Pennsylvania's Kids for Cash Scandal shows the danger of the profit motive in the juvenile justice system

If you want to see the danger of introducing the profit motive into the detention of young offenders, watch this video on Pennsylvania's Kids for Cash Scandal.

In the first decade of this century, two judges in Luzerne County, Michael Conahan and Mark Ciavarella, accepted millions of dollars in bribes to lock up children and teenagers for trivial offences from the owners of for-profit detention centres. At least 2,300 young people were wrongly imprisoned.

And get a load of cuddly Uncle Joe Biden at the start of the video.

The Joy of Six 1574

Liz David-Barrett argues that, by making rule-breaking a selling point, Reform UK is signalling it's open for influence trading: "It is no coincidence that some of Reform’s biggest donations have come from individuals in cryptocurrency, keen to ward off the threat of regulation."

"Our findings lay bare the reality of an industry that operates without regulation. Some companies are run by people with no previous experience in care work: directors are security bosses, or come from the music business or the military. One company in our dataset is owned by an overseas private equity firm." Tom Wall reveals the vast scale of England’s £255m illegal care industry.

"Eight in ten of the UK public think mobile phone thefts have increased since 2010 and around six in ten believe both vehicle-related thefts and burglary have increased. In fact, all are down by 50 per cent or more over that time period." Bobby Duffy says that, though crime is falling, the public doesn't feel safer.

Nik Popli takes us inside the attempt to remake the Democratic Party in the US.

"Everyone who knows Muir’s work knows that he grew up as the son of a peasant farmer in the Orkneys, in one of the last communities in Europe practically untouched by Renaissance and Enlightenment culture—and that his poetry and prose are greatly affected, one might even say determined, by the struggle Muir underwent when circumstances landed him in the middle of several modern industrial and political nightmares." Andrew Frisardi mourns the eclipse of Edwin Muir's poetry.

Mari Wilson on how she made Just What I Always Wanted.

The Joy of Six 1571

"This is Britain at the end of the hottest summer on record. So, it beggars belief that the Conservatives have chosen this time – or would choose any – to try to scrap the world’s first legally binding framework to cut carbon emissions. Legislation born in Britain and adopted by over 60 countries around the world including Germany, France, Mexico and countless others." Pippa Heylings condemns the Tories' scorched earth policy.

Anna Merlan tells us what ICE's scrobbling of Milo Yiannopoulos tells us about America's far right: "But while Yiannopoulos’ deportation contains an extremely rich vein of schadenfreude – he previously called for deporting 'millions and millions of people' and joked about masturbating while witnessing ICE raids – it’s also indicative of how power, punishment, and influence currently work in the MAGA movement, and broader crackup within that feud-heavy world, where fragile alliances are constantly being made, broken and remade anew."

Simon Ophir on assisted dying, the House of Lords and democracy: "I have delivered palliative and end-of-life care to many patients, including this man. It cannot help everyone and I know that even with excellent palliative care many patients are terrified of death. It is this experience, more than anything else, that makes me so determined to see the assisted dying bill reach the statute book."

"Lloyd George was much driven by his experiences as a child and as a youth, growing up amongst the mostly poor, non-conformist natives of North Wales, groaning under a dominant, minority, privileged class of wealthy, mostly Anglican English landlords and churchmen. He witnessed and early on complained bitterly against unjust evictions of tenants who ‘voted the wrong way’, of tenants who had to pay tithes to a church they did not believe in. Even at school he protested at injustice." Paul Spackman, author of a forthcoming biography of David Lloyd George, is interviewed by Nicholas Alderton.

Ishaan Selby discusses T.H. White's The Goshawk: "While White is generally seen as a misanthropic figure, I read his difficult kinship with the goshawk as an example of a kin relationship that formed outside of hereditary bonds and through a queering of domesticity; one that shows a difficult love and connection outside the bounds of the human."

"What burns on that clifftop isn’t Christianity losing to paganism. It’s a re-enchantment scheme running out of road, with nothing left to offer but a fire. Choose your priests wisely." Moreau Vazh reconsiders The Wicker Man.

