The Joy of Six 1486

The Secret Barrister argues that Keir Starmer and David Lammy are taking an extraordinarily dangerous gamble with our individual liberty: "Restricting trial by jury has been paraded by the government as the only way to tackle the record backlogs and delays in the Crown Courts – caused by years of chronic underfunding and political mismanagement – yet the government has produced not a shred of credible evidence to support this claim, nor is it interested in discovering any, forcing the legislation through Parliament at breakneck speed in the apparent hope of avoiding inconvenient scrutiny."

"The electorate is fragmented, multi-issue, and stubbornly resistant to simple stories. The Greens won in Gorton and Denton because they grasped that. Everyone busy constructing sectarian phantoms did not. Democracy does not need protecting from Muslim voters. It needs protecting from the people who would rather not count them." John Oxley criticises the right's response to the Gorton and Denton by-election,

Mihai Andrei explodes the myth that wind farms massacre birds.

"When I talk to students and ask them to tell me the truth, not necessarily what they would tell their teacher, but quietly tell me whether they go on to AI when they’ve got a piece of work to do, they say 'well actually yeah please don’t tell my teacher but yes I do'." Samantha Booth reports that pupils have been confessing their sins to Ian Bauckham, the head of Ofqual.

"His paintings unnerve us as they unnerved their Baroque viewers. Caravaggio didn’t draw but painted directly onto the canvas. He invented a dramatic, overpowering chiaroscuro, a spotlit style he used to freeze the worst moments of his subjects' lives in paint. There are so many decapitations, a frankly weird number of decapitations." Erin Maglaque on the shocking art of Caravaggio.

 Grant McPhee chooses his top 15 wyrd folk albums.