Against Publishing: universonline.nl/nieuws/2025/... Preprints are read, shared, and cited, yet still dismissed as incomplete until blessed by a publisher. I argue that the true measure of scholarship lies in open exchange, not in the industry’s gatekeeping of what counts as published.

Every academic career is built on rejection, but we don’t show it. 
CVs list publications, grants & awards, not rejected manuscripts, unfunded proposals, or failures. 
But those invisible rejections shape us more than our successes ever do. 👉 catherineeunicedevries.substack.com/p/fail-bette... 🧵

Increasingly, politics in West Europe is a mirror of East Europe, with a large radical right party against a rag-tag of centrist/liberal, centre-left, green and radical left parties and a rapidly declining centre right. The challenge is to coordinate the progressive opposition to the radical right.

It is my opinion that introducing age verification now is irresponsible, mainly because we have now reached the point where Western governments *are* using "the database state" and exploiting online surveillance to be repressive - just as privacy activists warned for decades. This applies to UK & US

One of those classic tales of the modern economy, a huge company nobody really knows is the middle of a supply chain. At this stage it seems such companies will be surviving Trump's efforts relatively unscathed. www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

"Trump’s push to destroy democracy depends largely on creating a self-fulfilling prophecy...business leaders capitulate to his demands because they expect him to consolidate autocratic power - which, given his unpopularity, he can only do if businesses and other institutions continue to capitulate."

One thing that remains fascinating to me is how much radical Trumpism wants to move down the value chain, instead of upwards to more value-add + complex production and research. Instead, RFK kills the NIH and NSF.

The firing of faculty and university staff and journalists for… reposting news articles about Kirk’s actual statements? And talking about other acts of political violence? … is staggering. Academic freedom and free speech are facing an incredible attack right now.

Grok is being sent to the reeducation camp

The professor has been fired and senior administrators removed from their post. No mention of this in the New York Times, The Free Press, The Atlantic or other outlets who drove the campus speech moral panic.

Literal cancel culture.

all those years of rw commentators complaining about cancellation, and here we are. what they disliked was being challenged or criticized for their views. this, by contrast, is a system where academics are being sanctioned for saying something that disagrees with the president. slow clap

Daniel hits the nail on the head here. Not only are Silver's characteristics not particularly unique to any group on social media, they accurately describe the group that just *won multiple electoral victories in 2024*. MAGA and Trump have done 100% of the things centrists say Democrats shouldn't do

"The point... is that what we are witnessing today is not the failure of international law but rather the failure of international politics." www.theguardian.com/law/2025/jun...

Reports of an attack, allegedly by a drone, on a vessel in the Global Sumud Flotilla (GSF), while anchored outside the port of Sidi Bou Said in Tunisia. The below video shows the moment of the incident. Keep it in mind when you read the next post. www.instagram.com/reel/DOXaR_M...

NFT sort of geniunely were bullied and mocked out of existence because they were fundamentally a status good that’s basically worthless if it’s seen as stupid and stigmatized. People overindexed on that and think they can do the same with AI. You can’t though, because LLMs, etc are actually useful.

"Any time you ask an LLM system to summarize a web page, read an email, process a document or even look at an image there’s a chance that the content you are exposing it to might contain additional instructions which cause it to do something you didn’t intend."

I don’t find this very convincing, either as a unique problem with Bluesky or as an electoral liability for democrats.

Name a better location for this @himself.bsky.social slideshow #SISP

This #Trump conference gives Nintendo Direct vibes

Centralising enforcement at the #EU Commission level strengthens consistency and coordination. Yet it also creates a single point of vulnerability, where regulatory enforcement can be more easily politicised.

"This is how smart people become useful idiots: not through stupidity but through selective attention. They created information ecosystems where campus politics was the main character and everything else was background noise." www.techdirt.com/2025/08/27/w...

So, #Trump just asked the #EU to drop its rules on digital services, or prepare for new tariffs. However, if the EU wanted to capitulate to Trump’s demands, how feasible is it to drop such rules? My opinion: not that easy! (1/) matteonebbiai.substack.com/p/can-the-eu...

“A year ago, the US appeared to have a coherent world view that tied together a particular perspective on AI with a particular view of American power. Now, both the AI story and the power story are crumbling. What next?” open.substack.com/pub/programm...

