I’d like to bury these disruption labs in an ideas sandpit.

What's lost when we lose staff, departments, programmes and faculties in Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, and what's that got to do with organ donation? Amid the looming losses faced by Cardiff, Edinburgh, Lancaster, Leicester and Nottingham (among many others), here's a worked example. 1/8

Beautiful - and intellectually interesting (inspired by some classics of modern European thought - de Certeau, Jacobson, etc).

Not enough attention is being paid to the effective closure of the bulk of one of the 2 or 3 most important public archives for modern British history. A terrible own goal for the BBC as a public-service agency.

Bit of excitement to see you into the weekend, the UK has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Oregon. Who says UK trade policy is going nowhere fast? (me, actually) www.gov.uk/government/p...

UCL Grand Challenges launched a strategic partnership with Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation to drive digital innovation. UCL will support knowledge exchange in key strategic areas. I was honoured to take part remotely in the signing ceremony: www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2025/no...

London is a place of constant slight discomfort [...]. You’re more attuned to it because it slightly rubs you the wrong way.(Iryna Shuvalova) A city’s rhythm changes, just like that of living beings. The exhale of morning is not the same as the pulse of night. (Nisrine Mbarki)

The Starmer government repeating many of the same cackhanded blunders that reflect a lack of strategic vision which Johnson and May stumbled into are another datapoint for the hypothesis that the UK has deeper structural dysfunctions towards the EU beyond party politics

Marie Curie, Polish-French physicist, chemist, pioneer in radioactivity, first woman Nobel laureate & only winner of two Nobel prizes in different sciences (Physics & Chemistry); born #OTD 1867, buried in the Panthéon, Paris. Nobel Prize | 5th Solvay Conference 1927 (colourised)

Yes and yet several European countries are embracing a far-right worldview that would burn these policies to the ground, so let’s be not be smug or complacent here - particularly as Mamdani‘s pro-immigration stance is radical by European standards.

From the EU-UK ‘Common Understanding’ in May: “32. The SPS Agreement should provide for an appropriate financial contribution from the United Kingdom to support the relevant costs associated with the European Union’s work in this policy area.”

A National Gallery show ‘full of shadowy wonder’. Until May 2026. www.ft.com/content/3053...

A List of Things Said to Have Been Ruined by Women 🧵

*Loved* co-curating this special issue of @swedishbookreview.bsky.social with its brilliant editor, literary translator Alex Fleming aftranslations.com. New translations, superb interviews, and a short intro by yours truly - all on #CityWriting and all linked to @europeanlitlondon.bsky.social.

Heute ist Welttag des unzuverlässigen Erzählens. Vielleicht auch erst morgen.

Between 11am and 1pm tomorrow, join Robert Spano, Jens Elo Peters Rytter, @colmocinneide.bsky.social and @profveronika.bsky.social to discuss the future of the European Convention on Human Rights, both in Europe and the UK. Sign up to attend this in-person event at @laws.ucl.ac.uk 👇

UK expands visa route to receive more European graduates. www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-u...

The #1 lesson from yesterday’s blowout: Humanities majors killed on the job market 1) Mamdani- Africana Studies 2) Spanberger -French 3) Sherill - Global History

Turns out this news was in the public domain yesterday but no one has covered it as far as I can tell. Does no one care about our national library anymore? It was much the same with the cyberattack. If this was a bit of 'science' infrastructure can you imagine? www.pcs.org.uk/news-events/...

Perfect story.

NYC election coverage on German radio is a reminder that there’s a well-established German word for nearly every point of Mamdani’s socio-econ agenda, coming from the extremely centrist and non-radical social-democrat vocabulary. The US is too brain-washed by the Cold War and racism to even see

Letzte Woche haben wir 5 Jahre #95vsWissZeitVG gefeiert. Viel hat sich seit 2020 & besonders seit #IchBinHanna geändert, nur ein paar spezielle Quatsch-Argumente für Befristung kommen immer wieder. Damit wir sie nicht ständig von vorn widerlegen müssen, hab ich das heute in #ArbeitInDerWiss gemacht!

The fish is cheap, yet rents rise all around, the butter’s salty and the water’s stale; great distances here shrink by underground, but I can’t nurse in peace my post-lunch ale. (Theodor Kramer, From the first days in London, 1985) www.europeanliterarylondon.org/feature/c016...

