I'm attending a digital humanities event in Montreal. There was a keynote on AI and something about the talk made me wonder if it had been written by Claude. I said as much in the Q&A. As I posed the question, the speaker shifted, looking slightly uncomfortable. What he said next shocked the room +

At the end of the term I asked my college creative wriing students to submit anonymous thoughts on AI. No real surprises: Mood ranges from resignation to despair, capitulation from embittered erosion of standards to total, feelings of betrayal from deep to furious. 1/

I just learned that the term "carbon footprint" was developed by BP to offload responsibility for climate change onto individuals. Something like that's happening in higher ed with AI. Institutions capitulate or dodge; students are submitting; & they believe it's their individual failing. 7/

No, it's because only 3.1 percent of the Dutch population live in poverty as opposed to 20 percent of the British population. The Guardian really needs to stop publishing irresponsible lifestyle crap as news. (The Avondvierdaagse is a nice tradition though.) www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

Time for me to repeat one of my ‘sayings’. If you try to solve a problem by passing a law, but people don’t obey the law, you now have two problems where you used to have one.

Don’t ban kids using YouTube. Make YouTube behave like a broadcaster. Pay creators. Reinvest in the creative industries. Pay fair tax back into creators’ economies. Follow guidelines on fair usage and copyright. Play fair. It’s bigger than TV now. Make it behave like TV.

As long as the government remains on the fascist enabling X nobody can take anything they say seriously with regards to social media and safety

Again asking why it's OK for Uncle Graham to doom scroll right wing racist anti-trans hate speech algorithmic propaganda in to the wee hours but young people have to have their entire social and study support network cut off at the knees.

One of my favourite bits of Peter Alliss golf commentary - aside from the time he said "bollocks" live on air of course - was during a tournament in St Andrews, at dusk, when the camera zoomed in on some bats, & he announced, "Ah, Christopher Lee & his friends have had enough & are heading home."

I do think, unintentionally, this exchange does probably sum up the government quite well.

Just 'concerned citizens' looting an African Shop in Shankill Rd, Belfast Then burning it down This is down to Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson fanning the flames of racism

So glad that Luqman Saeed - an academic at Ulster University - has written this piece about the Belfast riots. I hope I could write this clearly and perceptively were I under similar pressure right now. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/ju...

There are, in my view, 25 things everyone needs to understand in light of recent events: 1) Those out in our communities last night were not protestors, but organised far right extremists. 2) Their actions align with fascist ideologies. 3) So yes: these are fascist practices on our streets. 🧵

On a sunny Platform 1, beneath a broad sign reading MEDDLEGARTH, something rustles in the flower baskets.

It seems more and more as if every UK politician now believes that their task is to bravely and generously - and sympathetically! - take on the job of governing a country filled almost entirely with violent racists forever on the verge of mayhem, and to govern them by the racists’ own principles.

Going to just pick one part here to take up which is the Rousseauian notion that agriculture leads to land ownership which leads to warfare. If that were true, we'd expect non-agricultural societies (hunter gatherers especially) to be relatively peaceful. Instead, they're hyper-militarized. 1/

One of the obvious problems with a under-16 social media ban is that it won't work. (60%+ of Australian under-16s are still using these platforms). But it will make people feel like something has been done so they won't tackle the content, which is the real issue.

I think every politician who proposes to ban anything on the internet for teens should be required to propose, as an alternate, a free and accessible and all weather space for teens to hang out in their own hometown

The 2024 general election was a triumph for Ed Davey. Since then, however, there has been growing restlessness among Lib Dems MPs over what they see as a failure to capitalise on that momentum Lib Dem MP Tom Gordon told PolHome that the party has been “very cautious" so far in this parliament

Very striking indeed to come across this introduction to an academic book about the use of Classics in the era of Fascism and Nazism today. It sounds like the author is drawing a parallel with Trumpian politics, doesn't it? But actually it was written in 2003 in the Bush era.

Just circling back to this odious individual who was at the racist riots yesterday. Someone who for years after she called for all trans men to be sterilised, as well as reams of other violent repulsive transphobia was praised and fawned over by JK Rowling, the NS and other 'centre left feminists'

This framing is absurd. Look at the data. There is clear evidence of police bias on the basis of ethnicity, it isn't direct at white people. Can journalists please stop trying to convert every half-baked utterance of the far-right, whether on Twitter or the House of commons into a 'debate'.

