1. A measured but firm response from Harvard University President Alan Garber to the latest assault on his university by the Trump administration https://www.harvard.edu/research-funding/wp-content/uploads/sites/16/2025/05/Letter-from-Harvard-President-Alan-M.-Garber-to-the-Honorable-Linda-E.-McMahon.pdf PDF also below.

Harvard’s efforts to achieve (its) goals are undermined and threatened by the federal government’s overreach into the constitutional freedoms of private universities and its continuing disregard of Harvard’s compliance with the law. It ignores the many meaningful steps we have taken and will continue to take to live up to our principles and improve the lives of people across the country and throughout the world. That is why we have gone to court to address the government’s unlawful attempt to control fundamental aspects of our university’s operations. Consistent with the law and with our own values, we continue to pursue needed reforms, doing so in consultation with our stakeholders and always in compliance with the law. But Harvard will not surrender its core, legally-protected principles out of fear of unfounded retaliation by the federal government.

2. Joseph (Joe) Nye, generally considered to be the inventor of the term ‘soft power’, died recently. Here’s the last piece he wrote, published posthumously in Monocle, The late Joseph S Nye on what “soft power” means in Trump’s new world https://monocle.com/affairs/joseph-nye-soft-power/

Soft power is the ability to affect others through attraction rather than coercion. Its consequences are often slow and indirect, and it is not the most important source of power for foreign policy – but to neglect it is a strategic and analytical mistake. The Roman Empire rested on its legions but also on the allure of Roman culture and citizenship. As a Norwegian analyst described it, the US presence in Western Europe after the Second World War was “an empire by invitation”. At the end of the Cold War, the Berlin Wall collapsed not under a barrage of artillery but from hammers wielded by people whose minds had been affected by Western soft power.

3. Celebration Day is “a new annual moment (here in the UK), held on the last bank holiday Monday of May, to honour and celebrate those who have shaped our lives but are no longer with us”. Here’s Toby Jones reading the poem, Portrait of a Romantic, by A S J Tessimond in memory of his father and talking about his father https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTLi2VwWA8Q

And here’s Nathaniel Parker reading Anthem for Doomed Youth by Wilfred Owen in memory of the film maker Derek Jarman https://youtu.be/fPQMjuUW1eo

4. Here’s a ‘long read’ for The Guardian by Shaun Walker, ‘I am not who you think I am’: how a deep-cover KGB spy recruited his own son https://www.theguardian.com/news/2025/apr/10/deep-cover-kgb-spy-recruited-son-peter-herrmann-illegals

Rudi Herrmann took a deep breath and asked his son Peter to sit down. “I have a story to tell you,” he said. Rudi had been preparing for this conversation for several years, running over the words in his mind. He was about to tell his 16-year-old son that everything Peter thought he knew about their family was a lie.

5. And, finally, Michael Rosen’s poem in response to Keir Starmer’s recent and already infamous ‘island of strangers’ speech, My Island of Strangers, describing how ‘strangers’ saved his life when he was desperately ill in hospital with Covid https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/may/17/my-island-of-strangers-poem-michael-rosen