this is not true, and this guy doesn't speak for me! nymag.com/intelligence...

actually i kinda *do* think using genAI should be such a social faux pas that the user is marked as a pariah and no longer feels welcome in the community. "AI is bad" is no longer an abstract (it never was), my city has been under a boil water advisory for a week because of AI data centers

Never give up on your dreams

Academic departments deserve to be saved, supported, resourced, allowed to grow even if they're not "best in the country," "first in the REF," "top-ranked," "at a Russell Group uni," or whatever other austerity-brained nonsense senior managers have been using to flimflam you out of solidarity

Timid librarian in plea to save my workplace from making a huge mistake. A whole floor of Cardiff University's main library is under threat of being repurposed to teaching facilities with the removal of 7km of shelving holding valuable books. Pls share x you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/sa...

Hey Bluesky folks. If you’re in education or just follow for my thirst traps, would you please sign this if you can, and share far and wide? c.org/dCKk9vjqxY It’s much appreciated. My university is cancelling all UG humanities degrees. We need support and love right now x

The signs that your UK HE has entered the death spiral (may have started years ago) and is most probably getting advice from one of few HE consultants, such as Nous. 1. Losing your joint degrees if you had them, terrible for modern languages

English media analysis of recent seismic changes don’t really grasp the very different forms of nationalism in the other nations. Whereas English is negatively based on Imperial nostalgia the others are formed by their negative experiences of British colonialism. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Meet the sideshow FREAKS who REFUSE to use the work-stealing, planet-burning, minority-choking, teen-killing, water-guzzling, brain melter that gets most things wrong and makes the user decide whether they give a shit enough to do their job correctly or if they've given up completely on themselves.

My favorite Sam Neil fact will always be that he designed a future Australian flag that replaces the union jack with the aboriginal flag for Event Horizon and insisted the film use it.

Every day I watch the tech industry build The Boot On the Neck Of Humanity Machine and watch universities say “we are going to sustainably and ethically prepare our students to become innovators in The Boot On The Neck Of Humanity Machine space”

In my first year as a host at @newbooksnetwork.bsky.social, I've interviewed seven excellent film and literary scholars about their recent books, their ways of working, and the value of the humanities You can check out the episodes here: newbooksnetwork.com/hosts/profil...

Highly recommended!

Almost everything we argue about is a substitute for the thing we should be arguing about: the immense wealth & power of an oligarchic class, which captures governments, ruins lives and wrecks the living planet. This class redirects our rage at scapegoats. To resist its lies is to resist its power.

Please listen to my conversation about ARCHIVING THE PAST @ucpress.bsky.social with @alixbeeston.bsky.social on the @newbooksnetwork.bsky.social podcast! 🥳🥰 newbooksnetwork.com/archiving-th...

All I'm going to say that: If I had never done a thing, I wouldn't be so quick to jump into discussions about whether "AI" can do the thing.

I don't know how to clip a segment (sorry), but the bit I really want you to watch starts at 29'10". It's about the deep roots of the attack on Iran and why it's just as well Starmer is "no Winston Churchill". I'm surprised this aspect isn't more widely discussed. 🧵 www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/epis...

It's just so entirely grim that underlying all of this is the fact that there are really just one or two institutions that can be expected to hire at all for the foreseeable future, even on a replacement basis. Just total ecosystem collapse.

“The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.” James Baldwin

Reliance on the US, neglect of key industries, reluctance to raise taxes to fund public services, reluctance to re-embrace Europe, inconsistent foreign policy, commitment to reducing immigration, transphobia, illiberal positions on drugs and sex work are not serious contemporary policy approaches.

One cool thing about unequivocally hating AI is that you will be proven right over and over again every single day

"The UK pattern is one where people have the skills but jobs don’t let them use them." extremely familiar...

everyone loved the tech industry's free music and friendship machines of 20-30 years ago. it's unclear what could be causing people to feel the opposite about the industry's new racism and insanity machine

My general feeling is that every summary tool shortcuts the library shelf. In grad school there were few things I adored more than finding a book on the shelf bc I inevitably found six or seven other books on proximate shelves that I didn’t even know I needed! Process is the point!

It’s also not our job because “teaching students ethical use” is a largely vacuous slogan built on inevitability narratives, “just a (neutral) tool”discourse, & other misleading hype. In my humanities courses, I begin with the *ethics of non-use* when I explain the many reasons we won’t be using it.

Reading this beautiful weaving of past work and these chapters has healed the day. “somewhere behind this wall I have to believe in the quiet rhythm of your Sundays the blue obstacles routed from the fire held in your hands this life that demands only to let down its solitude”

Oh, hell yeah! The new issue of ASAP journal has the first four chapters of an unpublished novel by Kathleen Collins! It's titled Blue Obstacles and is open access here: muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/articl...

