Poetry is not a helpful thing. It makes you stop and feel Unexpectedly. Abruptly word order changing CAPITALISING poetically Using punctuation to play With your emotions. Yours! Compelling you to think Of your mother’s final breath...

stop posting shit from xitter, come on

Back by popular demand, and because the Fascist Feelings are ongoing on planet earth! Join us this summer.... senseandsolidarity.org/summer2026/

Always be becoming ungovernable

Science journalists, science communicators, science folks of all stripes — if you read nothing else today, read this post by @chriscmooney.bsky.social : 🧪

In this week's Scratch, @maggiemertens.bsky.social asks why writers remain on Substack—as a user of Substack herself—and interviews three writers who've left the platform for Beehiiv and Ghost. We know how hard Substack makes it to leave; we also think writers should still try do so.

texts in mummies doesn't grab me like words on bullets and bombs did, but sure, i'll give it a go

My co-authors and I surveyed international grad students and postdocs, asking them if they would have come to study in the US if they'd known about the current wave of restrictions on international students. About half said no. MIT is already down 20%, more to come. www.iza.org/publications...

"It may feel like nothing we can do as individuals will make a difference to stem the climate crisis. But this is a mistake. Individual actions do matter, just not the way we usually think." Check out my new piece with @michaelbrownstein.bsky.social for @slate.com slate.com/news-and-pol...

Grammar as metaphor enters the chat

If your team is trying to make sense of this kind of hybrid threat picture, in Norway or the wider region, get in touch. Mapping these crossings, between organised crime, radicalisation, and state interference, is what we built Revontulet to do.

1/ Excited to report we have a new paper out @nature.com today! The bottom line: training data for LLMs does not just fall from the sky - it is created in the context of existing social political institutions - and that has consequences for LLM output. nature.com/articles/s41...

My first book, Um..., has a whole chapter on the Freudian slip and an extensive section on the malapropism if you're looking for linguistic context on this

damn, this looks cool www.nemosciencemuseum.nl/en/to-do/eve...

super old guy on the plane turned out to be old, blind, gay, barely mobile, Dutch... *and* an open source absolutist. spent an hour talking taking notes on his browser, Linux, maps a11y traumas, then got him from plane->train->tram. one-handed bluetooth keyboard he made to type braille to phone:

Researching while Chinese: The full story of what is happening to Chinese postdocs--and faculty members--at the University of Michigan and Indiana University www.science.org/content/arti...

this sounds like a gripe but it's actually a #writing pro-tip: you can publish somewhere, and you can even have been on the masthead, but goddamn if your stuff will flow to the slush pile like everybody else's and you won't even get the courtesy of an email saying no. fine, it's a gripe

Issue eleven is out. The subscription price is lowered. We write about populist algorithms, Stefan Zweig, Pasolini, Thomas Mannm And 3 fiction writers take the stage. europeanreviewofbooks.com/issues/issue...

I know at least one european commission bureaucrat who would accuse me, on the basis of this syntax, of not being a native English speaker

always be becoming ungovernable sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/the-last-i...

The Emergence and Development of American English by William A. Kretzschmar, Jr. Based on data from the Linguistic Atlas Project, this book tells the story of American English from a linguistic standpoint. 📚 https://cup.org/41QndtU

polyglot wannabes alert

my father in law is in town, so I'm hearing about how my wife's ancestors on both sides both beat up LBJ

This is so fucked up. Years of scholarship stolen and resold on Amazon, without a word of the archaeologists and historians who did the labour, the interpretations…the actual work. Dystopian stuff. theamericanscholar.org/who-is-blake...

Every time I teach the MOVE bombing, students are shocked. And when I teach the aftermath involving an anthropologist who hoarded some of the remains and used them as teaching tools, they are even more shocked. And I teach in Pennsylvania. Even some students from Philly are unaware of this history

Weird how there’s kind of a scam weather—I don’t get anything for a while, then the emails come in a flurry.

Looking forward to that too! Btw I was asked to write a brief blog post on Carnap’s sentence in 2015: richardzach.org/2015/02/carn...

just when you think the hegemony of narrative has waned, there it is again

Licit sails, colorless green ideas - and also karulizing pirots! Martin Konvička (@teapotlinguist.bsky.social) wrote a whole blog post on these sentences a few years ago. 🔗 hiphilangsci.net/2022/03/21/c... #Histlx

Legacy linguistic data can take on new lives when returned to source communities. In this talk, Nicté Fuller Medina explores restitution, stewardship, and the afterlives of archived Belizean Spanish recordings. Thursday, May 14 • 12–1 PM ET. Register today! www.lsadc.org/ev_calendar_...

He of "Le silence vertébral indispose la voile licite," beating "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" by some 25 years

peeking out from the possible juggling jokes, a question: how is this even news? in *Luxembourg*?!?!

Maybe today is the day. Chin up, make someone happy, cross the street outside the crosswalk, and hydrate.

🦋 I've got butterflies in my whole body today: our paper is out in @pnas.org! I'd say thats on theme.. Together with @alexgalvezpol.bsky.social, Sohee Park, and @mtsakiris.bsky.social we mapped how people feel political emotions in their bodies. Turns out politics doesn’t just play on our minds…

i'm happy to see a CFP on "multimodality, language, and aging." getting there, almost, almost!

Did you know Marvel's #Deadpool was named after a game? Dead pool games are folk games where players predict which public figures might die within a given period. @gua-le-ni.com explores the space where play, ethics, and mortality meet in new #GameStudies article. www.um.edu.mt/newspoint/li...

just heard from a colleague about a conference that asked for a *blended* abstract and CV, so essentially a narrative CV. has anyone else encountered this?

'Stuck in the hole it was meant to fix'. The Starmer metaphor lorry: www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

We are all language journalists now. Or some sort of slop detective who’s compelled to write about everyday forms of textual nausea

Historian of abolition here, history tells us how we got here, to put it succinctly “John Brown was hanged for treason and Robert E. Lee was not.”

What was the name of that West Texas photographer, very famous in the 1990s, Robert something? had a studio in Sanderson.

📣 CALL FOR INTERVIEWS! If you know a recently retired sociolinguist who had a major influence on the field, consider interviewing them and publishing the transcript with the Journal of Sociolinguistics! To propose an interview, just email the EICs with your idea - contact details below 👇

One of the earliest digital humanities projects we did at Columbia University Libraries was an ethnographic history. The author wanted "intertextual" footnotes (impossible to design in print) and the publisher insisted on endnotes. This was the solution. Cool project, even if it's now been archived.

A reminder that Bye Bye I Love You has amazing endnotes, a stellar index, and insights and unimaginable histories of linguistic milestones.

consider for a moment that it's entirely normal these days for people to be walking alone down the street and be talking into the air. just bizarre.

Ffs people don’t put your meds in checked luggage

i hope this skeet finds you well

i was reading an old short story I wrote, never published, which has the line, "Jesus is the beacon. But the devil is the landing strip." Which I don't remember writing and can hardly believe is mine.

Want to do an experimental PHD on the evolution of human language? Only one more week left to submit your application!