iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Nicole Sykes @nicolesykes.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Topics of essays/blogs I have written in my head in the middle of the night while feeding a baby: - The maternity leave research vacuum - The life changing joy of community as a solo mother - The icy shock of post-natal care - Amos barely scratched the surface Words I have written:

static.klipy.com

The Answer Is Zero!

Alt: The Answer Is Zero!

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Nicole Sykes @nicolesykes.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Presumably there’s a Bug BlueSky that wants to tell me what these are and whether I should be worried that there are a million of them in my garden 🌱?

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Max Kennerly @maxkennerly.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Love how this dude discovered the cheat codes of "what if I listened to constituents" and "what if I modeled good behavior" and "maybe I behave like a normal person should." These are apparently dark secrets that have been hidden from other politicians.

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Nicole Sykes @nicolesykes.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

My son has never known the touch of rain on his skin. Never had the smell of petrichor explained to him. Never had a chance to have “it’s raining, it’s pouring” sung to him. Not once in his entire life. He’s three days old mind. www.bbc.co.uk/weather/arti...

bbc.co.uk

Summer 2026 on course to be hottest on record, says Met Office

Only average conditions are needed for the remainder of August to break the record, which was set just last year.

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Nicole Sykes @nicolesykes.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

Great and great-great grandparents 100 years ago but... Working in a mill in Yorkshire, a textile factory in Ireland, or raising the ten children of a Dutch priest.

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Luke Tryl @luketryl.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

Seen a few people saying rough sleeping policy isn’t aimed at median public concern. Quite apart from any policy/moral imperative it really is - rough sleeping comes up time again in focus groups as one of the most visible signs of Broken Britain and community decline!

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Helen Barnard @helenbarnard.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

Excellent research today from @jrf-uk.bsky.social shows how PM's promise to reduce welfare spending by tackling drivers can work: - Every 100,000 extra people in work reduces UC spend by £700m/year. - Hit 80% employment rate target & reduce UC spend by £10bn/year www.jrf.org.uk/social-secur...

jrf.org.uk

How to reduce pressure on welfare spend in a popular and lasting way

The new prime minister wants to reduce social security spend by tackling underlying causes of need, not with blunt cuts. This would be popular and effective.

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Nicole Sykes @nicolesykes.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

Completely missed that Burnham stopped off at homelessness charity The Passage this morning. That’s a bigger choice than whether or not to use a lectern IMO.

Andy Burnham chopping mushrooms in the kitchen of a homelessness charity

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Nicole Sykes @nicolesykes.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

If I were viewing the Odyssey in the cinema, and trying to work out at what point to nip out for a strategic loo break, I would stand up about 90 seconds after Circe says her name. That’s your top tip for the day.

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Ian Boudreau @ianboudreau.com · 12/07/2026

Every time I read a story about gynecology it's always something like "doctors discovered women could experience pain in 1989 but decided not to act on this knowledge for 20 years"

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Nicole Sykes @nicolesykes.bsky.social · 11/07/2026

This is the kind of fearmongering that gets pushed at new and expecting mums online. This is advertising a £70 cooling pad from what’s almost certainly a scam website.

An advert showing an ambulance pulling up outside with the words “if you has a baby during this heatwave.”

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Hetan Shah @hetanshah.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

Why it matters that @andyburnham.bsky.social is an English Lit graduate. Thoughtful piece from @tanjilrashid.bsky.social magazine.newstatesman.com/2026/07/01/a...

one of Burnham's favourites: "My father still reads the dictionary every day. He says your life depends on your power to master words."
The words, originally Arthur Scargill's, recall a working-class culture of literary emancipation. Labour was once steeped in it: a culture of subscription libraries, talks at the Workers' Educational Association and shelves creaking beneath the ever-voluminous John Ruskin (the Victorian art critic was the writer most read by the first batch of Labour MPs). So many politicians on the left were formed by this tradition.
The degree-less James Callaghan was as partial to poems as Burnham. His favourite was Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" - the poem with which Burnham's beloved "V.", set in a ruined Leeds cemetery, is in fiery dialogue.
Middlemarch, Burnham's favourite novel, also gestures to that old-school inheritance.
It's amazing, in 2026, to have a leader in contact with this rich proletarian tradition.

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Katie Martin @katie0martin.ft.com · 02/07/2026

This is a very good piece

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Sunder Katwala (sundersays) @sundersays.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

Do we know who we are? Ian McKellen reads James Graham's love letter to England www.theguardian.com/society/2026...

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Jo Kibble (Political Animal) @politicanimal.bsky.social · 28/06/2026

‘Hello, I’d like to talk about neighbourhood governance.’ ‘Great, are those NHS neighbourhoods, police neighbourhoods, local government neighbourhoods or Pride in Place neighbourhoods?’

