neurodiversity is Good Actually. just want to say that

This is outrageous. All people with an ounce of empathy in them must oppose it. Families will be torn apart, people will be plunged into poverty, and the state will be in chaos.

Today I learned Katie Couric and Katie Puckrik are not the same person. I had blended them together as a person with a misspent youth and an establishment middle age.

Tickets are on sale now for 'On Writing for Young People'. A two-day, online conference sharing ideas & insights from the academic field of creative writing for children and young adults. 20-21 Nov 2025 www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/on-writing...

A plea to academic publishers: please stop publishing articles formatted in columns. It’s a pain for people using screen readers and is generally more difficult to read on a screen, which is likely how the majority of articles are read these days.

Very much enjoying the culture of trust and respect implicit in the installation of room usage monitoring devices on academics' office doors today. Imagine my shock on discovering that managers' doors remain unsullied…

Lancasterian doric columns hit different in the rain. This is a niche brooding northern architecture post.

Where is the time saved? Lecturer A still only has two weeks to read and evaluate 100 essays. And now - additionally - make crib notes for an AI and approve the AI's copy, instead of just giving the student their opinion directly.

I've got twelve minutes to make a connection at Birmingham New Street today. The station designed and built by Daedalus. I'm taking odds on the chance I'll make it.

I love the history of London: Roman London, medieval London, and I love the London we're making today. A world city for everyone. ❤️

I came off Twitter years ago when it was bought by a transphobe. That transphobe is now calling for a racist mob to oust a democratically elected government in a country he has no connection with. Hatred where his heart should be.

Shot, chaser Young men more likely to vote Green than Reform. Young men second most progressive group of any demographic. Combined right-wing vote barely bigger than Green vote alone for young men

#NewIllustrationOfTheDay by skilful Ruchi Mhasane from This Is Who I Am, a picturebook by Rashmi Sirdeshpande about a girl with ‘a foot in two worlds’ who is ‘so much more than that’. It celebrates the places, people, history & experiences that make us who we are. @andersenpress.bsky.social 11 Sept.

Gave themselves whiplash with that about-face. Should call Injury Lawyers 4 You.

Considering that everyone I know does their research at weekends and in the evening, I wonder how they plan on stopping us? VCs rocking up at your house to get you to come and join their Sunday football league instead??

Insomnia is a weirdo. Woke up thinking "does 'provoke' mean 'towards voice'?" Then, "Does 'provocative' mean "with the quality of being towards voice'?" Then, "Does 'provocatively' mean "done in the manner of something with the quality of being towards voice'?" Stupid 3am brain thoughts.

At the 55 minute mark, it sounds as though Michael Hobbes tries to turn his whole body inside out with disgust at the project.

Sadiq Khan calling out Zack's use of "social media" instead of calling out the genocide in Mayor's Question Time really is the perfect analogy for why Labour are quite so astoundingly unpopular.

Crass consciousness.

Why is it always a children's book? When do we get a celebrity who decides to edit a Festschrift or prepare an annotated edition of a primary source text?

I thought maybe it was collecting green stamps. The correct answer was collecting the spoils of empire.

It’s Latitude with hashtags.

Nicola Davies and Siôn Tomos Owen have been appointed Children’s Laureate Wales and Bardd Plant Cymru 2025-2027, respectively 👇 #BookSky

You know, Joyce Summers, with her job running a gallery and, presumably, her degree in liberal arts of some kind, never struck me as someone who would name a baby Buffy.

- you clean up that banksy? - sure did, your honour, leaving a perfect, permanent outline, imbuing the work with real fuckin gravitas while making its point better than the artist did himself just like you asked

America sneezes, UK catches a cold. Coming our way on the current trajectory.

I guess if Clinton's don't do a 'happy birthday to my fav paedo' card then you just have to improvise.

Tickets are on sale for our 2025 online conference! Join us to hear best-selling author Abie Longstaff deliver the keynote. Hear papers on ways to engage reluctant readers, to representations of masculinity, social justice in historical fiction & much more. www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/on-writing...

