Danish author Olga Ravn is once again on the longlist for the International Booker Prize 2026, this time nominated for her historical and yet imaginative novel “The Wax Child”, and once again her novel has been translated into English by co-nominated Martin Aitken. Congratulations!! 1/6

Alf Jørgen Schnell skriver om hjemmet, horror og irsk-norske Catriona Shines «Habitat», en roman om en boligblokk i Oslo hvor det begynner å skje uforklarlige ting. www.vinduet.no/essayistikk/...

A compelling essay by Francis Spufford on why everyone should be reading fantasy in the 21st Century.

Only 10% of boys aged 14-16 read daily for pleasure, UK study finds

In today's @civicsoftech.bsky.social blog, I join @philnichols.bsky.social and @anterobot.bsky.social to reflect on what we've learned while writing about the Luddites over the last three years. We share thoughts about Luddism and education, collaboration, and writing for different audiences.

To acknowledge the ways AI systems are changing does not buy into hype, it sharpens the precision of critical thinking about their impacts. To make sense of what AI does to people, you also need to understand what it does for them, writes Eryk Salvaggio.

“Generative AI breaks long-standing correlations that society uses to infer things like effort, sincerity, authenticity, and credibility. Once these signals erode, we don’t automatically get something better.” jessicahullman.substack.com/p/zeynep-tuf...

Planning a webinar on "Uses and Abuses of AI Agents in Education" helped me learn more about the state of things from @marcwatkins.bsky.social @kevinroose.com @caseynewton.bsky.social @brehove.bsky.social and others. Slides: link.annarmills.com/agentsOneHE Recording: onehe.org/resources/us...

A big problem here is that we're not defining terms when we have these conversations. What do we want students to learn? How is this process helping with that? /4 www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2026/...

In today’s episode of CDN’s podcast Off Center, I interview Hazel Wilkinson on how 18th century literary slop relates to today’s AI slop. This printer’s ornament showing a monkey copying out a book was often printed in books you might call “slop”… podcasts.apple.com/no/podcast/o...

New piece: "ALGO-READ: The creative automation of the reading subject" Open access. Critical study of the production of ‘the reading subject’ as a media trend, unit of value and data point www.bloomsburycollections.com/monograph-de... in RELATIONAL TECHNOLOGIES (eds A. Lagerkvist, J. Smolicki

Beware of agentic AI browsers, Anna Mills states. Pedagogy, academic integrity, knowledge and online learning are at stake here among other things. So thanks for sharing, Anna!

Here it is: youtu.be/Yo8btJQpFng

Agentic AI is here: What does it mean for online education? This was a stimulating conversation with John Nash and Jason Johnston of the Online Learning Podcast. Note: agentic AI browsers do way more than the custom chatbots sometimes called agents. www.onlinelearningpodcast.com/e/ep-37-agen...

I'm arguing for all the reasons I think AI should not be embraced in K-12 schooling here (if you agree, plz vote no here): generativerevolution.ai/should-schoo...

Ask vendors. Ask administrators. Ask reps. Ask. In public.

"Framing something as a problem in need of an urgent response reduces the space for deliberative, “slow” decision processes and for democratic choice itself."

Norsk-danske Ludvig Holbergs utopisk-satiriske roman "Niels Klims underjordiske rejse" fra 1741 har inspireret Bergen Kunsthall. Susanne Christensen anmelder udstillingen "Iter Subterraneum", der tager afsæt i og skaber forbindelser til Klims besøg hos træerne i det underjordiske rige Potu.

Ohhhhhh snap! The signal is hot but the podcaster is not. Cyberpunk Librarian is back with episode 70 and Tales from the Dark Side. Let's talk about shadow libraries, shadow librarianship, and what the traditional library might learn from the underground.

‘Subversive’ has become one of the most common terms of critical endorsement. But what really is literary subversion? From Dante and Milton to Shane McCrae, this essay traces how new visions of Hell respond to earlier ones, not by destroying them, but by absorbing and reshaping them

Spionage ist Popkultur! Heute auf 54books: Heike Hellebrand über die zeitlose Attraktivität des Spionageromans. 54books.de/populaere-sp...

In the footsteps of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Karl Philipp Moritz @WiggishHistory considers the connection between walking and writing: https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/rambling-reflections-on-summers-in-switzerland-and-sheffield

Discover everything that the common European data space for cultural heritage has to offer - from rich data to a thriving community and a wide range of tools, products and events. Explore the data space: www.dataspace-culturalheritage.eu

‘Under pressure’: Greenland’s PM gains fans at home and abroad after his rebuke of Trump

Menneske, monster, uhyre, maskine? Billederne og fortolkningerne af Mary Shelleys "Frankenstein" er mangfoldige og forskelligartede i de romaner, film og tegneserier, der er dukket op nu og da, siden romanen udkom i 1818. 1/

"This reciprocal bargain of traffic in exchange for content underwrote the economic, cultural and information-based fabric of the internet for three decades."

Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee says he is in a ‘battle for the soul’ of the internet, says commercialisation means the net has been ‘optimised for nastiness’, but collaboration and compassion can prevail www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Agentic AI in education is a "ruse" - its promises of efficiency and productivity will really lead to an intensification of educators' work. Great to have @carloper.bsky.social on here now, and this is a smart short conversation with @neilselwyn.bsky.social www.buzzsprout.com/1301377/epis...

Gute Bildung ermutigt und ermächtigt zu gesellschaftlicher Handlungsfähigkeit. Im Kontext der Digitalisierung ist das besonders herausfordernd, da diese vorherrschend auf digitaler Infrastruktur und damit verbundenen Interessen aufbaut, die häufig im Widerspruch zu einer Gemeinwohlorientierung […]

Why I wrote this. techpolicy.press/grok-is-an-e...

This 👇🏽 🔥💙🔥💙🔥💙🔥💙🔥💙🔥

Google AI Overviews cite YouTube more than any medical site for health queries, study suggests

A 500-Page Book Explores the Ghosts & Monsters from Japanese Folklore

The German Romantic writer E.T.A. Hoffmann was born on this day in 1776. He accentuated the marvellous, the fantastic and the poetic, but also staged worlds of the uncanny and the uncertain in his stories and novels. Thus, Hoffmann introduced the fantasy/fantastic genre, in its modern form. #OTD 1/

Sex, death and parrots: Julian Barnes’s best fiction – ranked!

A new Bodleian exhibition uncovers the archives of John le Carré. This conversation explores the exhibition and Le Carré's life and work, which emerges as both a chronicler and critic of the messy politics behind modern power. With Jessica Douthwaite

Day 3/10 of sharing provocative scenarios to spark conversation. Students may soon arrive in college expecting faculty will use AI for feedback and grading because their teachers used AI in high school. How would this affect faculty decisions around using AI? open.substack.com/pub/marcwatk...

Yesterday's @brookings.edu report on AI and education (esp. the quote below) left me thinking about this piece we published in August in The Important Work, so I pulled it out of the archives for a second look. theimportantwork.substack.com/p/from-the-a...

My friend, Matthew Cheney, has published a new collection of essays on teaching. It's open access, so you can read it for free. This work displays the fierce, gentle power of generosity, and honors the humanity at the core of education. I can't recommend it enough. matthewcheney.net/blog/finite-...

"Practices of cleaning and dusting reveal domestic environments as environments in the full, ecological sense. They can teach us to understand comfort not as the property of objects, but rather as an often-gendered practice of maintaining environments and their habitability."

For CRITICAL INQUIRY, I reviewed @leifw.bsky.social’s very important LANGUAGE MACHINES. Also, unless someone tells me different, I’m going to lay claim to the first F bomb in CI’s history.

We covered pros and cons of a range of extrinsic and intrinsic motivation strategies for reducing AI misuse in today's panel for #MLA26, sponsored by the @modernlanguage.bsky.social Task Force on AI in Research and Teaching. The chat was lively! Slides: mlaai.short.gy/2026 (The polls are open)

Anthropomorphizing language conceals the limitations of AI, promoting misplaced trust. @emilymbender.bsky.social & @nannainie.bsky.social suggest focusing on a system’s functionalities: instead of saying a model is “good at” something, say what it is “good for." www.techpolicy.press/we-need-to-t...

The important part of this is not that AI can be good at craft—but that, as Hollis says, no amount of craft will make us feel a model has written a “great” poem. AI keeps revealing that we care about human action, not about the abstractions (intelligence, creativity) we invented to describe it. +

Ich lerne jeden Tag ein neues Wort. Heute: Slopaganda.

And now, part 2 with the AMAZING @annamillsoer.bsky.social where we talk a bit more about the intersection of #AI and #OER! open.substack.com/pub/aiedusim... #HigherEd #OpenEducation #GenAI #AIEdu

Very excited for this conversation with @annamillsoer.bsky.social and her work on an #OER book that examines #GenAI & #Writing…check out the interview & consider adopting her #OpenTextbook #HigherEd #EdTech #AIEdu open.substack.com/pub/aiedusim...

I was recently trying to make someone understand how good and important these books are. Should have just sent them this.

The whole issue is pretty great! rethinkingschools.org/magazine/

Many critical AI resources are written for teachers, rather than students. I wrote this for undergrad students dealing with “AI literacy” in the humanities, hoping to raise more fundamental questions about what it means to write. People have added it to syllabi, so maybe you’ll find it useful, too.