This is a 17th c painting of an Old Testament scene. Convince me otherwise.

'Music and modern foreign languages degrees are among courses being suspended at the University of Nottingham, with the institution saying it “cannot rely on additional income” from the coming tuition fee rises.' 1/3

'The University of Reading wants to build Loddon Garden Village on land close to Shinfield and Lower Earley and it is included in Wokingham Borough Council's current housing plans. The application includes about 2,800 homes, along with two primary schools and one secondary school'. 1/2

lol

Pope Leo XIV.: "Jesus says very clearly, at the end of the world we're going to be asked 'how did you receive the foreigner'? Did you receive him and welcome him or not? And I think that there's a deep reflection that needs to be made in terms of what's happening [in the US]".

'Academic futures are never secure. They're not even futures.' Or something.

Everyone enjoy this last day of Zohran Mamdani being a relatively universally approved figure on the left because by this weekend "ChairmanGonzaloWasARevisionist669" will be on here convincing people he's a CIA asset.

every single conservative commentator complaining about the rise of nick fuentes is responsible for the rise of nick fuentes

Had to share this from twitter just because

This needs to be shared more widely. It's on Facebook, which AFAIK doesn't allow direct links to its posts. Terry clearly wants it to be shared, so I don't feel bad about posting it in multiple screenshots. Terry Wallace was the director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

EXCLUSIVE: Sadiq Khan urges New Yorkers to reject the "politics of hatred and fear" and back Zohran Mamdani. Source close to the mayor highlights the "uncanny" similarities between the Conservative's Islamophobic campaigns against Khan and the attacks on Mamdani bylinetimes.com/2025/11/04/s...

hug your war criminals a little tighter today

For a good and growing list of studies and reports on said countless deleterious effects, see here, with thanks to @annakornbluh.bsky.social, @ehayot.bsky.social, and Krista Muratore.

Locked in with @arimelber.bsky.social.

You do not hate the trad right nearly enough

Some call it mass uncontrolled migration. Others call it the British empire.

🚨BREAKING NEWS🚨 6:23 Dick Cheney, influential Republican vice president to George W. Bush, dies www.cnn.com/2025/11/04/p...

My first thought was 'How does this fit into the narrative spun by Matt Goodwin and co'? And then I realised I was only thinking that because of this chap's name. So in a way, their rot has already set in, even within myself.

Well, would you look at that.

In today's post, Dr Peter Good guides us through the diplomatic drama surrounding the Rose Galley incident memorients.com/articles/the...

Matthew Goodwin, who is still welcomed by the BBC and other mainstream media outlets, now explicitly promotes a white supremacism identical to Enoch Powell's ("the West Indian or Indian does not, by being born in England, become an Englishman ... in fact he is a West Indian or an Asian still")

Find yourself something that makes you as happy as Edward Barlow's 'dolphin' was to 'swim in the sea'. #skystorians #earlymodern (National Maritime Museum, Journal of Edward Barlow, JOD/4/197-210, 213-294)

CFP: “Embodied Knowledge Practices in the Early Modern World” Conference at the University of Amsterdam Monday, 15 June 2026 How do material conditions shape how & what we know about the natural world? #earlymodern #C18L 1/6

Once again want to moot the idea that Elon Musk hasn't actually read The Hobbit, in which a small rural village sees a series of immigrants turn up, (voluntarily) take the protagonist on adventures around the world, defeat a Rich Guy Dragon, and then they remain friends for many decades.

elon musk: people in the uk live like hobbits. um let’s look at you for a second bro

My series ‘Intimate Histories’ about how history is not some abstract thing that happened to someone else, but personal to all of us is now available on BBC Sounds. www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/serie...

Nigel Farage, who has so far registered a total of £280,500 for four hours a month as a "brand ambassador" for a company selling gold bars, thinks a £10 an hour minimum wage for young people is too high bylinetimes.com/2025/11/03/n...

I sometimes wonder what Eric Hobsbawm would have called this 'age' had he lived to see it. 'Age of Anger', for instance, seems like it captures something. The headlong barrelling on of emotion divorced from fact or compassion. Capitalism on a rampage and extremism everywhere.

Godfrey is at again….now at Union Station in DC doing his Trump impression for the troops 🤣💀

Goodwin says "it takes more than a piece of paper" or birthplace to make somebody British. This is not often applied to Fred West/Ian Huntley, Kim Philpy, etc So how it is applied to British-born people from the majority + minority groups who commit crimes + who don't is rarely/never made clear

Matt Goodwin attributes a crime that he now knows appears to have been committed by people born in Britain in the early 1990s to "mass uncontrolled immigration"

yup. The deflection of decision-making to management-accounting (+ external consultants) has been disastrous in shaping the priorities of universities. Staff is now a problem, not an asset. And everything is short-term meeting of cash generation targets for each individual department. Mad.

Belgian AI scientists are advocating *against* the use of AI in academia. “If independent thinking is no longer encouraged at university, where would it?” apache.be/2025/10/24/b...

If you put up a union jack or George’s Cross in middle of a hate campaign against migrants, asylum seekers & people of colour that used those flags as branding, you knew what you were doing even if you didn’t have sufficient courage in your abysmal convictions to say it. This must be said.

Really detailed and thorough reporting but dismayed by the “bothsideism” about the flags. *Very few* people - even people without criminal records or neo-Nazi affiliations - who put up flags this summer did so innocently regardless of their stated motivations.

15 million Americans are going to lose their health care.

the tone deafness is beyond parody

If you're a National Trust member, it's that time of year again: Midnight tonight is the deadline. It's a shame people have to keep doing this to keep a toehold on historical truth in this country, but here we are. Voting link: www.nationaltrust.org.uk/who-we-are/a...

One of Britain's great grifters getting what he deserves here.

Elon Musk, Fellow of the Royal Society. Presumably, being "mindful that what is said or stated in a personal capacity could still impact the Society", as per its Code of Conduct.

Mounting a resolute defence against the far right on immigration is necessary but not sufficient. We need aggressively pro-immigration voices - like this - in UK politics. Actively welcoming migrants is morally right and better for everyone. Make that case and put the bigots on the defensive.

Look, the Humanities and the critical reading skills they impart are again proven essential here. It was, after all, the gentle hobbits and not the 'hard men' who were the heroes of Tolkien's world. Not through violence and antipathy, but compassion and camaraderie.

I’ve got serious constitutional questions now

All in the context of The University of Derby's new £75m business school. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Teaching the histories of slavery and keen to inform your students with insights from the most recent research? Just a month to go before @uclpress.bsky.social publishes this open access (free to download) expert volume. uclpress.co.uk/book/teachin...

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.

A neat tool I just came across: Viabundus, a digital road map of northern Europe 1350-1650, that lets you calculate contemporary travel routes/times. In 1500, going Amiens → Köln by horse took almost 7 days and 13 toll payments. #medievalsky www.landesgeschichte.uni-goettingen.de/handelsstras...

😆 #EarlyModern #SkyStorians, we all want this for our classes, right?

It's worth adding that while the hack of 2+ years ago has been dreadful for British Library users, it is also been awful for BL staff, who cannot fulfil readers' requests and are then confronted by their consequent frustration. With no end in sight.

"In the end, generative AI might be a blip in tech history, over-promising and under-delivering until finally the cash runs out. But it seems it’s arrived just in time to shove universities over a cliff edge they’d already walked themselves up to." defector.com/higher-eds-r...