Adam Tickell, Vice Chancellor at the University of Birmingham (previously Sussex VC) supports concentrating research in 20-30 universities, the argument too of Policy Exchange's Tarnished Towers report. An unevidenced, unmodelled ideological argument that's perniciously pervasive. Contest it. 2/2

The most letter to the LRB letter to the LRB that I have ever read.

Very excited at what just dropped through the letter box! It's the @vpfa.bsky.social special issue of Archiv (including a contribution from yours truly).

"AI" literally falsifying the historical record. On an industrial scale.

Well this really didn't take long did it. I also feel like the headline could be clear this is not a run-of-the-mill misdemeanor, this is someone promoting Hitler's Nazi party in 2026. BBC News - Sheffield Reform UK councillor 'brought party into disrepute' - BBC News www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Good luck with AI without humanities, UK.

Benjamin wrote his "Theses on the Philosophy of History" in 1940, shortly before he died by suicide escaping the Nazis. Imagine, now, Hannah Arendt reading this aloud to fellow refugees fleeing the Third Reich on the ship that was smuggling them to the U.S.

Excellent news for the field www.ucl.ac.uk/social-histo...

One of the more important tables imo. Pleased to see BCU moving in the right direction on this table - up to 7th place this year.

I hope UCU can successfully fight this! As an English student at Leicester I benefitted from both modern languages and film studies modules and had friends in both degree programmes. Arts & Hum was such a vibrant community when I was there and these are valuable subjects worth fighting for!

It's hard to do satire of a field that is continually self-satiring, but this is a valiant attempt: puregenius.education

Well, this is bad.

There's a bunch of Chevening Scholars in my Masters classes and they massively enrich it. Impressive people and also so obviously wedded to going back and improving their own countries.

Even as a cynical scholar of rape culture, I'm shocked that this isn't the headline story on domestic politics everywhere right now. It's just an unfathomable abuse of power, in clear violation of the law.

“In 2024 the UK’s creative industries contributed £145.8 billion to the economy while the entire AI sector contributed £11.8 billion.” www.thetimes.com/article/8561...

I still find it astonishing that, during Covid, the first response of so many people connected to the Conservative party was that it presented an opportunity to loot the country undercover of a national emergency. Unforgivable wartime profiteering. www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m...

Join us for a mid-week, mid-afternoon writing retreat and beat that afternoon slump! As usual, this event is free for VPFA members, but we have now opened this up to non-members for a small fee of £5 (£6.13 inc. Eventbrite fee). Sign up is available here: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/1984543534...

Coen brothers' Pickwick Papers.

CALL FOR PITCHES @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social and I are at work on a new version of Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century aimed at a more general audience. We’re looking for new contributions: your model close readings of texts, canonical and not, from literary studies and not. Details below!

This house thinks this is the best party political broadcast we've ever seen.

(cartoon Mike Luckovich) #politics #ice

The video in the thread redacts the images, mercifully. But you can see from the prompts what is happening. This is obscene, vicious and intolerable. X and Grok should be shut down until this grotesque harassment can be stopped. Those responsible should face the full force of the law.

Happy New Year, everyone! This is a @theguardian.com books cartoon from a few years ago.

Everyone has their blind spots etc, but Hobsbawm is a great historian - accessible, interesting, provocative - for undergrads and general readers so I'd be surprised if he wasn't still on many undergrad reading lists (he's on mine!).

Out of curiosity, I just ran a few paragraphs from The Butchering Art through an AI checker and it got flagged: 88% AI. This book was released in 2017, and AI machines were subsequently trained off it. How many writers are getting flagged for AI because of the literal theft of their work(s)? Insane.

Disco Elysium being free on the Epic Games Store is truly a Christmas miracle. This is such a singular and superb video game. store.epicgames.com/en-US/p/disc...

December 25th. The day the Fellowship departs Rivendell to destroy the One Ring. Whatever you celebrate, may you have the courage to take the first steps to defy and endure against the dark, and rekindle light into the world.

Go check out Bob for Wired!

We are delighted to be co-sponsoring this event alongside @ihr.bsky.social and @royalhistsoc.org. Details and sign-up information is below!

Its all over Threads www.threads.com/@permanent_o...

Amazing 😳 digital archaeology How AI’s annoying blandness “accidentally replicated the linguistic ghost of the British Empire”

💪🏽💪🏽

Happy 100th birthday Dick Van Dyke!

The world's richest 0.001% now control 3x as much wealth as the entire bottom half of humanity combined. 56,000 wealthy individuals have more than roughly 4 billion people. Read that back.

Excellent advice. Get away from the desk, go for a walk. Don’t listen to a podcast, just walk. That’s when the best thinking happens.

Love it 🙌

As a chess fan this is a marvelous read. I had no idea Marx played chess, though I'm not hugely surprised.

“One person is an autocratic president of the university for decades” certainly wasn’t a flawless system but it’s clear that “admins hop from job to job scaling the career ladder by filling their CV with ‘accomplishments’ that are expensive burdens to the schools they leave behind” is even worse.

So kid, in your heart you want to study humanities but you worry about your job prospects? Let’s play a game. On the latest data, who is more likely to be unemployed after 15 months after graduation. The English Lit grad or the Maths grad? WRONG!

“Scholarly effort is in decline everywhere as never before. Indeed, cleverness is shunned at home and abroad. What does reading offer to pupils except tears?” this guy has his finger on the pulse amirite www.history-uk.ac.uk/history-in-p... 🗃️

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What do UK graduates do? Lots of information in this annual report. A reminder that Humanities graduates are quite employable. Compare unemployment rates for Biology (8.4%), Chemistry (5.9%) and Physics (8.0%) with English literature (6.4%), History (7.6%) and Languages (7.6%) for example.

A huge figure in Dickens Studies, his contribution to the field over the last half century is unsurpassed. @dickensfellowhq.bsky.social has lost a champion.

A walk through the stone defences of Mither Tap, Bennachie in Aberdeenshire for #HillfortsWednesday I believe occupied in the early Middle Ages, don’t know how far it goes back? Whenever it was, I hope it was less windy than now.

This is one of the worst, most horrifying exposures we have ever seen. It is hard to overstate how bad the things that people are using tools like for are, and it's insane to pretend like these tools are anything other than nonconsensual porn machines www.404media.co/ai-porn-secr...

Well it certainly doesnt help if you start your focus on things that bring people joy instead of decarbonising the energy grid, yes.

For anyone who is like “the creature is also named Frankenstein”; Mary Shelley went to see a play version of Frankenstein and was tickled that they listed the creature as “———“ in the dramatis personae: “this nameless mode of naming the unnameable is rather good” www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3...