I'm finding this discussion a bit, I dunno, disorientating? I'd say half of the work that cites me hasn't read my work beyond an abstract and skim, and the whole of my field operates on who can coin a term that can be used without having to read the text it's developed in.

I've got one article that has been under review for so long I'm not sure I'll recognize it when I get it back.

About 90% of debate about universities and training can be boiled down to "I would prefer for someone to be a very successful tradesperson over an unsuccessful knowledge worker", and like, yes, I would prefer that too? But is that an actual policy position?

"A man who got on a rocketship without asking any questions" feels like a modern parable about greed that The Twilight Zone would have done.

I have been thinking about this a lot recently re: cultural studies and "media literacy". So much of the discipline was built on the belief that reading *and* thinking were both radical and valuable. I never fully understood the urgency of Williams and Hoggart on these points, but I get it now.

This is true for academic evals as well. Enthusiasm can cover for poor content, and flat delivery always gets punished over good content. So much complaints about lectures are about delivery and general vibes of lecturer.

I find Wes Streeting very odd because I understand why my bubble doesn't like him, but I am yet to see anyone outside of a very, very narrow set of the PLP like him either. What is he for? Who is he for?

It's kind of wild how central conspiracy has become in football fandom. It feels like it's one of the main pillars of pleasure attached to digital football fandom.

So much AI. Everything is AI. Not even "I wrote it and put it thought AI". Just a brief prompt and copy and paste.

I do vaguely worry that the whole country, and the British press especially, has got very addicted to replacing MPs rather than a conversation about why the underlying systems keep creating PMs that can't fix anything.

Something incredibly depressing about already poverty stricken areas getting completely unqualified reactionaries who don't even live in the area who will refuse to balance the spreadsheets. It can only end in tears (or even more fascism).

I don't think they should be allowed to announce existential crisis triggering information about how old TV shows are when I'm just trying to watch the football.

Very little public money has actually ended up in local arts and culture groups, there's terrible private funding for worker training, schools are chronically underfunded, R&D funding is middling. There's only so much juice left to squeeze from unis here who have been asked to pick up the slack.

It's infuriating that the broader discourse has settled on "the left is antisemitic, the right is Islamophobic", and the different groups point at each other and ignore the fact both happens in all parts of society and that it isn't a competition to begin with.

I know it's tough out there for journal editors, but it's a real pain getting asked to review stuff that is not in your area, doesn't use methods you've used, you have no idea why they've asked you, and you just get the automated response and aggressive follow-up 3 days later.

Changing the font counts as work so you can reward yourself with a little phone break treat.

Office for Students has not been fit for purpose since it was instituted, isn't remotely interested in students, and has overseen a dramatic collapse in the learning environment of students while it attacked culture war folk devils. Glad they've been shown up for what they are.

I do suspect that a massive, massive part of contemporary politics is driven by people having an innate sense of how industrial economies work but just can't do the same for knowledge economies even when they understand them in the abstract.

Just saw Michael as it was on at baby cinema, and found out that he solved gang violence and racism and definitely, definitely didn't do any noncing. I give the film two Jarvis Cocker arse cheeks.

The only thing of note we learned in the Netflix Hogan doc is that Bollea had embraced the widespread delusion among MAGA elites that they all were heading to jail if Trump didn't win. Insane. Properly insane.

I got to share my thoughts on The Pitt, fandom and the way the media industry encourages gossip and rumour recently. Great to see @iheartfatapollo.bsky.social quoted too!

It's a significant chunk of the electorate who haven't worked after email was a thing and can only imagine the British workforce as trades because they don't really know what economy we have.

As the world leading* scholar on Hulk Hogan's family films I am disappointed to see that Netflix didn't ask me to call him a racist piece of shit on their new doc. *Only person stupid enough to write an article about it

Vince McMahon wasn't charging cheaper tickets because he was a populist who understood the entertainment was working class, he was charging comparative prices for entertainment and would have charged more if he could.

Two weeks of teaching left after a three week Easter break, I don't think these are going to be all time classic seminars, guys.

I like it when read a fashion guide that says something like "Kangol hats are back this spring" and that's how I discover something I've been wearing for a decade has not been cool (but is now!)

I'm happy to get involved in the pettiness of it all, so whatever, but the idea that Artera has been making these wild and weird statements in press conferences is so obviously manufactured.

I am going to see Akira at the IMAX later!!!!!

I think Trump is the only heel who would feasibly work for a Pope babyface turn, but I'm still not sure I buy him in that role, there's just too much history of him doing evil shit.

If you gave me infinite money and a dedicated research lab I don't think I could create a better model of a tinderbox economy than the one we have.

There's a Japanese luxury fashion brand that sells t-shirts that look like old vintage pop culture t-shirts but sells them for £465.

I try not to feel much for Mike Pence, but I do wonder what he, devout evangelical, makes of the fact that a mob literally tried to execute him, Trump pardoned them all at the first opportunity, and that some AI slop is the thing that crossed the line for his fellow believers.

I dislike the "old Tories were good and sensible" takes here. The contemporary populist and reactionary right is fully rooted in Thatcherism, an ideology that supported tyrants in the global south and stamped out feminists and queers and non-whites at home.

"the pope is weak on crime" is just going to be one of those Trumpisms that rattles around my brain for a decade when everyone else has forgotten about it.

Does JD Vance wanna do me a favour and do Arsenal's pre-match talk next Sunday?

Rich and I have turned the Child's Play episode of Ill Effects into a book chapter for this very exciting looking collection. I don't think we do anything wildly new with the material, but I do think we give a good and readable account of how social contexts produce "controversial" texts.

This isn't just Rogan, in fact the whole pundit class seems to follow this logic, but positioning yourself exactly in the middle of two opposing arguments doesn't make you smart and sensible. It's a terrible way for an individual to engage with politics.

The amount of poorly designed surveys from students I see scattered across Reddit at this time of year makes me think that academia needs to be doing a much better job of teaching this stuff better and not letting students use surveys unless they really are the right method for the RQ.

There's still so much we don't know, but if Iran secures rights over the Straits, keeps its uranium and gets sanctions relief, the US has suffered an appalling, even era-defining defeat. www.theguardian.com/world/2026/a...

I actually find the "AI hysteria" from the critical left to be a bit moral panicky, but imagine seeing what AI is actually doing to people's sense making and reaching this conclusion.

This is very obvious when it is, I dunno, a majority ethnic group threatening to wipe out a minority ethnic group via radio and television. It's chilling.

International law - the whole edifice; all of diplomacy; and every comma in the American constitution are failing in this abject and absolute triumph of necropolitics with impunity. Every last sinew of diplomacy must now be strained. UK airspace must be closed to US military. Immediately.

It's so incredibly jarring to have someone threatening to destroy a whole civilization in the language of someone promoting a reality television finale. What the fuck is happening. Get him out of power and put him in the fucking Hague.

It's very weird that WWE has set up WWE to be the biggest heel in pro wrestling, and it has been the biggest heel for over 30 years, and they don't know how to get themselves out of this situation.

No bowl of European war until you finish your plate of Middle Eastern war.

Chatting with a friend's 8 year old earlier about Andre 3000 and Flea's jazz careers, as you do, and they have now decided to call themselves Chaos 920 for the remainder of the weekend.

I will never be shaken from my core belief that pro wrestling is best as a 1-2 hour weekly TV show that passes through your town a couple of times a year supplemented by 4 or 5 big annual shows. 10 hours of PPV content over a weekend is way too much pro wrestling.

The president of the United States keeps threatening to commit terrible, awful, genocidal war crimes, and no one knows how to stop him.