This looks superbly interesting: 'The voyage [which carried Walter Benjamin’s son Stefan to Australia] is a compound of many other voyages, on different fictional and historical wavelengths, its passengers a collection of stowaways, stand-ins, impostors, understudies, namesakes and doppelgängers.'

Academics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching

Die Herbsttagung des Politischen Clubs Tutzing (14-16. November) widmet sich der Wissenschaftsfreiheit mit einer ziemlich beeindruckenden Rednerliste aus Politik, Ministerien, Wissenschaft, Hochschulpolitik & Journalismus. Anmeldungen noch möglich bis 6.11! www.ev-akademie-tutzing.de/veranstaltun...

Libraries matter. Access matters. After years of legal battles, the Internet Archive is still here—and still fighting for a world where everyone can read, learn, and remember. @arstechnica.com tells the story: arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...

“It is also November. The noons are more laconic and the sundowns sterner...November always seemed to me the Norway of the year.” -Emily Dickinson, letter to Elizabeth Holland (Nov 1865) #everynightapoem #november

Please do join us at this HRLA next week. At a time when international law is under strain, & the ECHR is singled out for particular attack, it is important to reflect on the UK’s past and future commitment to international justice, human rights and the international rule of law.

And right on topic, more academic freedom news. www.theguardian.com/education/20...

A timely and authoritative lecture, and the most rigorous and riveting conversation I’ve witnessed in a long time. A privilege to have chaired this, very grateful to UCL Provost and to @laws.ucl.ac.uk, Disagreeing Well for invaluable support.

Dressing up as a catalogue ghost, that product of a 19th c typo that drains the time of researchers and librarians and which—after initial banishment—reappears unexpectedly elsewhere. For extra horror: the ghost entry seems to describe a source which will solve all your research problems, but alas.

Zu Halloween gehe ich als abgebrochenes Berufungsverfahren. #IchBinHanna

Government has published one of those quiet but important documents that might get overlooked as it is not 'newsy'. The headline finding is that £1 of public R&D investment generates £8 in net economic benefits for the UK over the long term www.gov.uk/government/p...

Deciduous indecisiveness

Aus gegebenem Anlass: Unser neues Dossier thematisiert Geschlechterungleichheiten im Wissenschaftssystem – von den historischen Wurzeln der Differenzkategorien über die politische Semantik der Exzellenz bis hin zu alltäglichen Mechanismen. www.soziopolis.de/dossier/wiss...

'What better way to disguise a lack of courage than to frame it as the pursuit of peace?' I wrote about the cost of abstract pacifism, and why choosing comfort over courage comes at the expense of real lives. Read via @bylinetimes.bsky.social (no paywall): subscribe.bylinetimes.com/edition/75/o...

Our 2025 UCL Europe Lecture is on tomorrow - privileged to be chairing Michael Ignatieff's talk on Academic Freedom. He'll be in conversation with @efieldingd.bsky.social and field questions after the talk. Sign up and come to @laws.ucl.ac.uk to join us for it (or follow via livestream).

This looks fabulous. Right onto the reading list for my UG memory classes!

🎫Upcoming event: Paris +10: Reflections on the impact of the Paris Agreement | 12 Nov @ 6pm Join us for a compelling conversation featuring climate experts and policy makers as we revisit the legacy of Paris & explore the path ahead. Secure your spot 👇 https://bit.ly/48AELyS

How fitting to stumble across this on my way to the Globale Literaturfestival in Bremen / meeting UNESCO #CityofLiterature reps on @europeanlitlondon.bsky.social business.

Eyp! Happy to say I will be returning to Cambridge in a little over a week for a discussion on academic freedom as a collective right, organised by the lovely Academic freedoms network at @crasshlive.bsky.social. Stop by if you're there! www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/47809/

Looking forward to it!

Missed this article at the time - superbly interesting, drawing on thinkers from von Redecker to W.E.B. Du Bois and 18th c British jurist W Blackstone. And relevant not just to today's US but Europe's emerging authoritarians, too.

🇪🇺⚖️🇵🇱 On 2 December, CJEU will hear the case of European judicial associations challenging the Commission's assessment that Poland met the rule of law milestones for unlocking the RRF (recovery fund). Ahead of the hearing, the Court has asked the Polish government an extremely difficult question:

Conference and poster look fantastic

Looking for information about 2025 exhibitions focused on women artists of the past?! Visit this ever-evolving post - Museum Exhibitions about Historic Women Artists: 2025 artherstory.net/museum-exhib...

This is how you blurb