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Nick Gray @path-dependent.bsky.social · 28/06/2026

Lots to think about here. First I'll admit it's always a relief with these articles to get to the bottom without finding a quote from someone at UCL or wherever.

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Phil Tinline @philtinline.bsky.social · 27/06/2026

The basic problem with a lot of MPs' video clips is that they're mimicking news pieces-to-camera. Start walking, say stats. One reason the better ones work, & why Mamdani's are brilliant, is that they don't do that. They have a visual conceit or a gag or a twist. (Just like the best news clips.)

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Nicole Sykes @nicolesykes.bsky.social · 27/06/2026

The great thing about these room thermometers they’ve made it feel essential for new parents to buy is that the colour scheme really helps you feel more calm and able to prevent your newborn from dying of overheating. So empowering. So non-threatening. 😶

A Tommy Teepee grow egg radiating red light with all the merciless venom of Sauron’s eye

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Nicole Sykes @nicolesykes.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

Drafting a polite letter to the storm inviting it over to South East London, where it’s welcome to deposit some rain also.

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Nicole Sykes @nicolesykes.bsky.social · 21/06/2026

You can prepare all you like for the heatwave, but some members of the household will still be completely furious about it.

Black cat on a reclining garden chair with a paddling pool at its base, screaming at the photographer

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Dorian Lynskey @dorianlynskey.bsky.social · 20/06/2026

Always grateful for proper research to confirm a hunch but you would expect that if you think less you would get worse at thinking

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Martin Lewis @martinlewis.moneysavingexpert.com · 19/06/2026

The first question school children asked Martin Lewis at the National Money Assembly was ‘does money make you happy’. The assembly was filmed at St Charles 6th form college London and live streamed to over 300 schools and sixth forms by @youngenterprise.bsky.social

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Dr Nigel Fletcher @nigelfletcher.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

Got to love British election declarations. A Prime Minister-in-waiting launching his bid for the leadership of the country from between a man with a bin on his head and a man in a fox costume.

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Nicole Sykes @nicolesykes.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

Nevermind the Germans having a word for everything. This is lovely.

Gezelligheid. The word doesn’t have a perfect English translation - perhaps cosiness or togetherness; but you know it when you see it. “It captures the Dutch spirit of being active outdoors regardless of weather, combined with a highly organised community effort.”

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Mark Wallace @wallaceme.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

A policy billed as banning social media for under-16s in practice means requiring ID for all over-16s to use social media.

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Will Davies @will-davies.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

Parents: is YOUR child staying up late at night arguing about the costs of HS2?

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Jonn Elledge @jonnelledge.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

If you're gonna pick a group to compensate for their treatment by government why not pick one that did acrually face financial disadvantage without notice, like Plan 2 graduates? As opposed to "some people who had many years' notice but didn't open some letters"

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Tim Bale @timbale.bsky.social · 08/06/2026

Absolutely crucial piece of research on misinformation in local news on Facebook, X and Nextdoor by @smfthinktank.bsky.social Full report is here (www.smf.co.uk/publications...) but these are some key findings:

2 in 5 local Facebook groups and over four-fifths of X searches featured at least one piece of misinformation in their last 1,000 posts. Of 19 Nextdoor locations studied, 3 were found to contain misinformation.
Nearly 1 in 26 (4%) of news related posts on Facebook were misinformation; on X the ratio is over 1 in 4 (28%)
Places in local authorities with no or limited local news outlets (e.g. ‘news deserts’) had nearly 3 times as much fake news as a share of all posts as average on Facebook groups, albeit based upon 12 groups worth of data.
Conversely, places with a relatively high number of local news outlets (‘news oases’) have half as much misinformation as average, again based upon a limited sample (13 groups).
Places with local elections, on average, saw more misinformation in the run up to polling day than they did earlier in the year. Misinformation as a share of all posts increased from 0.12% to 0.15% (26% increase) and as a share of news grew from 8.2% to 12.9% (56%).
The rate of misinformation seen across four Gorton and Denton local Facebook groups was 26 times higher than in the wider Facebook analysis – 3% of 1,000 posts were identified as fake news, compared to 0.1% nationally. This is driven by far more news related posts on these groups, and a near doubling of the share of them being classified as misinformation.
Three in five misinformation posts (61%) in places with local elections in the week of the vote related to national politics or council issues, compared to 28% in the wider national analysis earlier in the year.
1 in 5 ‘fake news’ (19%) posts analysed on Facebook groups related to local issues, including planning, transport, local services and council politics. Our case studies revealed how planning applications could be misinterpreted into the “council selling off the beach”, or how local authority communications can be faked.
A third (32%) of misinformation found on X was anti-immigration or Islamophobic, far ahead of the next most common, h…

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Alex von Tunzelmann @alexvont.bsky.social · 08/06/2026

This is exactly it. The work is the point.

