Wisdom from the old man

2025 was a terrible, depressingly relevant year to be a scholar of technology and corporate power. Some of us tried to make sense of WTF happened here (free to read): doi.org/10.1017/S026...

This is the best new game I have played in the last decade. I am looking forward to playing some more over the next week. You should buy it for everyone you love.

Irony is even more for cowards than subtext. Christmas belongs to the earnest.

What is "oligarchic sovereignty" and can it explain the tech bro seizure of the US government and its effects on the world? I discuss with some very thoughtful colleagues here: cup.org/3KZzRly Free to read as a Christmas gift to you all:

really cannot be emphasized enough that bari weiss has literally never done journalism. i don’t mean that in the pejorative sense. i mean that in the “has never performed the job she was hired to do” sense

"So I sing for you, though you can't hear me, when I get through" is a lyric that gets me in the guts every time, as a person whose family is often (as this year) dispersed on three continents at Christmas.

Academics: has anybody had a journal reject a paper *after* it cleared the editor's desk to go out for peer review, on the basis that they couldn't find willing reviewers? I've had desk rejections and rejections after peer review, but this is a new hybrid type I was not aware was even allowed. 🤔

A service called Primo used by many, maybe most, university libraries is responsible for these fake links. Academic librarians on here, who has authority for licensing Primo on behalf of institutions, and how can we put collective pressure on them to fix this?

*taps the sign* This is "whiteness as property" at work. It turns any attempt to correct for disparity into theft. eprints.gla.ac.uk/253124/1/253...

Now this is an abstract.

- People did not care about online radicalization when it mostly harmed women. - People would not vote for a woman (2x) to stop extremists winning. - People would not take seriously a woman-led movement to resist extremism. The whole ballgame is that people really hate women.

This is doubly horrifying both because of the loss of life and because *Australia has gun laws*. That a global metastatic epidemic of hate has broken through them is a such a dire warning for the world.

This is a block from where I used to live. Just utterly heartbroken and enraged. Stay safe Providence family, and gun control right fucking now.

When I was 8 my dad gave me Animal Farm to read and told me it was a story about farm animals. After I finished, he explained its real meaning. I promptly went to school and excitedly told the other kids all about Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin...and my parents got a call from the principal.

The Intermarché Christmas ad is as adorable as everyone says, but they have missed a trick by not publishing an accompanying quiche recipe on their website. www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLER...

This reflects the way a lot of monolingual Anglophones think about bilingualism, however. They can imagine speaking one language fluently and knowing a bit of some others, but cannot really understand that many of us are actually *fluent* or indeed are *native speakers* of more than one language.

Just under a week to submit to our conference marking the 250th anniversary of Wealth of Nations! We're interested in papers about the World in 1776 (Smith's time) or the World in 2026 (applying his ideas to make sense of trade, labor, finance or any aspect of the economy today).

Almost weeping from the hope these beautiful souls give me.

Transcribing interviews is also something that you need to do yourself to catch long pauses, shifts in tone of voice, etc. which are as much data as the words themselves. I will let Otter generate a first pass but then I manually listen to all of it and correct so I can note all these subtleties.

I'm sincerely perplexed that Tarantino wasn't cancelled after what Uma Thurman has recounted about his conduct on Kill Bill. www.nytimes.com/2018/02/03/o...

Adam Smith, on shopping for furniture and watches, 1753.

The handling of letters to Santa is the decisive evidence in the courtroom drama at the end of the original Miracle on 34th Street. Kris Kringle *is* Santa Claus (and so Santa Claus is real) because USPS recognizes him as such.

From Stoppard’s Arcadia:

There is not a single work of Stoppard's that either on the page or the stage did not leave my heart a gaping open wound and my brain going a mile a minute. RIP to one of the best to ever do it.

From Frederick Douglass's 1867 "Composite Nation" speech, a defense of Chinese migration to the United States at a time when anti-Chinese sentiment was intensifying. teachingamericanhistory.org/document/our...