Driving north in the rain. I have to say, limp, muddy England flags hanging off motorway bridges by single cable ties are a fairly effective symbol for my current mood.

Happy New Academic Year to everyone who has yet to be made redundant ! The institution will never love you. The RÉF/your huge grant will not save you. Join a union.

Free online attendance at The Fantasy Summer School 2025, organised by the University of Oxford, and Bloomsbury Publishing, that brings together the expertise of scholars, publishers working with fantasy authors. Link here www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/oxford-blo... Please share :)

This list is shameful and heartbreaking. www.theguardian.com/global-devel...

I need to record some teaching videos today. Am dragging my heels because I can't be arsed to do a full face of make-up on a Sunday. Then I get cross about the fact women can't speak in public bare-faced without feedback forms saying we look like the incompetent undead. I should just go back to bed.

Read yet another OpEd on how political correctness (yes, really, not even woke!) was the thing killing universities. In the year of our Lord 2025. When AI takes every OpEd job going, I wonder how we will even be able to tell?

How do we persuade Chris Morris to make a mockumentary about these men? I am willing to petition the BFI.

Precarious contracts keep getting shorter. Until recently short-term associate lecturer contracts were for 10 months. Now UCL advertises for 7 months. What does it say about our field, about how we treat the new generation of scholars? www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DNW277/a...

We've finally given VCs a platform with this survey (famously they have no other ways to make us miserable) so you'd best fill it in to make sure your voice is heard too: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Ibrahim has a scholarship to study at Glasgow Uni - but he's trapped in Gaza and needs UK Government help to get out. This week Labour told the media they would bring 40 Gaza students here. Ibrahim heard the news ... then learned he wasn't one of them. www.thenational.scot/news/2542399...

Quakers really are the absolute GOAT.

Am seeing lots of photos of white road markings (zebra crossing, junctions etc) inexpertly daubed with streaks of red paint... Is anyone else seeing 100s of sanitary pads in _SteveUpTheHammer's timeline, or is it just me?

Here ye, here ye, the inaugural New Adult Book Prize shortlist is here! 💫 In different ways - and sometimes in different worlds! - the authors beautifully articulate the concerns, challenges, joy and laughter of new adulthood, says prize chair Katie Fraser. See the thread below 🧵 #NewAdultPrize

Had a small autism lightbulb moment. It is not necessarily that autistic people don't understand social conventions and social constructs. Maybe that's true for some. But for others, social constructs are just *stupid* and simply *not worth my time*. A crucial difference...

I want to write a new blogpost, academic pals! What’s your best advice for sustaining your motivation as an early career scholar, post PhD, without institutional affiliation? How can you feel supported in carrying on with your work? And what can those of us lucky enough to have jobs do to help?

Despite the stereotypes, Bristol Uni is not just for the well-off. The English Dept does great outreach work and, this part-time, evening class, whole-ass degree, should be treated as the jewel in their crown (to upend a metaphorical hierarchy!) Please sign the letter.

Amongst all the fun of this it’s, once again, worth pointing out that I couldn’t convince a single university in the UK of the value of this sort of public history work or the benefits of a REF impact case study built around computer games and Lucasfilm. Worth reflecting on for academia I think. 🗃️

Who’s with me for a campaign to stop politicians wearing hi viz jackets and hard hats when talking about the economy and instead being filmed playing Total War: Warhammer

Back from the dentist. There was a trainee nurse. My dentist pointed out all the 90s repairs in my mouth, saying, 'We really used to do that' and 'There's mercury in that one', while the trainee nurse gasped in horror-wonder. My mouth is the Natural History Museum for teeth.

What on earth was the prompt Melania's people used for the Putin letter? "ChatGPT, I need to sound like the Cowardly Lion, having spent twenty minutes smoking the poppy field, asking the Wicked Witch of the West for some munchkins back."

Not Canada and Greenland watching anxiously as USA normalizes handing over chunks of sovereign territory.