What the WaPo has become: "The White House cannot simply be a museum to the past. Like America, it must evolve with the times to maintain its greatness. Strong leaders reject calcification." The MAGAfication of the language.

just opening up the new Epstein docs at random:

POSTDOC ALERT: in 2026-27, James Mulholland (NCSU) and I are running a Mellon Sawyer Seminar on “Sharing Ground: Humanities, Academic Freedom, and the Future of the University.” The position is for a Humanist-in-Residence and the job is live on AJO: academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/31122

My new book will be out in early December 2025 via @mitpress.bsky.social Details at: mitpress.mit.edu/978026255348... #HistSci #Computing #History #Books 🗃️

We’re now watching the murder of space sciences in America. Unless someone can stop this, this is the beginning of the end. The brain drain will accelerate until there’s nothing left to stay for. 🧪🔭

"Finance and computer science BAs have higher unemployment rates than do Art History graduates; coding is a path to Chipotle." www.compactmag.com/article/the-...

This is why we can’t have nice things

‘Study after study shows that students want to develop these critical thinking skills, are not lazy, and large numbers of them would be in favor of banning ChatGPT and similar tools in universities’, says @olivia.science www.ru.nl/en/research/...

@brewster.kahle.org and @murchstudio.com from @internetarchive.eu visited DATA LOSS (@erc.europa.eu) and The Danish Royal Library in September. Now a great interview has come out of it w @marcelfard.bsky.social and @moltke.bsky.social! Listen here [the interview is in UK]: www.dr.dk/lyd/special-...

Data documentation of disappearance #dataloss

I really do want to see the lawsuits from people who were assured by Google that its AI platform is all you need to learn how to do major renovations on your house, explicitly including the plumbing and electrics.

One of the q's on the new citizenship test is incorrect. 1920 is not when "all women" got the right to vote. The 19th A prohibited sex-based disenfranchisement, but didn't guarantee voting. Many women, esp. women of color, remained disenfranchised. #WeTheMen www.washingtonpost.com/nation/inter...

First delve, now emdashes and parallelisms 🤌🏻

We're seeing lots of headlines about the catastrophic impact of massive data center expansion. But what else could data centers look like? In my perpetual quest to seek out alternative technofutures, I want to highlight the really cool work of Keolu Fox. 🧵

Good thing the government hasn’t come to rely on AWS for tons of cloud and computing needs!!

we've got you covered, assignments, short readings, syllabus language, o captain speeches, the works! against-a-i.com

See @vanessathorpe.bsky.social in @theobserveruk.bsky.social — a devastating story: observer.co.uk/news/nationa...

all the anxiety human evolution developed to help me spot bears now kicks in when i have to answer emails

the thing with Wikipedia is that its human editors are way faster at and more diligent in reporting celebrity deaths than even Google's A.I.

It’s gothic nostalgia, isn’t it? All these shows about humanities profs with wood-paneled offices, fame, and enough autonomy to act like a diva. We’re doing it for the same reason cozy 1930s mysteries involved vicarages and viscounts with decaying mansions.

Octavia E. Butler’s 1993 essay in defense of public libraries.

New preprint on "Computational Hermeneutics," co-authored by too many people to list in one post. TL;DR: GenAI is a cultural technology, and needs to be evaluated in ways that recognize situatedness, plurality, and ambiguity as the conditions of meaning — not noise to be minimized.

"This used to be the best job I’ve ever had, the best environment I’ve ever had, the best culture I’ve ever had—and they fucking ruined it. I will never ever forget how much they ruined it."

And then there's this classic: www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HbS...

Very glad to take part on "Humanities in Times of Geopolitical Turmoil" seminar series organised by @utrechtuniversity.bsky.social and @fabianlferrari.bsky.social. 📆 Follow the thing AI: 20/11/2025: 15:30 - 16:30 @oii.ox.ac.uk cdh.uu.nl/event/cdh-on...

An absolutely terrifying SCOOP from @mattburgess1.bsky.social and @agreenberg.bsky.social revealing that everything from inflight browsing data to military communications are being beamed unencrypted from satellites all the time www.wired.com/story/satell...

