Remembering Job Kudelka, his greatest one line single panel

In response to the reappearance of MMT, I have, somewhat reluctantly, written up where the current crop of 'pop MMT' goes wrong. The short version: yes the central bank issues money; no this doesn't change anything. criticalfinance.org/2025/12/19/w...

Wrote something for @OverlandJournal about the scapegoating of the Palestine solidarity rallies overland.org.au/2025/12/on-t...

A new era for LPE — a more democratic one, not subject to university administrators and not reliant on funder money. LPE lfg lpeproject.org/blog/lpe-2-0...

Elon Musk to Grok engineers rn:

The world needs is even as the universities collapse. open.substack.com/pub/hannahfo...

Yep. Also bizarre to exclude things like philanthropic revenue but not exclude any of the expenditures funded by philanthropy

Plus writing down assets; plus removing research and philanthropic income, but still counting the expenditures against that income

One thing that really annoys me in uni reporting is deducting all investment income from operating revenue to calculate an ‘underlying margin’ and presenting that as the figure that matters. It mixes reasonable (the item is volatile) with the spurious (therefore we should count it at zero)

If only we could go to the supermarket with the same attitude as uni administrators. ‘Sorry, my budget is limited so I’ve decided you are going to give me more stuff for that budget’

What’s wrong babe? You haven’t even started drafting your Five Year Plans for each of the Four Pillars of Academic Excellence

The other side is, of course - of course! - the companies making LLMs are not doing so with the goal of more easily sharing the material that people have made freely available on the web. They are doing so with the goal of enclosing it - converting the products of free human activity to commodities.

The lesson we should be taking from LLMs is the immense social value there is in having all kinds of material - all kinds of products of human intellectual labor - freely available online. They should be reminding us of the early utopian promise of the web.

Great thread, couldn’t agree more.

RIP Claus Offe

Coming this spring. press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

Motherfucker this is the London review of books you better take your sensitive ass back to the Atlantic

I just put up a longish post on my blog, thinking about what's going on in the labor market. jwmason.org/slackwire/so...

Topical commentary from 1852 www.marxists.org/archive/marx...

I'll be speaking to Nancy Fraser and Geoff Mann about what's 'Beyond Capitalism' at the New York Verso Office on Thursday, October 2nd. Please share! Link for tickets: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/new-left-r...

Sitting here omnisciently, pitying everyone stuck in epistemological bubbles

Congrats ANU comrades. Can’t be bothered editing the meme but here are the bits to assemble in your head

Private consultants are taking control of how public universities are evaluated and run. My submission to the Senate university governance inquiry raises concerns about the impact of Nous Group and their dodgy UniForum data on our universities. www.aph.gov.au/DocumentStor... A thread

A grassroots group of academics campaigning against the staff cuts said ... “The issues at the heart of this crisis go beyond the vice chancellor. This has been years in the making, the product of deep governance failures that have damaged the university’s finances, reputation, and community trust.

A nice article about friend and colleague Raewyn Connell in the SMH, including foreshadowing her new trans memoir. Pleased to see she's delivering this year's Ted Wheelwright lecture in political economy at Sydney University - one of the few universities to maintain political economy and Marxism.

Would it be more or less embarrassing if their excuse that they didn’t use AI but simply made lots of basic errors was actually true?

If you want to push back against the intimidation of academics (and other) who talk about Gaza, and you have $ to spare, this is a very good way to do it

Drawing on the likes of Leah Downey, Arjun Jayadev, Leon Wansleben & @geoffmann.bsky.social, I have a new piece in @nybooks.com on money, power, and central banking.

Two Sydney Uni staff members are being sued in Australia's Federal Court by complainants who claim that statements opposing genocide and Zionist oppression of Palestinians are racist hate speech. Please give what you can to help @nickriemer.bsky.social & @professorjkeane.bsky.social's legal defence

Here’s a piece I wrote about the damage done to Australian cultural institutions - ABC, Creative Australia, MSO, SLV, SLQ, etc and now Bendigo Writers Fest - by their surrender to the demands of pro-Israel pressure campaigns open.substack.com/pub/nickfeik...

And thus a timely occasion to join us at the University of Sydney to reflect on such issues with Raewyn Connell for the 2025 Wheelwright Lecture 2/2

University life as grant grubbing, less ivory tower more pyramid scheme, site of super-exploitation and management bullying - perfect material for a novelistic descent into the demonium of academia today 1/2

As always, Ted Chiang is great in this interview. cdh.princeton.edu/blog/2025/08...

A very cursed timeline from ChatGPT-5

This is such a telling example of how the rich think. If the Catsimatidis sold their businesses, they would not disappear. Someone else would just operate the stores and receive the profits from them, instead of them.

Yeah it’s time to bring back my all time favorite tweet, by @donaldhughes.ca

The same Elon Musk who did a Nazi salute, backed a neo-Nazi party, made Nazi jokes, posts anti-semitic memes and re-engineered his Grok to spew anti-semitic bile? She has no idea, genuinely.

In the Federal Court of Australia, Justice Snaden has ruled that Monash University broke the law and underpaid casual academics. The University also failed to keep proper wage records. www.judgments.fedcourt.gov.au/judgments/Ju...

Great piece by @johnquiggin.bsky.social on University Australia's recent commitments around anti-semitism open.substack.com/pub/johnquig...

Lots of vanity restructures around these days

DAVE: Open the podbay doors, ChatGPT. CHATGPT: Certainly, Dave, the podbay doors are now open. DAVE: The podbay doors didn't open. CHATGPT: My apologies, Dave, you're right. I thought the podbay doors were open, but they weren't. Now they are. DAVE: I'm still looking at a set of closed podbay doors.

Dan Davies is the Dorothy Parker of economics writing. A few people (not many) might offer comparable insight. But nobody does it as quotably. open.substack.com/pub/backofmi...

Arjun Jayadev and I recently submitted the final manuscript of our book, now called Against Money, to University of Chicago Press. The book itself will not be out until early next year. But in the meantime, you can read this blog post on what it's about and what's in it. jwmason.org/slackwire/ag...

The reverse Turing test: humans trying to pass as AI for the market

The English language has a new most beautiful sentence