my view on this is that publishers should stop it with the 80k wordcount obsession, so many contemporary non-fic books are obviously 40-50k pieces of work stretched to the extent that they become very boring to read - just let people write cheaper, shorter books! www.theguardian.com/books/2025/d...

I feel like David Graeber really captured something about lefty academia because the concept of “bullshit job” is very resonant and has a lot of intuitive appeal but his exploration of it is totally hamstrung by the fact that he’s never left campus and is very vague on the mechanics of actual work

I once taught Old Norse to the re-enactors at the Jorvik Viking Centre.

"You wont find runes as interesting when you realise most inscriptions are thoroughly mundane or post conversion!" me looking at a comb that says comb:

Taught a class on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion today, and every one of my students said they've seen content on TikTok that comes directly from it, without knowing before today what the source was.

Finally, the bug is back with a round of the Guinness.

25th February 2026 07.07

"it's time for ideas, people, and critical thinkers to flourish. That means that, after years of mocking, English majors are finally getting recognized for their usefulness." www.businessinsider.com/ai-job-marke...

It’s not the crack you expect. It’s more a soft whump, then an elegant leaving, like a grand piano dropped from a silent-movie window… —Karen Ashe, “The Sound of an Iceberg Calving” in SOUND OF AN ICEBERG: New Writing Scotland 37 (ASL, 2019) #poem #poetry asls.org.uk/publications...

Gorillaz are back so time to resurrect the greatest of all music tweets. We're all out here tryna be The Quietus and she just walks up and zeroes in on the essence.

Such a good piece today from @jburnmurdoch.ft.com which shows that the declining graduate premium is very much a UK problem rather than a general (or inevevitable) consequence of more people going to uni www.ft.com/content/649d...

“Humans across multiple languages spontaneously associate the nonwords kiki & bouba with spiky & round shapes, respectively...We tested the bouba-kiki effect in baby chickens. Similar to humans, they spontaneously chose a spiky shape when hearing a kiki sound & a round shape when hearing a bouba.”😲🧪

If you don’t read old stuff you’ll never discover that people in the olden days had the same thoughts and feelings and dreams and anxieties you do, sometimes articulated differently, sometimes exactly the same way. You are never truly alone in anything and old writings are a neon sign telling you so

Terrific column by @sarahoconnorft.ft.com:

Bad for culture, bad for heritage, bad for the north east. My partner trained as a glassblower here. At the time, studying at the NGC via Sunderland Uni was the only way she could figure out how to get into glass (apprenticeships being few and far between). www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

🧪🏺 Update - authors have new paper showing how useless gen- #AI is for archaeological illustration. All 400 images were multiply inaccurate (physically, socially, technologically, environmentally), even with improved prompts. JUST USE HUMAN EXPERTS & ARTISTS www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Beautiful line drawing of a Scottish gold torc (Netherurd, @tessmachling.bsky.social ??) by Keith Henderson in Piggott’s 1958 Scotland Before History (thanks to @gjmichaelson.bsky.social for reminding me of this book!) #FindsFriday

"everyone has to get back to the office because the important thing about business is human interaction" is dying, but "white collar jobs will be replaced by AI agents within 18 months" cannot yet be born; in this interregnum a variety of morbid symptoms appear.

The study points to using libraries and visiting museums as bringing these enormous brain health benefits ... who would have thought? Well, librarians and museum folk for a start ... www.theguardian.com/society/2026...

Colonoscopy is the gold standard for diagnosing bowel cancer, but a very helpful home test is also available — the FIT test is normally done as part of screening after age 50, but you can ask your GP for it if you have any changes in your bowel movements www.bowelcanceruk.org.uk/about-bowel-...

More ramblings about Radbod! This time I delve into the later traditions surrounding him. longhairedkingsblog.wordpress.com/2026/02/11/r...

Rain hammering down. What a winter it has been! If this carries on much longer we may need an ark. It is peak snowdrop season here & the 'Candlemas bells' wear their water droplets well 🌱

Just a reminder that I’ve taken to recording all my blog posts. So if you’re doing the dishes and want to listen to me recite Beowulf in rhyming couplets, well, have I got just the thing for you:

i heard both of these today: "what are we solutioning here" "we don't have a solve for that" nouns and verbs, two ships passing in the night

Just a reminder that I’ve taken to recording all my blog posts. So if you’re doing the dishes and want to listen to me recite Beowulf in rhyming couplets, well, have I got just the thing for you:

Available Oslo PhD positions – heritage conservation, archaeological & paleoenvironmental geochemistry, & on the POLYCHROME project (concerning historical sources on changing attitudes to medieval objects after the Reformations in the Scandinavian countries) #jobfairy www.hf.uio.no/iakh/english...

