Saturday evening listening: Barry Can't Swim - Machine Noise for a Quiet Daydream www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKNN...

In case this one sneaks in beneath the cloak of all the other terrible things going on in the world, Environmental Pillar are running a campaign on the environmental impact of the EU-Mercosur deal. Email your Ministers and MEPs via the link. www.environmentalpillar.ie/stopeumercos...

50th anniversary issue of Saothar, the journal of the Irish Labour History Society, featuring articles by TCD staff members Carole Holohan, Lindsey Earner-Byrne, Deirdre Foley and Brian Hanley. The back cover has a photograph of the late Jack McGinley, long time Trinity librarian and union activist.

If this intends to make it legally compulsory for every adult in Derry to carry something called a "Brit Card", then I'm willing to offer some high-paid consultancy on why this plan might be flawed.

Forgive the personal post, but this is one of my great pleasures. For about 25 years, my friend Greg and I have shared mixtapes, CDs, MP3s, and now streaming playlists. We've been doing it since we became good friends at school over a shared love of music. 1/2

Another neat new collection of Irish social history courtesy of @dri.ie repository.dri.ie/catalog/6683...

To change your LinkedIn settings, go to Me - Settings & Privacy - Data Privacy - and set Data for Generative AI Improvement to Off

Solidarity. Arts Building, University of Galway. Friday, 19 Sept 2025.

For anyone who's used academia.edu, it's worth having a look at this. I've just deleted my account. At the very least, it'll spare me the spam emails...

Electric versions of songs Springsteen wrote during the Nebraska sessions are out later this year. First impression is that early 'Born in the USA' punches very hard - lyrically, it's the same, but the loose sound really amplifies the political impact. www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YNu...

Back in July, we launched our new 'Sites of Fracture' project with an event at the National Cooperative Archive in Manchester. Jade Burnett has written a really good blog post on the event: www.birmingham.ac.uk/research/pro...

Back in July, we launched our new 'Sites of Fracture' project with an event at the National Cooperative Archive in Manchester. Jade Burnett has written a really good blog post on the event: www.birmingham.ac.uk/research/pro...

Leaving work aside for the weekend with this magnificent Ghanaian groove in my ears... www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1bE...

A home office bookshelf, today.

One of the great things about Galway is how our colleagues @uniofgalwayasc.bsky.social are constantly putting out amazing materials, almost without us noticing. This week it's a collection of prisoner journals from Long Kesh prison in the 1970s. digital.library.universityofgalway.ie/p/ms/categor...

Flagging this in case anyone's not aware of it: the Ireland-Palestine Scholarship Programme, which supports 30 students coming to Ireland for a one-year Masters programme. Deadline = 5 Oct 2025 www.ireland.ie/en/ramallah/...

Heading to Belfast in November to talk about a case study I've been unravelling over the last few months. There will be talk of how we use odours, illnesses, and landscapes to tell the history of global capital in Ireland. Added bonus: I'll also talk about how chemicals disrupt our reading of time.

University of Galway launches digital archive of Long Kesh journals - an amazing archive of photos and prison journals from inside Long Kesh of the mid 1970s. www.universityofgalway.ie/about-us/new...

My word. What a shambles Ireland are.

Me (calling out): "Boys, the Ireland match is on." 4-year-old (arriving): "Who's playing up top?"

I think the AI in Windows 11 settings is playing with euphemisms...

One hell of an international "friendly" has just finished in Doha.

Perfect albums are like hen's teeth, and even rarer to find more than one from a single decade, but I'm putting my Sunday afternoon to good use by cheating at this game... Here's four for the #Perfect90sAlbum list.

Don't know what to make of that result, but a team with Ogbene doing well and with Idah grabbing the equaliser is a good statement of what Ireland means in 2025 - especially considering the opposition.

Calling all historians, social scientists & humanities scholars! Our conference, 'Opposition to Thatcher', has its webpage live with all speaker and topic info. An unmissable interdisciplinary event. Links to attend are coming soon. Please Share! #Conference #UKHistory #PoliSci

New academic year, new role.

I'm not big on ceremonies, etc, but I'm pretty glad that when I graduated with my PhD at Trinity College Dublin, Mary Robinson (in her role as chancellor) was the one who handed me the certificate.

Mary Robinson: "The entire Israeli cabinet should be sanctioned." She contrasts the positive role of the EU and US in bringing a settlement to the north of Ireland with their posture here. @virginmedianews.bsky.social

Delighted to share our Research Seminar Series for this semester! We're starting off next Wed 10 Sept @ 4pm by welcoming our new colleague, Dr Ciarán McCabe, who will be speaking on 'Privacy, Respectability, and Working-Class Domestic Spaces in Dublin's Tenements, c.1910-c.1960'!

