SCOTTISH LITERARY REVIEW 17/2 (Autumn/Winter 2025) The latest issue of Scottish Literary Review is online now via @projectmuse.bsky.social (institutional access required). Print copies will be in the mail to subscribers shortly! #litstudies muse.jhu.edu/issue/55415

'There in the shadows [of the White Paper] lies the call for HE institutions to specialise, with the lurking threat that many will lose their research funding in some, but perhaps many, areas, in order to better fund those with more intensive research.'

proof that all men are brothers

I thought this was really smart overall and a great explanation of the intellectual leaders/vision of Trumpism in particular, but it bumps up against the same problem that all such essays do, which is that there are so few meaningful principles there to understand. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

This is super fascinating and I'm interested in thinking about what we gain and lose with this kind of thing but the subfields that could benefit from this kind of technology are the first ones to have been completely hollowed out in higher ed.

An actual must-read article, as pretty much all of Malik's are. I genuinely worry how long she can keep up being the single British commentator who can say any of this stuff.

The shift from “migrants are the cause of racism” to “migrants are the cause of fascist rioting” is a big one in political terms but not, I think, in the minds of people who have for decades been saying that it’s not racism at all and even if it is, it’s not bad or shameful.

This is the shit right here. bsky.app/profile/the-...

Imagine looking at Scandinavian models of social democracy from Britain and picking out cruel immigration policies as the big source of inspiration.

“The elites are ecstatic about imagining a vast, uneducated, and unproductive population forced to pay companies like OpenAI to access the written word and to approximate thought.” Must read piece by Noah McCormack with too many quotaboe lines to select one! thebaffler.com/salvos/we-us...

'Professor Sally Foster, of the University of Stirling’s Faculty of Arts and Humanities, has now discovered the existence of this body of fragments, only one of which was officially recognised when she began her research.'

I think this is the truest baseball tweet for me

"Promises were made, and lives and families built upon them. How have we reached a place where wrecking those lives is even up for discussion?" On Powell, Heath, Lam and the descent of the British right.

'there are too many black people on my television these days' is about as far from legitimate as a concern can be

We lost Elliott Smith 20 years ago today. Some great remembrances in here: www.welcometohellworld.com/having-had-e...

Katie Lam has made a video - focusing on not giving new ILR grants to people who don't have it But quietly including the Conservative proposal to be the first government since Idi Amin in 1972 to revoke the permanent leave to remain, then expel: she underplays to what extent x.com/Katie_Lam_MP...

It’s always worth remembering that this utterly horrific wave of mass death inflicted on some of the poorest people in the world was for literally nothing. It hasn’t even been for some monstrously cynical benefit to someone, it hasn’t saved money. It is just some of the purest nihilism imaginable

people online are constantly saying shit like "the average person is now post-literate and returning to medieval peasant mindset" while neglecting the corollary, namely that our elite aristos are once again scrying for angels, summoning demons, distilling elixirs of eternal life, etc.

Two dudes whom despite their best efforts have no power in Canada.

Imagine you're at a writers' retreat with the lads and you're all showing off a draft after dinner and then your mate's girlfriend goes here is the novel Frankenstein which I just wrote

Find yourself someone who loves you as much as Vladdy hates the Yankees

It may destroy the global economy but it’s still kinda fun to take a tiny active role in the bursting of this bubble in Bartleby fashion

So if I’ve grasped the galaxy-brained strategy here, it’s: ✅ Day 1: reassure target voters that migrants are a problem & you’re ready to make them suffer ✅ Day 2: tell target voters their ideas are racist ✅ Day 3: reassure target voters that migrants are a problem & you’re ready to make them suffer

you can learn plenty about Scottish politics just by placing the graphs and images from this report side by side www.sfc.ac.uk/publications...

Doctorow on the impending economic collapse when the AI bubble bursts. pluralistic.net/2025/09/27/e...

Yep since 2019 we’ve paid £10-£15k in visa fees including around £5k to the NHS during which time my wife had no access to public funds and was paying income tax and NI like everyone else. Stop pretending it isn’t already a massive rip off and overwhelmingly net positive for the country.

Analytic philosophers - this is it, this is the moment that the grounding literature actually becomes relevant to something.

‘World-class research capacity at risk from cuts to staff time’. University leader warns institutions rowing back on research time could lead to “tipping points”. www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-u...

This final post from Kaleb Horton is very beautiful and hits hard. This is just so sad. RIP.

It seems that Kaleb Horton has passed away. A devastating loss. One of the best writers of this generation. Kaleb was a friend for ten years and in all our conversations I was trying to convince him how good he was, something he seemed to know but also never fully believe. I am going to go cry now.

There have been a ton of 20th anniversary "best of" podcast lists lately, and it has started to feel a bit like an obituary for an industry. [gift link] defector.com/the-future-o...

Re the new Reform pledge, a sports writer has already got to the heart of the matter better than the politics commentators www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

It doesn't make up for all of the bad stuff of course, but being the first generation of parents who can tell their kids that things were better back in their day, dadgummit, and actually be right about it is weirdly satisfying.

Too much American news the past few weeks. Once in a while is fine.

'As universities close courses and departments in response to financial pressures...students in parts of the North, South West and East of England, as well as large areas of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, are losing access to social sciences, humanities and arts (SHAPE) courses.' 1/2

Patricia Lockwood’s new book explores illness. Getting sick, she said, thrust the questions that lurk at the heart of all novels, and all lives, to the center of hers: “What is the performance of a self? What is a person? What am I?”

I’ve written for @lrb.co.uk on the closure of Scotland’s last oil refinery at Grangemouth by Petroineos and the unjust transition in British manufacturing. A committed workforce was betrayed by multinational employers as governments failed to meet their promises.

Exactly this - we are at a dangerous cusp where appalling people have crawled out of the woodwork and values-led pushback is vital. But the most hostile anti-migrant voices remain a tiny minority, given a platform because they reflect the obsessions of our hateful media

good explainer if you’re confused why some people are calling for Sally Rooney to be charged as a terrorism supporter

Showing children of the future the unacceptable hair rendering on the left to explain why we had to get rid of the rainforest.

Desperately trying to flush my hardback copy of Intermezzo down the toilet as the police kick in my front door

I wrote about this willfully stupid logic a couple of years ago www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

The old world is dying, and the new world is so fucking stupid dude

What Labour is proposing now was considered too extreme for North Carolina in 2016. The man who proposed it lost an NC election by 150k votes *last year*

One of the biggest obstacles faced by my first-gen students is a fear of writing. Fear that they'll be called stupid or wrong. Fear that they won't use "smart" words. Instead of working through that fear, LLMs give them a way to never confront it, never overcome it, never learn. I hate it so much

New YouGov polling. A monumental failure of our political class to educate, a monumental failure of our media to report fairly, for a generation

"The BBC World Service has compiled material on over 160 cases where children have been shot in Gaza, and found that in 95 cases the child was shot in the head or the chest. In most of these cases the victim was under 12 years old"