Okay, let’s take a break from all this horror and talk about #DoctorWho for a moment. First things first, I thought it looked beautiful, great production design, amazing cinematography, the casting was great, the lighting was wonderful, much of the CGI looked a generation better. As to the plot, well, I think you have to look at first appearances of new Doctors as doing two things - telling the story of the week story and establishing the show’s new status quo and the new Doctor. Honestly that doesn’t normally lend itself to a great main plot...

I’m sort of interested in this but I think it’s a bit underwhelming really. No one really wants that kind of engagement with TV. But I do think there are some fun things they should be able to do, which I’m surprised they don’t...

https://twitter.com/io9/status/1046924556013903873

Imagine if you made a murder mystery from five different viewpoints, but you distributed it at random to different homes, so that people couldn’t get the whole story from one place and they *had* to talk about it to their friends or go to their friends houses.

Does anyone know of a graph of voting percentage organized in cohorts by age? I’d like to know whether the generation born in the fifties has *always* had high turn-out or whether it has really escalated as they’ve got older. Found this from Pew which is interesting and covers the last twenty years or so: pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018…

Anonymous accounts are actually important for a range of reasons, to allow people to have social media lives outside their work, and to talk about personal stuff and have an identity even when they’re under threat.

https://twitter.com/guardian/status/1043920476639236096

However, the ability to easily create dozens of social media accounts is a bad thing. It gives massive power to trolls and harassers, and there’s only a limited amount that can be done to fight them while unlimited accounts are available.

@andybudd I’m sorry, I just don’t agree with that. I’m not sure how you can argue it. @andybudd Honestly this stuff is *profoundly* irritating to me. I would consider myself a product designer after being in the industry for twenty odd years. I think through the business case, I think through the users, I think through their core needs, I think about business needs...

Have to say, this full timeline of Russia’s mentions, actions and interventions in the 2016 election (and the contact with Trump) is pretty extraordinary when all laid out in order: nyti.ms/2Dqn1JF?smid=n… I was a little sceptical at first - not about the information presented, but the way it was presented - because I thought placing potentially unrelated actions together might force a story on what might be coincidence or unrelated actions, and to some extent I think it does...

@MattPirkowski James Damore is an idiot who expressed some stupid opinions. It is right that he was fired for them, and he should have apologized for it and moved on. At least partly this is because his statements may have left Google vulnerable for lawsuits. Any woman he ever intereviewed, managed, or worked with could quite reasonably argue that he’d expressed profoundly sexist attitudes and that his views may have resulted in discrimination

@jack Can I ask what views conservatives inside Twitter feel uncomfortable expressing? recode.net/2018/9/14/1785… I ask because these conversations are often held in the abstract but since I have been writing some fact check replies to @realdonaldtrump I have come into contact with a large number of people with strong conservative views.

Trump’s reaction to the appointment of Mueller after firing Comey against Bannon’s advice. (Getting to the good stuff in Woodward’s “Fear”) A lot of this stuff is just Trump wanting to do abjectly stupid things based on an incurious, massively over-simple or just plain wrong view of things, and the entire White House trying to find a way to nudge policy back towards something sane.

Jeff Bezos talks about how he's going to spend his money - to fight homelessness and to fund early stage schools in deprived communities. Both of these are admirable goals and both things I support. However, it remains a problem to me that government is not doing these things.

https://twitter.com/JeffBezos/status/1040253796293795842

(I should declare a vague interest in that I argued for some targeted help for LGBT youth, who represent 25-40% of homeless youth, are twice as likely to attempt suicide, twice as likely to succeed and 95% of whom report daily homophobic/transphobic language at school.)

Well written article about the experience as a comparatively well-off foreign spouse in the UK thewhitereview.org/feature/let-ea… I reacted oddly to this piece. My brother tells me I don’t know any more what Britain is like or feels like. That it has changed a lot in the last decade and not for the better...

It's not just me, right? The last week from McCain's memorial onwards, (plus book, plus Op Ed, plus Trump's statements etc.) has been f***ing insane and it feels like something qualitative has changed somewhere in this whole thing? Like maybe there is finally some kind of erosion of his public support that—combined with more outrageous revelations than before, and more overt unforced errors—feels like it might be the very slow beginning of some kind of snowball effect?

The Washington Post has gone through Bob Woodward’s book and ... ... ... I mean, I genuinely have no words: google.com/amp/s/www.wash… Some examples, just in case you can’t get past the paywall:

I have a number of Jack Ryan questions. #JackRyan (If anyone’s interested, it’s beautifully made, pretty engaging, but also on occasion a bit bland. It’s also semi-regularly implausible in a kind of “oh come on” kind of way, and is neither as clever as it thinks it is or quite as stupid as some critics would have you believe.)

So the people supporting Trump on Twitter have changed a lot over the last year and a whole bunch of new weird conspiracies have emerged. Here are some of the actual things some Trump supporters have said to me: That a “Great Awakening” is coming as a result of Trump’s Presidency. Multiple people have talked about this. It’s really unclear what they mean but the phrase is apparently related to historical periods of religious resurgence. More on the hashtag #GreatAwakening

Earlier today, @realdonaldtrump unblocked my twitter account. I thought I should probably talk about this in a little more detail. Around the end of 2016, I started writing fact-checking responses to Trump’s twitter account. With a few exceptions (mostly frustration based) I tried to keep things to the facts. It is not hard to refute most of his statements.

Been watching a lot of Agatha Christie modern adaptations recently. Always make a bit about the turmoil in the country while they’re going on. I’d love to see a murder mystery drama set during the 2016 election, or during the Brexit referendum. You know, you use the drama to open up the tensions and explore the different people and voices around the crime. You get to delve into the psychology of all the suspects and the circumstances but slightly askance so you don’t end up queasy about the politics.

If anyone wants to be reassured about my ultra-liberal coastal elite sexually corrupt tendencies I’m currently at the 23rd annual Drag King Contest in San Francisco and it is awesome!

In memory of Aretha Franklin xx Another amazing track:

The Trump administration wants to keep blocking critics on Twitter. They were taken to court for it and it was ruled unconstitutional. They unblocked the original claimants, but no one else and filed an appeal about a week ago. The argument was simple. The law indicates that when a government representative uses a social network for government business, for the purposes of their discussion it becomes a public forum, and therefore people cannot be banned from it for differences of viewpoint.

Members of my family have found themselves staying in a tiny shack with a composting toilet and I’m now receiving very many confused and horrified SMSs about the bizarre instructions. {blink} ... {blink} ... {blink}