1. @abenewman.bsky.social and I have a new piece in @wired.com on the enshittification of American power. It repurposes arguments from our book, Underground Empire amzn.to/3PbIyqX , and Cory Doctorow's idea of enshittification to explain how the Trump administration is trying to remake the world.

I wrote today about why we should shudder about ICE and CBP adding 19,000 new agents and officers — because we should terrified of WHO would want to join CBP and ICE amid politicized authoritarian images like this: www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/four-fears...

"...this is not about geopolitics—but just about value for money." open.substack.com/pub/musgrave...

I don’t believe politicians are suicidal, so to speak. If they pass this, either they think/hope they’re somehow insulated, or they think the alternative is worse for their political careers. Neither of those bodes well for democracy.

Can the #EU really enforce — or refuse to enforce — digital rules for geopolitical reasons? matteonebbiai.substack.com/p/the-mirage...

By putting two very loosely connected things in the same paragraph, the NY Times appears to credit a few AI bots and fake accounts with the entire success of the AfD. Gotta stop doing this! It's so dumb.

I mean, the ridiculous bit is how often Stephen Miller and MAGA folks focused on getting universal injunctions against Biden. So I'm assuming this is going to be another one of these "well it only applies during GOP presidency" type SCOTUS rulings.

Another packed #EPSA2025 panel with impressive papers by @hilmal.bsky.social, @canalejoalvaro.bsky.social, Dave Hope, @gaetanoinglese.bsky.social & @matteonebbiai.bsky.social. Great to see so much interest in questions around AI and the knowledge economy! One more to go tomorrow (3pm, room -1.A.03)!

Two pertinent graphs from me tonight... First, U.S. support for bombing Iran is very low — much lower than support was at the time for the American military attacking Afghanistan, Iraq, and ISIS. Link: www.gelliottmorris.com/p/polls-amer...

Some of the arguments being made this week in the Telegraph and London Standard about the authors' preferred ethnic makeup of Britain/London would have been considered dubious, antiquarian, and extremist in the 1990s.

🎉 A great surprise to win the Giandomenico Majone Prize for best paper by a junior academic at the @ecpr.bsky.social Conference on Regulatory Governance! Huge thanks to the @hertieschool.bsky.social for creating such a cosy atmosphere!

I guess the only successful annexation of #Trump was the one with Israel. #Iran

🚨You should read this official State Dept post bc it foreshadows a major fight: Zuckerberg & Musk want 🇪🇺 regulators off their backs. Trump & Vance want to help AfD, Le Pen, and the global populist right. So they are reframing tech regulation as tyranny & censorship. open.substack.com/pub/statedep...

The DOGE mindset, perfectly encapsulated in one tweet. Destroy incredible public assets for a short term sugar high that would not come remotely close to ending the national debt

Labour is already taking notes

New, from me: Quick explainer on why the Supreme Court (likely) decision to overturn Humphrey's Executor and move toward unitary executive theory will undermine any future efforts to rebuild state capacity. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/why-the-su...

This bespoke exception for the Fed is one of the most brazenly made-up things I've ever seen the Supreme Court do (which is saying something). There is no principled basis to distinguish the Fed from other independent agencies. The conservative justices just don't want Trump to crash the market!

There is a false dichotomy drawn between "the ivory tower" and "the real world," and I'm here to report that in a post-industrial society, your real-world economy absolutely hinges on the university. University towns are factory towns. Universities drive economic activity, not the other way around.

Starmer 2025: "Starmer 2020 is squalid"

New post from me about the elections of the last week, where the 'peak populism' hypothesis stands, and what lessons the Labour Party should be drawing. 1/n benansell.substack.com/p/labour-is-...

A Brief History of Men Today Are Too Feminine and Women Too Masculine 🧵

You cannot wipe out 57% of the world’s global cancer research budget and just assume the only loser is going to be the US. www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

just one more racist dog whistle I swear bro, one more crackdown on benefits cmon, cmon man just one more spree of flag shagging, we’re so close to creating an eternally unshakeable electoral coalition bro cmon i swear

Rather than follow the lines of politics, news engagement cuts across them. And importantly it does a lot to divide the voters we (and they) need to solidify and persuade from those who are bought in. This divide has probably always existed, but media trends have likely deepened it. From our study:

1/Just back from 2 weeks in Asia. US engaged in the most far reaching attempt to restructure the global economy in a century and we have hit the omnishambles portion of the program: undermining US economic security and weaken US credibility in the world. fortune.com/article/trum...