Happy New Year to you all! May you make a success of all your endeavours. But above all, enjoy peace, love & equanimity.

Seeing daughter off on early train "up North" . Breakfast at GermanGymnasium followed by a visit to London Canal Museum. Both very good, though the second significantly cheaper!

A couple more weeks to apply for this! ✉️ me if interested and want to discuss

🎤 Meet Zhiwo (Suzy) Xu! After graduating from UCLA, she’s now joined the Department as an MSc student. For Zhiwo, sociology is about uncovering the invisible strings that connect everything - from coffee orders to class and culture ☕️🌎 Read more ➡️ sociology.ox.ac.uk/article/msc-st…

Up North for the weekend. Dispensary Lane, Newcastle. In 1861 my 2x Great Grandfather Joh Mills is a lodger in no 8, age 17, a bill poster, born in Co Roscommon. It's changed a bit since then. Next door was the tannery foreman's house & where I'm standing was a slaughterhouse.

Wonderful vegan lunch yesterday ⁦Super Natural Cafe⁩ Newcastle. Donner, Gyros & Colcannon.

We have to consider the possibility that President Trump is a Russian asset. If so, Trump's acquisition is the crowning achievement of Putin's FSB career - and Europe is on its own,

How can we tell if the DOGE cuts are actually reducing US Government expenditure? Michael Lane has put together a feed of the most high-frequency data - departmental withdrawals from the US Treasury general account - which, while imperfect, gives you some idea.

Congratulations Dr Michael Biggs, enormously well deserved!

Great to see the work of my colleague Michael Biggs being rewarded. Forcing a public authority to admit that they made a mistake is truly a labour of Sisyphus.

I am very much afraid this is true.

My official comment for all occasions, moving forward.

That's because if a space or service purports to be single-sex, but admits men if they say they are women, it won't be single sex any more, but mixed. So it won't be a proper operation of a single-sex exception at all, and its exclusion of all the other men will be unlawful.

There's no way around this. A service is either single sex, or mixed sex. If it's mixed sex, it can't lawfully exclude some men because they are men, while admitting others who say they are women. If it's single sex, by definition it excludes all men.

Are all the right on bros who, against all the evidence, including the evidence of their own eyes, asserted Khelif was female now going to admit they were wrong? No, of course not, they are going to double & treble down, motte & bailey or remain very quiet. Contemptible fools.

Idyllic day on Lindisfarne. Larks in the sky, the air full of butterflies, what more could you want?

Great day in Harrogate. The Mercer Gallery, artisan market in Valley Gardens, tea at Betty's & a look around the Kursaal/Royal Hall which has a splendid Frank Matcham interior.

📢 Research by DPhil student Zoe Abrams reveals a major shift in Scottish attitudes to sexual violence after #MeToo 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Between 2014–2019, victim blaming declined and perceptions of perpetrator culpability rose - but changes varied across social groups. 🔗sociology.ox.ac.uk/article/scotti…

And, lo, NHS Fife did gift us material for another column. With, it must be said, considerable assistance from our political class. thetimes.com/uk/scotland/ar…