Hizb ut-Tahrir makes a curious - and I'm tempted to say: cynical - target of Tony Burke and the government's response to the horrors of the Bondi Shooting. I say cynical because one of HT's primary political activities is to advocate against Muslim involvement in political processes in Tony's seat.

I can say that it does not appear that my students used AI to write my evals. The roast was entirely human. It was the hat I think.

I've been writing a bunch on substack lately. So far it has hosted some opinion pieces on higher ed, some general non fiction writing and some of my memoir writing. If you're on that orange toned part of the internet then check me out there ❤️ substack.com/@hpstorian/n...

From October.

I overheard students talking about me today and I think I've never been more flattered but simultaneously insulted. "He looks like Arthur Morgan if he never got to work with horses". Not my students thankfully. They'd know I'd not miss the reference.

I turned 39 the other day. I usually get a bit glum. My cure for that kind of mood is a pretentious urge that I'll defend. I find a way to feel the better and worse feelings of others - I read poetry. I go to a bookstore and pick up books at random, open a page until I feel what I read.

Allow me to flex right quick? Since 2021 I have received 100% on student feedback surveys, an unblemished record.

Pete and Bas dropped a Wheatus bar and I'm going to do AI psychosis but for aging cockney drillers. They're talking to me specifically.

Does anyone else have deep lore songs? That one song on that one album that you feel is really underrated and the artist never performs it but it's one of the reasone you listen to them? I want to hear yours.

We were very pleased to get the news today that the Australian National Dictionary Centre will be saved, thanks to an anonymous donation and the halt on involuntary redundancies under the Renew ANU plan. We thank everyone for their generous support through these difficult times.

The Black Death ripped through the world to devastating effect. /u/Noble_Devil_Boruta has a surgically precise post on how medieval people tried to fight it, and what effective ways were just beyond their capabilities. #Skystorians #HistMed

It isn't some great gotcha. They want to exploit and steal while reviling the people who labour for it (cultural product).

It's easily intelligible, but still mildly perturbing, that Australia's Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism has said nothing about the National Socialist Network & the March for (White) Australia. (I don't think this silence is a good way to Advance combating antisemitism, racism or xenophobia.)

The wee baby Thomas is participating in the MS read-a-thon. Please donate if you can: www.msreadathon.org.au/fundraisers/...

Just a reminder: before, during, and after the height of the pandemic numerous health authorities told decision-makers in government both publicly and privacy that the policing response actively harmed the public health response. The desires of the police were almost universally prioritised.

Anyone else remember this campaign from 2021?

I'm curious about the dynamic at play when people unironically adopt a similar approach to genAI as Nancy Reagan to drugs. Do they think that the campaign in question worked?

The boys fight incessantly. My efforts to break them up are often met with indignant insistence that they both find it fun. The latest development to the living room arena situation is O (7yo) making rhyming songs to accompany his gladiatorial exertions.

The context of this post was when I got doxed by some fascist and got a bunch of death threats, to which I usually responded with my location tag. We were all young once.

Anyone want to take bets with me about what the recommendation of this envoy will be? www.crikey.com.au/2025/08/08/i...

I gave up policing both AI use and attendance in my gen ed course and I'm never looking back. The depth and creativity of the assessments this term honestly moved me. One group made an absurdist film, another performed a play, another filmed 10 minutes of intense debate about AI. It fkn ruled.

Every time you ask ChatGPT a question it replies with an extended tangent before making a bitter comment about the neoliberal academy while filling its pockets from the catering table with pastries wrapped in napkins.

Every time you ask ChatGPT a question it brings the topic back around to the portrayal of birds in early 20th-century literature and then realizes it’s late to teach a class.

The first great successes of AI are fortunes made from grift. Then fortunes made through short term wins - layoffs that look great for quarterly reporting but bite hard long term. Then will come the backlash, the realisation that all that was promised was never to be delivered.

Invigilated high stakes exams might make it harder for students to get genAI to write their essays, but it makes it easier for them to be marked by genAI. Invigilation is not a specialist skill, and exams were already a way that academics made their courses more efficient (no feedback).