When I assign analysis, I am not trying to extract a polished product; I am trying to put the student’s mind through resistance in order to make it stronger. Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not “free students up for higher-order work.” It deprives them of building the strength to do any substantial cognitive work at all.

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Coll 🩰💻📚🎢 @soarin-to-tower.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

rip Anthony Stewart Head 😭😭

“thinking about the pink nintendo ds anthony head brought everywhere while filming merlin”

4 pictures of Anthony Head as King Uther Pendragon holding his pink Nintendo DS on set between takes

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Nicole Sykes @nicolesykes.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

The comms around the Obama Presidential Center have been a masterclass in centreing the audience as the hero. It's. So. Well. Done.

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Jay Hulme @jayhulmepoet.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

"True fulfillment is not achieved by eliminating weakness, but through harmonious growth. It is found where freedom and responsibility are intertwined with mutual care and true solidarity, and where progress is measured by the dignity of each person and the good of all peoples."

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Zamira Rahim @zamirarahim.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

Tolkien would be absolutely thrilled about this lol

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Nicole Sykes @nicolesykes.bsky.social · 24/05/2026

If you were to, hypothetically, ask a woman in the 7th month of pregnancy about the weather she would like to be experiencing... It. Would. Not. Be. This.

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Nicole Sykes @nicolesykes.bsky.social · 17/05/2026

👮 "The beagle we spent thousands of pounds training is alerting! What could it be? Drugs? Exotic pets? Weapons?" 🐶 "Illegal sammies."

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Duncan Weldon @duncanweldon.bsky.social · 12/05/2026

I think Labour thinking here has gone backwards since 2015. The Ed M ‘responsible capitalism’ agenda was a genuinely interesting engagement with the varieties of capitalism literature and how to change institutions to get different outcomes. The agenda since 2024 has been “make companies do things”.

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Nicole Sykes @nicolesykes.bsky.social · 10/05/2026

Back pain management advice in pregnancy is insane. "Reduce sitting or standing" - Those are the main options. "Keep up exercise" - I just had to crawl up the stairs. "Maintain a healthy weight" - This child's weight will triple. "It will probs go away when you give birth" - That's 3 months away.

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Nicole Sykes @nicolesykes.bsky.social · 09/05/2026

Astonishing, given the ward’s makeup. Given that (and appreciate they’ve only announced 8 of 52 councillors), huge Green majority in Lewisham absolutely nailed on by my reckoning.

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Rachel Cunliffe @rmcunliffe.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

Nice voting system you've got there. Definitely able to cope with electoral landscape. No issues whatsoever

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Nicole Sykes @nicolesykes.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

So it happened. 40% of the vote to Labour's 35%. Blimey.

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Nicole Sykes @nicolesykes.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

In much-more-wholesome-news-than-the-news, a gleeful small boy just yelled “GOOD MORNING BUS DRIVER” at the top of his delighted lungs as he boarded the 54. Ah to have that verve for the simple things in life.

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👻madeline bOoOoOoOodent👻 @oldenoughtosay.com · 07/05/2026

One thing I do think the U.K. inclusive does well wrt elections is the widespread access to polling locations. they’re everywhere. they’ll turn anything into a polling station. I’ve never had to go further than my neighbourhood

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Nick Plumb @nickplumb.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

This quote really struck a chord: “Nothing good can happen democratically if people have nothing to leave their homes for, and no places to meet when they do.”

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Nicole Sykes @nicolesykes.bsky.social · 01/05/2026

Finding it quite difficult to stop myself solely buying baby clothes based on what I find the most inexplicable. Dinosaurs and ballet dancers on babygrows have nothing on A SCHOOL FOR EELS, A STARWARS FEVER DREAM, or DOGS IN THE NAVY - let alone the feral need to dress your 2mo as a highland cow.

Blue baby romper with, for some reason, a print of fish and eels with backpacks, whiteboards, and abacus

A child’s dungarees showing Luke and darth Vader in some sort of multicoloured rainbow space cloud

A tiny romper embroidered with serious looking dog faces each wearing a cap and a beret

A sports hoodie with a highland cow hood staring mournfully at the camera.

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Nicole Sykes @nicolesykes.bsky.social · 24/04/2026

Not a single person standing for election in my ward lives in my ward.

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Stephen Bush @stephenkb.bsky.social · 16/04/2026

In addition, the “shit shit, gonna make the OBR light go green: cur welfare!” stuff hurts, not helps, working out how to reform “UK spends roughly the same as it did in 2008 to get more destitution”/“rising number of Neets”.

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