This collaborative PhD project with the LSE and Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, on Planting Decolonization: Plantation Science and Empire in the Twentieth Century, sounds amazing. I’m sure many of you might be interested. #STS #HPS #HistSci www.lse.ac.uk/study-at-lse...

I use archival images for my posts so that I don't have to 1) pay for good ones or 2) steal them or 3) use shitty AI ones, which means I do a lot of searches in the National Archives index for things like "FBI" which sometimes yield unusable but awesome images like this. Check out the hat!

no words

if you were to teach a class on the pre/history of AI in terms of key concepts ideas, what would they be? the mind/body problem? abstraction vs materialism? history of the database? automation?

Such a nice paper on feature extraction as a project of perception - drone enclosures in digital India. “Feature extraction is an entirely speculative endeavour” rgs-ibg.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Hey Colossal - spend some of your money on saving this real bird!

It’s real!! I just got my first copy of Ghosts Behind Glass and it is beautiful. You all really need to order your copies. You will not regret it. press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

Lotta “A.I. bubble” talk this week — but this time, it’s coming from the folks inventing it, selling it, buying it and financing it. 👀 @cnbc.com @fortune.com @axios.com fortune.com/2025/10/03/s...

✨Deeply honoured to deliver this year's Annual Digital Lecture at The National Archives! Drawing on our @erc.europa.eu Data Loss project, I'll explore how preservation creates loss in the digital age and what that means for the politics of archives. Nov 20 6pm at Senate House, London. Do join us!

public goods "47% have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher ed institutions, w a net positive rating of 33—up 13 points since 2023. more confidence in higher ed than in the police (44%), the medical system (38%)+large tech companies (25%)" www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-t...

To the surprise of no-one, #Albania 's supposed #AI Minister is revealed as a human actress on green screen... the whole thing being a smokescreen for some dubious government procurement dealings.

“We are not working on building an AI agent. We are working to protect Signal from the invasion of AI agents that threaten privacy and that are being implemented in irresponsible ways”

Can't believe I missed an Ombudsman report with that title! Media release: www.ombudsman.gov.au/__data/asset... (PDF)

Remarkable document: hundreds of European politicians are calling to mobilize European resources to protect the Sumud aid flotilla as it faces escalating attacks on its way to Gaza. In other words: European politicians are trying to protect humanitarian volunteers *from Israel.*

Things that depend on the UN quietly doing work, #42: The internet From undersea cables to satellite radio links to the entire ITU (including the X.509 standard that's part of security for most popular websites), the UN has put in place pieces we would struggle to manage without. Really struggle.

Excited to co-host this seminar! Join us Oct 6 as Professor @daniel-solove.bsky.social explores and explains privacy rights in the age of AI. In-person @ucph.bsky.social or hybrid. Co-organized with Mette Birkedal Bruun/CoE PRIVACY & @tgammeltoft.bsky.social/@mobileucph.bsky.social! @erc.europa.eu

In rural Georgia, residents are waking up to the massive impacts that "hyperscale" data centre projects will have on local habitats, water and air quality -- and starting to push back. buff.ly/7PyHWjc

Data dispossession

“Pirate Wires”—a media project of Peter Thiel ally Mike Solana—has been circling Greenland & Guantanamo like a hawk. Its latest is by Palmer Luckey, founder of Anduril, which is backed by Founders Fund. Solana is a VP at Founders Fund—started by Thiel & Ken Howery (now ambassador to Denmark). 1/

Always fascinating to read about replication before the 20th century. Here it's Pasteur doing a live demonstration of the efficacy of his animal anthrax vaccine (the third vaccine ever developed).

going down a bit of a YouTube rabbit hole this morning, and I've somehow never come across this clip of Wendy Carlos—the first trans Grammy winner all the way back in 1970!—giving the all-time greatest lecture about what a synthesizer is and how it works.

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity. 1/n

That's how I feel about defenders of "AI literacy" in the classroom; you've added additional tasks for your students to perform critical evaluation of tools that nobody asked for (except administrators and LLM salesmen). 5/5

UK government report based on internal civil service trial finds Copilot doesn’t increase productivity, and indeed makes Excel take longer and with more errors, and requires Powerpoint users to have ‘corrective action’ applied to their outputs. www.theregister.com/2025/09/04/m...