The Joy of Six 1561

"My husband, son, and I have been locked up for months – despite being permanent residents with no criminal record. It is an unendurable, unending nightmare." Maryam Tahmasebi writes from the hell of ICE detention.

Femi Owolade argues that Black academics suffer when life stories eclipse scholarship: "Academics are ... expected to have stories that capture attention. University websites, media profiles and press releases often lead with biographies before discussing research. Stories of hardship, resilience and unlikely success have become part of  higher education branding. The academic is no longer just a scholar but an integral part of the university’s public image."

"The UK’s Online Safety Act was sold as a 'world-leading' child-protection law, one that would establish the UK tech sector as a global safety-tech powerhouse. Instead, it has normalised the idea that governments can bolt identity checks and surveillance layers onto the internet. Now that blueprint is crossing the Atlantic, where authoritarian-minded politicians see it as ready-made kit for censorship and control." Heather Burns finds that a British law has inspired the Trump regime's attempts to censor its critics.

No, Harry Potter fans didn't force the rerouting of an undersea able to preserve Dobby's' grave. Dan Davies explains.

Meaghan Roddy says Frasier brought Nineties minimalism to the masses: "I’d hazard a guess that Frasier was the first time a giant swath of America came to experience interior design meant to represent wealth that wasn’t slathered in gold and marble. It was quiet and sophisticated."

Clayton Dillard celebrates John Schlesinger’s film Billy Liar (1963): "Though the film’s ending is outwardly celebratory as Billy strolls back toward his family’s flat, the fact that he’s opted for the familiar comforts of home feels like a questionable – even nightmarish – endpoint for this young person who so craves his autonomy."

We have no idea what history will say about Keir Starmer and it may not be right anyway

I see a lot of people saying that history will be kind to Keir Starmer - much kinder than commentators have been in recent weeks.

Three points...

First, history is not a single agreed narrative but a collection of debates. History will say lots of things about Keir Starmer, some of them quite contradictory.

Second, we have no idea what history will say about Keir Starmer, because his career will be seen in a wider context, much of which hasn't happened yet.

Andy Burnham may be lead Labour to defeat at the next general election, or he may win that election, bite the bullet and start the process of rejoining the European Union. How Keir Starmer is viewed by future will depend greatly on how Burnham and Burnham's successors fare in office.

Third, history may be wrong about Keir Starmer. History may be wrong about a lot of things.

There is an implicit assumption here that the judgements of future historians are bound to be correct, both factually and ethically. This blog's hero Karl Popper used to call this view "moral futurism", whether it was inspired by the Marxist view that socialism was historically inevitable or Liberal confidence in the inevitably of "Progress".

But these future historians will operate in a social and academic climate they have not themselves made. Imagine a far-right government coming to power in Britain – sadly it's much easier to imagine than it used to be.

We have seen the accommodations that American academia has made to please Donald Trump, and I see no reason to believe that its British counterpart would behave any differently Now imagine the sort of history that would be produced here after five or ten years of that.

And even without the intervention of a far-right government, there is no reason for us to assume that the judgements of future historians will be informed by years of moral progress.

So it's no use appealing to future historians. If there are any, we don't know what they will say and we might not like it if we did.

The Joy of Six 1532

About 1 million 16- to 24-year-olds are not in employment, education or training – and the obstacles they face are bigger than ever. Sammy Gecsoyler talks to some who have been unemployed for a year or more about how they are coping.

Kitty Melrose interviews Nova Reid about the creeping spread of book censorship in the UK. Reid says: "Non-fiction books about racism written to help readers learn about the topic and explore approaches to reducing racial injustice are labelled 'racist' as the reason for their removal. By closing discussion of racial injustice, one perpetuates the systemic harms of racism. If injustice for one group is dismissed and ignored, it gives license for other social iniquities to be continued too."

"Years of criminal justice reform have left the state, several counties and towns, as well as the profit-driven private prison industry hungry to fill empty bed spaces or to explore new sources of revenue. Incarcerating and exploiting immigrants for ICE has proven to be an opportunistic and lucrative alternative." Greg Constantine takes us to the Oklahoma communities gutted by ICE.

