It’s 25 years since we lost Douglas Adams. I am happy to have been able to get a reference to him into this piece in the FT about why the humanities are essential www.ft.com/content/fbde...

The creator of Roger Rabbit (who is 85 years old by the way) is a good sort Crossposted with @openvibe.social

This part rings true to me: "people today are inoculated against moral critiques of social and technological systems... we exist in a world where it’s impossible to live a regular life ... without relying on the exploitation of countless people and finite environmental resources"

'Being anti-AI feels the same as being anti-war.'

There are 31 men and 3 women standing in Clacton.

At lunch a child asks what agency means. I give a definition and then begin to explain that the relationship between agency and structure is central to the subject I teach. Cue groans from both kids 'we don't need a lecture Mum.' So I have remotely disabled their phones. Experiential learning it is.

oh are reform calling other politicians “traitors” now well i’m sure nothing bad will happen because of it

Jesus. 35 UK universities quietly- without debate - joined the Ministry of Defence’s “Battlefield Alliance” which seeks to “reorientate academia towards Defence and National Security” They’re destroying the social sciences and humanities while militarising the institutions

I've signed and sent a letter - from authors, broadcasters, journalists, artists, scholars and performers - to express our deep concern at @exeter.ac.uk’s troubling plans to make mass redundancies within the Humanities Dept @uniofexeterhass.bsky.social. I would love it if you read and shared widely.

Every time I read a story about gynecology it's always something like "doctors discovered women could experience pain in 1989 but decided not to act on this knowledge for 20 years"

When you owe a university money: We're going to boot your car, repossess your diploma, and retroactively fail you on the swim test When a university owes you money: Sorry, what is money? We think there's a person on the 6th floor who handles that but they're out until January.

My feminist IR module just designs itself at this point.

napinillos.substack.com/p/the-honest...    This article recently went viral.  "You will, at some point, need to advocate for your child at her school. You will need to read a teacher’s email carefully enough to notice what it is and is not saying, and write…

RIP Bonnie Tyler

Did you remember to leave a mince pie out for NSS Santa?

Has anyone else lost the same war this many times?

Just found a fox in my son's bedroom. Does he live with us now?

I have this idea for a game show called Less Online, where the more online spouse/partner tries to explain something to their less online partner and they are racing against another couple to see who gets it first. (this morning I tried to explain the grink to my husband)

Worthy of the Tate Modern

Open letter in support of the Centre for Geography and Environmental Science at the University of Exeter, in which all 20 staff (including myself) have been put at risk of redundancy. Additional voices welcome, and please share widely docs.google.com/document/d/1...

I giggled over this

Good read for sociologists too:

This misses the point. Self-education has become more accessible in the last 20 years than at any point in history, though not through ‘amateur reading’. The problem isn’t access to information but learning how to evaluate it critically - and that brings us back to universities (and Humanities)

Hydration break

Don’t. Print. Lies. In. The. Newspapers. Or. The. Magazines. No, it’s not. No one says this. What is journalism, anyway?

So Oxford University announced they were embracing AI, while simultaneously announcing a new partnership with Open AI to research the societal impacts of AI. But don't worry, there is no conflict of interest here! Paging @emilymbender.bsky.social and @alexhanna.bsky.social new artefact drop.

Mel Brooks is 100 years old. The U.S. is 250 years old. Mel Brooks has been around for 40% of the time the U.S. has existed.

god this is perfect for how to deal with administrators at universities

In case you didn’t know, Exeter uni, where I work, has announced a plan to make 25% of staff in my English department redundant. Left-over staff will do double the teaching while their research time will be shrunk to 1%. Meanwhile admissions for English at Exeter are HIGH, and on the rise this year

My main lesson from this week is that menopausal women are basically heatwave queens. Too hot to sleep at night? Irritated all day as a result? Yeah already doing that 365 days a year, way ahead of you. Crucially, tend to already own those little handheld fans plus selection of wafty dresses.

I’d love it if you’d sign this. It might not prevent me and my colleagues losing our jobs, but it will draw attention to the ideological vandalism being perpetrated by the wealthy execs running our university. Stop Redundancies at the University of Exeter - sign the petition below! c.org/NpvY4sR9gH

📣 People are understandably up in the arms about this (it is horrible). But just want to wave a hand out there 👋 as we're going through the same thing in Humanities at Northumbria (1 out of 5 staff need to go by end of July). 1/?

Every year, hundreds of young people arrive in Scotland alone with no family, no familiar faces, and a complex asylum system to navigate. At Guardianship Scotland, we make sure they don't face it alone. Here are 5 things you probably didn't know about the asylum process in Scotland.

HYDRATION BREAK.

The Encyclopedia of Women Philosophers: A New Web Site Presents the Contributions of Women Philosophers, from Ancient to Modern

Note: The US has no safety regs that limit vehicle blind zones. Federal car rules only protect those inside a vehicle. Others are ignored.

The bar for men remains staggeringly low.

Incidentally, he fucking sucked as a bureaucrat, or a technocrat, or anything really. And he "stayed calm in interviews" because as he once said he had no interiority.

I mean, look around you. Would you say that these clowns have made Britain less racist, less cruel, less stupid, less unpleasant? You would not, because they have fought for most of a decade to make much dumber, nastier, harsher and more cruel. They are not sorry they did, not a bit of it.

Les femelles dauphins se transmettent une liste des mâles relous à éviter 👉 slatenow.link/43LGr50

If you're going to an event where you won't know people, I can recommend this K-Drama list as a good conversation starter.

Marking the summer solstice with my first wasp sting of the summer.

British politics in all its diversity on the BBC this morning

I LOVE this tool, showing annual temperatures over time. What does your graph look like? showyourstripes.info/c/northameri...

I am reminded of David Campbell's fantastic work from 2005 www.jstor.org/stable/40068...

🚨 New research by us! 📣 Most British drivers don't know how dangerous SUVs are to other road users, but adding information to SUV marketing materials seems to do almost nothing to change people's plans to buy SUVs Here's a 🧵 on why harder action is going to be needed 1/10

'Behind every one of those numbers is a person—a lecturer, technician, librarian, researcher, cleaner, professional services worker or student wondering whether their course will exist when they are due to graduate.' (Maggie Chapman) 5/5

'A less than five-minutes-long Teams call with no opportunity to respond is how staff at the University of Dundee heard that their jobs, the courses that they teach and their livelihoods might be at risk. I ask members to think about that for a moment.' (Maggie Chapman (North East Scotland) 1/5

Andy Burnham: Manchester Manchester Manchester MPs: London? Andy Burnham: London London London

I'm attending a digital humanities event in Montreal. There was a keynote on AI and something about the talk made me wonder if it had been written by Claude. I said as much in the Q&A. As I posed the question, the speaker shifted, looking slightly uncomfortable. What he said next shocked the room +