This came across my IG feed and it's too good to not share here

Red Wall discourse has so clouded Labour’s mind that they’re sleepwalking into doing to university towns what Thatcher did to mining towns

There’s an unfortunate thing creeping in now which is because it’s being treated like it’s decisions are supreme that’s going to become a legal convention

Today Microsoft moved all its GitHub copilot subscribers to token-based billing. If you want to see what happens when people have to pay the actual costs of AI, the day is finally here. It's obvious that every customer sees the deep, meaningful value and isn't angry at all.

Demographic change is part of life, generations change, communities change, it is healthy, it is normal. Wanting things to stay the same or go back to another time is the kind of magical thinking that leads to deep unhappiness and misanthropy.

"Biological sex" is just a euphemism for the sex binary, which is a social construct. Those who use a dialectic framed around the term "biological sex" are using it to enforce an ad naturam argument around the gender binary. Otherwise, they would simply use the term "sex."

Here's the former EHRC commissioner gleefully pondering whether trans people should have any form of legal protection. BTW, "biological sex" is as real as "biological race." It means whatever TERF/MAGA ideology says it does, at any given time, for any given case.

Rewatching all of Poirot and a new reaction gif just dropped

Fascism can’t succeed without centrism, because far fewer people will admit to being a fascist than will endorse its policies — especially when they’re allowed to do so with the barest minimum necessary plausible deniability.

"First past the post brings stability" "Coalitions bring chaos" Tell that to the 6 Prime Ministers we have had in 10 years Meanwhile the last government that lasted 5 years without changing leader was a coalition The arguments against proportional systems do not stack up

The EHRC’S new code has been published. We’ll have a detailed analysis out shortly. The guidance has been toned down from the previous draft – but it still treats trans people like they’re a third sex. This pushes trans people out of public life and violates their human rights.

Tactical voting is now a growing feature of the landscape, and so as well as our normal voting intention we track negative voting intention (who would Britons vote AGAINST): 🌹Lab 35% (+1) ➡️ Ref 32% (-6) 🌏 Green 11% (+4) 🌳 Con 7% (-) 🐦‍ LD 5% (+2) changes w/ Mar 2025

This. God, this. It is such a manufactured panic and it started the moment they lost the fight over gay marriage. Support trans rights because it’s the right thing to do and also because this is all just a fascist push

OK. Stop. Read this. What's detailed here is ILLEGAL, because it's wickedly cruel abuse. ILLEGAL CHILD CRUELTY. For profit, by "investors". Paid for by PUBLIC funds, because, well, why, WHY? Filthy country.

We've had our first request! If you're the right expert to talk about Alcibiades for an hour or so, let me know!

Absolutely infuriating that the University of Leeds should be having to send this sort of message out to its staff! According to the rest of the item, we should expect delays in ordering new laptops, especially anything high-performance, and costs are rising all the time.

The UK government: We're with Ukraine for as long as it takes. The "it" in this sentence apparently being "realising we're actually more worried about people having their holidays cancelled".

Michael Whitby. Single-handedly channeling the rage every editor of a collective volume has ever felt throughout generations.

Though smaller than last year, the Unite the Kingdom march over the weekend was still sickening. The resurgence of out-and-out racism in the UK, from demands for remigration of British Asians to Antisemitic slurs on placards at both demonstrations, demands we meet this moment.

This is the step many miss in this debate. It doesn't have to be no-free-speech vs anything-goes. There are many activities that we regulate more strictly when commercial. Rules are mostly different between doing-X and doing-X-for-money. Remove financial incentives and grifters will soon peel away.

Labour folks: You've got to stand aside for us or you might get RefUK Every other Party: yeah but we did that before once, and you broke the promise you made to us

Recently, I gave a lightning talk about how my work on Augustus' bimillennium has drawn on Brazilian Studies. I've now written it up as a short blog post outlining the project as a whole, and how I've worked as a subject outsider across c. 40 different countries. brazil.leeds.ac.uk/augustus-in-...

Job Opportunity! Lecturer in Global Medieval History University of Leeds jobs.leeds.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx...

I see Simon Heffer, in Michael Gove's Spectator, is once again repeating his lie that Enoch Powell's Rivers of Blood speech wasn't about race.. I debated Heffer recently (at the Oxford Litfest) - here's what I said. archive.ph/bqKZF

The world’s biggest bike parking in Utrecht didn’t happen overnight. And it didn’t fall out of the sky. It’s the product of decades of effective urban and transport planning. Long-term political decisions. Sustained public investment. Great cycling cities aren’t miracles. They are policy outcomes.

The local elections in one chart. Labour has been squeezed between the Greens in young wards and Reform in older working-class wards www.economist.com/britain/2026...