Worth finding the 'off' button before all your documents end up in the cloud... www.theverge.com/news/767522/...

Bloody hell: 'Kitty O'Brien is undergoing surgery for an arm injury sustained during the incident ... O'Brien’s right arm "was pulled and then twisted with great force, snapping the bone" while they were dragged from the protest.' www.rte.ie/news/world/2...

Saturday listening. Say what you like about U2 (I happen to like them quite a bit), Achtung Baby remains one of the most ambitious artistic about-turns in the history of popular culture. What's most astounding, however, is not just that they tore up the template, but that they made something better.

Fifty-two young Palestinians from Gaza are due to arrive in Ireland today and in the coming days to begin a new life as students in Irish universities.

I was listening on shuffle and this popped up: 'Harrowdown Hill', Thom Yorke's song about David Kelly. A timely reminder of what British Labour governments are capable of. "Don't walk the plank like I did / You will be dispensed with when you become inconvenient." www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8yb...

🚨JOB POSTING🚨 We are currently looking for a postdoctoral researcher to cover the history of veterans among the colonized population/Indigenous population of the interwar imperial polity of the United States of America. 18 month contract, deadline October 03. universityvacancies.com/maynooth-uni...

With news of a reported settlement with Anthropic I went back to check the class action form and it now allows authors outside the US to input their address, so it may be worth adding your known pirated titles (from the LibGen pirate database) www.lieffcabraser.com/anthropic-au...

Arrived in Birmingham 45 mins ago. In the airport we were met by one police officer per two people on the flight. On the train, "see it, say it, sorted" reminds us to snitch on our neighbours. Now, on another train, conductor has just reminded us to report anything suspicious. This is England 2025.

Over the last couple of weeks, I've watched the BBC documentary, "The Death of Yugoslavia" on YouTube. It's incredible. A six-part series, dating from 1996, which traces the crisis from the rise of Serbian nationalism in the late 1980s to the Dayton agreement in 1995. 1/4 youtube.com/playlist?lis...

It's not about history, but this is a good argument for why our skills remain vital in the age of LLMs. "Problem solving skills come from experience. Intuition is a skill that is developed from repeatedly working in real-world environments." www.siliconrepublic.com/machines/opi...

Sunday listening. Odd to think this record is nearly 25 years old. I vividly remember the furore over its experimental sound - including a conversation I had with a friend, who argued that Radiohead had betrayed their fans. I still think that argument completely misunderstands the creative process.

The Call for Papers for 'Talking Records: Pollution in the Archive', a symposium at The National Archives in London, 4 December 2025, is now open! Submission deadline: Friday 19 Sept See the CFP and details about bursaries for speakers here: orlo.uk/Z8StS #envhum #envhist

'The AIAC has written a formal letter to the Italian football federation, to be forwarded to European and world football’s governing bodies, calling for Israel to be suspended ... “Because the pain of the past cannot cloud anyone’s conscience and humanity.”' www.aljazeera.com/sports/2025/...

Goodbye Uppsala. And a good way to end my #eseh2025 : a workshop on seaweed and what we can make with it, with Julia Lohmann.

I've just read the New Yorker piece and found this such an odd argument. We know from plenty of crises post-1945 that debating how NGOs draw attention to extreme violence (in this case genocide) as part of their campaigning doesn't negate the fact that it's actually happening. archive.md/4PI9T

It is a moment of great satisfaction when attending any conference, workshop or symposium of any scale to remember to take off your name badge *before* venturing back into the real world.

I'm writing something on how Ireland's economic transformation since the 1970s has been based on making nature work harder (echoing Jason Moore). Fish kills were one of the first ways the public recognised this - but rarely anything on this scale. Catastrophic. www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/ourv...

I'm so glad I switched away from using Adobe years ago. "While some power users thoroughly enjoy the AI features, many signs point to a growing segment of users being exhausted by the glut of generative AI dominating current software releases." www.wired.com/story/adobe-...

The view from Uppsala and a great day of papers and conversations at #eseh2025. Really enjoyed my panel on capitalism, industrialisation and the environment, plus two fascinating panels on different facets of state/business relations and climate change policy and denial since the 1970s.

This is genuinely one of the most narrow-minded, arrogant articles about academia I've ever read. I'm struggling to see the whole thing as anything but entirely disingenuous. Ironically, it also shows a real poverty of intellectual curiosity. 1/2 thedispatch.com/article/scie...

Research Assistant - School of English, Media and Creative Arts, University of Galway full-time, two-year position as a Research Assistant with Professor Marie-Louse Coolahan universityvacancies.com/university-g...