Thanks for all the discussion on this. I'm pleased to see the debate. Also pleased (and interested) that my 19-yr-old daughter, a classicist, is much more hardline than me in refusing to use AI, for a variety of reasons.

None of this is to deny that the technology has some uses in these capacities (though not ones I've felt any need for myself). But I worry that we are starting to see intellectual labour as just a means to an end, and as something that can be shortcut.

And as for writing, don't get me started. Most often, the process of writing is not a laborious business of transcription, but a process of thinking itself. I'm not about to outsource my thinking to a machine.

...I mean that even with careful prompts I would not be confident LLMs could perform the function I'd want. How do I know that any bland AI summary of a paper is going to extract what might be of value to *me* in it? I don't even know that myself before I read it...

I'm often surprised at how much researchers are using LLMs for intellectual work. It's not that I disapprove, or at least not on principle. It's more that I'm surprised at the trust being placed in the process. And by that I don't just mean LLMs can give wrong information...

In about 40 years, some history postgrad class (probably in China) will run seminars trying to understand why the US liberal establishment, at one moment so smug and arrogant, allowed a bunch right-wing authoritarian nationalist idiots to take over their country, apparently with zero resistance.

The folks at Globalizations have managed to get their hands on one of those devices from Wm Gibson's novel The Peripheral that allows you to send messages to people in the past. This one arrived today, 19 September from, let me see, 23 October 2025. Reviewer 2 is presumably in a different stub.

The folks at Globalizations have managed to get their hands on one of those devices from Wm Gibson's novel The Peripheral that allows you to send messages to people in the past. This one arrived today, 19 September from, let me see, 23 October 2025. Reviewer 2 is presumably in a different stub.

[READ] Professor John-Mark Iyi promised his older brother, Godwin, that he would complete his PhD before getting married and starting a family. He kept that promise and worked hard to achieve academic success that far exceeded his family's expectations. #IAmUWC

I think the world, or at least my part of it, was better when we didn’t have 24 hour access to Americans

An LLM is a lossy encyclopedia simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/29/...

My book, A Blow to the Head, in which I reflect on my own experience of the violence of white supremacy and the complexities of repair, is on the Longlist for the #Canex Prize for publishing in Africa. What a surprise, and what an amazing honour!

Time flies. I remember Zohran as a little boy with tousled curls, cute as a button, the pride and joy of Mahmood and Mira. They must be beaming

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

Nice look for you, Facebook! Thanks, hometown paper! And more thanks to the people who advocated for the "permanently disabled" status of my account there to be overturned. www.sfchronicle.com/entertainmen...

Presumably he knows that Proxima Centauri is 4.25 light years away, so "travel to the stars by 2030" is close to being literally impossible. So he's speaking metaphorically - what's it a metaphor for? fortune.com/2025/06/06/g...

Tis ever so, during crackdowns.

ZEP holders have won another court victory against the Minister of Home Affairs, but their legal battle to stay in South Africa is far from over. Read groundup.org.za/article/new-... by Tania Broughton

I worry that recommendation algorithms may be getting too good.

True of much of Marxism, poststructuralism and mainstream economics. Also, according Sabine Hossenfelder, theoretical physics. The interesting work is often at the margins, with the people working between traditions, at the frontiers of disagreement.

Zapiro

This leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I will be canceling my @backlisted.bsky.social subscription until I hear this has been sorted out

Mr Macron always wants to geopolitics

Fact-checking the inaccuracies, half-truths and duplicity in the latest Ramaphosa presidential newsletter: www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/...

Incisive piece from @nilsgilman.bsky.social on MAGA and the Risk Society. Spot on, I think, and it points to the key issues at stake in the assault on universities and the professional-managerial class more generally.

So is the fact checking really by Michelle Harris? How would we know?

In case you wonder how Trump won

Who is going to play Bix Caleen's daughter in the inevitable #Andor sequel?

People keep talking about the left needing its own Joe Rogan as if I don't already exist???

No, the anger is about the willingness of people who should know better to make nonsensical claims

When the joke goes, um, over your head

I’m pleased with #Andor writers’ decision to leave behind Lucas’s infantile Good v Evil framing and to explore, instead, the idea that rebellion is political

The Great #Tsek, according to Zapiro

lots of wonderful geographers celebrated by the @rgsibg.bsky.social yesterday - honoured to be in their company. check out the full list here: www.rgs.org/about-us/our...

In the spirit of Mother’s Day, here’s a clip of Björk two-piecing a reporter who was stalking her and her baby.

Hello––Is A River Alive? is published in the US & Canada on 20 May. I am coming on tour––dates & locations below––& would love to speak of the book’s ideas, people & rivers to as many folk as possible while I'm out there. Please let anyone know who you think might want to come to an event. Cheers!

I have never been able to understand why David Graeber has such a stellar reputation.

Today, our client Rümeysa Öztürk was released on bail from ICE detention in Louisiana, and she will return to New England to continue her studies. 📸 Giancarlo D’Agostaro

In which it is discovered that the Pope is, in fact, Catholic

The Trump administration wants startups to remake the US military, setting the stage for a battle over the world’s biggest defense budget

An audience with His Majesty

I don't have much fondness for the Roman #Catholic Church (we were Huguenots) but look at the list of #popes. You gotta hand it to those wobbly old uncles - in terms of institutional longevity, they hold the candle. Almost 2000 years pretty much uninterrupted. That's a lorra #patriarchy,

FdB on Best Whiteism. The demographic reductionism Freddie pillories in this furiously angry piece is of course the direct descendant, dumbed down and flattened even more, of the Stalinist class essentialism that characterised the writing of an earlier generation of so-called leftists.

(After reading a semester's worth of #ChatGPT essays) - so it seems that the value of polished writing in a student population works a bit like that of currency in a market economy. Increase the money supply too quickly, and all you get is inflation.

This is The Last Supper now.

Cassocks are red Conclaves are dope Wake up babe we got a

And then a Plank in Reason, broke, And I dropped down, and down – And hit a World, at every plunge And Finished knowing – then – ▫️Emily Dickinson, c.1861

And if we want a trade war on IP, we return to the days when bootleg copies of American films were on the streets of Beijing and no copyright was ever honored. I still have unlicensed Chinese DVDs of The Wire as a treasured souvenir. Tariffs on IP in an era of streaming is magical stupid.

I remember when Adam Curtis's documentaries seemed like loopy postcards from the fringe. Little did we know the deep oceans of weird shit generated over the last decades by the intersection of half-baked science and post-christian mysticism.