This year’s reading includes a novel in which a biologically female character is consistently referred to by the narration and other characters as ‘he’, and one of those characters is described as ‘mansplaining’ to him.

I can well believe that whatever is in store for higher education will be carnage (I’m especially wondering what recruitment caps for ‘low value’ subjects would mean for cross-subsidy), but I’m wondering what to make of this:

‘Do you agree that we are living through an era in which rational dispute and reasoned debate are being rejected? Have your say in the comments below’

Our overlords may be remiss in many ways, but they go further than any since the Middle Ages to protect us from seduction by vampires.

Among the numerous things I did not foresee, narrow rollout of ’phone OS updates as a bulwark against illiberalism must rank fairly high:

I searched for Threshold Kids and this happened:

Recently the Telegraph not only carried an opinion piece on the Benin Bronzes, but supplemented it with a news item about the existence of the opinion piece. (Links may be paywalled.)

Heritage organisations are less immune to short-termism than their vocation might suggest. I know of a National Trust property that got rid of its snowplough (dead money, according to the accountants), and then found itself unable to open for parking on many Winter days.

Wanting the truth doesn’t mean you aren’t training people to lie to you. I learnt this way back when I tried answering Panelbase surveys: completing a survey earnt a small amount of money, but it had to be a completed survey, and many surveys included screening questions. Give a disliked answer to one of those and …

Thanks, Doctor Irvine. Now I get to spend the rest of the day speculating about who this was.

Now that we know the entire fabric of statutory protection for listed buildings and scheduled monuments can be suspended at the local police commander’s whim, it has been a grimly fascinating exercise in social psychology to see how rapidly the iconoclastic impulse spread from slaver to abolitionist. I toyed with the idea of a spoof campaign …

Not mocking armchair philosophy now, are they?

After suggestions that Greece would push the Marbles onto the EU’s post-Brexit agenda, it’s unclear whether this is still being run up the flagpole:

Atlas Obscura has an odd article about 1850s photography of Egyptian archaeological sites, wherein capturing the ‘strange emptiness’ of scenes minus the contemporary population living nearby is characterised as some sort of ‘colonial agenda’ that ‘sidelined or erased indigenous residents of other countries’. Which is the kind of thing that would be easier to swallow if …

It’s not often that news of the Future Generations Commissioner for Wales reaches my redoubt in England, but today I learn that the Commissioner is proposing scrappage of GCSEs. Which doesn’t seem quite what I thought was anticipated when the role was set up.