Fieldwork sketch of pyracantha - ubiquitous on South African highways.

I am of course biased, but if you're going to ICA, this is going to be really excellent.

The thing about research which AI will never do, can't do, and wouldn't do a good job of even if it could do it, is that reading your citations can let you discover something that one person said sixty years ago that nobody ever picked up on, but that is revelatory, even sublime.

10/10 cover.

THREAD: So you may or may not recognize this little girl, but it's timely to learn about her now, as Iran's Hormuz deadlock is pushing desperate regional & global powers towards alternative trade corridors. This is Ciham Ali Abdu, an American citizen. She hasn't been seen or heard from since 2012.

"Never hallucinate or make anything up." yes, you can just demand that the LLM not make errors that's definitely how the technology works

This was the constant tension of apartheid in South Africa: between the White business elites who needed a reliable supply of Black workers and the obsessively racist purists demanding they all be expelled to the Bantustans.

Wow. Where was the president of Cornell and did he know his car was capable of doing this on its own?

it tells us that billionaires have rejected the post-1945 fiscal and social contract and, regardless of what the democratically-expressed will translates into law, have no intention of surrendering any of their oligarchic power or wealth

"objectivity is not the same as neutrality. If there is an aggressor and a victim, a liar and an honest person, a corrupt individual and an honourable one, then your task is to describe all that clearly and forcefully." www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

I've just read Octavia Butler "The Parable of the Sower" & "Parable of the Talents", I've skimmed these before in an undergrad way, but so glad to now take time & read them properly. Bleak, hard reading but inspired. Written for our times, literally, was set in the 2020s & on.

This reminds me of the Home Office interviewer, in all seriousness, insisting that I tell him what specific date LSE term began or they would likely not approve my student visa. I laughed at what I thought was an attempt at banter. He explained it was not.

The people who should win this year's Nobel Peace Prize - the volunteers running Sudan's Emergency Response Rooms www.ft.com/content/e9fc...

I remember when it used to be harder to prove genocidal intent.

It's me in the Financial Times, detailing the deep and pernicious influence of one-size-fits-all management consultancy in our universities... Take a look! 👇 www.ft.com/content/5032...

Watch a new documentary about photography, memory and disappearance in Argentina by Piotr Cieplak.

My drawn statement on Ai as standalone from my now finished minicomic as syllabus for new liberal studies class! As promised this is shareable, printable - all from my site, feel free to make use of it, cite me & let me know how it’s received. Share away all here! spinweaveandcut.com/fall-2025-sy...

Upside down, by the ankles, and then treat him like a piñata.

I can’t believe this needs to be said, but here we are. I truly don’t understand why ppl do this. If you don’t wanna do the work, just turn it down! It’s not like you get paid for reviewing. Or credit that counts towards your career development. Just say no and move on.

Sánchez: “You may have heard that Spain is alone. They’re the same people who said that when we recognized the State of Palestine, and then others followed. “We are not alone — we are the first. Those who will end up alone are the ones defending the indefensible.”

FT comments section this morning - saying what everyone else is thinking, right?

Paul Conroy — a brilliant photojournalist who documented wars & human chaos for decades — has passed away. He was injured in the same attack in Homs that killed Marie Colvin & he just carried on travelling to conflict zones. May he rest in peace.

I think about this Tony Benn speech much more than I used to

Israel has now killed more journalists than any other government since the Committee to Project Journalists began collecting records in 1992. The Israel-Gaza war is the deadliest conflict on record for journalists, the CPJ found. https://wapo.st/4aJGqBm

Greetings from Kyiv. Today, I came to visit them. To say thank you – our fallen Heroes 💔

It is a failure of imagination and morality to act as though the highest and only aim of human communication were the market-based accumulation of an audience.

"How dare you say shit about our fair city and our single child, when you won’t even help your own" clarkesworldmagazine.com/kim_02_24/

Honestly, I thought this was a pic of Duke Nukem.

This is something we should think about across all writing intensive fields. Even if you're using the AI to turn notes into drafts, you are offloading the kinds of creative and epistemic decisions that drive the organization of your writing to a machine.

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...

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/...