It is exhilarating to see Becca Rothfeld, whose Washington Post reviews were little islands of intelligence, open to a broader New Yorker canvas, as in this essay (ostensibly on Leslie Fiedler) www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...

OLH flips another journal to diamond/fee-free OA, from Taylor & Francis. Another world is possible. www.openlibhums.org/news/970/

So, the premise is because AI is further burdening peer-review, we should implement it across the publishing process. This uses inevitability rhetoric, and noticing a pattern of those who are developing AI tools, or building their career and status around AI expertise, saying we need to use more AI

Thomas Frank in @harpers.bsky.social: "When the GOP holds the White House, America is great; when it doesn't, it isn't. Simple. One day, the eagle screams in triumph; the next, we remember our forsaken Old Glory through the noble haze of patriots' tears." harpers.org/archive/2026/07/s...

"What Wittgenstein—and the many other Romantically inclined intellectuals who got a bad vibe from the twentieth century's thoughtless faith in scientific progress—didn't anticipate is that the threat of annihilation would one day become a selling point for technology" www.commonwealmagazine.org/wi..

Inequality in the usa is now the same as during the French Revolution - Downtown Los Angeles June 2026

ESSENTIAL: we need to support open infrastructure more systematically - without it, science crumbles. A great article here issues.org/open-data-re...

L to R: Chris Richards: biracial kid from Alabama who speaks about black history and has tattoos of MLK, Ali, and Obama Sergiño Dest: Dutch-Surinamese, emigrated to Brooklyn as a kid, naturalized Fola Balogun: born in Brooklyn to vacationing parents, raised in UK but CHOOSES to play for USA

"Even though open access was motivated partly by the desire to rein in commercial publishers' profiteering, it has in many ways simply reinforced their dominance" — @samuelmoore.org www.researchprofessionalnews....

A Second Sight is officially out today! Please consider buying and sharing with your friends, students, colleagues, neighbors. Publisher’s Weekly said it will help you understand America at 250!

Now available to read online. Here's my chapter, on Shadow Libraries and Pirate Infrastructures. dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/critica...

Jacques Berlinerblau, our campus jester: "… my prediction [is] that by 2035, drones will be professors. They'll whir and zigzag above the students' heads. The gizmos will dispense AI-generated mash-ups of a million compressed lectures in Kylie Jenner's voice." www.chronicle.com/article/the...

👀ICYMI | "At the core of all these tools is a series of verbs: to surface, to rank, to summarise, and to recommend" #AcademicSky #AIbias #MatthewEffect @jpooley.bsky.social

The May History of Media Studies newsletter is out, with updates about the journal, new bibliography additions, and CFPs! buttondown.email/hms/archive/...

Great, disturbing reporting from the Times on private equity profiteering off autistic kids. The lede, though, is buried—these clinics are all using ABA, a dehumanizing therapy that treats kids as Skinnerian robots www.nytimes.com/2026/05/23/he...

The Matthew effect means prominent and well-cited scholars tend to receive still more prominence and citations, whereas less-cited scholars tend to slip into further obscurity over time. How will this manifest in AI summary? @jpooley.bsky.social for @lseimpactblog.bsky.social

#AcademicSky I think a lot about this. AI will perpetuate all kinds of biases already found in the literature. Not just racism & sexism, but Matthew Effect and others. It's a prediction machine, based on what's in the ether.

Good piece by Jefferson Pooley on how LLM-powered “research” tools like Google’s “Deep Research” and Elsevier’s “AI Discovery” likely strengthen the “Matthew effect”: highly-cited authors are amplified while undercited (often female) authors are increasingly ignored: blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsoci...

"If we hand off the work to computational probability and the profit motive, we may reproduce, or perhaps worsen, an academic “class structure” with all of its accumulated (and now hidden) injustices." Post from @jpooley.bsky.social on the "Matthew effect in AI summary"

💥New | The Matthew effect in AI summary ✍️ @jpooley.bsky.social #ScholComm #Libraries #AcademicSky

“Every successful technology needs to find a problem that people are willing to pay money to solve. In the case of emotion AI, that problem appears largely, so far, to be worker performance and productivity, especially in customer service and blue-collar labor.”

After the mass resignation from Journal of Economic Surveys over bad publisher terms, I could not imagine in a couple of years we would have **Reviews of Economic Literature** Non-profit. True OA. With @stanfordpress.bsky.social; 2 articles already up this year rel.journals.sup.org/index.php/rel

The April History of Media Studies newsletter is out, with updates about the journal, new bibliography additions, and CFPs! buttondown.email/hms/archive/...

