor would appear to be the first person of colour to appear on television in Britain.

A government-sanctioned "truth arbiter" will soon arrive at CBS. Their role will be to ensure that journalists do not criticize this Administration or express views that conflict with its agenda.

This is a betrayal—not just of journalistic independence, but of the public trust. 🧵

To give a concrete example, we tested LLMs on coding open text survey responses into categories. The best LLMs had human-level accuracy (94%) so we've adopted this. If the accuracy had been 80% we would have tried again in a year to see if the performance had improved

Trump Wants Admissions Data on Grades and Race, but Who Will Collect It?

I always look at college major data, but this article (with star turn from @robertkelchen.com) confirms that the layoffs at the National Center for Education Statistics included all 7 employees who work on IPEDS. (Which the Times calls only "the college dataset")…
www.nytimes.com/2025/08/09/u...

“The state reported collecting nearly $3 billion from the millionaires tax, a 4 percent surtax levied on the state’s highest earners, far more than the $1.3 billion state officials estimated.”

Interesting. Possibly also relevant is demise of QAA as Designated Quality Body (DQB) in England in 2023 w/ divergence from European Standards and Guidelines (as reported by wonkhe.com/blogs/qaa-to... ). PCU (previously?) adduced its QAA accreditation: www.praguecityuniversity.cz/about-us/acc... .

This is definitely about stopping antisemitism.

The White House is taking new steps to undermine every international student at our universities.

It has approved a new rule restricting student visas to 4 years max. That's not long enough for PhD students, or about half of undergrads, to finish their degree.

Likely to enter force within days.

Just jumping in on this to say ITV digitised a 1984 World in Action documentary that wasn't available in any archives, and then emailed the file to me - so it can be done, though it will cost you (£50 in my case). Can dm you email address of person in charge of this service if you want.

ITV does have its own central film archive - I don't think it's easy to access but I have known students able to buy footage from them, so it may be worth an enquiry.

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Hello journalists. If you report this you gotta say that under the Constitution he has no power to do it. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

And most of the votes they've lost are actually to "undecided" which are excluded from this chart.

Spent part of this morning using AI for research purposes: getting it to write code to identify verbatim overlaps between two texts, faster than I could manually. Worked a treat.

From the way some talk, you'd think Labour is losing all its voters to Reform. Absolutely not. From @georgeeaton.bsky.social excellent email

Funded by Gates and Zuckerberg and under contract to IRS - sadly, conditions unlikely to be replicated in future.

opportunityinsights.org/wp-content/u...

More eye-opening work from Raj Chetty: mild preferences for poorer children at elite US universities but very strong preferences for very rich children. (Only part of the over-representation of the rich: admissions bias, but also differential performance and differential rates of application.)

There's a real danger that the left/centre get themselves totally out of line with public opinion on LLMs (they are already so widely used).

Got to be possible to highlight dangers/risks while still accepting most people will find value in them.

Record number of young Scots headed to university after exam results A record number of young people in Scotland have gained a place at university, new figures have shown ...

"Record number of young Scots headed to university after exam results"

Desai entered the University of Bombay at 14, began reading Marx at 15 and gained his BA at 18, at which point his father's hopes went awry. "You could not sit the civil service exam until you were 21, so I stayed on at university and took more degrees. I ended up far too qualified to be a native bureaucrat," he said. He had his MA by 20 and at 23 completed his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania thanks to a Cold War grant from a US State Department anxious to snap up the brightest Indian talent before Russia. "I knew when I left America that I would never return to India," he said.

Lots of interesting stuff in this obit of Meghnad Desai. Including this reminder that the US would fund bright people to pursue further study in the US during the Cold War lest they instead be snapped up by Russia
www.thetimes.com/article/d2b7...

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Dear oh dear.

Without question the thing Trump benefits from more than anything else is being able to do stuff that would've triggered Watergate-level media outrage and turn it into a nothing burger you barely hear about