And we now have a full roster of speakers confirmed, including Emmie-Rose Price-Goodfellow of You're Dead To Me, Kate Wiles of @historytoday.com, @estelleprnq.bsky.social on social media and @drsurekhadavies.bsky.social on building a freelance career.

Just booked my travel to COMFAS in Lisbon! That will be an intense week as Mon-Tues is my nostalgia conference and then Thurs-Sat is COMFAS. But am v excited to visit a new city & take some of my new BA-funded research for a spin!!

I loved the Made in the Middle exhibition, currently at mac Birmingham. 37 artists creating beautiful things with exceptional technical skills in different media. The pictured vases look like delicate hand-carved clay, but are 3D printed - by www.keeleytraae.com. Full info at craftspace.co.uk/mitm/

the girl guides in the UK just kicked out all their trans members specifically bc they were threatened with a lawsuit from a rowling-funded group

Job: Modern British History and Public History at York. Great opportunity to work with amazing people and live in a beautiful city!

Feeling quite sorry for myself as the chest infection I was finally almost over has been followed by a stomach bug. I’ve been rereading Wuthering Heights recently & lying sick in bed hearing hail strike my window makes me feel positively Cathyish.

Job opportunity with manuscripts and early printed books! Librarian at Lincoln Cathedral – Cathedral Library £43,722 - Full time applicaiton DL: 14 April 2026 www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DQX901/l...

Aaaand it's sold out! See you folks in a couple of weeks!

Amazingly, I manage to wear dresses while baking while maintaining a professional career having earned three degrees! Probably because all the feminism gives me crucial energy

Received this email from kid's school today: "We have been notified by the UK Health Security Agency of a small number of confirmed measles cases". GREAT. Love to know a disease that was nearly eliminated is now circulating in our community around innocent children. Thanks anti-vaxxers.

Once again reminding all academics in the UK that they really, really, really, really should sign up to @alcs.co.uk Lifetime membership is £36 and they take it out of the money they collect for you so it really is "free money". I'm getting a little over £100 *every year*. Do it!

Only 2 places left! www.lifelong-learning.ox.ac.uk/courses/medi...

I am so SO sick of coughing! The antibiotics have helped somewhat and I don’t feel unwell overall, but the cough is still quite debilitating. All this money being poured into AI to outsource our brains instead of giving us sexy robot bodies, sheesh

My Medieval Chivalry course has only 4 places (out of 25, I believe) left! :) www.lifelong-learning.ox.ac.uk/courses/medi... You get a lot for your money - approx 10 hrs of recorded content, access to paywalled journal articles, 10 hrs of live class & forum discussions too.

also, discourses of despair cause paralysis, so they serve a far right agenda - don't do it!

Everyone who applied to this has been contacted (if you haven’t been let me know!). Due to demand we now have 2 in person days and one online day (a week later). Amazing! Shaping up to be a very rich event. And it looks like i have enough money in the budget for CAKE 🍰!

I’m grateful I have 2 jobs (for one thing, it pays my bills!!) but sometimes the mental load of keeping track of everything I have to do at 2 institutions can feel a bit much. I am also recovering from a chest infection, but I have quite a few hard deadlines approaching.

These people also buy one coffee in two hours... Cafes are not offices! If you want this kind of space outside of an office, get a workspace subscription where you can have a bougie atmosphere but not annoy everyone.

Wes Streeting is planning a Cass review for neurodivergency. We are the latest group targeted for public punishment in Labour's vain quest for rightwing support. Lives will be ruined and lives will be lost if they get their way. Please sign this petition. petition.parliament.uk/petitions/75...

My favourite outputs so far this year are paintings and bakes. Sadly not REFable.

Happy Mother’s Day from Robert Grosseteste (d.1253)!!

I am genuinely gutted about Buffy reboot being cancelled! I was fully prepared for it not to be great, but I just wanted a little bit of my adolescence back. Buffy is canonically only 1-2 years older than me and it was MY SHOW in a way tv can only be when you’re that age. 😢

The corners that Ai wants us to cut are what make scholarship good!!

he's describing what would be a hackneyed YA dystopia scenario if you wrote it as fiction "imagine a world where in order to have a thought, you had to top off your Thinker account, and most people can't afford to so they work in companies that pay for their Thinker meter, and if they're fired..."

Search-and-rescue crews were “flying blind” trying to rescue survivors from deadly tornadoes that hit the Midwest last week. Why? Because Kristi Noem hadn't approved FEMA’s $200,000 contract with a tornado-tracking tool. But she had time to spend $220 million on anti-immigrant ads. Priorities.

