Tony Harrison RIP I taught Long Distance, his beautiful & honest poem about bereavement to my students for decades. Eventually, it provided consolation to me as well.

Culture change!

I adapt a method from @tedunderwood.me, & “The Evolution of Popular Music” (Mauch et al), to measure "novelty" over time. I use it to pinpoint when a word's frequent contexts significantly pivot away from past ones. "Station", e.g., pivots sharply in 1850s from a word for class, to a train station.

The history of words: a methodological gambit.

La Noire de... at 60 📽️ Join us from 12-14 November for a symposium & film screening to celebrate Ousmane Sembène’s La Noire de…/Black Girl (1966), the first feature-length film made by a Black African director, which won the Prix Jean Vigo at Cannes https://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/47520/

Important new #OpenAccess article on how slavery in Britain was ended, and who ended it. Taken Not Given: The End of Slavery in Britain by Simon Newman www.cambridge.org/core/journal... #History #EnslavedHistory 🗃️

Oh it's personal: These are the top viral Russian fake news stories about European politicians

Another big move in Trump terror memo that must be explicitly named: expanding from “antifa” to “anti-fascist,” then naming state monopoly on violence—that’s the wonk term for its armed forces—as immune from charges of fascism. To call a cop a fascist, this says, is itself a crime.

We've all had this happen at work - you send someone additional internal notes about a thing along with what they need to tell the client, and the idiot copies the whole lot in to the email. Haven't we?

On this point, I really valued Time’s Monster by Priya Satia. History as a mode of ethics is the kind of history I want to practice 🙂. www.penguin.com.au/books/times-...

I wrote a book review on the influence of Russian cosmism on Silicon Valley’s transhumanism. One way to better understand where some of their crazy ideas come from. www.sav.sk/journals/upl...

@alice10orlandod46.bsky.social Are you Alice or Megan?

Trying to take these digital humanities more seriously, just had a go at a bar chart... @davidgunkel.bsky.social @coeckelbergh.bsky.social @digitaldang.bsky.social

Rechtsaußenparteien sind nicht Parteien 'des kleinen Mannes' und ihre Politik ist nicht im Sinne der Arbeiterschaft, wie unsere ETUI-Studie vor einem Jahr gezeigt hat: www.etui.org/publications...

Do men see gender parity in representation as detrimental to their interests? What about when women’s representation exceeds parity? And how do such shifts affect men’s fairness perceptions? I address these questions in my article, now published in PRQ. 1/9 
doi.org/10.1177/1065...

If one's place in society seems to be under threat, this enables reactionary thinking and fear of those who didn't belong to one's past, possibly idealised, world? Even legitimate concerns are vulnerable to being translated into increasingly inappropriate and imaginary ones.

Now out in @cpsjournal.bsky.social. In our new article, @denis-cohen.bsky.social @thmskrr.bsky.social and I show that where local rent prices increase more, residents with lower incomes become more likely to support the radical right AfD. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Stephen Mullen, a highly regarded historian specialising in Scotland's links with Atlantic slavery, objects to a right wing scholar's flagrant misrepresentation of his own work and that of Glasgow's Kelvingrove Museum's curators in @thetimes.com alanlester.co.uk/blog/falsify...

Population growth also means it's as illegal for as many people as 25 years ago. Progress is uneven and unreliable.

We argue that moral expressions—that signal one’s sense of right and wrong—are highly sensitive to social norms. These norms can amplify moral expressions (eg social media) or restrain them (eg work settings) See our new paper on How Social Influence Shapes Moral Expression: osf.io/preprints/ps...

Yes! I will have a read... but while I'm on my shameless streak, here is an excellent ARTE documentary with me talking about this very topic (also: cameo from a cat called Chouquette, which, coincidentally, is the name of my other cat!). @valentinpetit.bsky.social www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIqY...

Extremely useful video presentation on how phone farming works and the multiple directions it's been going in here: bsky.app/profile/digi... Well worth a few minutes to watch!

Great paper! Two quick thoughts. a) Self-report correlations may not be the best criteria bc they underestimate scales'/items' correlations (doi.org/10.1016/j.jr...). I wonder why the embeddings-based correlations seem even smaller. b) Fig 5 b suggests the optimal number of constructs is well > 100?

