With all the disturbing and horrific news and developments over the last few days - a small timeline cleanse: Carthage contentedly snacking on a little hibiscus leaf in the sun... May watching him devour a leaf larger than him bring you as much peace as it does me!

call me crazy but it really feels like “World’s Richest Man Creates AI Chatbot That Generates Child Porn” would’ve been a huge international outrage requiring a governmental crackdown not even 24 months ago

2025 has been a rotten year for most early career postdoctoral researchers, especially in Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. For a better 2026, check out (or repost) this short thread on a free resource for UK-based SHAPE PhDs within 10 years (excluding career breaks) of the doctorate. 1/3

This man is a genius! "Sheets damp with his own resolve" - chef's kiss to you sir

Israeli forces are targeting journalists' families in a war to silence Palestinian reporting. At least 706 family members have been killed, according to the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate aje.io/pkapjm #IsraeliTerrorism #GazaGenocide #EndTheOccupation #FreePalestine #JournalismIsNotACrime

the graduation of a cohort of gaza’s new medical professionals in front of the ruins of al shifa hospital. No words, really.

While I hope everyone celebrating Xmas today has had a lovely, peaceful time, my heart remains in Palestine, with the people of Palestine. 🇵🇸 #StopIsrael #FreePalestine

Israel has bombed Lebanon once every 4 hours on average since a “ceasefire” took effect in late November 2024, according to ACLED, an independent conflict monitor.

What historians (and other scholars do) is create knowledge. We should use that phrase more and talk about what it means. I think we don't, and it's part of why AI enthusiasts are confused when we don't readily agree that our work can be replicated/replaced by their products.

Now seems like a swell time to point out that Frontline just released this excellent 11-minute mini-documentary about what happened inside CECOT.

The IOF murdered 7 Palestinians in Gaza yesterday sheltering at a school and celebrating a wedding. No widespread outrage. Each of those lives and the over 100 thousand Palestinian lives murdered is a universe. If you are more outraged by the deaths of others then your moral sense is nothing.

This is so terrifying and such a spiral into a bottomless pit of lies...

"In an era where the authentic written word is under threat....English isn't just about reading the past--it's about understanding the power of words and narratives in the present and future and giving our students the skills to successfully navigate the world". True of all UK English programmes.

Not for academics it isn’t. You learn by reading and by following citation chains and talking to other people in the field. Letting the AI do the summary is abdicating your job.

"We envision a resistance that is...a repudiation of the efficiencies that automated algorithmic education falsely promises: a resistance comprising the collective force of small acts of friction." "How to Resist AI in Education" by me & @cnygren.bsky.social www.publicbooks.org/four-frictio...

And please also, AGAIN, never forget that they are inherently unethical to use because no one gave permission for their research or writing to be used in it. It is all stolen, and if you're using the plagiarism machine, please keep that in mind.

I am not sorry. This is simply true. Academics should be able to write fluently and express themselves clearly and academics should do their own work. It’s literally our job. It’s what we trained until 22nd grade to do. This is a simple observation that should require no explanation or defense.

Do not cite an academic paper unless you’ve read it

“The Israeli soldiers had rigged [a] can of food with an explosive.” American surgeon Irfan Galaria tells @mehdirhasan.bsky.social about the Israeli military’s brutalization of children, and what he witnessed while working at Gaza’s Al-Shifa hospital. Watch: zeteo.com/p/i-did-not-...

NEW: Without USAID funding to help buy food for refugees, the World Food Program rushed to prioritize families based on need, determining that only half the population would get food. Refugees learned which half they were in from a number stamped on the back of their ration card.

This is so true yet increasingly everyone is just rolling over /shrugging/accepting the "it's done now so stop bitching" narrative propounded by the thieving Tech-bros...

Trying to get everything ready before the baby comes. My self-appointed helpers are not very...helpful...

Premium newsletter: my 18k word AI Mythbusters: There’s no insatiable demand for AI compute, AI is not “getting exponentially better” or “tricking humans,” we haven't “lost control of AI,” AI doomerism is a grift, and there is no “GenAI arms race with China.” www.wheresyoured.at/ai-mythbuste...

It is impossibly cruel and racist for bsky to keep deleting Palestinians who are not doing anything more than describing their situation. Seriously, who is sitting there at their nice, warm, comfortable desk and doing that shit?

My humanities dept was relevant. Majors were up. Courses were 100% enrolled. Revenue positive, GE serving, etc etc. We were still eliminated. The problem is ideological administrative destruction. Couldn’t write a report, a self study, or a spreadsheet against that.

one of the great, pernicious myths perpetrated about higher ed—which media, higher ed administrators, politicians, and a number of faculty are complicit in spreading—is that humanities departments close due to some combination of cratering student demand and unjustifiable cost. It’s not true

This. 100% this.

