Canvas, the Strait of Hormuz for American education

Teaching has ground to a halt at my Uni & many others bc of the Canvas hack. It's making me think about the extent to which pretty much every large institution I can think of is reliant on US companies like Google and Microsoft for their digital infrastructure. I mean, maybe that's... not great?

Just finished this: devastated... I wanted it to go on forever. It's a mystery to me how Sarah Hall isn't constantly talked about as one of Britain's greatest living writers.

'Brooks had been experimenting with an entrepreneurial approach to self-cultivation since at least 2015, when he confessed in a Times op-ed that he treated his courtship with his wife “as if it were a start-up.”' wow, lucky Mrs Brooks 💀 www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

The world of Scruton homage is so unbelievably strange. (Exhibit A in this world is of course Scrutopia, the summer school he founded, which still runs in his honour. Yes that is its actual name)

I mean this is lovely and everything, but if I thought there was a chance that playing music would attract alligators (which is reasonable to suppose given that I live in Australia), I would never play another bar in my life

It's weird how in all the hoopla about the Artemis mission being a unifying moment for mankind, etc etc, people seem to be skating over the fact that the whole point of this mission is to eventually mine the moon 💀 www.theguardian.com/news/ng-inte...

Oh great, science bros are out there proposing to use facial recognition technology to infer people's emotions in real time (can't imagine any problems with this) so that they can recommend 'matching' music (ditto, no notes) 💀 link.springer.com/article/10.1...

I reckon we could already be doing this. Each of us prices our intelligence according to how smart we have shown ourselves to be, and charges by the hour. So like, $500 would get you half an hour with someone like Thomas Nagel, or, three years with Sam Altman

Looking forward to giving this talk today, about Athanasius Kircher's two-volume doorstopper 'Musurgia Universalis' (1650). I had so much fun researching Kircher: one of the strangest blokes ever to write about music (and that's saying something) www.eventbrite.com.au/e/spotlight-...

I always get so sad when I see pictures of the old Penn Station, in NYC. (R: the waiting room.) How they could bring themselves to demolish this so they could construct a seething underground hellhole is just beyond me

Terrible news. His book Values of Art was, and still is, one of my touchstones. He was one of the best in the business.

Good morning to everyone apart from the person that drove past my apartment at 4:30am blasting 'Who Do You Think You Are' by the Spice Girls

TIL that Rick Rubin, record producer for basically every huge act since the 90s, started off as a philosophy major at NYU. I guess some decent alt/ac careers are possible then 🙃 www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/bro...

My department (philosophy, University of Melbourne) is advertising a 4-yr fixed-term lectureship in metaphysics and philosophy of science. Open to people with Australian work rights. Philosophy folk, please feel free to repost etc unimelb.wd105.myworkdayjobs.com/en-GB/UoM_Ex...

MY TICKET SAYS I CAN TAKE THE BUS www.rte.ie/news/courts/...

Re the Andrew Formerly Known as Prince: I'm sure I'm not the first to think of Sue Townsend's 'The Queen and I', in which the royal family have been deposed and are living in a council estate. Hopefully King Chaz is reading this for inspo @backlisted.bsky.social en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Que...

This is a great (open-access) paper, cataloguing the utterly staggering amount of unwaged labour that generative AI -- and recommender systems before them -- rely upon to function. It's not just copyright-holders that gen AI violates, it is literally all of us link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Also, name me one other president who released a spoken word poetry album in his last few weeks in office. I'll wait

What a legend. Tiny Wizard Presidents are clearly the best presidents www.independent.ie/irish-news/m...

4.8/10... oof. Setting aside the verdict (though tbh I agree, it's a disappointing album), it's refreshing to see a thoughtful negative review in a world of 'five stars no notes' bullshit. Far preferable to the 'we only write about it if we like it' policy IMO pitchfork.com/reviews/albu...

Louvre: The thieves were highly organised and professional, we couldn't possibly have detected them, i mean they were basically ninjas Also the Louvre: They used an angle grinder and power tools to bust in the window of the gallery. Also it was broad daylight www.theguardian.com/world/2025/o...

i've got quite a few unsolicited emails lately from strangers claiming to have developed conscious AI. i'm like: 1. 👍? 2. surely if you really had developed conscious AI, there would be far more lucrative things you could be doing than emailing me, a random philosophy lecturer in australia

me, spending like 4 hrs tweaking a paper to fit a journal's idiosyncratic formatting requirements when it'll prob get desk rejected anyway 💃

How rude... (Actually interesting tho. Apparently much of our contemporary hell-related imagery comes originally from 12th c. Irish knight who, upon falling into a drunken stupor after a massive bender in Cork, had a vision of hell that he later related to others) www.rte.ie/brainstorm/2...