AI isn't a threat to historians because it can do our job (it can't) its danger comes from the harm it does to our institutions' primary way of making money: the certification of degrees. This is not in the abstract - "the value of a degree goes down" - it is first in the cost of invigilation.

The conversations you have with your students about generative AI can be productive if they push beyond prohibition and towards a reflection on process. To aid that conversation I made this scale for thinking about thinking. You might find it useful.

Absolutely massive turnout from people of Sydney marching over Sydney Harbour Bridge calling for an immediate ceasefire and end to the genocide in Gaza. March so big NSW Police have now turned us around back over the bridge.. #freepalestine

August arrives in the dark we are not even asleep and it is here how can it be so late all at once -WS Merwin, Nocturne II from The Shadow of Sirius #everynightapoem

“In her judgment, Justice Belinda Rigg said “the march at [the Sydney Harbour Bridge] is motivated by the belief that the horror and urgency of the situation in Gaza demands an urgent and extraordinary response from the people of the world”.” Spot on. See you on the bridge tomorrow.

let me throw some fuel on the fire that is the discourse about boys getting laid!!! current-day manopshere content is not good at getting boys laid and that's an effect of the incentives at play. you cannot build an audience of resentful little virgins if you succeed at helping them to have sex

Yep!! PhD students are often extremely good at catching these zombie factoids because they are tenacious, buried in footnotes and have *time* to root stuff out. But at some point stuff just gets footnoted to the most prominent historian who repeated the claim, and nobody bothers to look it up.

Academics (including the journal’s founder) told Wiley to pound sand, started an open access journal, and Wiley just surrendered. I think more academics should tell academic publishers to pound sand. They are vampires.

Someone needs to write an ethnography of the post-LLM sentence.

This is why I remind people that 90% uptake is still very high (just not, epidemiologically, high *enough*). Because we need to remember the vast majority of parents comply *when vaccination is made accessible and health professionals have the time to work with parents who might have concerns*.

24. Historians should read more Stuart Hall

Report: Faculty Often Missing From University Decisions on AI A new survey from the @aaup.org shows that a breakdown of shared governance around implementing AI has implications for the future of teaching, learning and job security. #HigherEd #EDUSky #AcademicSky bit.ly/3H0mcZp

“It’s only their first term, they can’t fix everything at once you know!”

Sorry but it's not AI, it was uploaded to Shutterstock in 2021, there's a whole set of pics www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/...

A lot of my thinking about generative AI began on Christmas Eve, 2019, when I was interrogated by police in Mexico - one wielding a Glock 19 and the other Google Translate. I couldn't detach genAI from its role as a mediator with coercion even IF I thought doing so would make sense.

@meghanor.bsky.social I thoroughly enjoyed your article and wanted to ask about an underrated finding in the MIT paper. It says students who used genAI picked essay topics new and of interest. Those without chose the familiar. Does this line up with your experience, in terms of increased boldness?

www.nytimes.com/2025/07/18/o... I think this is the best thing I’ve ever read on writing and A.I. by @meghanor.bsky.social Gifted article.

I've been writing again. I wrote 16 bars that none of you will ever hear me perform. But I'm putting it here because I have no shame.

Here is an interesting magazine advertisement from the 1960s featuring an illustration of the jeep-mounted version of the Davy Crockett in action: “Some of the weapons illustrated on this page make an individual infantryman more powerfully armed than a bomber squadron of World War II ….”

The world may fall apart, but I still got another Clipse album. Just to channel "Свету ли провалиться, или мне чаю не пить?"

If AI is going to kill universities it's not going to be through attacks on the validity of assessment. It will be through the death of disciplines via managerial responses to that feared loss of validity.

There's a lot of concern - well placed - about the results of LLM use in undergraduate writing, but I've not read much about its effects on mature/developed writers. The latter are often configured as relatively immune to the stylistic/cognitive influence of ChatBot facilitated writing...

I envy those who have used LLMs insufficiently enough to be able to find them less than a kind of miraculous. Sure, a kind of miraculous that sometimes turns water not to wine but to Monster Energy from a bin. Funnily enough AI boosters confuse metaphors & are trying to use water to feed the 5000.

Friday's lecture continues my trend of making this course about my haywire pattern recognition. It's basically: How the Unabomber invented (not really) ChatGPT. Hear me out.