the Black Panthers were right

💘 This Valentine's Day, fall in love with the future. As the world celebrates love, we’re turning our gaze to the shifting landscapes of desire in the digital age. How is technology changing the ways we imagine intimacy? 🔗 4 days to go – register now: www.kcl.ac.uk/events/digit...

There’s a guy called Klima in the Czech curling team who looks like he carries the stones for the whole team 💪. #winterolympics

What are you doing for fun on a Friday night? Oh, me? I’m just reading more about all these basic-ass creeps in the Epstein files and wishing all the coverage of it didn’t talk about how “powerful” and “special” these people were.

We’re in trouble when the sources of life-saving biomedical research, game-changing technological innovation, and essential humanistic inquiry—all byproducts of university grants—are under fashionable suspicion for being ideologically and financially corrupt. 2/5

“The richest man in the world posted about how the white race was under threat, made allusions to race science or promoted anti-immigrant conspiracy content on 26 out of 31 days in January” www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

My thoughts, FWIW: JB screamed about being “silenced¡!” because virologists, clinicians, public health experts & pandemic control professionals rejected his push for mass infection instead of COVID vaccination IMHO men should process their hurt feelings instead of risking mass death as revenge 😿

One of the purest examples of a moral panic in our time. A clinic that had years-long waitlists and required an average of 7 appointments before providing transition care smeared and shut down for being reckless.

The White House could have—& should have—reformed USAID. It chose instead to obliterate the agency, causing deaths all over the world. Now we know what happened to the Congressionally-mandated funding for USAID. Ending our rule of law will harm all Americans, on the Right & Left.

In a new article for 𝘙𝘢𝘤𝘦 & 𝘊𝘭𝘢𝘴𝘴, Marcel Paret & I turn to apartheid South Africa to think strategically about how to confront racial authoritarianism in the US today. This isn’t analogy for its own sake, but what Stuart Hall calls “delicately disinterring” lessons and transplanting them with care.

The Guardian's Jillian Ambrose unpicks the many tens of millions in state support that Jim Ratcliffe's businesses have accepted, after the billionaire railed against people on benefits (and claimed Britain was being "colonised" by immigrants while himself having moved to tax-free Monaco).

The absurdity about this coverage is that, when you read what the advice actually consists of, ‘gender’ is reduced to very little more than a question of pronouns, and the advice is basically ‘do what seems best under the circumstances’

More here about the company and the process of getting the granite from Ailsa Craig.

Is it just me or does everyone else find themselves repeating ‘round the outside, round the outside’ every time it’s said in the speed skating?

You can't... repeal... a scientific finding. At that point it's just called lying about it.

Just going to leave this here

sick of the "kids are always on screens" narrative while we continually steal all their public space and ability to exist outside thanks to our car first at all costs approach to our cities.

HHS is canceling $600 million in CDC grants for HIV and STD prevention in CA, IL, CO, and MN that were marked for state and local health departments, hospitals, universities and non-governmental organizations. These cuts conspicuously correspond to areas of DHS operations as well.

If you are in the UK please consider signing the open letter to the government about this here: weandai.org/updated-open...

The British public doesn’t ’foot the bill’ for immigration. The opposite. Immigrants foot the bill for Brits.

Very excited to see our new paper from the project out in Journal of British Cinema and Television Studies, we hope you enjoy reading it! @lrjdmnr.bsky.social @bethjohnsontv.bsky.social @annaviolasborgi.bsky.social @drdaveobrien.bsky.social www.euppublishing.com/doi/10.3366/...

I guess the point here is that, outside of a narrow range of technical applications, LLMs are *absolutely terrible* at producing the reliable outputs that would be necessary to think of them as successfully "automating a process". And it's on those areas where they're worst that the hype focuses.

