How to be a journalist, by one of the best. Carlos Hernández died this week. @mattwalshjourno.bsky.social www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Gun violence is not just a security issue. It is a public health crisis shaped by inequality, gender norms, and the global gun market. Our new report argues prevention must move beyond policing towards health, equity and evidence. aoav.org.uk/2026/the-pol...

If anyone is interested in an AI haters cocktail meet up at #ICA2026, please let me know. I think it'd be cathartic.

'to treat peer review as a throughput problem is to misunderstand what is at stake. Review is not simply a production stage in the research pipeline; it is one of the few remaining spaces where the scientific community talks to itself.' 1/3

What technology takes from us – and how to take it back | Rebecca Solnit

Written version available here: open.substack.com/pub/louisear...

As a side note, it’s funny to see so many of these emails with thirsty academics repeatedly enact Marx’s bit in the 1844 Manuscripts about the power of money. “Oh Mr Epstein, your house in New York is enormous and, unrelatedly, your questions at dinner were so intelligent, so insightful, so deep.”

Nothing happened, except that they killed one of the journalists involved in the investigation, Daphne Anne Caruana Galizia.

1-- Epstein was funding white nationalist stuff (see next post) 2- How is he making these many typos 3- I don’t even know what to say about Chomsky anymore

Yeah, don't give it back, it's past it's use by date. Honestly, if you can, buy him a new one.

Wow. Just wow. bit.ly/4rcswOY the future begins in a Petri dish

GAI in academia is such a disheartening lesson in how many people - when they think they won't get caught - will readily deceive their colleagues.

Amen! Amen! Can we have an “Amen”?

I have some bad news. One, if you need to use ChatGPT for your graduate application letter, you are not ready for graduate school. Two, no, not "everyone is doing it" and those who don't do it aren't "losing out." ChatGPT is not an advantage.

Langston Hughes on Patrice Lumumba on this the 65th anniversary of his assassination.

This is one of those stories that feels implausible, but not *quite* as implausible as you want it to be. Like I'm sure back then if you paid a guy who knew a guy you could essentially do anything there. And we know better than ever that most of the truly rich simply have no ethics. So... 🤷🏽‍♂️

This article is excellent: "...why study atrocities in Africa but not in Gaza? And it would raise a question that now haunts us: Was our work just a prop for advancing Western hegemony? Was conflict studies, even if inadvertently, an imperial science?"

One of the best AI critiques I’ve seen read.dukeupress.edu/critical-ai/...

Celebrating three #ICA26 rejections and counting. I'd like to dedicate these decisions to God, my enemies, and geopolitics.

Please consider passing this along: If you are a scholar interested in journalism and how it's coping with increasingly violent targeting and repression (see Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, even the US), please consider sending in an abstract. There are even bursaries available for early career folk.

Folks getting in the weeds about licensing agreements but this research study engaged me in research, by creating a bespoke dataset about me, before I agreed to participate. They already made the dataset before I was invited to participated. That's not how informed consent works

This was an excellent kick in the pants. I miss that blog era.

Libya and Iraq. “Those who fail to learn from history are bound to repeat it. Those who learn from history are bound to watch others repeat it”.

Compiling some reading recommendations i see on here on the situation in Venezuela, feel free to add your own bsky.app/profile/alda...

"Not only will America come to your country and kill all your people, but they'll come back 20 years later and make a movie about how killing all your people made them feel sad." - Frankie Boyle

"We envision a resistance that is...a repudiation of the efficiencies that automated algorithmic education falsely promises: a resistance comprising the collective force of small acts of friction." "How to Resist AI in Education" by me & @cnygren.bsky.social www.publicbooks.org/four-frictio...

The Embassy staff of Germany, France and the United Kingdom sing Schedryk in the Kyiv underground. Wonderful!

Less pettily, there's just so much in this amazing world to wonder about that it seems so sad to abdicate doing that.

My personal 2c on the AI in academia discourse is that if I discover you have used AI to replace your reading or writing, you are going on a literal list. I am that petty. I don't want to deal with people who don't actually understand their areas.

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.

It’s absolutely disgraceful but it’s also been a very useful tool to assess who is worth listening to in my academic circles—the ones who are uncritical about gAI have lost me entirely. I distrust your judgement, your research skills, everything.

*I blame the speculative science fiction of AI-exuberant CEOs youtu.be/xiIKyTFCQik?...

My colleague reviewed a paper for the journal Climate and discovered it has been written by AI (citations that didn’t exist). Not only did the journal keep the paper, they asked her to re-review it. We are so cooked.

Recalling Fanon's observation that perhaps we aren't mad, society is. For no particular reason. 🙃

my great-grandparents arrived in the UK in the 1890s with nothing. they sold pickles from the front room window, took in laundry, worked as tailors. their children were nurses, teachers, salesmen. their grandchildren were professors, designers, opticians, doctors, magistrates, entrepreneurs.

Those who ‘give’ are now reduced to medical workers and the rich, apparently.

"When there’s no war, you aren’t committing war crimes when you kill people indiscriminately. You’re just a straight-up murderer."

The Pentagon reporters who have been kicked out of the building continue to break huge stories every day while the right-wing New Media continue to post selfies of themselves hanging out in the Pentagon.

breaking: reviewer that doesn't share your approach thinks your article manuscript is not ready for publication

This tracks my intuition that AI text generation is for generating prose nobody wants to write or read. Which is a lot of the work at these echelons.

Applications Now Open for the University of Glasgow Library Visiting Research Fellowship scheme - supporting scholars from across academic disciplines to come to Glasgow to work on our unique research collections. Please RT or pass on: www.gla.ac.uk/myglasgow/li...

"I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."

This is very interesting (and yeah, I also had an initial “oh come on, that’s nuts” reaction to the first part of this article, but as I read on, I realized he was making some pretty compelling points)

Hey authors! Check to see if Anthropic stole your book to train their slop generator on. You’re entitled to $1500 per stolen Work. Look up your work, and if you’re in the database, file a claim secure.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com/lookup/

Just heard re: some ICE agents who raided a Chicago taqueria, then went back to the same taqueria for lunch the following week and got confused when the owner kicked them out, and I realized "jesus these doofuses really do believe we're all living in a video game where the NPCs have no memory"

this is more or less the whole thing imo

This is such a crass example of the shift in US (and UK) politics where human life now ought to exist to serve 'the economy' (wealth accumulation by a minority) rather than the opposite.

Angelina Jolie used her Instagram platform to shed light on Russia’s so-called ‘human safari’ in Kherson. It is a deeply important and much-appreciated gesture.

I read that headline and my first thought was "violence?"

This is such a powerful opening paragraph to a stunning essay, I am still thinking about it hours later. Full article: people.brandeis.edu/~teuber/Care...