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Josh Cowls

@joshcowls.bsky.social
562 followers 869 following 170 posts

Tech policy person (Google), PhD in app store governance (Oxford). Views own. Repost signals interest. Expect miscellany.

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Reposted by Josh Cowls
Michael Spicer @michaelspicer.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Most TV is just this now.
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Josh Cowls @joshcowls.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
Genuinely curious how VAR becomes less explicable each and every season.
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Josh Cowls @joshcowls.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
GeoGuessr, bloody hell
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Josh Cowls @joshcowls.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
Imagined community of Severe Alert recipients
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Josh Cowls @joshcowls.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
Looking forward to finding out whether exams are getting easier or kids aren’t applying themselves enough, it must be one or the other!
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Josh Cowls @joshcowls.bsky.social · 08/08/2026
Starting to think sincerely, visibly, viscerally liking football might prove to be an asset for a UK prime minister.
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Josh Cowls @joshcowls.bsky.social · 02/08/2026
Not to be hipster about it but having loved Sam Fender’s album the first time around, which included liking Rein Me In, I didn’t foresee it going on to break the UK singles record! (On the other hand, Olivia Dean has a Midas touch)
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Josh Cowls @joshcowls.bsky.social · 23/07/2026
Taxing vape shops (and warehouses?) to relieve rates on pubs… aka percussively leveraging soft-left state intervention on tangible median voter/“common sense” wins seems to have political potential. (Burnham just needs to find another ~900 similar amuse-bouches to flood the grid from now to 2029…)
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Josh Cowls @joshcowls.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
Majority female UK Cabinet (which I think would be a first?) seems well on track
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Josh Cowls @joshcowls.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
Although these descriptions are intended as synonyms for one another, amusing to note that the ur-Starmerites seem to have received the most aggressive oustings
A list of cabinet sackings described in various ways
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Josh Cowls @joshcowls.bsky.social · 19/07/2026
Galaxy brained to wait for fifteen minutes and ten men, rather than 40 and eleven, before applying the clincher
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Josh Cowls @joshcowls.bsky.social · 19/07/2026
It’s almost as if unprecedented fiddling with suspension rules mid-tournament has sown wider mistrust at the sharp end
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Josh Cowls @joshcowls.bsky.social · 14/07/2024
“Why don’t the Spanish sing their anthem” takes incoming in 3, 2, 1…
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Josh Cowls @joshcowls.bsky.social · 12/07/2026
Kudos to @felixsimon.bsky.social for capturing the anguish of an England fan
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Jack Bernhardt @jackbern.bsky.social · 07/07/2026
oh no, oh no, sorry everyone, I love this
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Josh Cowls @joshcowls.bsky.social · 01/07/2026
Football, bloody hell
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SpinningHugo @spinninghugo.bsky.social · 19/06/2026
CountBinface is like the slave in the chariot behind the victorious Roman general whispering "memento mori." A (genuinely) important constitutional role.
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Josh Cowls @joshcowls.bsky.social · 16/06/2026
2.8 goals per World Cup game so far. Wonder whether the path to qualification from third place in the groups has made a first game loss not necessarily fatal, which in turn has helped to open the first games up
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Josh Cowls @joshcowls.bsky.social · 12/06/2026
For those of a certain age (mine), the realisation that we’re as far from “Football’s Coming Home” now as the release of that song was from 1966 is enough to send a shiver down a millennial spine
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Josh Cowls @joshcowls.bsky.social · 13/05/2026
Have long thought the tropes of British politics are so rote that a bit of fourth wall-breaking would be well received. e.g. you’re a minister walking up Downing St to reporters’ cries of “will you resign minister?”: cup your ears and pretend you can’t quite hear them. Just to mix it up a bit
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Josh Cowls @joshcowls.bsky.social · 05/05/2026
The benefit to flavour of food served at room temperature relative to refrigerated is underestimated.
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Josh Cowls @joshcowls.bsky.social · 12/04/2026
Magyar joins Atatürk and Kenyatta in the select group to lead countries which partly bear their name
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Josh Cowls @joshcowls.bsky.social · 12/04/2026
Mushy peas are British dal
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Josh Cowls @joshcowls.bsky.social · 01/04/2026
Did the PM just make a Nathan For You reference?!
Email from Keir Starmer with subject line “The plan:”
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Tim Bale @timbale.bsky.social · 28/03/2026
Highly recommended (free to read but might take around 15 mins).
ft.com
The bench
A true story of two strangers, a home-made bomb and an extraordinary act of courage
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Jordan @jordanpfot.bsky.social · 26/03/2026
Might be the greatest opening paragraph of anything ever.
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Fared Al Mahlool | فريد المحلول @faredalmahlool.bsky.social · 28/02/2026