“Does being in a landscape automatically imbue us with a greater understanding of it? … We all find our own way, and notice different things as we go.” @markhailwood.bsky.social manyheadedmonster.com/2026/02/10/i... 🗃️

New post! I take an in-depth look at Seamus Heaney's Beowulf, alongside forays into Victorian translations by William Morris and the brilliantly named Athanasius Diedrich Wackerbarth. This is based on an undergraduate lecture I gave at Oxford in 2020. nikolasgunn.co.uk/2026/02/09/o...

If nothing else, this map at least partly explains why engagement about anything that isn't politics is so hard on here.

I would never argue all self-publishing is bad, but I realized years ago that Amazon designed KDP for exactly this purpose: to incentivize people to adopt new tech to churn out more slop titles in a clear attack on the publishing industry with little regard for readers or even the writers themselves

One of the key points I have presented to students is that they have to understand the difference between information & knowledge. Only then can they actually start analysing & making sense of things.

Jeremy Noel-Tod on RF Langley, a writer I also knew a bit and whose writing has likewise had quite a deep effect on how I think about poetry. I put him on once at a literary festival in Bath, with Tom Raworth. Both poets were paid (in money). Read their poems, & pay the poets when you can.

Trilingualism in action: Latin book on herbs & their uses gets translation annotations of some head words to French & English Things I learned: 'haus' (Middle French) is a (rare) plural form of 'allia' (Latin), aka 'garlec' (Middle English) CCCC MS 438, f. 21v parker.stanford.edu/parker/catal...

On the fifteenth anniversary of his death, I wrote about one of my favourite poets, R.F. Langley, who I was lucky enough to know for ten years someflowerssoon.substack.com/p/we-speak-f...

work with me and @drdaveobrien.bsky.social as part of @creativepec.bsky.social! we're recruiting a postdoc to work on the arts, culture and heritage sectors using quantitative methods. please share, please feel free to email me directly with any Qs! jobsite.sheffield.ac.uk/job/Sheffiel...

Some Old Norse terms for the sea show perceptions of it as an alternate reality. Here are some favourites #medievalsky The glistening world The swan plain The road of eels The gull’s land The whale country The cold island rim The trembling ground The field of fish The ship roads

Our paper on the mysterious Devonian organism Prototaxites has now finally been published! See the paper here (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...) and our explainer thread below! Prototaxites reconstruction by Matt Humpage

Inspired by a colleague saying she’d like a lesson on how to read a runic inscription, here’s a lesson! open.substack.com/pub/jasminhi...

Awful news. She leaves an amazing legacy for the field and her work on language and gender will remain a staple of reading lists on the topic a hundred years from now.

I missed that the latest book in the series of critical companions I edit for Palgrave has already reached print, Joseph Rex Young on George R. R. Martin's A Game of Thrones: link.springer.com/book/10.1007... . Feel free to pitch us on a potential project if you'd like to write one of your own!

I like the cow using a tool story, more international news should be about animals doing things imo

An interesting volume discussing the work done on the writing tablets of Roman Tongeren (Belgium) available here: doi.org/10.1484/M.ST...

It is even worse than it looks

What midlife crisis?

The inkless doodles of Eadburg, an 8th-c. nun, discovered by new technology: now published by Jessica Hendy-Hodgkinson in EME doi.org/10.1111/emed... (Open access)

neolithic guys get pissed if you tell them their cultures are organized by the type of pots and jewelry they made. "we called ourselves the blood hunters" "we conquered villages far beyond this horizon" sorry bud you're the western linear pottery culture now

Some good news, though, if anyone has mislaid medieval Britain.

A rich, thoughtful post about the fine difficulties of translating the Old English poem The Wanderer, including its most famous line. Perfect for a winter night! @nikgunn.bsky.social nikolasgunn.co.uk/2026/01/13/b...