gideonrachman.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

If academic institutions want to grade students in a meaningful way, I suspect they will now need to go back to handwritten exams and oral tests only. If you can’t handwrite or speak, it’ll have to be done on a non-networked dumb machine. Maybe just a typewriter

submitted 5 hours ago • 39 comments

this is very awkward for Kemi Badenoch

submitted 3 hours ago • 43 comments

Always surprised by how often the email of quite famous people is simply [email protected]. Always worth a try

submitted 1 day ago • 4 comments

Excellent pod with Prof Lawry Freedman who explains why Russia might not like the Trump proposal on Ukraine

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

Non-zero chance that the programmer for WLRN 26 Miami is currently the most powerful person in US politics. www.independent.co.uk/news/world/a...

submitted 1 day ago • 6 comments

Some very good points by @gideonrachman.bsky.social, about why the EU is better at trade deals than the US: on.ft.com/3ECSdpq

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

“The business exports more than three times as much as it imports, the trade group says. No foreign-language film ranked among the 50 highest-grossing movies in the US last year. The 10 highest-grossing movies in the world last year were all released by US studios.” www.bloomberg.com/news/newslet...

submitted 2 days ago • 1 comment

If Trump is serious about tariffs on movies, it's a very dangerous escalation. Tariffs have not traditionally been applied to services, and the United States is a massive net exporter of services. We would be extremely vulnerable to any service-based retaliation.

submitted 2 days ago • 290 comments

submitted 2 days ago • 96 comments

“He smelled — excuse me — like shit. And he said ‘there are millions of flies in the evidence room.’” My dispatch from Belgium's justice palace on the country's embattled legal system: @financialtimes.com www.ft.com/content/0b72...

submitted 7 days ago • 0 comments

Why the EU beats Trump at the art of the deal: The mayhem of Mar-a-Lago is less effective than the boredom of Brussels, writes @gideonrachman.bsky.social @financialtimes.com on.ft.com/44Uat8c

submitted 2 days ago • 5 comments

Or to put it another way, overseas students now subsidise the cost of teaching each UK undergraduate by an average of £2,500 each. Take them away and you've got an absolutely existential crisis for universities. www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/pol...

submitted 2 days ago • 30 comments

www.bloomberg.com/news/newslet...

submitted 2 days ago • 5 comments

You: B-b-but Mr President, it makes no sense to tariff the French New Wave Trump:

submitted 2 days ago • 1 comment

Christ! These US tariffs are set to smash southeast Asia manufacturing, and we're not even there yet in Indonesia. Sritex a giant, sure, but I'm nervous for the next numbers

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

Great news, but also worth noting a couple of points 1/ www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

submitted 2 days ago • 3 comments

Wasn't just Signal leak "Waltz appeared to have engaged in intense coordination with Netanyahu about military options against Iran ahead of an Oval Office meeting between the Israeli leader and Trump. It got back to Trump and the president wasn’t happy with it" www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

submitted 4 days ago • 5 comments

Leader of the conservative Liberal party Peter Dutton has lost his seat in national elections according to state broadcaster ABC. He has done a Poilievre www.abc.net.au/news/2025-05...

submitted 4 days ago • 6 comments

April 28, 2025: Migrants are making SOS signs out of their bodies so drones can see them at our country's concentration camps.

submitted 6 days ago • 804 comments

Fantastic piece. Read it (if you can get past our fiendish paywall)

submitted 4 days ago • 4 comments

I implore whoever is writing a book on Australian democracy to consider this as their cover image

submitted 4 days ago • 5 comments

the Slavic sauna I go to has just sent me this invitation by email and: can stupid bullshit please stop infecting every area of life, I swear it was once possible to live a life relatively free of stupid bullshit, and yet here we are today what the fuck does "seeds of intention" even mean

submitted 4 days ago • 13 comments

15% is the Tories worst ever score, against an unpopular government, as the main opposition. It really is starting to look terminal for them.

submitted 5 days ago • 37 comments

Former HK opposition lawmaker Claudia Mo has made her first public comment about her "prison experience," days after her release from jail. In full: buff.ly/leecfYS

submitted 5 days ago • 1 comment

Seems senior US State Department official Darren Beattie has got Bellingcat on a special list - "Senior State Department official sought internal communications with journalists, European officials, and Trump critics" www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/01/1...

submitted 5 days ago • 15 comments

Lesson of the elections I suspect is that it’s now incredibly difficult to be a national party in the U.K. A party like the Tories that tries to appeal both in the Red Wall and the previously Tory shires risks failing everywhere. Labour may face a similar risk

submitted 5 days ago • 5 comments

By endorsing Netanyahu’s strategy of using aid as leverage, Trump is making humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza an official policy goal, Philip H. Gordon and Andrew Miller argue.

submitted 6 days ago • 3 comments

How is this making America great?

submitted 5 days ago • 84 comments

An amendment to the Antisemitism Awareness Act saying criticism of Israel is not inherently antisemitic, sponsored by Bernie Sanders, was approved in a Senate committee today. All committee Democrats supported the amendment; all Republicans except Rand Paul opposed it. www.jta.org/2025/04/30/p...

submitted 6 days ago • 14 comments

Suffice to say this wasn’t exactly the campaign message!

submitted 7 days ago • 300 comments

He must have overdosed on fluoride then

submitted 7 days ago • 3 comments

Delusional…

submitted 8 days ago • 4 comments

Southeast Asia has no choice on economics and trade policy. China's not going anywhere; they aren't going anywhere. There's absolutely no way they can decouple from China or side with the US, at least on trade... www.bbc.com/news/article...

submitted 19 days ago • 0 comments

via @tombaldwin66.bsky.social "when I walked around one of the constituency’s more well-to-do areas last week a woman told me she was backing Labour for the 1st time because of what the reputational damage of having a Reform MP 'might mean for our property prices' www.thetimes.com/comment/colu...

submitted 9 days ago • 12 comments

The Trump peace plan favors Russia—but it doesn’t result in the complete surrender of Ukraine. Which is clearly what Putin still wants. So is Trump finally going to pressure Putin to compromise? Saying “Vladimir, STOP” doesn’t qualify.

submitted 9 days ago • 4 comments

"How Ukraine could break the western alliance" www.ft.com/content/aa21... @gideonrachman.bsky.social @financialtimes.com

submitted 9 days ago • 0 comments

A jolly message from my daughter

submitted 9 days ago • 2 comments

You don't have to be Catholic, or religious, to be moved by this.

submitted 11 days ago • 10 comments

No biggie. It’s just the Secretary of the Treasury agreeing with the Chinese government that the President of the United States is brazenly lying about trade talks.

submitted 11 days ago • 179 comments

If you are Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin, you look at Washington these days and see chaos, incompetence and a thin layer of bravado masking real weakness. What better time to test how far you can go… on.ft.com/4iznhUC

submitted 11 days ago • 5 comments

Amazing moment as Vatican crowd erupts into spontaneous applause as Zelenskyy appears on the screen shaking hands with officials at the funeral of Pope Francis

submitted 11 days ago • 6 comments