Larue Leglise and James Scott Vandeventer look at the barriers facing community energy projects in the Outer Hebrides, including ageing turbines and an application process that favours large-scale projects.

Mathew Lyons reviews Nonesuch by Francis Spufford: "Childhood stories and myths suffuse the book: Nonesuch is steeped in Edwardiana, and not always charmingly so. Spufford's world takes the overlap between Nazism and the occult seriously, and the antecedents of both lay in the esotericism of the late-19th and early-20th century. The Edwardian imagination wasn’t all treasure-packed attics, cosy burrows and curious rabbit holes."

"Of all the medieval women I have researched and written about, Aethelflaed is by far my favorite." Susan Abernethy is an Aethelflaed, Lady of Mercia, stan.

The Joy of Six 1524

"You will know them. They are in every policy working group, every conference fringe, every strategy call. They are the people who hear a proposal for genuine economic reform and say 'that’s outside the Overton window' as if they have ended the argument rather than ducked it. They treat the boundaries of current political acceptability as load-bearing walls, when in fact they are furniture, and we are allowed to move them." Liberal Democrat Tom Reeve introduces us to the Overtons.

"Since 2021, Ellison’s personal foundation – the Larry Ellison Foundation – has donated or pledged at least £257m to the Tony Blair Institute, making it a think tank like no other in the UK. Ellison donations have helped it grow to more than 900 staff, working in at least 45 countries." Peter Geoghegan and Lucas Amin take us inside the Tony Blair Institute and introduce us to its main funder.

Steve Webb says the triple lock cannot last forever, but scrapping it now would trigger a retirement disaster.

"What happened to the master con man? For one thing, as the former reality show star should know, people get bored. The same old Trump shtick gets tiresome; the public's patience with his excuses wears thin. They have heard all the lies, all the Biden blame-shifting, all the 'two weeks away' deadline-shifting. It’s stale." Jennifer Rubin says Donald Trump is losing his grip on US voters.

Chloe Duteil, Daniel Cumming and Jon Winder look back to how London, Paris and New York coped with past heatwaves: "When seeking outdoor relief, most 19th-century New Yorkers headed to the beach – the city is an island, after all. But by the 20th century, they were also planing block parties with plenty of ice from corner store bodegas. On occasion, they also cracked open fire hydrants – a relief strategy that has become a classic trope of New York City summers."

Morgan Jeffery talks to people from Film is Fabulous!, the organisation that recently found, preserved and screened two lost Doctor Who episodes.

When the United States worried about migrants in small boats

Here's a short passage from Roger Greaves's book Reading Madeleine that describes one of the British writer Robert Henrey's adventures in Canada as a young journalist in the early 1920s:

He was sent to Niagara to investigate a rumour that an organisation had been formed for passing aliens into the United States. The passengers were collected in Toronto or Hamilton, taken by car to the Canadian bank of the Niagara river a couple of miles below the falls and a crossing was attempted by night. 

The immigrants were packed in a small boat and the other side would be signalled with a flash lamp. However, the tangle of branches and undergrowth proved a good hiding place for United States immigration officers, who were always on the watch.

Penile implant specialist with history of far-right comments led hantavirus presser

CNN wins our Headline of the Day Award. The judges chose this one because of the clear picture it paints of the Trump administration:

Before he joined the Trump administration last year, Christine was an Alabama-based urologist who specialized in penile implants. 

He has little public health experience and a history of far-right commentary and promoting conspiracy theories. 

He’s said the Covid pandemic led to a wider government plot to control people, compared the Biden administration to Nazi Germany and suggested the Covid vaccine had little effect in stopping the pandemic.

The Joy of Six 1516

"The scale of the beating handed to Labour in these local elections is difficult to convey just in words. You need to see numbers and maps, showing seas of red replaced by turquoise and green and yellow; you perhaps need to see the tears and feel the desolation longtime servants of the party are feeling this evening. That this defeat has been suffered in the heartland of the modern Labour Party – the stronghold atop which names like Andy Burnham, Angela Rayner, Lisa Nandy and Lucy Powell have built their reputations – is all the more harrowing." Lucy McLaughlin and Joshi Herrmann witness the fall of Labour Manchester.