The richest man owns X. The second and fourth richest men control Google. The third richest man owns The Washington Post. The fifth richest man owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. And now the sixth richest could soon take over both Paramount and Warner Bros. See the problem here?

"SLACs face so many challenges today that their precarious survival may be more surprising than their escalating demise.... And yet the shuttering of Hampshire... feels different, not so much another liberal arts domino falling as the symbolic end of a whole tradition of progressive education"

The Entire Archives of Radical Philosophy Go Online: Read Essays by Michel Foucault, Alain Badiou, Judith Butler & More (1972–2022)

NEW PUBLICATION ALERT! Andrew, Marcel, & I introduce & draw some conclusions from a series of interviews w/ anthropologists experimenting w/ data sharing, process documentation, intermediate publishing models, & infrastructure building to enable new forms of collaborative knowledge making.

See the new issue of History of Social Science, just published! Half the articles are free, including @brad.bolman.com’s account of Bruno Latour’s blocked appointment at the Institute for Advanced Study and Chas Camic’s short bio of Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class muse.jhu.edu/issue/56614

In the early 1990s, Bruno Latour was not hired at the Institute for Advanced Study. I wrote an article about that decision and what it reveals about the science wars and the history of science studies, now live @histsocialscience.bsky.social muse.jhu.edu/article/985884

On Elsevier's LeapSpace summary-and-citation tool: the camel-cased vacuity of the product name is an index for the whole thing: extractive parasitism on the knowledge that human scholars craft www.jeffpooley.com/2026/04/jo...

An effective long term strategy for those who care about independent and credible news would be to fund nonprofits to enable nonpartisan journalism. We can see where CNN is going, we need more ProPublicias.

This is absolutely disgraceful and deeply perpetuates the divisions between research active and teaching and scholarship colleagues. HE teaching requires research skills and this division is as incoherent and unsound as it is immoral.

Without support and engagement from the broader communities of institutions (e.g. HEIs, libraries, etc.) venture capital is looking to sweep in and centralise control of all of it. Some of it purely commercial, some of it for the data (which are, of course, not unrelated.)

Now is really a crucial and also vital time for supporting open infrastructures. Many have been built in many contexts. I'm reflecting upon @rupertgatti.bsky.social's end notes to last week's @copim.bsky.social conference on the work undertaken there to infrastructure the OA books space.

So the fact that we bombed a girls elementary school, while likely using AI for targeting, is going to be a major headline story dominating American news coverage when exactly?

“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

Irony alert: Springer Nature's Journal of the Knowledge Economy retracts 113 (!) articles from a special issue, for "compromised editorial handling," etc. Underscores one truth: special issue grift helps drive the journal-knowledge economy link.springer.com/journal/131...

Cutting, lovely sentence-level writing in this Andrew O'Hagan essay on the Murdochs www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...

Goldsmiths drops three out of five deals with big publishers. University cites “financial and values-based” reasons for not renewing with Elsevier, Springer Nature and Wiley. www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-o...

"Quick, let's screw everyone over while they're too busy getting screwed over to notice" is a hell of a business strategy

Had a great day in Paris at the École pratique des hautes études mapping out the future alignment between @ojcollective.bsky.social & @openbookcollective.bsky.social. Here’s me with @rupertgatti.bsky.social & @joedeville.bsky.social (Fernand Braudel looks on). #diamond #openaccess

Our first report is out! Read on to find out why open research practices in AHSS are diverse and extend beyond the suite of practices emphasised within dominant accounts of open science.

Sad news but honestly a good innings for an APC-free, community-led open access journal.

An interesting post from Jeff here: with my technical hat on, I've long said that collectivised systems infrastructure is the way to go for HEIs and other overstretched bodies involved in open publishing. We need to pool resources and work together rather than waste money on individualism.

Waiting for an open infrastructure collective @oatp.fediscience.org.ap.brid.gy @investinopen.bsky.social www.jeffpooley.com/2026/01/wa...

Until Miller’s gone these are just gestural purges to sanitize and consolidate his reign of terror.

Really hard to look at this and all the other examples of bravery and kindness from ordinary people in this moment not think also of the tremendous cowardice exhibited over the past year by some of the richest, most well-protected people in business, media and politics