Here’s a gift link to my New York Times piece on what Dems can learn from bad bunny www.nytimes.com/2025/10/04/o...

Columbia canceled my class on race and media, but I'm teaching the people anyway. Oct. 5 is the *last day* to register for my online live + recorded classes on Race, Media & International Affairs! We have more than 500 students enrolled. Let's gooo! www.resistancesummerschool.com/fall-2025-re...

Happy kanelbullensdag to all who celebrate! Holiest day of the year

Thoughts and prayers with Alexis Petridis, who will shortly be going into hiding. www.theguardian.com/music/2025/o...

Furthermore, Sweden and Finland joined NATO, which was a "major strategic defeat for Russia." "Now the question is how not only to support military efforts, but also to clearly change the dynamic and help Ukraine in this context," Macron said in Copenhagen.

On National Poetry Day, the greatest poem I have ever read

Great thread

We laugh at this shit -- I mean, how can you not? -- but it's serious: these guys want to infuse reactionary thinking into AI and then infuse AI into every nook & cranny of American life. They can't win the argument so they are trying to blunt-force their views onto us with money & power.

This is what I don’t get about Gen AI. Everything meaningful we do is *process*. And yes: everything is, can be, meaningful.

OpenAI employees are very excited about how well their new AI tool can create fake videos of people doing crimes and have definitely thought through all the implications of this

Many students use AI to get their work done. I think this is a disaster for higher education — it circumvents the process of learning, and expertise never gets built. I wrote about it for The Argument today, with findings from our latest poll on AI attitudes. www.theargumentmag.com/p/chatgpt-an...

Is there anything more tantalising than the promise of an early 19th-century letter with the postscript "Burn this immediately"?

#LunCon2025 is a science fiction and fantasy convention and literary festival in Lund, SE, October (10th)11th-12th, 2025. A weekend filled with lectures, panel discussions, book sales and more. Read more and buy your membership/ticket here: malmolundfandom.weebly.com/luncon-2025....

Miliband says it's 'possible' government should come off Elon Musk's X social media platform DO IT www.theguardian.com/politics/liv...

books should automatically come with time to read them

Bétis had grandads as their mascots today 😭

And why wouldn’t you want your ham smoked in a sauna?

From a former Palantir worker: “Using software I worked on to send U.S. citizens to a foreign gulag without due process is surely not a situation where ‘if you don’t like it, your remedy is to go vote’ is a reasonable response…”

...by convincing our #Montreal borough to set up a pilot-project for a rue-école (school street). 6 movable concrete barriers, which still allow ambulances to pass. About 50 metres closed to cars—but open to people. The improvement was immediate, and dramatic. Kids poured into the street...

Happy Rapture Day to all who celebrate! 💥 👼 🍻 PS Thanks for the reminder @windust.bsky.social it didn’t show up in my google calendar

that is definitely a problem for sprinting but I feel one I could easily solve

Another shout out to Dav Pilkey, who just has this knack for getting kids to enjoy reading, a mystery how he does it

"I'm cancelling your show ... for a week!"

Doubt is one of the names of intelligence. Jorge Luis Borges

Yeah man we should really fight back by staying on X

it's Bilbo and Frodo's birthday and i just got done rereading LOTR for the hundredth time or whatever. here's the moment that stuck with me the most time time (from Faramir's ambush of the Haradrim in Two Towers)

Russia is a pathetic third rate power yet it keeps provoking European neighbours. A bully only understands the language of force. When will Europe use appropriate force to deter the predator? www.theguardian.com/world/2025/s...

Russia is at war with you, dear Europe, whether you like it or not. Brilliant investigation. Outstanding journalism.

The Godfather, part II me II you

there should be a transfer window for mps.

The primary aim must be getting the govt off X. This offers the possibility of a cascade effect taking journalists etc off it. We need to seperate the national debate from the extremism engine.

The four horsemen of the apocalypse turned out to be War, Pestilence, Famine and Ethics In Games Journalism.

Brilliant piece on the casual erasure of of a female artist from a landmark moment in pop culture. And the answer to the question, Why don’t Peter Blake’s other album covers have the power and impact of Sgt. Pepper?

Foreign billionaires don’t get to incite violence against Britain. We cannot stay silent. 1/5 www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home...

are you constantly collecting links online of things you might like to read/watch/go to see/buy/look at again? can I recommend (not affiliated in any way) mymind.com ? very pretty and the lovely thing about it is the "serendipity" button where it shows you a random thing from your collection

What do we call this maddening thing v grand people do? Sir Richard Eyre [on R4 for it is he]: "I went to see a play called ... Hamlet, starring an actor called... Peter O'Toole"

“AI isn’t magic; it’s a pyramid scheme of human labor,” said Adio Dinika, a researcher at the Distributed AI Research Institute…These raters are the middle rung: invisible, essential and expendable.”

Obligatory occasional “Banger!” post youtu.be/KcpNnfM3s88?...

Now Google translate’s going downhill too, what have they done to it?? Consistently translating “vi / oss” (we/us) as “I” in this text I’m checking. Weirdly basic error

“Helsinki has not recorded a single traffic fatality in the past 12 months, city and police officials confirmed this week.” City engineer credits lower speed limits and smart design. I agree. #Helsinki #VisionZero

I would sue if I found out my therapist was using AI during therapy. A total privacy nightmare. "Suddenly, I was watching him use ChatGPT,” says Declan, 31, who lives in Los Angeles. “He was taking what I was saying and putting it into ChatGPT, and then summarizing or cherry-picking answers.”

Reading about this brought to mind a piece I wrote two years ago, inspired by one of my favourite authors. Ursula K. Le Guin emphasized that there’s a big difference “between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art.” OpenAI’s AI-generated movie offers us nothing.

Like, I know search sucks these days and social media search is extra broken, but at least try to check what these dudes said about Web3/crypto before you treat their opinion on “AI” with any sort of respect.

Remembering the time I was almost lured into joining a lamb cult.

Once again: even if vacating X is too much of a leap for the government to contemplate, cross post! There are apps (Fedica, Buffer, others) that allow you to send the same message to every site with no more effort. Call it being "platform-neutral". Help non-death-threat platforms to grow.

Grimmelings > The Gloaming

the treachery of the sign

Classic example of "a fine is permission for the rich." Haven't bothered signing up for the class action because this is just an incredibly cheap rate to pay for the source material they intend to then use to generate endless derivative profit-making works in perpetuity.

#booklog 18. The Grimmelings – Rachael King Tip-top Kiwi middle grade “horse girl folk horror”. Unsettling and lovely, and stuffed with obscure Scots mythology and vocabulary. Reading to kids ftw!