I had the honour of being interviewed by BehanBox for my work. So grateful to Saumya Kalia, Malini Nair, Urvi Sawant & the team. Please give it a read here: ‘The Algorithm Is Paying Women To Uphold Patriarchy’ behanbox.com/2026/05/15/t...

I finished my 5 DECRA reviews less than a week ago, and today was asked to review 7 DPs by 5 June. They still won't be announced this year, and some will be vetoed by the Minister in the meantime. This system is truly broken.

Including that this will have differential effects across students (ie impacting those with lower prior attainment)

Our own work on cold spots is influential in the report

Today’s Education Select Committee report on higher education is the best report on HE to come from Govt/Parliament in ages. It takes a rounded view of the whole system, moving away from the more atomistic or narrow accounts we’ve seen 🧵 committees.parliament.uk/committee/20...

“Lo recommends treating your AI investing companion similar to how he treated an exceptional teaching assistant. The TA was whipsmart, but there was one issue. He tended to smoke too much marijuana. As a result, Lo took everything he said with a grain of salt. That’s what you should do with AI.”

Gloria Caulfield at the UCF commencement, in case you were wondering

"Mildly positive" for hantavirus. Yeah. Like the time my girlfriend got a little bit pregnant.

All of these things--casualization of academic labor, censorship, the insistence that academic research of any kind can be done by AI--are part of a longer project of devaluing academic work, especially in the humanities. You only work this hard to DEvalue something if it's valuable--and a threat.

May the 4th and all that. Here’s the easiest way to draw Darth Vader #maythe4thbewithyour

Just think, if it were not for #Brexit our farmers, hauliers and fishing industry would be eligible for a share of these funds! #RejoinEU for our economic security! They were conned by #BrexitLiars like Farage and Johnson. www.theguardian.com/world/2026/a...

I need to start tracking /collecting these. Let's create a Museum of AI Failures. The Repository of AI Refusal. The AI DENIED Database.

I talked to my students a few months ago about how it's hard for them to see all the tech that has been canceled or rolled back, especially a social movement wins are often not publicized or taught. This is so important!

Fucking tired of people’s complicity in their own ignorance. Read a book. Care about something. Notice your environment. Anything.

The discourse is now that you’re the weirdo because you can identify white supremacist and Nazi symbols? …that you might need to be able to recognize for your own survival? Or maybe, if you’re my age, by having paid attention to popular culture or history at any point in your 50+ years of life?

BREAKING: The Chinese government pressured Zambia to screen + exclude Taiwanese speakers attending @rightscon.org, leading to the largest international convention on digital rights being canceled a week before it takes place, the host org @accessnow.org tells WIRED. By @telliotter.bsky.social + me

My therapist said many of her other clients who are tech workers are going to her with the same complaints about AI

Undone erc.europa.eu/news-events/...

Ideas → Action @citystgeorges.bsky.social SCC #ECRCommunity Research Sandpit Led by @devinasarwatay.bsky.social ECRs & PGRs put fellowships & grants inmotion TYSM ADR @leahellmueller.bsky.social STRs Abdullahi Tasiu Diana Yeh SRSO Pedro Centeno attendees & Enhancing #ResearchCulture Fund #CityStGSCC

The Muon g-2 experiment wins the 2026 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for its precision measurement of the muon. Congratulations to Leverhulme International Professor Graziano Venanzoni and researchers @liverpooluni.bsky.social @livuniresearch.bsky.social!

Grateful for the invitation to join the editorial board of Media, Culture & Society, a leading journal published by Sage. More here: journals.sagepub.com/home/MCS @mcsjournal.bsky.social @journals.sagepub.com @sagepub.com

Add to this, of course, the 100s of previously employed academics who are now out of work or whose jobs are at risk and the 100s of academics in fixed term positions trying to find permanent roles.

🚨NEW ESSAY ALERT🚨Broken Connections: Fieldnotes from the Old Internet. The most personal thing I've written in years. I trace my history with internet communities & online relationships & how much of that is now gone. And a lot about LiveJournal. Open Access! journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

1. Amazon has built powerful pricing algorithms that have learned how to steer prices upward — not just on Amazon, but across the web. I have a new piece on how these algorithms work, and how they help sustain Amazon’s monopoly.