Jonathan M. Winer warns us that Donald Trump is planning to use emergency powers to take control of this year's midterm elections.

Emily Enns on the campaign to deny the abuse of native Canadian children in residential schools. "Even now... there’s not a Facebook post that goes out about Indigenous events in Kamloops where there’s not at least one person in a comment section on a shared post saying something about how our experiences as Indigenous people are fabricated."

"The latest ChatGPT model, released last week, included the instructions: 'Never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user’s query.'" Alex Nguyen explains why.

"History, in Mad Men, shapes the air around the characters, occasionally intrudes to seize control of the story, and nevertheless slowly changes each person. History is also experienced as something beyond the characters’ control and understanding. Like real human beings, they respond with a mix of bewilderment, accommodation, grumpiness, opportunism, and, occasionally, a full embrace of change." Joseph Stieb looks at the way Mad Men shows history reshaping people’s lives, perspectives and interactions, often without them fully realising that things have changed.

James Warren considers the unexpected evolution of the progressive band Stackridge into the poptastic The Korgis.

The Joy of Six 1513

"The taboo around the word 'membership' has been maintained not by principle but timidity. Farage built his project on lies. The least we can do is have the courage to tell the truth about what those lies have cost us in our classrooms, laboratories, training colleges, concert halls, and our standing in a world that badly needs Britain to be more than a bystander." Caroline Lucas goes where Certain Other Politicians fear to tread.

Barry Gardiner points to an important lesson of the Mandelson affair: "Most leaders surround themselves with people who tell them what they think they want to hear. Good leaders surround themselves with people who are not afraid to tell them the truth."

"Just as Hitler’s failures led him to resent the German people ever more strongly and destructively, we can expect Trump’s growing frustration to result in ever more nihilistic and destructive actions as his term moves toward its end." David R. Lurie warns about what may come next from Trump: 

Samantha Booth and Ruth Lucas report on worries that the effects of poverty and deprivation are being treating as Special Educational Needs, relocating what is a social problem in the psyches of individual children.

"The first exhibition space includes several of Eardley's social-realist figure depictions of 1950s inner-city Glaswegian children. The works have a joyful, raw, playful spirit to them, in spite of the squalid slum environment the children were living in. No artist has painted Glasgow's 'weans'  in the way that Eardley has." Blane Savage on the Joan Eardley exhibition at National Galleries Scotland: Modern Two.

John Connors pays tribute to Richard Carpenter's long career in children's television from Catweazle to I Was a Rat.

How the Guardian flattered Morgan McSweeney and why it did so

Those hoping to be impressed when Morgan McSweeney made a rare public appearance, courtesy of the Commons' foreign affairs select committee, will have been disappointed. A No. 10 led by him and Keir Starmer really was a case of the bland leading the bland.

But how did the Guardian's Whitehall editor greet Morgan McSweeney when he was appointed? Those of you with strong stomachs, read on:

As the brains behind Keir Starmer’s leadership campaign, McSweeney is credited with having brought the prime minister to power. He entered No 10 as head of political strategy, in charge of charting the party’s path to another victory in five years' time.

When it emerged there were rival power bases around McSweeney and Gray in No 10, few had any doubt he would survive any fallout. He has now emerged as chief of staff, with unrivalled influence, and is likely to bring a much sharper political focus to the job.

McSweeney is adored by many staffers, with some party figures retaining more affection for him than they do for Starmer. The highest form of praise in Labour HQ has been said to be: "Morgan loves it." However, he is something of a bogeyman on the left after leading the thinktank Labour Together in a campaign to purge the party of Jeremy Corbyn’s influence.

After working in Labour’s attack unit in the New Labour years, McSweeney cut his teeth as chief of staff to the then Lambeth council leader Steve Reed, who is now a cabinet minister, and helped defeat the British National party in Barking and Dagenham. Born in Ireland, he divides his time between Scotland and Westminster. His wife, Imogen Walker, is Labour’s MP for Hamilton and Clyde Valley.

Why this unctuous tone? As I explained at the time, it was beat-sweetening and source-greasing.