'As a humanities professor myself, the biggest danger I see to the discipline is the growing perception, fueled by the ubiquity of large language models, that knowledge is cheap—a resource whose procurement ought to be easy and frictionless.' 1/2

Just noticed every single Palestinian account I reposted last night has been deleted. I really need folks to realise that need in Gaza has never been greater, but donations have gone down entirely. Meanwhile, BlueSky moderation has seemingly doubled down on its racism and quickly deletes accounts.

British Library staff asked for a decent pay. Instead they got ‘a few money-saving present ideas’, such as ‘consider not giving presents this holiday season’. They are on strike this week. I wrote about it for @lrb.co.uk. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/de...

Striking BL staff, struggling to pay their rent, advised to consider not giving presents this year, and interim CEO, Jeremy Silver, has the nerve to tell them they ‘don’t live in a real world’. Only 17% of staff guaranteed the Living Wage (£14.80 ph) suggests acute familiarity with the ‘real world’.

Sorry for using comics and art to vent and cope with the world changing around me. I will return to drawing whimsical and silly frog wizards and adventures.

Do you think #scicomm is more important than ever these days? I definitely do ... and so do @icy-pete.bsky.social @drjoehanson.bsky.social @ravenscimaven.bsky.social @simonoxfphys.com and many more. Join us TODAY 11am-2pm for a special live @pbsnews.org broadcast + Reddit AMA at the same time! ⬇️

Looking forward to sharing some insights later today. This project has been a pet mission of mine for about a year, largely driven by my uncontrollable (cat-like?) curiosity and need to know what is actually going on... Join if you want to learn about #OpenAccess journals landscape in #Arab world...

It's wild that there appears to be more current concern for the Lost Library of Alexandria than for the British Library. The BL's crisis exemplifies the accelerating destruction--through apathy as much as by design--of human knowledge & learning. I'm not even being dramatic.

More people are dying in Gaza this year that Trump is president than last year when Biden was president yet people are regularly in my comments upset at Kamala Harris who lost the election while acting like Gaza is now a vacation destination under Trump. Like MAGA impervious to facts or rationality

if I see another academic describe LLMs - a tech owned by a small elite of white billionaires, built from extracting data from humans and minerals from the earth, and refined by the labor of underpaid workers in the global south - as an ‘important tool for decolonization’ I may simply just explode

I know there are lots of people at fault here, but the fact that such an obviously unethical article got published is another illustration of how publishers have completely lost control of what they're publishing in the push for APCs.

The calls from America this weekend to "abolish the EU" are for one simple reason: the EU is the only thing that can keep European nation-states from becoming Russian or American vassals.

The fact that four hostile drones tried to hit Zelenskyy’s plane & it’s barely a blip in the news cycle should terrify everyone. We’ve been dragged so deep into the chaos era that an attempted strike on a world leader doesn’t even break through. When this becomes normal, the world is in real danger.

This tech is destructive of human creativity and intellect. It is burning the planet so people can avoid thinking. Administrators who embrace it are hastening their own demise.

When the publisher of a children’s book has to say please don’t use our IP to celebrate war crimes… This administration is such a moral stain.

We can't really say this enough... > Anastasia Berg [at UCL Irvine] said that new research — and what she's hearing directly from colleagues across various industries — shows that employees who heavily rely on AI are losing core skills at a startling rate. www.businessinsider.com/ai-tools-are...

Today's the last day to submit for our end-of-year publication lists. We're soliciting monographs, journal articles, and book chapters by contingent historians with a 2025 pub date! contingentmagazine.org/yearly-pub-l...

the invasion of Afghanistan is among the most horrific recent chapters of the long history of elite impunity in the US. this coda is grim but fitting - the govt practically explicitly affirming that it should only be Afghans who live with the consequences amid fading public memory of the atrocity

As I wrote a while back, AI systems are "digital vultures bloated on stolen books which they churn together and vomit out in imitations of words from actual thinking, feeling brains." 2/3 buttondown.com/surekhadavie...

Oh. But, I guess, yay that UUK finally discovered they had a voice and could actually use it to mention, politely, in passing, the utter destruction of one of the UK's major industries. Decade too late but ho hum.

Israel just struck Beirut’s southern suburbs for the first time in months and first time since last year’s war without a warning. Reports saying it was an airstrike in Haret Hreik. Though such attacks usually are struck by drone

'It is notable that in the last Research Excellence Framework exercise the Department of American Studies at Nottingham was ranked third in the Area Studies unit of assessment and was one of the top-performing units across the whole of the University of Nottingham.' 1/2