Very pleased to be doing this upcoming online research seminar for University of Reading's Film, Theatre & TV department: Wednesday 25 February, 14.00 - 15.30, "Muriel Box, 'The Truth About Women', and the truth about women directors" www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/muriel-box...

I guess I have to say this too: staff worked ourselves ill to do our best for students and we didn't make the decisions that led to their dissatisfaction *but we know that we'll bear the fallout from it.* We are already losing jobs, departments, campuses, fields of expertise to government decisions.

A few years ago in the Kathleen Collins archive in New York, I started reading a heavily edited, coffee-spilled notebook. I'm honored to share an excerpt of Collins's first novel, virtually unread before now, in dream magazine @parisreview.bsky.social: www.theparisreview.org/blog/2026/02...

Hot on the heels of the @parisreview.bsky.social piece featuring an excerpt from Kathleen Colllins's unfinished novel "Blue Obstacles," ASAP/Journal has published a longer version of the draft materials with scholarly notes and a contextualizing essay. It's open access! 🎉🎉🎉 doi.org/10.1353/asa....

Happy to have had a chance to write about Nella Larsen's author portraits and to reflect on my first book In and Out of Sight in the postscript to a special issue of the Journal of World Literature on the modernist face, edited by Anca Parvulescu and @tynedaile.bsky.social: brill.com/view/journal...

At long last our Special Issue on 'The Modernist Face in/as World Literature' is now out in Journal of World Literature, edited by Anca Parvulescu (Washington University in St. Louis) and me! Our Introduction is open access here: brill.com/view/journal...

Just a few hours left for this, but it's plenty of time. Even just answering the "overall do you agree" question can be meaningful. Speak against this endless cruelty.

Hot on the heels of the @parisreview.bsky.social piece featuring an excerpt from Kathleen Colllins's unfinished novel "Blue Obstacles," ASAP/Journal has published a longer version of the draft materials with scholarly notes and a contextualizing essay. It's open access! 🎉🎉🎉 doi.org/10.1353/asa....

A few years ago in the Kathleen Collins archive in New York, I started reading a heavily edited, coffee-spilled notebook. I'm honored to share an excerpt of Collins's first novel, virtually unread before now, in dream magazine @parisreview.bsky.social: www.theparisreview.org/blog/2026/02...

this will be an extraordinary book + everyone should read Alix's methodological précis!

✨✨✨ After a bit of a wayward journey, my critical-creative book about women and girls in photography history has found a wonderful home @psupress.bsky.social! *Image Encounters: Photography and the Feminist Art of Being Seen* is coming in late 2027 ✨✨✨

The UK government is proposing radical and punitive changes to settlement rules. This is settlement, not citizenship. The consultation is open until 12 February; please respond to it and oppose these evil proposals. Amnesty have a good guide: www.amnesty.org.uk/resources/gu...

I got to chat with @alixbeeston.bsky.social about Here Is a Figure for her @newbooksnetwork.bsky.social podcast! Alix asks such great questions, and it was really a joy to talk to her about where the book came from and what it’s about! If you’d like to listen: newbooksnetwork.com/here-is-a-fi...

New on Print Plus As a part of our "Visualities" blog series, Jane Frances Dunlop explores Gertrude Stein's visual thinking, the simultaneity of perception, and interdisciplinary approaches to seeing. Read the piece here: modernismmodernity.org/forums/posts...

This is like the British Museum complaining that someone took their stuff

Professional societies keep beclowning themselves buying into a lie about what an LLM "summary" is. They are inherently counterfeit: not an epistemic product of the ideas in the source, but summary-shaped text linguistically based on *other* works (in the training corpus) that use related language.

This, for the record, is what goes into a footnote. It’s the key part of the research process where I examine the practical, methodological, ethical implications of my sources before I join the stream of interpretation. It cannot be outsourced to an LLM.

I find research just as gratifying as the writing itself - whether it's for fiction or essays. I like seeking & learning, I like it when one piece of art illuminates another. I love when the process makes me feel like a detective cracking the case. denying yourself this pleasure makes no sense to me

My latest @newbooksnetwork.bsky.social interview is with Jonathan Eburne, whose new book Exploded Views is a fascinating and witty experiment in returning to and reimagining unfinished scholarly projects. Listen here: newbooksnetwork.com/exploded-views

one of the coolest things about ChatGPT is how you can actually just never use it. you can fill your whole entire life with simply not once using it. it's incredible.

Open access for one more week folks x