And I got these terms from an article Timothy Noah published when Obama named his team after first winning the Presidency:

This is the season of the beat-sweetener. A beat-sweetener (some prefer the term source-greaser) is a gratuitously flattering profile that a reporter writes about a government official in the hope that it will encourage (or, at the very least, not impede) that reporter's access to the official in question. Newspapers and magazines have been full of them, and even the uninitiated may feel they've been reading a lot of dull profiles lately without knowing exactly why. 

My advice is to adopt a defensive-reader posture and treat all profiles of Obama’s new team as guilty until proven innocent. If you encounter emollient rhetoric in the first five paragraphs, skip the rest and move on. A beat-sweetener is a meal prepared for someone other than yourself, and there’s no reason you should waste precious time ingesting it.

This is why even the teams behind candidates for the leadership of opposition parties get enthusiastic write ups. They may just turn out to be the people the journalist wants to take his calls for years to come.

The Joy of Six 1510

Charlie Young, Carole Cadwalladr and Ian Tucker have discovered "a 'revolving door' that has led to dozens of highly experienced UK government officials, former ministers, intelligence service chiefs and members of the House of Lords taking up key roles in the controversial Silicon Valley surveillance tech company co-founded by Peter Thiel, the libertarian friend and ally of Donald Trump."

"There is no need for the UK to replace its warheads. A Holbrook’s maximum yield is ninety kilotons of TNT-equivalent, about six times the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. But the US Navy wants a new warhead in the mid-2030s and the UK has to follow suit even though there are no good reasons to do so. No one in Britain played any part in choosing the parameters of the W93." Norman Dombey dissects Britain's nuclear subservience to the US.

Because of the way they are trained, large language models capture only a slice of human language. But it's feared that this slice will come to dominate how humans communicate, report Ada Palmer and Bruce Schneier.

Pam Jarvis offers a personal memoir of the Blair-era widening participation policy for higher education, which promised opportunity but left a complex legacy.

"It is impossible not to talk about The Reckoning in the same breath as Get Carter. Both films are about men who have left their working class roots to become successful in their various professions in London, and who are then forced to come home due to a family tragedy. Liverpool, like Newcastle in Get Carter, is depicted as a tough, rainswept working class town. And much like Jack Carter, Marler is intensely uncomfortable in its bleak surrounds, the tiny council house that his family still live in, with its wood panelling and flocked wallpaper, the raucous smokey pubs they drink in, with their bad torch singers and cheap bingo games." Andrew Nette watches Nicol Williamson heading north before Michael Caine.

Chris Baker on an 18th-century plan to build Britain a new capital – in Rutland.

The Joy of Six 1503

Marcus Hughes on the many problems the Welsh government must overcome in achieving its laudable aim of removing private profit from the care system. "The anxiety inducing question from those working in the sector is what happens if local authority and not-for-profit provision can’t replace that offered by the private sector in time? Finding places for some young people is already a challenge even with the current options available." 

"Could the bellicose, belligerent and braying Hegseth – with his Crusader tattoos, his disdain for diplomacy, and his evident taste for violent domination – have convinced Trump to start a war to complete the unfinished business of the Crusades?" Julia Carrie Wong reveals the militant Christian theology animating the US attack on Iran

Hannah Sharland reports on fears that the government's transport strategy will not see the improvements for disabled travellers that were promised.

"Standing at 6ft 2in, with an imposing physique and a razor-scarred face, she was a Black, gay multi-instrumentalist who refused to let a racist society or a rapacious industry confine her. Thornton should be ranked alongside the likes of Billie Holiday and Nina Simone, but instead she is little more than a footnote in the histories of Elvis Presley and Janis Joplin as the original voice behind songs they would make famous." Garth Cartwright celebrates Big Mama Thornton.

"For really I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he." A London Inheritance takes us to St Mary's, Putney, where the Putney Debates took place in 1647. 

