very, mind-blowing bad, and possibly the future given this Labour government is determined to run us into the ground: if you're not REFable, you're precariously employed by a firm that subcontracts your teaching to the university.

two new facts from the files 1] Mandelson demanded compensation of er £547,201 for his dismissal 2] nearly half of the £75,000 he did get was discretionary, which will raise questions about Starmer's judgment

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.

Kemi Badenoch claimed at #pmqs that Rachel Reeves worked “in customer services” at the Bank of England when she was in fact an economist there

Listen! @mivich.bsky.social talks to @newbooksnetwork.bsky.social about the fantastic The Division of Rationalized Labor newbooksnetwork.com/the-division...

I'm old enough to remember when Carter had to sell his peanut farm to avoid the appearance of conflict of interest.

ICE has been verified on Bluesky, and quickly becomes one of the top most-blocked accounts.

Holy shit, this thread is incredible.

Call for proposals for workshop on '(post)neoliberal Authoritarianism' at @goldsmithsuol.bsky.social in June irgac.org/calls/post-n...

I think the disconnect between Atlantic elites is that Americans think Donald Trump is a kid getting to drive a monster truck for Make A Wish and Europeans and Canadians think Donald Trump is the president of the United States.

So I have only just discovered at some vague point in the next couple weeks Google is going to break the way my work email works, and the company has done nothing to alert people to it. www.theregister.com/2026/01/05/g...

📣 Publication alert Just before the break, a special issue co-edited with Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn on ‘(Post-)Growth Infrastructures’ was published in @econsocjournal.bsky.social. /1 👉 www.tandfonline.com/toc/reso20/5...

Apparently China has banned those stupid Tesla style car door handles, and all I can say is YES I WILL TAKE ALL THE GOOD NEWS I CAN GET

They've turned every press office into a groyper shitpost factory www.liberalcurrents.com/the-war-on-p...

A year of genocide, of unspeakable horrors, ends with Israel banning Medicines Sans Fronteres.

"Manufacturers of aeroderivative turbines — which are based on or made from jet engines — and diesel generators have reported increased demand because of data centres seeking to bypass the grid as they wait for larger gas turbines."

Attention northern word nerds: The very first Canadian Word of the Year is MAPLEWASHING!

Gonna keep posting about this until everyone acknowledges how bonkers it is that prediction markets, which are pitching themselves as information aggregators, cannot provide a consistent answer to "who was TIME's 2025 person of the year?", a question with an empirically straightforward answer.

Facial recognition notification in the big supermarket. "Don't worry, the technology is designed to only recognise known offenders who have committed acts of violence, aggression or theft. For everyone else any data generated by the software is deleted instantly."

It certainly appears that the United States government is run by neo-Nazis.

No one should gloss over how appalling this is. A president who feels this comfortable demeaning women, and so many others, is nothing short of embarrassing and shameful.

Labour is handing more victories to the Far Right than the Far Right even thought was possible.

A piece I wrote about the manufactured ‘impartiality’ panics that greeted Tim Davie’s arrival just over 5 years ago, when GB News was still a glint in Robbie Gibbs’ eye www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

i think about this way too much - how tech companies act vs. “legacy” companies that produce consumer goods, news, media or entertainment.

So it turns out... the US air travel system was incredibly, deeply dependent on federal funding to just run day-to-day all this time, to the benefit of private airline shareholders, when everyone thinks that state-run trains are leeching off the government. Weird!

thank you for all the support; the statement from our union is now live here with some more reporting. now that this is public I can confirm that the majority of today’s layoffs were women of color. there are no longer any Black women working at Teen Vogue.

I’ve heard her name a dozen times today in a room where I shouldn’t have heard it once. We are about to see a real world case study of the difference between authority and legitimacy.

Some say the solution to the UK’s productivity slump is to expand the sectors that pay the highest salaries. Next time you hear that ask the person how many quant hedge fund computer scientists earning £250k-£800k they think the economy needs to become more productive.

