Need a Yuletide treat? Check out this new episode of Historical Friction (@historicalfriction.bsky.social) on The Muppet Christmas Carol! Hosted by me, @aaprocter.bsky.social, and @helenvmurray.bsky.social!

A big part of being a historian is being a detective! Who did this? Why? Where? Why does it matter in the grand scheme of things? You have to learn how to probe, how to uncover, how to read against the grain, how to find unusual sources, how to interpret those sources. How to piece together a puzzle

Encouraging undergraduates to *start* with AI, robs them of the skills they need to begin learning how to be a history detective. And when you move up to the graduate level, AI doesn't have access to actual archives. And it cannot produce new knowledge. *YOU* have to do that.

Remember how I said I have it written into my foreign-language contracts that my work has to be translated by an actual human? This shit is why. Those book translations are gonna suck. They'll save money putting out books that are going to be painful to read. That's not a great long-term strategy.

Collective failure to repudiate Trumpism is how we got here. Throwing trans folks under the bus is how we got here. Denying the fact that healthcare is a human right is how we got here. I don’t know what else to say. We are not getting through to enough people for some reason.

This entire weekend

The 'ai' fraud is a uniquely dangerous accelerationist scam because its harms begin right now and extend indefinitely: • in the short term, it fucks up your immediate work, needs, safety,and erodes trust in any image or text • creative people are instantly impacted as workers &victims of plagiarism

All of this thread. We cannot turn whole universities into AI development centers. This is a commercial and political obsession, not education or skill-development.

I’m just a simple country historian w/o a law degree, but it’s more than a ‘long standing tradition’ when its IN THE CONSTITUTION

After the recent joy of Hard Boiled in a packed theater it hit me that one of the tragedies of capitalism’s manifestation of our tech age is that on top of imprisoning us in gilded cages disconnected from shared reality, they are transforming communal experience into an expensive, uncommon novelty.

be the bitch doing something yourself that you want to see in the world

What could be better for a family-oriented holiday? An episode on the ultimate parent-child relationship: Frankenstein! Put on those headphones and listen to our first new podcast episode in three years! Or leave those headphones off and share the episode with the fam! Quality time!

I think the President of the US responding to a question about the murder of a journalist with "A lot of people didn't like that gentleman" is probably pretty bad.

Well, it's a little clearer now why billionaires are so invested in technology that produces better written emails.

We've had 2 massive mergers in 2 years. In both cases, QMUL refused to hear students (staff was told not to talk about it with students for fear of repercussions), and *after* both of them, management said 'our bad, we'll talk to students next time'. #UKHE managers don't prioritise students.

Okay well, I had hope on Tuesday and now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

I will not support a deal that does nothing to make health care more affordable. We are in a health care emergency. A simple one-year extension of these tax credits would cost less than Donald Trump’s $40 billion bailout for Argentina. A vote for this bill is a mistake.

S I G N I F I C A N T L Y

One trillion reasons not to buy a Tesla.

The key thing to watch here: they fired a Wired political reporter. That’s the title doing the most effective, pointed work. Teen Vogue’s stuff was culturally impactful, but less focused on investigating the administration. Within the Condé portfolio, Wired and the New Yorker are the canaries.

Don't cross a picket line.

Love to have just a bit of hope in the morning! 🎉

Election Day = Existential Dread

I was laid off from Teen Vogue this week, alongside multiple other phenomenal team members. At our Summit, I was asked how it felt to be 1 of 2 Black women left and what that meant for representation. Now, there are no Black women at Teen Vogue and that is incredibly painful to think about.

This is incredibly upsetting. Teen Vogue was doing genuinely great work. I hate how the press keeps caving.

As I regularly note, "AI" at this point is an umbrella marketing term for a bunch or generative/machine learning/other formerly differently-termed processes that (of course) have no actual intelligence behind them. It means nothing useful for how the underlying computing proceeds. Thus the quotes.

The richest man on earth owns X. The second richest man on earth is about to acquire TikTok and his family could soon own both Paramount and Warner Bros. The third richest man owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. The fourth richest man owns The Washington Post. See the problem here?

Updating my LEGO White House

It’s far from the most important thing, morally right now, or in terms of the human stakes, but the ballroom thing is really breaking my brain.

I know we all get desensitized and think our calls / voices can't move the needle, but we can, we do, keep it up:

you don't understand. as someone who isn't inherently good at art, stealing paintings from the museum is the *only* way i'm able to express myself creatively. i wouldn't be able to paint beautiful portraits. but by breaking into a museum and stealing the paintings, now i am

Important PSA: It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown will air all day free of charge today, October 19, 2025 on Apple TV, no subscription required. #Halloween

This is almost literally what the English Civil War was fought over.

the president using the office to punish americans that didnt vote for him should really be one of the biggest scandals in americas history

King George III in early 1776

I’m so tired of AI everywhere. I don’t want to engage with it, I just want to read and hear things made by actual humans with their human brains only.

“Copyright growing pains” is one hell of a euphemism for the biggest IP theft in history

flipped classrooms & the unquestioned shift toward “student-led learning” were also part of the deprofessionalization->adjunctification->mechanization program whose ultimate goal was a fully administrative university

today in "predicted by 30 Rock"

Unconstitutionally taking money that the law says must be spent on one purpose & using it for something else—when it's to establish personalist control over the FUCKING MILITARY—is about as dangerous a constitutional crisis/failure as you can imagine Via: www.nbcnews.com/politics/tru...

It's still so fucking weird that all these tech companies are foisting all this A.I. shit on us in spite of the fact that we DO NOT WANT ANY OF IT. Like, bros, read up on sunken costs and go find something else to invest in.

We are thrilled to announce that our NEW Large Language Model will be released on 11.18.25.

Uhhh friends, we have a big problem.

I've said it before but people in the future are going to have a better understanding of the 17th-19th centuries than the 20th-21st centuries. Why? PAPER [the most durable technology invented by humans]

The first time Charlie Chaplin used his voice in a film, he wielded it to forcefully condemn the rising forces of fascism around the globe. Will we listen to his words today?

This feels like a spot of good news www.sciencedaily.com/releases/202...

this iconic advertising copywriter named Kathy Hepinstall Parks died over the weekend and I wanted to share something from her website I thought Bluesky would like

Not really an overstatement to say that the test of a free society is whether or not comedians can make fun of the country's leader on TV without repurcussions.