Simon Hughes (not that one) remembers Channel 4's years of covering test cricket – they gave us Geoffrey Boycott without the tiresome public-school teasing of him by Jonathan Agnew: "Our principle aim was to make cricket coverage more interesting and informative: to tell ‘why’ as well as ‘what’. Part of our motivation came from people who said they often watched cricket on the TV but turned the sound off and listened to the radio commentary. We wanted our content to be so intriguing viewers would turn the sound up."

Ed Davey on Hillary Clinton, restive Lib Dem MPs and chess

Ed Davey has been talking to Hillary Clinton:

"We talked about how we need to fight Reform in the way they need to fight Donald Trump, and she gave me some choice advice, which I'm not going to repeat because that would be unfair on her."

He's also been talking to PoliticsHome – that's a quote from an interview they've posted this evening.

"Pressed" (as if he needed pressing) to say more his meeting with Hillary Clinton, he added:

"She said you have to be very strong and stand up to bullies and don't cave in and cosy up to them. She didn't say she was criticising Keir Starmer, but I think the approach we [the Lib Dems] have taken, and the approach that someone like the Liberal Prime Minister of Canada, Mark Carney, has taken, is the sort of approach she will endorse."

He described Clinton as "very friendly and very warm!: "You could tell that she realised that we had shared values."

The interviewer, Zoe Crowther, then turned to restlessness among Liberal Democrat MPs. This is part of Ed's answer:

"I'm restless like they are… I share their restlessness," Davey told PoliticsHome, while stressing that his MPs and the party “work really well together”.

However, in a bid to face down his critics, the Lib Dem leader pointed to his electoral record.

"The polls are the polls, but the elections are the elections," he told PoliticsHome.

"Winning elections is what we've done under my leadership. If we make net gains in May, it will be the eighth year in a row we've made net gains, the sixth under my leadership. It's never happened before. That's a continual increase, year on year.

"This year we could well beat Labour and the Tories for the number of councillors we elect for the second year in a row, and it’s never happened previously."

He insisted that the Lib Dems are "still the most united parliamentary party" despite recent negative briefings.

The MPs know how well the party as done in elections under Ed Davey – I mean, they would, wouldn't they? – but that success is not a complete answer to their restlessness. I suspect that restlessness is rooted in disappointment that achieving the best result by a Liberal party in over a century in 2024 has done so little to raise our profile.

You can complain about media bias, but we have to ask whether our style of campaigning is one of the causes. We adopted the "three bullet points and a reminder that Labour can't win here" approach that won us spectacular by-election victories in the last parliament at the general election too, and are still using it two years on.

Ask the public what the Lib Dem approach to the economy is, and they would be justified in asking how they are supposed to know, even if they've noticed the stand-alone proposals we have made.

And this concentration on target seats in the South of England has coincided with a further fall in our core vote. Yes, we're now in a novel political landscape, but in council by-elections where we have not campaigned, there hardly seems to be a Lib Dem vote at all.

To end on a happier note, Ed also talks about chess:

Davey – similarly to Chancellor Rachel Reeves – played chess competitively until he was about 12 years old, though he said he would "not put myself up as a great chess player" anymore. 

"Playing the long game, that's the key thing in chess," he said. 

Ed may be pleased to learn that my blog post about his chess game with Mike Ross in Hull was responded to on Bluesky by the eight-time Russian chess champion Peter Svidler.

I also liked Svidler's comment on Rachel Reeves.

timid, indecisive, unwilling to commit to even temporary sacrifices when the situation calls for a reassessment, and drastic measures might be needed. the chess game is meh too.

[image or embed]

— Peter Svidler (@polborta.bsky.social) 11 April 2026 at 13:07

The Joy of Six 1502

"As need has grown and reform and resources have stalled, 1.9 million people in England alone provided a 'full-time' (defined as 35 hours or more) week of care in 2023-24 – that’s 70 per cent more than 20 years ago. Others have to fit caring responsibilities around their jobs: dropping off the kids at school, going to the office and then helping their elderly parents bathe and eat." Frances Ryan asks who will care for the carers.

Ari Berman names the far-right conspiracists who are urging Trump to take control of the mid-term elections. 