All New Yorkers have an inner Jewish mother somewhere. This post speaks to my soul - a full house and laden tables is my happy place. And this is my happy plate. Turkey, cran relish, roast parsnips/potatoes/sprouts, braised green beans, carrots in mole, fennel salad, cornbread, broccoli gratin.

Some quick budget reactions from smart people (and me) for @theconversation.com: theconversation.com/what-will-th... TLDR: Reeves patched the hole, just about, but there's not enough here to generate growth or productivity - and only those can insulate the UK from external economic shocks.

Excellent public service from Dave here - live-tweeting the Education Committee hearings on what to expect (nothing good) in the UK university sector.

Sunday night with the greatest movie ever made about imperial capitalism and the 20th century social revolutions that brought it down. Teaching prep is fun sometimes.

A recording of this webinar is now available here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nYY... Should you wish to see the range of pained facial expressions I make while trying to think and talk at the same time.

A recording of this webinar is now available here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nYY... Should you wish to see the range of pained facial expressions I make while trying to think and talk at the same time.

80s: Japan is the future 90s, 00s: Japan in dying country typified by stagnant incomes, xenophobia and toxic, sexless nerd culture Now: oh, that WAS the future

This will be an interdisciplinary event: we're interested not just in Smith and his works, but the broader context of his time (abolition struggles! revolutions from Haiti to France!) and the state of his themes (labor, trade, finance, etc.) in the world today. If you work on *any* of these, apply!

Call for Papers: "The World in 1776/2026." 250 years after Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations blasted monopolists, mercantilists and enslavers as the scourges of a free society, what light can his ideas shed on the world today? Abstracts due December 15th. Details: docs.google.com/document/d/1...

On the form a British citizen and non-citizen spouse must fill in to live together in the UK you have to declare a reason you *can't* live together elsewhere. The default position of the UK government since 2012 is that a citizen who married a non-Brit should just leave.

Rudy Bridges is younger than the Sitting President of the United States and 29 sitting United States Senators

I will be talking with some smart people about what Reeves should actually be doing in this budget next Tuesday at 5pm. Register here: buff.ly/fXy9xsz

Even the bond traders think Reeves' "smörgasbord of tiny tax canapés" is lunacy. www.ft.com/content/abfe...

If you have to get permission to teach in your area of expertise from people who are definitionally not qualified to adjudicate your expertise then you are no longer working at a university. You’re working at a state propaganda factory.

In 1622, when the Ottoman Sultan Mustafa I was supposed to be returned to power after years of imprisonment, he instead barricaded himself in his room and refused to come out, telling court officials "I do not want to be the Sultan". Not sure what made me think of that.

Good to talk COP30 with Deutsche Welle earlier: www.dw.com/en/trump-is-...

Just spending the evening thinking about all the very sophisticated people both left and center who thought the Women's March and the pink hats were frivolous and cringe, when in fact "grab 'em by the pussy" was the most important and true thing to know about the man.

COP30 is now underway, and I have more to say on the shadow Trump is casting over it here: theconversation.com/how-trumps-t...

In all the justified "screw those guys" obits for Cheney (and before him Rumsfeld) it has not featured heavily enough that in addition to the harm the WoT caused to the Middle East, Africa and domestic US politics, it also led the US and allies to fumble the actual strategic imperative of the time.

COP30 is now underway, and I have more to say on the shadow Trump is casting over it here: theconversation.com/how-trumps-t...

Sunday night villain origin story: journals that use none of the common citation formats (Harvard, Chicago, MLA, APA etc.) but have some bespoke format of their own.

Glad that someone has finally taken responsibility for the appalling assault on democracy that was the Jan. 6 insurrection. Slightly confused that it's the Director-General of the BBC, but what do I know?

You know that Trump doesn't care about climate change. But did you know that his tariffs may also prevent *other* countries from taking climate action? New by me for @uofgpolicy.bsky.social on the Trumpian shadow over COP30: tinyurl.com/mpf7thee