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New substack: in wanting to reform social care, Andy Burnham risks bringing economics into politics: chrisdillow.substack.com/p/social-car...

Enjoyable to read Malcolm Turnbull savage Daniel Finkelstein open.substack.com/pub/malcolmt...

And this (from the same IPPR essay). In an essay of my own from 2024, which critiqued the 'polycrisis' concept, I argued that one way to pursue the historic mission of social democracy in our unstable present is to seek the egalitarian redistribution of risk. renewal.org.uk/blog/the-pol...

Strongly agreed. www.ippr.org/articles/wha...

It wasn't put in these terms by those actors, but it left me wondering if this was an (unintentional) grassroots prefiguration of the turn to 'human capital' investment and 'equality of opportunity', as the realistic area for state intervention, by the UK British left at the end of the C20th.

This is good, both on the gendered way in which we conventionally count unemployment, often disregarding structural barriers, and on the dilemmas encountered by 1980s socialist feminist groups, who ended up engaging in state-sponsored 'training' programmes to catapult women into the labour market.

What I want to know is where Sienna somehow got a hold of the recording of this song (to which you can listen in the article). Was it 'sources close to Lord Glasman'?

Andy Burnham may be giving people some breathing space on the cost of living, but the cost of normal crisis remains as serious as it has ever been

NEW: A glimpse at how AI image generators are used. Researchers set up a fake image editor on Hugging Face and within a week received 1,000 prompts. 73% of them were sexual and 83% of those were asking for people (women) to be “undressed”. Around 6% of the sexual requests also targeted minors

Chuffed to see my article on feminist responses to the unemployment crisis of the 1980s out in JBS:

(a review is never entirely interesting when the main message seems to be "I just think it should have been a different movie/book altogether" and though it is very elegantly written, I worry that Emily Wilson's take on the Odyssey falls at that hurdle)

I don't mind a critical take and agree with some of the points (e.g. the dialogue at times, the filming location). I think my issue was how central aesthetic criticisms are to the essay, which to me scream 'is this film for you, though?'

I liked it a lot more than that, and thought it was a story about PTSD and the consequences of warfare, albeit male-centred and set in a patriarchal society. Clearly not the theme of the source material but (as Wilson says herself) who cares.

I ended up preferring the podcast conversation which was more reflection than criticism: podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/t...

1/ Great reporting in The Times on the emerging momentum behind support for compulsory voting, which @ippr.org called for a couple of weeks ago: www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/...

It's honest, and fair play to her for that.

This is a fun read, but honestly I don't think it's a good review. The aesthetic criticisms - as opposed to those based on interpretive choices in the text - imply an (involuntary?) predisposition against the film. (Nolan's big budget fares are clearly not Wilson's cup of tea.) And these predominate

Useful to understand social care.

undoubtedly, but I would be sceptical (in the absence of evidence to the contrary) that this is high on the minds of most of those choosing 'mass migration' on the YouGov survey. It doesn't seem to come up in qualitative evidence a lot among those concerned about migration.