he would have killed it in an 80s ski gear ad

Nothing I love more than a scathing, borderline-petty academic book review. Truly the best tradition in the genre.

luigi goes to switzerland 🇨🇭

The name of the publisher of the @nytimes.com appears in the Epstein data base 72 times.

The emerging narrative from the people who worked for Biden seems to be "we debased ourselves repeatedly and violated our own laws for Israel and Israel won't even say thank you".

With the contract now signed, I’m pleased to say that I’ll be publishing my second book, *Peasant Modernism: Marx, Culture, and the Future of Eating Well*, with Brill in the @histmat.bsky.social Book Series. It should be out by early 2028 at the latest.

this whole narrative is stupid anyway. where’s the panic over european reliance on “asian” food products, pharmaceuticals, agro chemicals, textiles/clothing, etc.? yellow peril 2.0 in service of western oil and gas companies. yuck.

CFP: Ecological, Territorial and Urban Dignity (CEDOUA Journal - University of Coimbra, Portugal) networks.h-net.org/group/announ...

i’m in the wrong field

Mapping food apartheid in its intersections of racial discrimination, economic segregation, and market consolidation - terrific layer to emphasize for this established pattern of food injustice

Martin Dermine of Pan Europe: “We show that 85% of the apples have multiple residues, and we don’t know if they are safe for consumption or not". If the same apples were sold as processed baby food, 93% of the samples would be banned.

maastricht city hall this morning

new publication! HOW #TRANSPARENCY WORKS check out my chapter "transparency and the meaning of #sustainability" in an excellent collection of essays that take an anthropological approach to transparency, out now & #openaccess from @universitypress.cambridge.org www.cambridge.org/core/books/h...

nancy mace has been effectively santorumed for me because every time i see her name all i can think is "that's a lot of beans"

my grandmother, an Auschwitz survivor, was Anne Frank’s neighbor in Amsterdam, and Oma thinks this comparison is perfectly apt

new publication! HOW #TRANSPARENCY WORKS check out my chapter "transparency and the meaning of #sustainability" in an excellent collection of essays that take an anthropological approach to transparency, out now & #openaccess from @universitypress.cambridge.org www.cambridge.org/core/books/h...

it was bizarre reading this report that looked like a set of powerpoint slides with no authors, no attribution, no anything really except very bleak warnings.

Something in the latest LRB. It's not the cheeriest of pieces but I hope some find it worthwhile. Thanks for reading.

Publication date: Nov 4, 2025 🎉

My article is out! On how ‘ecosystem services’ went from a word for those aspects of nature that economics cannot express to a word for nature's economic value, and how concerns for planetary habitability disappeared from the environmentalist vocabulary. www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

Agentic AI in education is a "ruse" - its promises of efficiency and productivity will really lead to an intensification of educators' work. Great to have @carloper.bsky.social on here now, and this is a smart short conversation with @neilselwyn.bsky.social www.buzzsprout.com/1301377/epis...

📱🍏 How are researchers studying food’s digital turn? My new chapter in ‘The Handbook of Digital & Computational Research Methods’ (ed. @Anders Koed Madsen & @akmunk.bsky.social) charts inventive methods for exploring food’s datafication, algorithmisation & platformisation. 🔗 tinyurl.com/4su87xnz

"The results also indicate that current #climate models underestimate the magnitude of the observed changes. This is caused most likely by a too simplistic representation of deep mixing processes in the ocean in numerical models" #AMOC #FasterThanExpected

Bye forever, WeTransfer.

"ghost jobs" -- positions companies advertise that they never plan to fill, just to harvest your data, make themselves look like they're growing, etc. columbialawreview.org/content/ghos...

nice thread about recent attempts to make environmental collapse a security issue (cf the icelandic report from nov.) i'd add a 3rd issue, which is that it's actually very dangerous to frame this as a security issue because it invites military "solutions" and delegitimizes other kinds of responses.

“.. He cared about people deeply ..,” said Michael Pretti, Alex’s father. “He thought it was terrible, you know, kidnapping children, just grabbing people off the street. He cared about those people, and he knew it was wrong ..” @washingtonpost.com www.washingtonpost.com/national/202...

'Crypto imaginaries, crypto escapes' @jcultecon.bsky.social youtu.be/0_gWAJrjkD4

"It’s far from unreasonable to expect scientists and the academic community to act in line with their own knowledge and warnings, and I think it’s fair to say that (like most other parts of society) academia isn’t responding robustly to a world that’s literally and metaphorically on fire."

To understand today’s social malaise and generalized burn-out, I’m increasingly drawn to Herbert Marcuse’s strand of Freudian critical theory. A devastating critique of the work ethic and mass media manipulation that doesn’t dwell on melancholy but is actually serious about changing the world.

It's genuinely astonishing to me the number of people willing to claim with a straight face that this word association tshotchke that didn't exist a few years ago is absolutely necessary for the conduct of science.

Feels almost quaint, at this point, to be reporting things like disclosure requirements and stricter labelling rules ‘did not materially alter the sustainability of [mutual fund] portfolios’. www.ft.com/content/7535...

📢 A national AI board is needed in the Netherlands! Our lab directors @natalihelberger.bsky.social and @claesdevreese.bsky.social, and our board member Pascal Wiggers, have signed an open letter asking the government to establish a regulatory body for AI. Read more: www.aim4dem.nl/letter-to-th...

New book officially out 🚨 If you ever wanted to know what Italian philosophy has been up to in the last 10-20 years, look no further. “An introduction to Contemporary Italian Thought” is out today with chapters on cyberfascism, technology & work, pandemic biopolitics, and posthumanism.

Our paper on the mysterious Devonian organism Prototaxites has now finally been published! See the paper here (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...) and our explainer thread below! Prototaxites reconstruction by Matt Humpage

It's a sign of the times that Big Tech has switched from greenwashing to datacentre-washing. In actual fact, the AI industry has revitalised fossil fuel and the imperialist credo that burning as much energy as possible is the route to worldly power. arstechnica.com/ai/2026/01/m...

Science personnel and funding gutted at astonishing scale in the US: www.nature.com/immersive/d4...

"Meticulously researched and lucidly written, 'Hard Work' uncovers the multiplicitous meanings and manifestations of work among the Mengen of Papua New Guinea." - Dr. Sophie Chao, University of Sydney Find Tuomas Tammisto's 'Hard Work' (2024) at: doi.org/10.33134/HUP.... It's fully #openaccess!

Out now! I've edited a special issue of New Political Economy on 'Centring exploitation in global political economy'. Link to the intro: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... Other articles (all brilliant!) and a short summary 👇 1/

Valentino Garavani, the iconic Italian designer known for his glamorous gowns and signature "Valentino red," has died at 93.

RIP German anthropologist Johannes Fabian, who passed away last Tuesday. Fabian was most widely known as the author of "Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object" (1983), a then-radical & still-influential critique of anthropological writing, knowledge-making & fieldwork relations. RIP.

a bright spot: jill scott has a new album coming soon

‘We regularly call the cops on our students. Now we’ve sold them to Microsoft’.

#Poland: A sample of #farmers who diversified, i.e. who sell 15-50% of their products into short food #supplychains (and not only into normal/long food supply chains), have higher perceived #resilience, i.e. higher perceived adaptability & transformability of their farms: doi.org/10.1186/s401...

what a truly horrible system we’ve built

Grok is so much worse than you think.

Tech companies want us to outsource all cognitive labor to their models. Instead, academics must defend universities by barring toxic, addictive AI technologies from classrooms, argue @olivia.science and @irisvanrooij.bsky.social . bit.ly/48FNcJj

move over, Wittgenstein