Thomas Jones

The Today programme, more politically tone deaf with every passing week, wonders why pop musicians are posher than they used to be. 'Conclusions': Are they really? Does it matter? Who knows why? Actually it does matter, and the reason for it is straightforward. One of the commenters on the BBC website gets closest to it when he says: 'It's not about being "posh", it's about there being cash in the family to support a potentially non-earning career.' But nobody there points out that changes to the benefits system mean that it's no longer possible to live on the dole while you're making your first demos and playing your first gigs.

The online secondhand bookselling broker AbeBooks has published a list of its ten most expensive sales of the year. Among the haul were a first edition of Joseph Story's Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States, which was sold for £8910, a complete first edition of Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which went for £17,425, and a rare 'super deluxe' 1979 edition of Moby-Dick, which fetched £18,310. Top of the list though is a 12th-century Arabic manuscript of Al Wajaza Fi Sihhat Il Qawl Bi l Ijaz, which was bought for £28,500 – still a long way from the £7.3 million paid for a copy of Audubon's Birds of America earlier this month, but then AbeBooks isn't Sotheby's, and isn't trying to be. Meanwhile, Michael Gove's Department for Education has told Booktrust that its Bookstart, Booktime and Booked Up programmes will no longer receive government funding.

If you're in London and not sure what to do on Saturday afternoon, why not grab a book and head down to the read-in at the Vodafone shop on Oxford Street? It's being organised by UK Uncut to protest against both the mobile phone company's tax avoidance and the recently announced cuts in local government funding: The Library bloc’s mission is to target Vodafone and highlight the government’s 27% cuts to local government budgets. Vodafone’s £6bn tax dodge could pay for every single cut to every single council everywhere in the country for the next two years. Library bloc will meet inside Vodafone’s flagship store to stage a read-in. At exactly 1.04pm, on the librarian’s signal, everyone will sit down, take out a book and begin reading.

The second verse of Bob Dylan's 'The Times They Are A-Changin'' tells 'writers and critics' not to ‘speak too soon/For the wheel’s still in spin/And there’s no tellin’ who that it’s namin’.' Dylan was smart enough when he wrote that to know that his own prophecies were as unreliable as anyone's.

In the latest issue of Genome Biology (thanks to Alan Rudrum for pointing it out) there's an angry open letter to George Philip, the president of the State University of New York at Albany, from Gregory Petsko, a biochemist at Brandeis, protesting against the budget cuts that have led to SUNY axeing its French, Italian, Classics, Russian and theatre departments. As for the argument that the humanities don't pay their own way, well, I guess that's true, but it seems to me that there's a fallacy in assuming that a university should be run like a business.