How can we reduce conceptual clutter in the psychological sciences? @ruimata.bsky.social and I propose a solution based on a fine-tuned 🤖 LLM (bit.ly/mpnet-pers) and test it for 🎭 personality psychology. The paper is finally out in @natrevpsych.bsky.social: go.nature.com/4bEaaja

Next up, @dirkwulff.bsky.social talks about conceptual clutter and jingle & jangle in psych #DPPD25

Farage presents a curious paradox to the LibDems Firstly, LibDems look like being major tactical beneficiaries of the Tory/Reform shift within the right: one early impact of a Tory-Reform swing is to make almost every one of the LibDem 72 seats safer + put their first dozen targets within reach.

NEW: Here's our report on the "SIM farm" the Secret Service discovered, which hopefully helps better explain what the hell is up with all this. @agreenberg.bsky.social, @lhn.bsky.social, & @mattburgess1.bsky.social report: www.wired.com/story/sim-fa...

It's why the idea of something akin to AI has followed us since the first human remarked on their own shadow.

useful stuff but also give me this novel: “Kudzu plot Plot which weaves and curls and writhes in weedy organic profusion, smothering everything in its path”

‘Kafkaesque’: teacher in Birmingham fights to clear his name after identity fraud. Michael Bene is repaying £763 ‘advance’ despite evidence he did not attend face-to-face verification interview. www.theguardian.com/money/2025/s...

What I learned from my graduate daughter’s job search is that kids now make hundreds of applications and employers automate the first few rounds of selection in response

British Future Director @sundersays.bsky.social is speaking alongside Lisa Smart MP and Tim Farron MP today (Mon 22nd) 13:00 at the Safe Routes Coalition event ‘Safe routes at risk: defending compassion for refugees’. Bournemouth International Centre, Meyrick Suite.

Elon Musk’s speech to far-right rally should have us all thinking about the power social media companies hold over our democracies. The power of social media companies lies in your data. theconversation.com/elon-musks-s...

Small boats: TV coverage - day after day after day after day.... PPE scandal: TV coverage - let's stick this powerful, enraging documentary on at quarter past ten on a Sunday night.

To place myself in a lineage here—rather than risk being mythologised by others—for me, the Moirai are the foil to Latour’s Gaia. This is the book I want to write forward. www.amazon.com.au/Facing-Gaia-...

"Media Studies 77" by Rodney Graham

Should pubs be nationalised? www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... They often are valued community assets.

I was going to add Le Guin b/c "The way one does research into nonexistent history is to tell the story and find out what happened. I believe this isn't very different from what historians of the so-called real world do. You look at what happens and try to see why it happens... 1/2

@bim01.bsky.social Who is Bim?

@whysharksmatter.bsky.social 🙌we are so proud to see your ICB paper featured on @oxfordacademic.bsky.social ‘s bsky👏👏👏👏

I'm confident that all my followers knew this was the endgame, because that's always the endgame.

According to Facebook: "Brocky & Twiggy were the dogs names I think, photo taken on the Woodford River? He was a very gentle man."

@breannehayes.bsky.social Not Kaiya then? Where do all these accounts like yours come from? What's the point?

I was mesmerized by the idea that something static can convey not only motion but also temporality, and I decided to test it empirically. It wasn’t an easy task, as the way our data was organized didn’t make it straightforward. But now, here is our paper! ♥️ www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...

In the US, PM₂.₅ from wildfire smoke already kills about the same number of people as guns and cars (~40k each), but this will increase significantly with climate change. 😐

Revealed: ‘Corporate capture’ of UN aviation body by industry - Industry delegates outnumbered climate experts by 14 to one at recent ICAO meeting, @influencemap.bsky.social thinktank says #climatecrisis Story by me www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Network representations reveal structured uncertainty in music arxiv.org/abs/2509.14053

@influencemap.bsky.social analysis of the International Civil Aviation Organization’s climate negotiations reveals insufficient transparency, and the development of policies disproportionately reflecting industry interests, a clear case of corporate "policy capture". influencemap.org/report/ICAO-...

The third stack is here. A path for ai that isn’t the stale U.S.–China binary, but something assembled, sovereign, and stubbornly local. My essay in Noema: www.noemamag.com/a-third-path...