I feel like it should be more widely unpopular that in the past year we’ve witnessed the creation of an American Stasi required to meet arrest quotas who utilize an AI technology created by a company run by a sweaty raisin of a billionaire who thinks Greta Thunberg is the antichrist.

Just finished Bridgerton season 4 and it was my favourite so far! Of course a lot of it is silly, but there was some really funny and really moving stuff. Two characters dealing with widowhood really spoke to me too! Spoilers in next messages . . .

The whole "AI" industry is just based on the hope that they can deskill people fast enough that they'll have to rent back cognitive support systems. Forever. It's like Uber. Just that they don't try to break existing transportation infrastructures but your brain.

Has anyone here ever had viral bronchitis without a cold first? As I am pretty sure this is what I have. I know it's possible, but it's never happened to me before! I have been coughing for five days now like it's going out of style. Very tiresome (and tiring!!).

Assisted dying is a very complex issue & I have some complicated feelings about it myself - but I want to pick up on a couple of the points raised in this review, which are presented as things all right-thinking people should be worried about.

Cannot believe TEACHERS are being denied access to the TEACHERS Pension Scheme!!

Wow, the metrification and KPI-chasing of UK universities reaches a new low. SHU quite clearly only cares about the REF, not their students and teaching. This is appalling.

Once again appalled that Oxbridge colleges keep getting away with advertising jobs like this that are paid in this way - www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DQU189/s... This one only gives you 6 free lunches a term too (college lunch is a big part of Oxford life so it shuts you out of a lot)! Sheesh

Find it deeply odd that there are a couple of schemes in which I have aged OUT of being considered mid-career in my early 40s (because it's based on time post-PhD). Given how long it takes to get an academic career up & running & how late we retire, mid-career should be... the bulk of your career.

Am working on the Nostalgia and Radical Politics conference acceptance list - I have had 3x more abstracts than I can fit, so now I am adding an online day too! (If you applied, you should have had an email about this - if you didn't please let me know.) That way I can reduce my rejection list...

Wait some two fuckwit DOGE bros with no background in the humanities just fed a bunch of words like "equality" and "tribal" into ChatGPT, based on their fuckwit tech bro prejudices and MAGA fantasies, and used the results to cancel a whole boatload NEH grants-- did I get that right

One thing I’ve done for myself this year is sign up to a watercolours class. As you know I dabble in wc, but I’ve never had an actual class & it’s getting me to try some things outside my comfort zone! Quite pleased with this.

I enjoy @theguardian.com Blind Date, but why do they keep setting up people in their 20s?! These are not the people who need the intervention of the media to find love.

New The poisoning of the wells Why discrediting election results without waiting for due process is unhealthy for a democracy This week's Weekly Constitutional by me at @prospectmagazine.co.uk

the amount of Islamophobic content they've managed to generate out of a historically left-wing constituency voting for a left-wing MP is astonishing

Just had some very good tech help from Vodafone so I offered to leave the guy good feedback and he seemed genuinely surprised and pleased. Come on, people, be nicer to customer service!!

So nice to chat to @amyfuller.bsky.social today (with @rebeccarideal.bsky.social on tech duty!) for her upcoming podcast series!

Thiiiiiis

I have seen a lot of cursed stuff in my time in academia but this is among the *most* cursed. Grammarly is generating miniature LLMs based on academic work so that users can have their writing ‘reviewed’ by experts like David Abulafia, who died less than two months ago.

Another thing to warn students (and colleagues tbh) about!!

so, torture. they’re torturing them as federal policy. entirely predictable, but that doesn’t make it any less evil

America First was always about bigoted and belligerent unilateralism. Pacifism never had anything to do with it, so could journalists please stop repeating Trump’s framing as if it was real? www.theatlantic.com/national-sec...

Got a (vaguely spammy) email addressed to "Dear respectable Prof Dr Rachel Moss", which has made me smile today! I think I would prefer "resplendent" to "respectable", plz make a note.

Ovarian cancer is a scary one because all these symptoms are easily attributed to other things, especially in women my age-ish. It can go undetected for so long. But if you're persistently dealing with these symptoms, do speak to your GP!

This is one of the most frustrating things about taking a terf stance (not merely a transphobic one): the myopic inability to recognise that bodily autonomy and legal protection benefits EVERYONE and conversely, reducing those for 1 group also impacts on ones you personally care about