Córy Doctorow with another verbal bullseye: pluralistic.net/2026/01/13/n...

We ask students do lit reviews as means to become familiar with the field, critically assess evidence, learn how to write, establish justification for research questions. If we outsource it to a bullshit engine that makes up citations we might as well just give up on the whole idea of education.

Had a great day teaching on Victorian detective fiction with @victoriandetective.bsky.social and David Grylls for @oxlifelonglearning.bsky.social yesterday. I'm back there this Saturday with a course on British detective fiction from Holmes to Morse. lifelong-learning.ox.ac.uk/courses/brit...

Wow, sure would be pretty crazy if a ton of experts in the artificial intelligence field relentlessly warned everyone about this state of affairs being inevitable over and over for years.

Today's work: lecturing on Victorian detective fiction and the Strand Magazine in Oxford.

Will be reading this tomorrow, but just noticed that the copyright page says 2026, so I suppose I picked up an early release...

I once liberated a nice Ruskin volume from a pub that had bought books by the metre. No regrets.

Jenrick going to Reform is hilarious because he's solely motivated by personal ambition, and NUKIP is essentially a personality cult centred on Farage.

Ah - catching up with the Christmas LRB, and found John Lanchester making the same point.

The Guardian have launched a new article series, "The Pub That Changed Me", and it sounded great until I read the first entry, which was a poorly written piece on how a Guardian hack was outraged that she, too, had to follow COVID regulations on the number of people in a gathering.

Disappointing to see BBC News using terminology like "hallucinate" and "make things up" in relation to AI. These terms imply a subjectivity that simply isn't there, rather than a machine that doesn't work.

The eye is so drawn to the three Warringtons that it's easy to overlook the fact that Manchester Piccadilly is also Sheffield.

INSPECTOR MORSE: [Types into ChatGPT] Who killed the Master of Lonsdale College? CHATGPT: That's a great question! Let's delve into why murder really is a top issue for you and I. MORSE: [Mutters disgustedly] You and me.

Reboot of *Columbo*, but modern Columbo relies on Microsoft CoPilot and 78 people are wrongfully executed.

I'm running a popular romance course at the University of Liverpool... but only if enough people sign up! Come and join us! www.liverpool.ac.uk/continuing-e...

Cuts. Never. Produce. Growth. It is a downward spiral to collapse, and that’s the way we’re all headed.

With a hat tip to @twirl.bsky.social

Picked this up from the library on my way home. In August I'm teaching a summer school at Brasenose on Gothic and while I usually teach a lot of Gothic literature, I'm doing something I've meant to do for ages and added a whole new bit on folk horror (Andrew Michael Hurley's *Starve Acre*).

Tomorrow's work: being interviewed for an audio documentary on Sherlock Holmes and the Louvre heist.

Interesting to see Nadhim Zahawi described as an ex-Chancellor. Zahawi was Chancellor for about 63 days in that weird period in summer 2022 when there was no working government because Boris Johnson had buggered off. Zahawi did absolutely nothing in the role.

What's that? A Guardian opinion piece on how cafes have become gentrified?

It's no surprise that fascists love generative AI. It erodes critical thinking. It makes mass disinformation easy. And it's great for humiliating and abusing people. These so-called 'tools' are not politically neutral and they can't be used responsibly.

Lots of MLA discussion on here at the moment. I only went once (Philadelphia, 2006), but I was there at "Is the Anus a Text?" The whole back row was journalists desperate to report on the decadence of the humanities.

Catching up with Katherine Rundell's Radio 4 documentary on Christmas ghost stories, and wondering why our modern culture now privileges summer, with winter seen as something to be put up with.

Waking up 10 years ago to the news of Bowie's death was an uncanny experience. The previous day I'd been listening to *Blackstar* and the various references to death had prompted me to wonder about how sad it would be when Bowie himself died. Of course, I had no idea that it was already that day...

About 70pp into *Caledonian Road* - is it worth persisting with?

This craven cowardice is not only morally repugnant, but also completely at odds with the Royal Society’s own code of conduct. By failing to uphold the code, Sir Paul Nurse looks like he’s himself also breaching it - both are bringing the Society into disrepute. royalsociety.org/-/media/abou...

You have to wonder exactly what Musk has to do next to get expelled from the Royal Society.

Time to bring out this bit of top advertising from 2017.

I've just declined a meeting in Outlook Calendar because of a schedule clash, and instead of allowing me the opportunity to add a note saying why I can't make it (as would be the case in Google), Outlook has instead completely deleted the invitation. How can this system be so aggressively bad?

Time to resurrect this classic headline: bsky.app/profile/lexi...

News outlets are reporting that a 'rare red wind warning' has been released. A quick google reveals that the last time this 'rare' warning was issued was January 2025. Before that, December 2024. There was another in February 2024. And another in November 2023. And October 2023. And February 2022.

I feel it should be bigger news that Falmouth has shifted about ten miles southwards.

Following on from yuletide viewings of the Granada Sherlock Holmes, I rewatched the Brett *Hound of the Baskervilles* this evening. It's an odd one - the performances are strong, but the production makes some bizarre directorial/adaptation decisions...

Interesting moment in Peter Cornell's *The Ways of Paradise* where I'm not sure if the error is Cornell's or the translator's. There's no such Holmes story as "The Man with the Scar"; it means "The Man with the Twisted Lip."

This is good news, but based on my own experience it feels hugely counterintuitive. Are these shops clustered in particular cities?

This fake rear admiral story is absolutely fascinating. Why? How? We'll find out at Christmas 2027 when ITV release *Medal Man*, starring Jason Watkins.

BBC News just introduced Chris Mason's report on Starmer's response to Trump by saying the PM is on a political tightrope.

You can hear Faith Clarke near the end of this R4 documentary from a couple of years ago - you can also hear Paul (and, um, me as well). www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

It's Twelfth Night tonight, the actual end of Christmas (no, it wasn't Boxing Day). Fortunately, the mince pies and Christmas puddings are all at bargain prices.

It is cold in January. It is hot in July. These things happen every single year and yet they seem to surprise a lot of people.

With great sadness I learned today of the death before Xmas of Faith Clarke née Dawson, aged 85. She was the last living grandchild of Victorian novelist Wilkie Collins and the last bearer of the Dawson name which Wilkie invented for his lover Martha Rudd and their 3 children.

Just watched the Jeremy Brett "Man with the Twisted Lip" for the first time in ages, and it's an interesting adaptation. There's an emphasis on Hugh Boone's literary performance skills as explaining his level of income, which isn't really there in Doyle's story...

I mean, it's not as if Keir Starmer is a lawyer or anything. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

I mean, Henry Kissinger had a Nobel.

I've long thought that the committee for the Nobel Prize for Literature was questionable after some very dodgy decisions, but I'm wondering now if the whole Nobel thing is suspect.

*The Eagle Has Landed* is on. The Alderney scenes are actually Charlestown in Cornwall. My dad watched them film the bits with Donald Sutherland and the stuntman coming through the window.

I miss the days when you could go to Woolworths and fill up a bag with Blirer in the pick and mix.

The cultural whiplash of this episode of #totp - Terry Wogan to Bob Marley to Brotherhood of Man to Wings is quite a welcome to the world.