Tao Wang says a study of  the prohibition of absinthe in France in 1915 can teach us about modern day blaming and shaming. "Scapegoating operates as a powerful social mechanism. It often turns uncertainty, fear or political conflict into social blaming directed at certain persons or groups, based on thin, selective or simply false stories being told or repeated as if they were true."

Caitlin Chatterton argues that though female fans can make a musician's career, they are not taken seriously: "Perennial sexism in the music industry has often seen female fans stereotyped as hysterical. Rooted in Ancient Greek, 'hysteria' has long been used to portray women as somehow innately unstable, and therefore incapable of critical thought. It’s what kept us out of politics for so long, and it’s why our opinions are still being discredited."

"Though supported by the Parish Council and pressing need, this modest plan for six council houses aroused fierce opposition. William Maclean Homan, the town’s historian, argued it would cause Winchelsea to become a 'third-rate modern village'. He favoured, instead, a proposal to build private rented housing on low-lying land away from the town at the bottom of the hill on a site rejected by the Council because of its poor drainage." Municipal Dreams on the battle to build council housing in Winchelsea.

Adam Roberts wonders why no one reads Walter Scott any more: "Back then, everybody read him. He was the first global superstar of the novel. It's the Rule 34 of 19th-century literary studies: Everybody read Scott, no exceptions. ... Dickens's great dream, when he began writing fiction, was to do what Scott did."

The Joy of Six 1501

Samira Shackle meets victims of successive governments that have sought to reduce immigration while insisting universities recruit more overseas students: "Each year, about 400,000 international students are granted study visas to the UK. A significant proportion do so with the help of education agents: middlemen paid by universities to find foreign students. In 2023, UK universities spent a total of £500m on education agents – but there is very little oversight of how these agents operate."

"In places like Kootenai County, where white Christian Republicans hold a supermajority, local politics is mutating into something undeniably extreme. North Idaho offers a particularly stark example. A decade after Trump took over the GOP, the Coeur d’Alene region finds itself beset by a ­vexing mix of far-right activists and white nationalists who are trying to drive moderate voices out of political life." Michael Edison Hayden talks to the locals who are fighting back.

"Does the democratisation of information and access provided by social media help or hinder women in political careers? Is it an essential tool for visibility and mobilisation or another obstacle that disproportionately discourages women, especially those from marginalised backgrounds?" Georgia Richardson reports on a discussion of these questions.

Michael C. Munger recruits an unlikely pair of thinkers to question naïve optimism about government intervention in the economy: Adam Smith and Michel Foucault.

"The newly exposed floodplain was cracked and parched, the slate river chugging along in its rediscovered course. I’d hoped to see a fish or two; instead, the river practically vibrated with them. Salmon skittered from pool to pool, shark-like dorsal fins waving above the surface, dozens of Chinook chasing and nipping and circling each other in ancient dance." Ben Goldfarb celebrates the rebirth of an American river.

Ryan Lambie on the importance of Professor Quatermass: "ITV didn’t launch until September 1955. As a result, The Quatermass Experiment was viewed by just about every British person who owned a television; it was reckoned that some 3.4 million people tuned in to watch the first episode, and that the figure steadily climbed to a staggering five million by the sixth and final episode, which aired that August."

The Joy of Six 1499

Alexandra Hall Hall warns that Donald Trump’s Iran war is bringing the post-war international order to breaking point. "The UN has been completely sidelined in this conflict. The US, who helped design the institution after World War 2, no longer pays either its dues, or even lip service to its founding charter, including the requirement to resolve international disputes by peaceful means."

"The cumulative effect is an ecosystem that looks, from the outside, exactly like what it is: a set of institutions that have come to prioritise their own stability over their original purpose. Outsiders do not see idealism when they look at us. They see a class protecting its position. And that fuels the populist rage, because at some level, they are right." Gregory Maniatis has no words of comfort for the US left.

The new universities of the 1960s were founded on intimacy, radicalism and community. Looking to what is happening at Essex, Adam Wright asks whether an obsession with growth has made those promises impossible to keep.

Michael Solomon Williams makes the case for expanding our railway network: "The story of British rail is often told through major infrastructure projects or high-speed lines. But just as important are the quieter stories of reconnection: the return of a station, the reopening of a route, or the transformation of a corridor into modern public transport. These changes show that the legacy of the Beeching cuts is not permanent. With the right decisions, communities can be reconnected and the network can grow again."