A couple points on this manifesto, apart from the racial superiority subtext others noted. Palantir is a company built on public contracts, they bill the state billions to surveil and target the state's population. The manifesto exists to justify their demand for even more. /1

Increasingly impossible to exist at all without a tech company claiming control or ownership over you, your identity, and/or any information about you. And, no, "just stay offline" isn't really a solution. We've all but made living without using the internet impossible. We need a better compact.

Lovely piece from @helenpearson.bsky.social on how evidence (especially but not only RCTs) have improved so many areas of life including policing, tackling poverty, and medicine www.ft.com/content/9b8e...

She wanted to pry her late mother’s Oregon vineyard from two of her brothers. Instead, her lawyers were fined nearly $110,000 for citing bogus case law generated by A.I.

Silicon Valley’s next great leap may be built on videos of people folding laundry. Start-ups and entrepreneurs are trying to make robots smart enough to help with house chores. But adapting artificial intelligence to new tasks requires example data.

Sentiments are changing and fast. "More Europeans see US as threat than China. Washington outranks Beijing as a threat in Spain, Italy, Belgium and Germany, according to POLITICO Pulse survey." www.politico.eu/article/poll...

Israel is doing to entire neighbourhoods and communities in Lebanon what it’s done to the entirety of the Gaza Strip in Palestine. Razing human life and civilization to the ground.

Loads of chat and even discourse about so-called AI literacy, but I don't think most realise you need to teach things from quite a few angles and zoomed out. If people want to just know how the models work, that's not always possible without a much wider base anyway... Our offering below:

I used to write the WaPo editorials on US-Africa policy, as well on as human rights and politics on the continent. To describe hundreds of thousands of deaths on the continent as “messy” is an absolute abomination.

Bahahahahaha

When Trump says “Two Weeks” he means he has no idea and to stop asking him about it. From 2025:

Welcome to our new Deepfakes Tracker, your hub for tracking and understanding synthetic media. Take a quick video tour. deepfakestracker.org

To read Devina's review in the British Journal of Sociology, see: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...

'The emphasis on the book's scope, the inclusion of appendices detailing participant demographics and ethical considerations, and Gerrard's scholarly and public writing credentials are not mere paratextual elements but central to establishing trustworthiness in a contentious field.' 🥹🥹🥹

I've just returned from my maternity leave to an emailing linking me to the first scholarly review of my book: The Kids Are Online (@ucpress.bsky.social). I feel *so* honoured that @devinasarwatay.bsky.social has taken the time and care to write such a thorough piece. www.ucpress.edu/books/the-ki...

This is called “strategic defeat.” You have ended up in a worse position than before you began, with your adversary, while battered, emerging in a stronger position than before.

Here's the link to the free pdf of my new book The Inattention Economy: How Women of Color Built the Internet. Access is so important and I'm grateful that the press is platforming it as one file that is easy to download. www.upress.umn.edu/978081669906...

One of the things I've been keen on is bringing academic insight into the policy sphere. So I'm really happy we are placing 7 academics in Whitehall to help think about sustainability matters www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/news/the-bri...

Breaking: the DOGE deposition videos have been taken off YouTube. On Friday the government asked a judge to intervene, said the videos could cause reputational damage, death threats. Judge agreed, ordered them removed: www.404media.co/doge-deposit...

I met with AI data labelers in Kenya who are organizing their colleagues to fight the brutal working conditions and horrible pay given to the workers at the "bottom of the AI supply chain." They believe the NDAs they've signed are unenforceable so are speaking out: www.404media.co/ai-is-africa...

Palantir CEO promises that his technology will reduce educated women's economic and political power newrepublic.com/post/207693/...

Imagine if Obama or Biden had done something like this.

Yes, the illegal war is unpopular, damaging to the stock market, and making everything more expensive. But are we talking about Epstein? Mission accomplished.

One of my favourite sides of politics/media.

Few pre-book copies of "Unlimited: Aspirational Politics and Mobile Media Distribution" arrived in package, and some kind endorsements from scholars whom I deeply respect. The book is going to be published in late March through MIT Press.

an updated debbie downer sketch but it's friends showing her funny videos and she has to respond like this to every single one like this: