copilot, thank you

blogging - it's back!!

✨ Tonight on ARTE France: City Country Culture — Invitation au voyage spotlights Glasgow and Alasdair Gray. Filmed June 2025 by Orane Delépine & François Chambe, with @sorchadallas.bsky.social, @rodgeglass.bsky.social & Alan Riach. ✨ watch 👇🏽 www.arte.tv/fr/videos/13...

‘If I think about what this means, I want to cry’: what happens when a city loses its university?

please spread the word!

we absolutely need to know who he sent this to. how is this something the public is being kept in the dark on???

Writing Politics in Modern Britain: Genre and Cultures of Publishing since 1900, edited by Gary Love & Richard Toye, has now been published by CUP in Hardback & Paperback. Delighted to get my copies. Thanks to all the wonderful contributors who have helped us to bring the broader subject to life

The UK version of “Project 2025” by the Reform party includes a British ICE, a concentration camp for 24,000 people, mass surveillance and withdrawing from refugee, anti-torture and anti-trafficking conventions. It’s on their website. That’s how comfortable fascists are in the UK today.

just to record my children's continuing domination of the local Burns recital championship, the dynasty is undefeated

As the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk shooting proved, the mainstream media needs to impose labels on what is often just ideological disarray and political incoherence. All narratives collapse in the face of the streamer.

I mean, it's not too early is it? We can all see the membership line-up, the constitution and the price for inclusion.

"I spent my morning buying water purification tablets, butane for a camping stove, a first aid kit and other emergency gear in between Slack messages and Zoom calls for my day job, where no one talks about the elephant in the virtual room."

The New World asked me to speak to some British trans women about what life has been like for them over the past few years - here's what they had to say, in their own words: www.thenewworld.co.uk/marie-le-con...

it's genuinely incredible how nobody batted an eye at trump threatening imperialistic wars of expansion against mexico, iran, venezuela, nigeria, and colombia but the one that actually got people to be serious about the warmongering is denmark. parodic, even

There should be grave national concern about one of Britain’s leading economic sectors and chief export earners shedding tens of thousands of often skilled relatively well paid jobs. Universities are also key to local and regional economies across the country.

Last couple of issues of @thebaffler.com have been superb. I particularly loved this essay by Sophie Pinkham about Ms Rachel, early years education and TV, the joys of (certain) children's books and the genocide in Gaza thebaffler.com/salvos/speak...

when your GP goes completely silent on treatment options while working overtime on every detail of your funeral, down to who will empty the bins

Nominations are open for the newly-founded Scottish Literary Studies Book Prize, administered by the Universities Committee for Scottish Literature and awarded biennially to an outstanding work of scholarship in the field of Scottish literary studies. £300 prize. ucsl-scotland.com/scottish-lit...

Jeez. This is completely insane. How has this been allowed to happen?

History is just the world-spirit inventing a class of guy to get mad at

There were 29,300 student visa applications last month, 17 per cent less than in December 2024 "The Home Office will be pleased but pretty much everyone else will see it as the disaster it is—for university finances and the UK’s soft power," said Nick Hillman, director of @hepi-news.bsky.social

Wrote about how of course Donald Trump loves imperialism, one of the closest things to outright organized crime the state does www.welcometohellworld.com/stripping-aw...

So clever of US, UK and European universities, with ample encouragement from their governments, to have been closing down Area Studies, History, Languages and Politics & International Relations programmes, so clearly irrelevant to the world in the second half of the 21st century.

Almost a year now since I received this absolutely classic burn from the Canadian government.

this is amazing

*at a christmas party* oh Rudolph is your favorite reindeer? That’s cool yeah yeah he’s pretty great *in reindeer chat* BlitzenBoy92: at the work thinh. take a guess DonnerTime: buncha dolphies? VixenLover: fuckin lame bro just keep ur cool change the subject The Dasher Enjoyer: thinh

GenAI is destroying research mechanisms before our very eyes.

It's become a mantra that the govt are protecting curiosity-driven research It's still the biggest chunk of UKRI's budget But figures out today clearly show it will decline in real-terms, while spending on govt priorities and innovation will rise www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-r...

RIP Mass market paperbacks. Always my preferred format. www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/...

'Chris Parkes, a senior lecturer in history education at King’s College London, told Times Higher Education that “to be a trans person in the UK right now is to be exhausted and terrified”.' 1/3

It's music's biggest night! Welcome to the Hell World 2025 best 50ish(?) songs of the year. www.welcometohellworld.com/the-best-50i...

Credit where credit’s due, this is great from Sarwar

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