The invasion is here.

Now playing. Fabulous album.

His immediate statement following Kirk’s killing may have been ill advised, but the amount of flak that Ezra Klein has been receiving since then seems disproportionate - a variation of the accusations social democrats have been hearing from the more radical left for a century and a half.

War ravaged Portland.

Saturday is basketball 🏀

📣My analytical op-ed in @ForeignPolicy on AI-powered information warfare. Is the window for combating AI-driven propaganda is closing? Local, open-weight models let State, non-state and micro-operators run industrial-scale influence ops with no central points. foreignpolicy.com/2025/09/18/a...

I can’t be the only one who often finds the smalltalk at the beginning of podcasts a bit CRINGE.

My daughter described a tube of cheap lip gloss as smelling like “AI watermelon.”

the kids are all right mastodon.social/@Daojoan/115...

It’s over for us

Forton services, M6, painting by Jen Orpin.

Add to this worrying list “Library Washing” - persuading very prestigious university institutions to contribute their digital library collections to OpenAI’s model, to lend legitimacy, in exchange for a handful of (reduced cost!) magic AI beans.

Free movement or not I just can‘t get over the fact that he basically gives up on young people in Britain learning foreign languages. It is basically "we need to pull the drawbridge up because our young people are too uneducated to be confronted with the world“.

Die von der Stiftung Gedenkstätten Buchenwald und Mittelbau-Dora initiierte Wanderausstellung „Rosa Winkel. Die Verfolgung homosexueller Männer im NS“ ist ab dem 27.9 im Foyer der Museen der Stadt Lüdenscheid zu sehen. Digitalen Begleitband: https://stiftung-gedenkstaetten.pulse.ly/qedjoel6km

Psssst – noch nicht, äh unbedingt weitersagen: Der Kalender 2026 ist in Arbeit. Figürliche Illustration auf ganzer Zeitungsseite, 56 x 40 cm, Tuschestift, Acryl

'Darf es etwas mehr sein' #FotoVorschlag Mehr Speicher? Mehr Akt? Mehr Text? Mehr Kunst? Mehr als 16? Mehr als 2,8?

No Hepatitas, NEVER -- it's no good, honestly.

"Farage’s mistake is to assume that unease about migration in general translates into support for any and every proposal to make life hard not only for potential arrivals, but for migrants already long settled in Britain." Predictably top piece from my #BGE2024 co-author, @robfordmancs.bsky.social

Praise when praise is due: happy to report that the mandatory move from Windows 10 to Windows 11 on my University laptop went extremely smoothly - efficiently managed by @itservices.manchester.ac.uk.

Kollwitz understood the essence of grief.

Really good article. “There are autisms, rather than just autism.” While it can be challenging, let’s try and celebrate diversity; let’s face it: it’s the thing that not only makes human culture fertile but is the root of all life on earth.

This is such a nuanced and big-hearted piece on the evolution of autism as a diagnosis, by an anthropologist of mental health who is also the dad of a now-grown daughter on the spectrum. Great reading (gift link) www.nytimes.com/2025/09/24/o...

The richest man on earth owns X. The second richest man on earth is about to be a major owner of TikTok. The third richest man owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. The fourth richest man owns The Washington Post. See the problem here?

On the day Rubio inaugurated an archaeological “tunnel burrowed under a Palestinian district, along a Roman-era street” in an “archaeological park established by an Israeli settler organisation… Israeli planes bombed the most important storage depot of ancient artefacts in Gaza City”

Why is nobody mentioning Brexit in the discussion about the increasing reluctance of pharmaceutical manufacturers to invest in the UK? We are no longer part of the big EU pharmaceutical market; we’re a comparatively small market with its own regulator.

"Tools such as ChatGPT can be used to generate almost-identical research papers that pass standard plagiarism checks. Hundreds are thought to have been published." www.nature.com/articles/d41... #research #edchat #HigherEd #University #research

Bonnie’s book on autism in Britain is a must read too. It was such an influence on mine.

This is great on the shortcomings of what we used to refer to as 'machine learning' in the olden days, before everybody hyped it as AI, and on the privacy implications of AI agents. podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/b...

Please follow our @manchstm.bsky.social PhD students, @chstmphds.bsky.social, ‪for updates on the excellent lunchtime-work-in-progress online seminar series they host.

On 11 November, jointly with the colleagues in East Asian Studies, we are welcoming Dr Lewis Bremner (Cambridge) for a talk on The Heart of the Eye and the Heart of the Sun: The Struggle to Translate Science in Tokugawa Japan. blogs.manchester.ac.uk/chstm/2025/0...

On 21 October, co-hosted by the Centre for the Study of Sexuality and Culture, our speaker will be Dr Brandy Schillace, on Hope in the Dark: How a daring team of sexologists built the world’s first trans clinic in the shadow of the Third Reich. blogs.manchester.ac.uk/chstm/2025/0...

The new academic year is kicking off! Please join us on 7 October for our first seminar of the semester. Our speaker will be Alan D. Meyer (Auburn University), on Flying While Black: The Slow Pace of Racial Integration in the U.S. Airline Industry. blogs.manchester.ac.uk/chstm/2025/0... #HistSTM

@rolandmcs.bsky.social can we get a RT for this thread?

@fbmh-uom.bsky.social @socialresponuom.bsky.social @srbmh.bsky.social

Published by @manchesterup.bsky.social

Autism is back on the front pages. Why not read the book that my excellent @manchester.ac.uk @manchstm.bsky.social colleague Dr Bonnie Evans has published on the history of autism? It's open access and you can read it online for free. www.manchesterhive.com/display/9781...

Where does this end...?

It didn’t exist as a concept, as my colleague Dr Bonnie Evans tells us in her book — it’s open access - read it for free: doi.org/10.7765/9781... That doesn’t mean that the combinations of human characteristics that we today refer to as autism didn’t exist.

They need to start putting fictional countries into Trump's briefings Pandora, Moldavia, Wakanda, wherever Balki was from in Perfect Strangers

For 56 minutes Sky News and BBC News interrupted everything else and carried a Reform UK feed live, uninterrupted, unchallenged. The stream spluttered, froze, pixelated - dozens of times - still they stuck with it. FOR ONE HOUR. This is an editorial choice. No other party gets this coverage. ~AA

This is disastrous, quite frankly.

Whoop! It’s Welcome Week @officialuom.bsky.social ! We are getting ready and absolutely cannot wait to see you! And it’s even gloriously sunny!

The CHSTM Lunchtime Seminar Series is back this semester! 🎉 Our first talk will be on Tuesday, 21 October 2025. Stay tuned for speaker details and more updates! #HistSci #HistMed #CHSTM

Howdy Manchester

Lots of muddy water coming down the Mersey this morning.

Just like 2015/16, in the run-up to the Brexit referendum. Excellent.

The 100K fee for H-1B visas (yearly!) is reported as a hit on tech -- but it is a hit on universities. It will make it impossible for us to hire foreign visitors, or foreign scholars into tenure track positions--I think almost 40% of H-1Bs go to universities and university hospitals.

I worked in the US for two years in the 1990s, holding a H1B visa sponsored by the Scripps Research Institute. People won’t be able to return from a family visit; and with virtually zero warning.