Do YOU have a family that needs sedating? Then get on down to the Cosmetic and Family Sedation Surgery in Tottenham. Hurry, don't delay. Ask about our multi-family "Jim Jones" package deals

You can currently pre-order @leannecalvert.bsky.social's Pious and Promiscuous: Life, Love, and Family in Presbyterian Ulster from the @ria.ie for 20% off shop.ria.ie/en-us/produc...

Been meaning to share this for a while: BROKEN RECORD: GENDERED ABUSE IN ACADEMIA ft 40+ contributors & THE Sara Ahmed from @sunypress.bsky.social. Because higher ed is not a bastion of the radical left. It's A WORKPLACE where abuses happen all the time & it's NOT OK. sunypress.edu/Books/B/Brok...

I hope the European Research Council is paying attention

"Famines are wars over the right to existence." —Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World

Historians must 'tell...an uncomfortable story & explain why the discomfort is part of the truth we need to live well and live properly. A well-organised society is one in which we know the truth about ourselves collectively, not one in which we tell pleasant lies about ourselves.'Tony Judt

Conversation with students yesterday confirmed that “mass culture” and “selling out” are now mostly historical concepts, but “slop” gets the helpless laughter of pained recognition.

Our politics seems to be entering a phase of "right supremacy" where only the lives of right-wingers have value. Assassinating the leader of a state legislative body in her own damn home was business as usual, but all of America has to have a reckoning if it's a far-right online influencer.

The start of the academic year is going to feel like a relief after this summer o' hell.

Corruption Inc Boris Johnson traded PM contacts for global business deals. Used publicly funded office to manage commercial deals. Secret meetings with Palantir, handed NHS data. Secret Dinners during COVID lockdown to secure refurbishment of his flat. £200,000 from a hedge fund.

Susan Ferrier (1782–1854) was born #OTD, 7 Sept. Her 3 novels—Marriage, The Inheritance, & Destiny—are vivid & humorous accounts of Scottish society. Often compared to her contemporary #JaneAusten, Ferrier’s satires are much more vicious… A 🎂🧵 1/8 www.scottishwomenwritersontheweb.net/writers-a-to...

‘Ah, you thought love human till you lost yourself in the forest, but it is more strange These grave and patient saints who pray and pray and suffer your little embrace.’ ~ Carol Ann Duffy #BookWormSat 🖼️ Le Livre de la Chasse France, 1405—1410.

Hello everyone. Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax has a tenure-track job in Enlightenment rhetoric and / or 18th-century literature. Tell everyone. www.msvu.ca/about-msvu/c...

With a few exceptions (all women) the contributor list of this TLS cover could easily be from the late Nineties

Opt out of the collective interinstitutional project of producing knowledge and intellectuals in some ways, then opt out in all, I say. You don’t get to endlessly extract labor and prestige from others.

Side note: I look forward to Chicago and any other schools suspending PhD admissions and hiring also suspending publication requirements for current faculty in those fields since such reqs presuppose the existence of an adequate pool of peer reviewers

Dear Sir: Thou eunuch of language; thou Englishman, who never was south the Tweed; thou servile echo of fashionable barbarisms; thou quack, vending the nostrums of empirical elocution… —Robert Burns, Letter to a critic (1791) #WorldLetterWritingDay #C18th news.lettersofnote.com/p/thou-pickl...

Perversely cheering to re-encounter the "Index to Tears" compiled for an 1886 edition of Henry Mackenzie's #18thc novel _The Man of Feeling_. (It's reprinted in the modern Oxford edition.) 47 entries for a novel of 98 pages. I like the parenthetical annotation "Choking, &c, not counted".

More for the OED: bas bleu, indigo (in humorous reference to Bluestocking views), dissertation 'debate', haut ton. Chaperon and dirty (as verbs), moonshine (adjective), a bundle of nerves, jargonic, lucet, parliamenteering, spa toilet, strongle, tarot. #Linguistics #18thC #c18th

finishing a book is as grim as finishing a PhD: writing, revising, dreaming about writing and revising, feral, demented. As @paulodykes.bsky.social wisely said, 'this is the mother of all essay crises'. Girding my loins and opening that laptop, again.

