The deadline for paper proposals has been extended to 🗓️ 16 January 2026! We would be grateful if you could forward this call to your respective networks, particularly those in the humanities. Please find details for the call for paper here: ishtip.org/forthcoming-...

beyond me why anyone would want longevity instead of a gracious exit

Seven eleven 3 course meals cobbled together, not bad, at all: egg sandwich, soft tofu with spoon, onigiri, chicken skewers, roast sweet potatoes, fruit salad, Americano — report from Korean hospital. Will report back once through all the convenience store menu options.

Maybe me. One day.

Academic freedom in Germany excludes pro-Palestinian speech acts so this is a bit thick

Article 22 is a jewelry company that repurposes Vietnam War shrapnel and battlefield debris. A portion of their profits goes to the Mine Advisory Group, which works to remove landmines still left in Laos (they've removed more than 300k mines!). I like the company's "Shard" necklace collection.

Truly truly evil, well known to hurt civilians and children most

Don’t know what it is but November and December seem to be the menses terribiles for me — every year, clockwork, no joke

How needful it is to enter into the darkness and to admit the coincidence of opposites, to seek the truth where impossibility meets us. - Nicholas of Cusa, note in Ad Reinhardt’s Daybook (quoted by Susan Howe)

the more I am forced to face entropy and seeing the undignified endings of humans in hospitals on tubes, the more I want to blow my money on beautiful and frivolous things (like the last Celine collection). no worries I don’t have the money 💄

Bed-time reading from @tobiasvryan.bsky.social : claustrophobic, studied, precise, oppressively atmospheric. (That’s as near as I’ll get to a review)

Drum roll ... Our final Issue of 2025 is a very Special Issue on (Post-)Growth Infrastructures, edited by Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn and Matthias Kranke. This was one of two winners supported by funding from our Special Issue Competition. www.tandfonline.com/toc/reso20/c...

ISHTIP @ishtip.bsky.social particularly welcomes paper proposals which study IP from humanities-oriented and interdisciplinary perspectives.

Please join us for a timely discussion on intellectual property and democracy (and other IP theory and history matters) in June in Brazil! Details on CfP:

Reminder that @ishtip.bsky.social is now calling for papers for the 17th annual workshop: this year hosted by the University of São Paulo on the theme of 'Intellectual Property and Democracy', 25-26 June 2026. Abstracts due 22 Dec 2025. Join us!

they should invent a kind of writing where it doesn't feel physically painful

The letter, which the Treasury Dept characterized as “interpretive guidance,” makes clear that hosting a speech by [U.N. Special Rapporteur Francesca] Albanese, asking her questions, and sharing research and scholarship with her are “not prohibited” under U.S. sanctions law.

supposedly the Korean government is in favour of hair loss treatments being paid by the national health insurance, what’s next, eye and nose operation, botox…

the parallel worlds between the living and the seriously ill are just a hospital-wall-thin separation, as if finding oneself featuring in a (bad) movie and then being released to the world outside

Am listening to this on my late uncle’s seventies? sixties? massive wooden Bose speakers, and it’s a total stereo experience, and why does not every morning should start like this

... not just Microsoft which ran and then shut down the ICC system, but the others, too. the tech dependency on US is insane. besides the point but -- why would a high profile judge use Alexa, i'm sorry but that seems just silly and risky.

So much for innovation by pharma… another case of market failure

seeing the lights dimming for a loved one with dementia or alzheimer's, and the dylan thomas rage poem pops back into the mind

US Dominance: 70% of ALL the data centers in the world are in one country. The state of Virginia alone has more compute than Western Europe. FT's big new piece on "The AI power crunch" is staggering. ig.ft.com/ai-power/ www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

If you are managing people (e.g. PI, HoD, etc) the best thing you can do at this time of year is actively help your people let go of false end of the calendar year urgency. Can that wait until January? Say so. Out loud. They can decide what to do but relieve the pressure to do it because of you

Just the feeling that I have time to do grocery shopping in person after term has finished is just so nice

It takes so much time to properly understand scholarly discussions in another discipline let alone to contribute to these discussions. So yes, proper interdisciplinary scholarship is slow and it totally should be.

Spotted in Seoul subway - Korea Fintech Week 2025 “Towards more fintech x AI finance” sponsored by Korean financial regulation authority and ministry of finance What could go wrong… 😑 Tagging @paullangley.bsky.social

Monday 15th December 2025 is the final closing date for submissions to our Early-Career Paper Prize 2026. Last-minute submissions are very welcome! files.taylorandfrancis.com/economy-and-...

Back in my happy place

💯

ICYMI

USPTO is targeting radio stations (esp. abroad) … but not AI companies (in the US): “…and it would prevent American performers and record companies from facing diminished rights when their work is played abroad…”

LIterary mutuals, did Fitzcarraldo Editions get bought up by Harper Collins?

Learned a lot about the history and present issues around science diplomacy today, so nice to be amongst historians, anthropologists and sociologists of science again 🤍 Thanks @sonjavw.bsky.social for the great symposium at CRASSH Cambridge.

the pavement is ALMOST dry enough to wear my new precious red shoes instead of my Nike waterproof trail Air Pegasus

What we're seeing here is, I think, capital's instrumental rationality finally turning against science itself. We're seeing capital trying to emancipate itself from the need for human understanding. In this way, AI is anti-intellectualism being turned from a logic of capital into capital itself.

The internal aim of science is understanding, even if the external one (the reason it gets funded) are to produce competitive advantages (economic, military, etc). For science, measurements and correlations are tools, used to get at causality as part of that understanding. In AI causality vanishes

"there is little reason to doubt what the aim [of the massive investment in AI] is: to embed knowledge in machines—knowledge that previously belonged to the people working in these domains." 🧵

Thameslink bumpiness makes me think of the smooth Shinkansen rides...

Calibri imho is a terrible font but now they make me defend it

"unlimited free welfare" in the US ... news to me

the relief of teaching with experienced colleagues as a genuine team, it makes all the difference when work gets into the bones and there is pressure of deadlines without margins

‘“I can’t pay my rent with prestige,” one sign said. Another was a mock-up of the cover of Great Expectations, with “Great” crossed out and replaced by “Reasonable”.’ Anna Aslanyan on the strike at the British Library, new on the blog: www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/de...

“the confused fear of an ageing white man confronted with a changing world”

But the good news is, by doing this, we defeated racism in the UK.

The university bought Claude AI for students to use. Here it is at work, denying that the East Wing of the White House has been demolished. Great stuff, academia.

It's wild that there appears to be more current concern for the Lost Library of Alexandria than for the British Library. The BL's crisis exemplifies the accelerating destruction--through apathy as much as by design--of human knowledge & learning. I'm not even being dramatic.

Reading Rooms at the British Library are closed *all week* because so many of its workers refuse to work for pitiful wages in a contemptuously authoritarian and obliviously managed environment. We need leaders who get it and are big enough to sort it out! It’s a mess and a disgrace. Lift it up!!

Jamie Sexton’s ‘Sounds of Lost Futures: British Musical Hauntology’, which I edited for @reaktionbooks.bsky.social, is an excellent survey of a genre and its origins–musical, televisual and cinematic–and a fascinating consideration of memory, nostalgia and the uncanny. Pub July 2026.