their slender means J.H. Prynne, ‘Against Hurt’

Sumer is icumen in! And with it, the unfurling leaves of more Guild events! 🌱 Join us for more Making Space sessions, and a special workshop on modular haiku comics. Not a member yet? Join us (for free) via out website: www.guildmedmak.com/join-the-guild

Palantir are about six months away from ordering their employees to leave audio logs scattered around their offices

Ancient Exchanges have finally managed to re-upload their archive of past issues after moving website host. This means my translations of the Old Norse visionary poem "Sólarljóð" and Old English lyric "The Wanderer" are now available again: exchanges.uiowa.edu/ancient-exch...

Going to get some great images from NASA in the coming days. Here’s a couple of post-splashdown snaps of actual heroes.

all these universities kept axing medieval history departments as if they thought tyrants beefing with the Pope was going to stop being relevant

'[...] the canon takes on a malleable, almost organic quality, like a network of cells that keep self-replicating.' Our latest Meet a Medievalist Maker blogpost is by the creative writer and performance artist Dr Clare Mulley, who writes about her experience responding to Völuspá 👇

i guess those celebrating soras death didnt get the memo that some of us need daily personalized greetings from james bond—for mental health

This week over 100,000 ALCS members will receive their share of £34m. Let's celebrate the value of human creativity, something that isn't going anywhere 💡📖🌳

The University of Essex has proposed to discontinue most of their undergraduate language provisions as well as the Languages for All programme as part of large-scale restructuring. Sign their petition to urge the Executive Committee to reconsider the proposal: docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Had my first piece of original poetry published in Northampton Poetry Review last year and finally got my hands on a hard copy. It’s about Corby, my hometown, and I started it way back in lockdown. I think it’s quite sprawling and messy but I do like the penultimate stanza.

Look, you’re cutting it fine now. Registration deadline is 20 March for on-campus attendance. ‘Teaching Literature in the Language Classroom’, University of Nottingham or online. tinyurl.com/teachlanglit Final programme is up here:

Great piece from @stephenkb.bsky.social, who speaks to my own personal policy hobby horse better than most. Also includes an astounding chart comparing England's tuition fees to other OECD countries. www.ft.com/content/a067...

This is the best lede I've seen in a tech story in...years? There should be an award just for ledes.

Good piece from WonkHE on how we might help graduates talk about their skills and experience better. I always look at industry reports about lack of work readiness with a dose of scepticism, because it's often unclear what, exactly, they're talking about. wonkhe.com/blogs/do-stu...

In 1926, as a member of the Irish Senate, W.B. Yeats enthusiastically took charge of the committee designing new coinage for the Irish Free State. Yeats decided the different denominations should be symbolised by different animals (was he consciously thinking of this as the “tails” side?) 1/2

I'm one of many professors quoted in this report from Alice Speri. I really appreciate The Guardian taking an angle which has basically eluded every other major outlet.

gambling monk, germany, 15th century

Good news that the digitised Beowulf manuscript has survived the digital equivalent of the Cottonian Library fire, the British Library cyberattack of 2023

"If I was to use ChatGPT for my designs rather than our designer Sean, that's taking money out of the local area into the hands of a multibillionaire ... removing value from the local community and local artists [and] into the hands of some of the richest people in the world." #AIslop #refuseresist

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... 🗃️