"Crawley has been given a great many opportunities to prove himself – enough, you could argue, that he has already done precisely that. For years and years, he has generally done just enough to maintain the idea of Zak Crawley, without ever really managing to move things beyond that." King Cricket concludes that if England’s leaders aren’t being ejected then some of the players will be.

Anne Bilson ranks the surprising number of killer-rabbit movies.

The Joy of Six 1498

Peter Juul argues that Donald Trump sees America not as the leader of a global posse bringing international gangsters to heel, but as a mob boss threatening America’s allies and neighbours while carving up the world with other gangster powers.

"The government’s plans will patch up the water system, particularly with the boost in revenue from bill payers. But the private sector has found unanticipated ways to maximise profits in the past and may well do so again. Rather than continually tweaking the failed private model, the only real route to operating water in the public interest is for it to be in public ownership." Kate Bayliss and Frances Cleaver say is treating the symptoms of the water industry but not their ultimate cause.

Britain’s swift population fell by two-thirds between 1995 and 2023. Emma Beddington lists 10 ways we can provide these beautiful birds with the help they need.

Josh Taylor asks how Australia can sell its social media ban for young people to the world when the evidence suggests it is not working: "When the age assurance technology trial released its final report before Australia’s under-16s social media ban came into effect last year, its first finding was: age assurance can be done privately, efficiently and effectively. Four months since the ban came into effect, we can say that was – to paraphrase Yes Minister – a courageous statement."

Richard Norton-Taylor reviews Antonia Senior's Stalin’s Apostles: The Cambridge Five and the Making of the Soviet Empire: "Stalin’s task in building what Senior calls his 'Red Empire' was made so much easier, and so much more brutal, by the intelligence the Cambridge spies passed to Moscow. This included information about partisans and individuals hostile to the Soviet Union, and about how much support they would get from the Western allies."

"Not long after, in 1845, inventor Charles Wheatstone attended a demonstration in London. Chess legend Howard Staunton played against his rival George Walker over the South Western Railway line between Portsmouth and London. Müller-Pohl describes how witnesses found the match “rather tedious,” but it received a lot of press." (Roughly) Daily on Victorian e-sports.

The Joy of Six 1495

Christopher M. Cruz says US Democrats have failed to offer a vision of a liberal education: "This is not just bad for Democrats, but bad for the world as we have seen the country slip into chaos. If liberals want to see things change in 2028, they (and everyone else) should concern themselves more forcefully with the role of the liberal arts in educational institutions and invest to become the primary champion of books in the public square."

"This is not what I wanted to write. I wanted to write about how I’m about to go on book tour for my new book in a few days. Instead I am writing about the fact that I was just informed that my first book Let’s Pretend This Never Happened was banned from the high school library of a nearby town I love and visit often." Jenny Lawson on how we should respond to censorship.

Adam Stanaland and Andrea Vial find that gender conformity starts young and that boys and girls fall in line in different ways.

The Argumentative Old Git takes on Dickens' detractors: "It is entirely characteristic of him that, after the comedy of Pickwick Papers, he wanted to try his hand at something quite different. Oliver Twist is, admittedly, highly melodramatic, and teeters at times on the edge of sentimentality. But nonetheless, it projects a very real sense of menace. And I cannot really think of any other novel so crammed full of iconic scenes and images."

"Because Lee plays him like this, resisting every temptation to wink at the audience, or signal his villainy, refusing to give Howie or the audience any purchase on what he really is, Lord Summerisle becomes one of the most quietly frightening villains in British cinema history." Adam Page argues that The Wicker Man provided Christopher Lee with his greatest film role.

"First published in 1999, when Elizabeth Jane Howard was nearing the twilight of her career, Falling was inspired by real-life events. When Howard was in her seventies, she fell for the charms of a con man – a seemingly attentive man who took advantage of the fact that she was unattached and vulnerable yet receptive to admiration." JacquiWine praises Howard's late masterpiece.