The Joy of Six 1487

"On this occasion Starmer has taken both the correct and popular position and stuck to it despite relentless attacks from the right. The result is that it is now his opponents, rather than him, who is having to embark on a humiliating U-turn." Adam Bienkov argues that the government should learn from Farage and Badenoch's reversal on Iran.

The Lancet dissects Robert F. Kennedy Jr's year of failure.

Michael Webb and Rebecca Flook say the choices universities and colleges make about AI are political: "The systems now being woven into education are shaped by a remarkably small group of people. Not 'the internet' as the source of training material. Not 'society' influencing the way we use these tools. It’s shaped by a small leadership class in a handful of companies, operating within specific political and economic pressures."

"I lived in a suburb on the very edge of London, far away from Soho’s Piano Bar or the Waterloo WHSmith glimpsed in the video to ‘West End Girls’. I was a lonely boy at the back of the garden. There weren’t out gay people or role models in my white working class neighbourhood, just an expectation that you would be the same as everyone else, and fit in – or else." John Grindrod reveals how Pet Shop Boys sold city glamour to queer suburban kids.

Parker Henry on Iris Murdoch as a philosopher. It seems to me she is being discovered in this role as her reputation as a novelist fades.

"Two Italian former amateur radio operators, Achille and Giovanni Judica-Cordiglia, claimed to have recorded audio from an orbiting capsule in the days before Gagarin made his flight, and it was actually the fourth slice of startling audio released by the pair." Was Yuri Gagarin really the first Soviet cosmonaut? David Crookes considers the theory that the USSR launched earlier, unsuccessful manned missions.