With current restrictions on speech and assembly, heckling from a crowd may be one of the few unmediated modes of political expression left.

Having watched the footage the most striking call is "You are killing our brothers and sisters".

Albanese suggesting that those who heckled him at Lakemba Mosque are unhappy because he has "outlawed extremist organisations" is pure John Howard - straight up LNP playbook.

#OtD 18 Mar 1834 the Tolpuddle Martyrs, members of Friendly Society of Agricultural Labourers (which was like a union) in Britain, were convicted and sentenced to 7 years penal labour in Australia for their involvement in that organisation stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/9015...

The far right will make a terrifying amount of ground off the back of the oil price and interest rate rise, and federal Labor seem incapable of taking action against racism because of their foreign policy commitments. We're in a uniquely dangerous moment as a country — can't remember a darker one.

In early career you have lists in your head of scholars you admire who are just a few years ahead — I remember clearly when these scholars started to disappear. These scholars aren't replaced. The knowledge disappears. The gaps widen.

Our older boy spotted the hare through the window tonight and grabbed a cartoonishly large carrot off the kitchen bench and chased the hare with it, yelling "Bunny want a carrot! Bunny!" The insults never end.

We're all rightly laughing at the failures of AI toys - but these things only exist because of the deranged social order we live under. Thanks to the concentration of wealth and property, in a world of obscene abundance, we have no time to raise our children — we have to work all hours for shelter.

Pivot to video; pivot to AI 🥰

First convincing evidence I've seen of machine consciousness. If you have young children you've been here, too.

When I taught Romanticism I had a joke that went something like "Men would rather write ecstatic, revolutionary poetry than participate in actual revolution". After the last year and a bit it's changed in my head to "Men would rather write poetry than have their doors kicked in by the state."

Funny how tech billionaires are always like "we're bringing back the woolly mammoth" but never "we're bringing back the 8-hour day."

If you follow our work at Overland Literary Journal, please consider filling out our readers survey, which closes on Monday. It would help us a lot.

When they did this to Tom Waits to make ads (not AI but an impersonator), Waits sued, won, and used the money to fund a series of spectacularly weird albums. Just saying.

3-year-old watching a Sesame Street DVD: "There's the red one, Elbow!"

Really excited for @micwink.bsky.social 's new one coming soon. If any publisher wanted to send me an early copy that'd be fine - I'd be fine with it. Absolutely fine.

CORRECT

Our toddlers have been chasing this hare around our backyard yelling "Bunny! Bunny!" and I cannot imagine how degrading and insulting that must be for him.

"wars can be lost before they are even declared if defenders surrender strategic terrain without a struggle. For universities, that terrain is the ultimate high ground: human intelligence itself. If we do not fight for it now, those who come after us will face an even more unequal struggle."

A gem - funny and decent and unbowed to the very end.

“We’re heading into, within the next five years, a real reduction in the capacities to sustain a creative and cultural workforce … There will be an enormous decline in the amount of creative and artistic activity in Australia.”

The continent's greatest writer on Dick Roughsey/Goobalathaldin and The Rainbow Serpent. When I was a kid this book hit me like a lightning bolt — in amongst the piles of English and American pastoral, it was the first picture book I'd ever read where the sky looked right.

Writing thread/very modest archive: 1/6, 'The Whale Ghosts', an essay on whales, wealth, and their ghosts in Australia's richest suburb, "founded" by whale magnate and former slaver Archibald Mosman.