All-time GOAT bass baritone Paul Robeson, politely explaining to the HUAC why he refuses to leave America for good. Suspect that many in the US feel like this now

I'm rewatching The Sopranos. Really struck by how you hear Tony breathing through his nose so much. It gives you an immediate, uncomfortable sense of his physicality, & how intimidating he is. They must have had to mic that specially, it wouldn't have come across on boom mics. It's brilliant

Reading Plato's Republic, realising that even Socrates swore on occasion. So, am now trying to figure out appropriate circumstances to say things like 'By the dog of Egypt' and 'By the goose'

Oscar Wilde knew what he was talking about, when it came to pleasure (from 'The Picture of Dorian Grey')

Folks, take approx 30 seconds to fill this in. The Irish Basic Income for the Arts scheme is a trailblazing initiative that might well die a death if we don't come out in support of it.

Tell me you've just started an Iris Murdoch novel without telling me you've just started an Iris Murdoch novel @backlisted.bsky.social

Useful article which tells you (among other things) how to transfer your playlists from Spotify. www.theguardian.com/music/2025/j...

I reckon army recruitment would be a lot easier if they still allowed soldiers to dress like Maurice Ravel did, when he was in the French army in 1916

Just met a deadline and it feels GOOD. I love writing in the same way that I love running: it feels really great when you stop

Panel proposal: 'What is it like to be a bat on-stage with Ozzy Osbourne?' RIP to the Prince of Darkness www.theguardian.com/music/2025/j...

V satisfying when composers indicate the time signature like this. IT'S IN 4 YOU IDIOTS

Someone thinking stuff through and expressing themselves honestly if clumsily is so much more useful, worthwhile and insightful than fluent banalities from the digital void.

Reading (and v much enjoying) @ksetiya.bsky.social's Midlife. I never knew that JS Mill's wife Harriet was so centrally involved in his intellectual life, and that they had such a wonderful marriage

Reading Michael Tanner on sentimentality and art, and having a great old time. Here he is on Winterreise, and on the dubious nature of the poems that Schubert sets, which he refers to as 'Müller's indistinguishable dollops of goo' #philsky

I was interviewed by staff at my university about my research, and what brought me to philosophy in the first place. Fun! blogs.unimelb.edu.au/shaps-resear...

V interesting piece about the 'crusader aesthetic' adopted by the far right in the last ten years: the medieval religious symbols used, the overall attitude expressed, and what Hegseth in particular is saying through his tattoos. newlinesmag.com/essays/pete-...

'Infinite Reality said it would create virtual 3D spaces that will allow fans to attend concerts' I'm all for creating platforms that help artists. but hollowing out the live musical experience even more than it is currently is? just... please don't www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

First Phil Mind lecture today. Plan is to get the students thinking about how *weird* the human mind is, and how many mental capacities there are. We'll discuss (inter alia) this passage from Joan Didion, about the urge to write stuff down, and the inevitable drift toward self-obsession

Enjoying imagining how Sam Altman is feeling this week. He's like, 'Ohh, so when other people use your stuff and make bank off it, and don't pay you or acknowledge you, and also undermine your ability to make profit yourself, it feels... bad??' gizmodo.com/openai-claim...

Thinking about doing a unit on personal identity for my Phil Mind class this semester. I usually set one paper over two lectures, so it has to be meaty enough to warrant that while also being fun for undergrads. Parfit's 'Personal Identity' an obvious thought, but any other suggestions?

Gutted to have finished this. Sentences so perfect I almost wept for envy at not having written them myself. (JB sometimes lets prose get in the way of action, but not here.) Told from POV of art historian / double agent based partly on Louis MacNeice. I'd love to see @backlisted.bsky.social do this

Baffled by this image on a Melbourne medical surgery's website. The salad bowl appears to be... levitating? Odd for them to use AI for this, given that the internet already abounds with 'women laughing alone with salad' pics

My process for writing papers: 1. Make a distinction 2. Spend several days making like 11 sub-distinctions in carefully crafted prose 3. Realise that I'm circling a drain 4. Cut it all out and paste into a doc called 'cut out bits', so I can put it back in later 5. Never open 'cut out bits' again

I'm polling philosophy people on Twitter (no poll function here) re how many papers they're actively working on at any one time (i.e. working toward an outline, drafting, editing). 1/3 of respondents are saying '4 or more'. That seems nuts to me... what do people on here think? #philsky

my book is out tomorrow! here's an interview with rolling stone about it www.rollingstone.com/music/music-...