BREAKING: Simultaneous explosions reported in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Source: Reuters
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Mark Chadbourn @chadbourn.bsky.social · 28/02/2026
Iran has fired ballistic missiles into: Israel Bahrain UAE Qatar
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Josh Cowls @joshcowls.bsky.social · 15/02/2026
Mixed team skeleton, bloody hell
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Paul Fairie @paulisci.bsky.social · 01/01/2026
A List of Predictions Made in 1926 About 2026 🧵
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Josh Cowls @joshcowls.bsky.social · 06/12/2025
Ben Duckett and Zak Crawley have the opportunity to do the funniest thing ever (get to 100 without loss)
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Josh Cowls @joshcowls.bsky.social · 04/12/2025
If there is a greater joy than waking up to find Zak Crawley still at the crease I don’t know of it
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River Action @riveractionuk.bsky.social · 15/11/2025
🚨 SHOCKING 🚨 A HUGE illegal waste dump has appeared between the A34 and River Cherwell, linked to organised crime. Every rainfall risks toxins washing into the river. We’re calling on the Environment Agency & Cherwell Council to act NOW. Our rivers cannot wait. 👇👇
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Josh Cowls @joshcowls.bsky.social · 09/11/2025
open.substack.com/pub/londonce... eye-opening weekend read about a (very large and concrete) path not taken
open.substack.com
Would your home have been under a motorway?
"The most astonishing and destructive thing never to happen to London," says the man who has spent twenty years researching the first true map of the unbuilt Ringways.
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jim fishvvick @fimjishwick.bsky.social · 26/10/2025
do you think the nyt puzzles people saw the only connect wall about them
a new york times connections puzzle, where the top four clues are Only, Connect, Olive, Branch.
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Josh Cowls @joshcowls.bsky.social · 07/10/2025
Interesting how colloquial use of non-standard number words tends to alter their perceived size over time. “Myriad” formally means 10,000 but can now mean anything from “quite a few” to “innumerable” “Orders of magnitude more” often refers to quite a bit less than 100x or 1,000x
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Josh Cowls @joshcowls.bsky.social · 23/09/2025
Out of morbid curiosity I watched the very 1st episode of the Wallace/Torode era of Masterchef in 2005. Besides dodgy music, the nastiness of that era of TV is striking, judges acting like wannabe Simon Cowell/Anne Robinson. Ironic how the show was reinvented as cuddly comfort TV (at least onscreen)
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Josh Cowls @joshcowls.bsky.social · 17/09/2025
D > G > F (with Peru) > E > A > B/C/H
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Robert Saunders @robertsaunders.bsky.social · 27/08/2025
This has been a rough decade to be a supporter of parliamentary democracy, liberalism, membership of the EU and Manchester United.
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Josh Cowls @joshcowls.bsky.social · 17/08/2025
Was not expecting Love Is Blind UK to provide such an effective antidote to creeping Island-of-Strangerism, but here we are??
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Josh Cowls @joshcowls.bsky.social · 04/08/2025
Test cricket is without equal.
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Josh Cowls @joshcowls.bsky.social · 03/06/2025
RCB!
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Josh Cowls @joshcowls.bsky.social · 12/05/2025
“Island of strangers” seems destined—if not outright designed—to live in the history books alongside a similar rhetorical construction by a rather different politician in a different era. I can’t think of another PM in my lifetime who would have uttered it; May perhaps got closest.
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Josh Cowls @joshcowls.bsky.social · 12/05/2025
“Island of strangers” seems destined—if not outright designed—to live in the history books alongside a similar rhetorical construction by a rather different politician in a different era. I can’t think of another PM in my lifetime who would have uttered it; May perhaps got closest.
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Josh Cowls @joshcowls.bsky.social · 08/05/2025
Etymological root I realised today: “preposterous” literally means “before/after” as in topsy-turvy, inherently contradictory. Confirmed via the excellent etymonline.com www.etymonline.com/word/prepost...
etymonline.com
Online Etymology Dictionary
The online etymology dictionary (etymonline) is the internet's go-to source for quick and reliable accounts of the origin and history of English words, phrases, and idioms.
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Josh Cowls @joshcowls.bsky.social · 03/05/2025
If I was designing a majoritarian electoral system from the ground up it would look a lot like Australia’s
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Josh Cowls @joshcowls.bsky.social · 01/05/2025
Aide memoire for a busy election week
Diagram showing differences in party names across Australia, Canada and the UK
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Evan Davis @evanhd.bsky.social · 22/04/2025
Sad news about the Happy Heat Pump Podcast. Sorry to say, that after about 20 episodes, we’re drawing it to a close at the request of the BBC which worries it may be seen as steering into areas of public controversy. 1/2 youtu.be/RJPKgngqoX0?...
t.co
https://youtu.be/RJPKgngqoX0?si=92B9xN4zy6BiWXqK
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Simon Nixon @nixonsimon.bsky.social · 10/04/2025
“Britain is shackled to a corpse.” Gosh this is good
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Josh Cowls @joshcowls.bsky.social · 04/04/2025
Don’t know about yours, but my Following feed has reached a happy equilibrium: enough posts per minute for a good skim of what’s important (with outlinks!) as well as decent amounts of marginalia without being overwhelming. (Of course it’s a purposive not representative sample, but that’s the idea.)
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