📚 Big news for box breakers and fans of LGBTQ data! Rainbow Trap is publishing in paperback in June 2026. I want to say a huge THANK YOU to everyone who's championed the book so far and I'm excited to get out there and spread the word about queer lives, categories and classifications.

all I’ll add is Bondi, as Florida AG, used “fighting sex trafficking” to elevate herself—empowering cops at the expense of survivors. long before Trump she was like this

SAVE Act aka “show your papers” law If you don’t have a passport or access to your birth certificate, you’re not alone. About 21 mill Americans could be blocked from voting, just like you. Why are Trump and Republicans pushing this? Because they do better when fewer people vote. #HandsOffHerVote

ICYMI: Who Makes the Far Right? @booklearning.bsky.social and I used membership application forms for the National Front of Australia (secretly copied by ASIO in 1980/1) to analyse who supported the far right in Australia in 1970s-80s. Open access article! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

3 in 5 fear family separation absolutely monstrous www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

we need to talk about that Ring Super Bowl ad

Genuinely, if you live in the UK you should so the consultation just to find out some of the unbelievable details of what's being proposed. Even with their spin and obfuscation it's shocking

📢NEW OP-ED! Together with the brilliant @taniaduarte.bsky.social, @markwong.bsky.social, @suoman.bsky.social & @timdavies.org.uk we wrote for @techpolicypress.bsky.social why the new UK Government AI Skills Hub is undermining our democracy. Our 🔑 points are->🧵 www.techpolicy.press/the-real-cos...

New OA article just out on "assetizing academic content" led by @jkom.bsky.social with me, @keanbirch.bsky.social & Klaus Beiter, exploring how academic materials are turned into value-generating digital assets by HE institutions, edtech platforms, and AI companies link.springer.com/article/10.1...

“If America’s university presidents believe that their foremost responsibility is simply to keep their institutions operational — collecting tuition and protecting endowments — they are mistaken… presidents and chancellors are stewards of intellectual freedom and democratic norms.”

My commute is 2.5 hours each way. Unsurprisingly, I am much more productive on wfh days when I have those hours in my home office. Hilarious self-own from a man whose conspicuous absence from parliamentary debates is frequently noted.

This consultation closes at 11:59 pm tomorrow.

'Cutting off funding for culture and knowledge has social and political consequences. If you want a healthy and harmonious civil society, invest in the humanities and the arts, for they foster understanding, knowledge and empathy.'

PLATFORM POWER AND EDINBURGH'S GIG ECONOMY Sat 21 Mar 2026 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM Round The World Studios, EH6 6RS www.tickettailor.com/events/scotl...

Although this type of thinking (along w/ banning abortion) is what pulled my other-wise Catholic/Dem mother towards Fox News years ago. I think we overlook the spiritual warfare beliefs at our own peril. It's not insanity, but a very different metaphysics for understanding a starkly "split" world.

Farage was banging on about Turkish barbers, so these lads in Glasgow did this. It's in Dumbarton Road, if you fancy a trim.

Once again, RFK Jr has appointed a panel stacked with kooks & anti-vaxxers (see also: his ACIP appointees & ACIP chairs) I spoke with @davidgilbert.bsky.social for this superb news feature, and, um, I did not hold back It‘s a horror show; RFK Jr is such a dangerous menace

“First Monday will cease publication, after 30 years…” Sad news about one of the first open access truly independent interdisciplinary journals out there. firstmonday.org/ojs/index.ph...

Lol Hashtag Streisand Effect.

I mean, AI is already "powered" by real humans, but you will never see these people-- they work around the globe cleaning and labelling data and being the "eyes" for facial recognition systems. Still, this project is interesting. Just grousing about the reporting. www.youtube.com/shorts/W5rZZ...

Epstein managed different networks. The UK media has rightly centred the powerful pedophile ring. It has maintained an uncanny silence about the global, anti-democratic, far right political network. Farage is up to his neck in it. If it weren’t for unprecedented double standards it’d be career over.

My lovely friend Debbie was on Look North tonight talking about the snowdrop garden she designed at Goldsborough Hall 🍀

Sound on, hats off.

Committing this to memory for the next pious outburst from the 'Judeo-Christian values' brigade.

We have untrained ourselves of interrogating the core problems of border migration because we have allowed the media di divest from good reporting from the front. We only get to this conversation when tragedies like this happen, but it is not enough. journals.sagepub.com/eprint/4RXS9...

Despite Kuenssberg’s rationale at the start it was pretty much as feared. The BBC doesn’t just reflect opinion, it also shapes it. If you give fascists a platform they will use it to spread the disinformation that fuels them.

The guy who owns Amazon shutting down the books section of the Washington Post is beyond parody