She was brought to the US as an 8yo, worked hard, studied, earned a scholarship, planned to become a nurse. ICE kidnapped her. Held her for 6 MONTHS in a detention facility with conditions so miserable that she finally agreed to voluntarily move to Honduras, which her family left at gunpoint.

E.J. Thribb's lines on the anniversary of the Covid Pandemic. #PrivateEye

Frankie Boyle called this years ago of course

Something for @bbka.org.uk 🐝

"AI has no Dreaming, it has no kinship, country, or cultural obligations," she said. www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08...

thousands and thousands of people have viewed tens of thousands of pages at our site in its first week; teachers want solidarity and students want to think bsky.app/profile/anna...

History that makes you comfortable is propaganda.

Oh no. This is a serious tragedy, particularly for eighteenth-century studies. I really don't know where the field would be -- will go -- without Bucknell.

Reading The Guardian today I saw a headline and thought that Rhiannon Lucy Coslett had finally written about something other than herself and motherhood. But no. Apparently Renaissance art is important because she had a baby.

A key difference here is that while either can be incorrect, the structure of Wikipedia *creates context* and the structure of LLMs *destroys context* Wikipedia has linked sources and an edit history showing where information came from and who added it when An LLM just generates text

Please dm me if you can help.

Goodnight. Krakow by night, Jozef Wilkon.

Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree Challenging dimorphic binaries

'Diasporic documents from the Gaelic Atlantic,' in-person one-day workshop at @edinburgh-uni.bsky.social, 5 September. Speakers include IASSL members Rob Dunbar, @pomuirch.bsky.social, and Silke Stroh. All welcome, registration required.

few things are more humbling and teeth-pulling than reading one's own prose.

Today's @jesuscollegecam.bsky.social #deer sighting. Under the shade of a tree, contemplating the day.

The five brave Palestinian journalists whom Israel targeted and killed today (left-right): -Anas al-Sharif (correspondent) -Mohammed Qreiqeh (correspondent) -Ibrahim Zaher (camera operator) -Muhammad Al-Khalidi (photojournalist) -Mohammed Noufal (camera operator) -Moamen Aliwa (camera operator)

Journalist Anas Al-Sharif reporting from Gaza, shortly before Israel killed him tonight: “If this madness doesn’t end, Gaza will be reduced to ruins, its people’s voices silenced, their faces erased — and history will remember you as silent witnesses to a genocide you chose not to stop.”

BBC International Editor Jeremy Bowen has confirmed that the entire Al Jazeera team in Gaza City has been killed.

Allan Ramsay, eminent Scottish artist, Principal Painter in Ordinary to George III, friend of Samuel Johnson, died #OTD 1784; known for his subtle portraits of Bonnie Prince Charlie (1745), David Hume (1754) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1766). National Galleries of Scotland

Avashai Margalit’s The Decent Society argues that a civilised society is one that avoids humiliating its citizens. Judith Shklar makes a similar point about cruelty. It’s as if governments around the world have chosen to take these not as warnings but as goals.

Mariupol, Aleppo, Gaza. Putin, Assad, Netanyahu & Trump.

the new season of THE THICK OF IT is getting off to a promising start

My first @theul.bsky.social #dragon of 2025.

Jane Austen was a satirist – why isn’t she treated like one? theconversation.com/jane-austen-...

Tonight begins Tisha B'Av, on which we fast to commemorate some of the greatest disasters in Jewish history, the destruction of both temples, and the ensuing exiles. This year, I think we have to add to that the destruction of Gaza, one of the greatest moral catastrophes in Jewish history.

this; just this Via @joshshepperd.bsky.social

We're dreaming of sand between our toes and nights spent under canvas. Images are details from the dustjackets of: 1. The English Air by D.E. Stevenson (1940.7.1679) 2. A Devon Summer by Joan White (1941.7.630) 3. The Compass Points North by M.E Atkinson (1938.8.680)