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Now that it’s a reality, can an esteemed historian produce convincing arguments for the UK’s departure from the EU?

They may have triumphed in politics, but in academia, Brexiters are an embattled minority. Perhaps the most combative of their tribunes is the emeritus professor of history at Cambridge, Robert Tombs. Beyond the innate value of dissent, Tombs’s own position is also intrinsically interesting. As a brilliant historian of 19th-century France, he can hardly be written off as a Little Englander. As a French citizen by marriage, he presumably continues to enjoy the benefits of EU citizenship as well, so he has less skin in the game than most.

A short, punchy, eloquent statement from such a distinguished historian on the case for the kind of very hard Brexit that has now become a reality raises hopes for some genuine illumination. But The Sovereign Isle will, for varying reasons, disappoint both many of Tombs’s fellow Brexiters and anyone looking for a cogent statement of what this great disruption means for the economic and political future of the UK.

A version of this post was originally published on Redecentralized and VSquare.

After the violent events at the US Capitol social media monopolists are finally waking up to the reality that centralisation is dangerous; with power over daily communication of hundreds of millions of users comes responsibility perhaps too big even for Big Tech.

When I’m out and about and find I want to remember something I used to write it on a scrap of paper. I would later discover these obtuse numbers, words or mind-maps scrawled on torn scraps of paper or cardboard. Or, worse, soft pellets of inky paper in my …

His skills as a fixer are finely honed – but they cannot restore a pre-Trump normality. As president, Biden’s private self, shadowed by loss, must come into its own

Every year after 1975, Joe Biden, his second wife Jill, his sons Beau and Hunter and their growing families, would gather for Thanksgiving on Nantucket island off Cape Cod. Part of the annual ritual was that the Bidens would take a photograph of themselves in front of a quaint old house in the traditional New England style that stood above the dunes on their favourite beach.

In November 2014, when Biden was serving as Barack Obama’s vice-president, he found, where the house should have been, an empty space marked out by yellow police tape. The building, he wrote in his memoir Promise Me, Dad had “finally run out of safe ground and run out of time; it had been swept out into the Atlantic”.

Obviously I’m getting older and shamefully lazier. I have been cycling less and less, I barely run anymore. Since starting nursing in 2015 I have put on 12kg. I am angry and frustrated at myself because I know better. I know muscles start to waste when we get older …

In this essay I discuss the nature of teaching and the circumstances of teachers' work and lives. It was written as a submission to the 2020 Inquiry Valuing the Teaching Profession, sponsored by the NSW Teachers' Federation. The essay builds on recent debates and writing about teachers, on my experience as a researcher concerned with school education, and on what I have learned as a teacher in the tertiary sector.

Teachers' Worth

Teachers' cultural position

I was recently going through some old bug reports for Backdrop CMS and I came across one that I discovered had since been fixed, though the issue was still open. Rather than just closing it, I wanted to post a link to the commit that fixed it (for posterity), so I went looking in GitHub for when the change to the file in question was made...

The file was views_handler_filter_term_node_tid.inc in the core Taxonomy module, and on line 129 I could see the code that had been a problem but was now fixed:

To see when it was fixed, I did the following:

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