The Joy of Six 1481

"Other guests at the party included Mandelson’s good friend Nathaniel (Nat) Rothschild, a financier and heir to the Rothschild fortune (Mandelson often stayed at his villa in Corfu), and Rothschild’s old schoolmate, the then shadow chancellor George Osborne." Tamsin Shaw looks back to the Yachtgate scandal of 2008 and argues that we misread it at the time.

"Across the country, thousands of children are quietly lingering in ORR [Office of Refugee Resettlement] facilities, unable to reunite with parents or relatives because of new Trump administration policies limiting who can sponsor them. According to a class action lawsuit filed by immigration advocacy groups last week, children are 'being separated from their loving families, while the government denies their release, unnecessarily prolonging their detention'." Julia Lurie on the cruelty of the Trump regime.

Tanya Park believes Liberals should care about the collapse of serious Conservative journalism: "Not because the Spectator and the Daily Telegraph were ever friends to progressive politics (they weren't), but because a functioning liberal democracy depends on a press that engages honestly with reality across the political spectrum."

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols predicts that general-purpose AI will poison itself: "We're going to invest more and more in AI, right up to the point that model collapse hits hard and AI answers are so bad even a brain-dead CEO can't ignore it."

"Alcohol has its many downsides as I can attest having a childhood punctuated by my father’s alcoholism, but it lowers people’s inhibitions making them willing to talk. It’s why you’re more likely to spark up a conversation over an interesting cask beer instead of waxing lyrical to the person next to you about the smooth flavour of an Arabica coffee bean." When it comes to social cohesion, beer beats coffee, says David Jesudason.

Ian Jones reminds us that Kenneth Williams was never off the television: "Yet over the next two decades he failed repeatedly to be – in one of his catchphrases from the BBC radio show Round The Horne – 'properly serviced' by the small screen. Despite all that graft on stage, he never landed a leading role in a TV drama series. For all the comic virtuosity that poured out of him in the Carry On films and his radio series with Tony Hancock and Kenneth Horne, he not once played lead in a TV sitcom."