If you just banked that coffee money every week and denied yourself every other instance of life’s gastronomic pleasures, however small and ordinary, you could save enough to make the down payment on that starter house in [checks notes] five hundred and seventy three years

Pull up for a bumper issue, nine articles, from ecologization as a mode of economization to the prompting of generative AI models in UK government, with stops in Brazil, Venezuela, Kenya and the US along the way! www.tandfonline.com/toc/reso20/c...

NEW @jmmnews.bsky.social Process, profession and purpose: the 3 ps of digitalised marketing - Franck Cochoy, Johan Hagberg & me- SI Intro with @cleabourne.bsky.social Akmeraner-Kökat & @lenapell.bsky.social ; @christianfuentes.bsky.social & Stoopendahl www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

"Amazon as a whole consumed 105bn gallons of water in total in 2021, as much as 958,000 US households, which would make for a city bigger than San Francisco, according to the memo." www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

We can't media literacy our way out of this systemic information catastrophe the same way we can't financial literacy ourselves out of what's designed to function as a commercial caste system

dear US friends, when a sitting president (re)builds the seat of government, it almost always means the president has no intention of leaving at the end of term. your African friends with decades of experience

Congratulations to Professor Ragupathy Venkatachalam, who has been elected as a Foreign Member of the Istituto Lombardo. Read the full story 👇https://www.gold.ac.uk/news/2025/professor-venkatachalam-istituto-lombardo/

Humor is kryptonite to Trump, so let's have fun tomorrow! March, dance, sing, and laugh at your local No Kings peaceful protest on Saturday. #NoKings @gtconway.bsky.social

Wrote a blog post about why there's no such thing as a universal digital service - which may seem counterintuitive "now that everyone has a phone" but it remains as true today as it was 10 years ago. www.careful.industries/blog/2025-10...

tbh I think Microsoft is going to blink right before October 14, and if they don’t… well, that’s a very, very bad decision on their part.

Our article on the politics of AI prompts is out now @econsocjournal.bsky.social www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... 1/n

On the anniversary of his murder, when he was hacked to death by mercenaries hired by Saudi Arabia, Jamal Khashoggi is beautifully remembered by another writer they have tried to silence, Karen Attiah. Important reading for us all.

Join us this evening at @mediacomgold.bsky.social @goldsmithsuol.bsky.social for a fascinating discussion and film-screening on how to find the tools to do the essential work of #journalism. Details 👇🏽 complete with empanadas! There’s a livestream too on this link: www.youtube.com/live/IHf4Iue...

Fucking amazing.

Story filed by Ellesheva Kissin from the FT: www.ft.com/content/934c...

Either real-time bidding data or app SDK data is being bought and used by ICE to seize people from the streets. If you didn’t believe that the adtech stack is a human rights concern, I’m not sure what more evidence you need. www.404media.co/ice-to-buy-t...

We are delighted to welcome four new members to our Editorial Board: - Kimberly Chong (UCL) - Sarah El-Kazaz (SOAS) - Paul R. Gilbert (Sussex) - Joy Y. Zhang (Kent) Their disciplinary expertise and research interests will broaden and deepen our editorial collective.

@kimberlychong.bsky.social @joyzhang.bsky.social @iliasalami.bsky.social @cleabourne.bsky.social @will-davies.bsky.social @hyoyoonkang.bsky.social @ft-highbury.bsky.social

🔔 freelance researcher call At @carefultrouble.bsky.social we're looking for freelance researchers to deliver a literature search on the impacts of AI adoption, looking at worker safety, infrastructure resilience, and environmental safety www.careful.industries/blog/2025-9-...

Now available in Latest Articles. Peter Lockwood investigates property's promise of escape from a life of labour in Nairobi www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Apropos of nothing in particular, here's Walt Disney's testimony to HUAC in 1947, where he named employees he believed were communists, condemned labor unions, and accused "commie" groups, including the League of Women Voters, of smearing him. 🗃️ archive.org/details/walt...