'Now, Alexandra Wilson’s new book, Someone Else’s Music, unpicks the myth that opera is alien to the working class. For much of the past century, Wilson shows, opera was a hugely important thread in working-class lives.'

‘To the men who ran the world, I was just a photo op’: Malala Yousafzai on growing up, getting cynical – and how getting high nearly broke her

If you’re writing a discussion and conclusion it helps to know their relationship difference between claims and conclusion patthomson.net/2025/10/11/c...

“Concerns over an AI bubble bursting have grown lately, with analysts recently finding that it’s 17 times the size of the dotcom-era bubble and four times bigger than the 2008 financial crisis.” Hang onto your butts. This “correction” is gonna hurt. futurism.com/artificial-i...

The Mount Burr Swamp in South Australia is brimming with water, giving conservationists hope its success can be a blueprint for the future.

What’s in the drawers of your desk? I have a bureau that I bought when we lived in Cambridge and I was doing my PhD, not-quite 2 decades ago. Today I sat at it and realised it was still full of old UK stuff 🧵1/5

Many congratulations to my colleagues in the Forms of Labour project team on the publication of their new monograph! 🗃️👏🎉 Brilliantly, The Experience of Work in #EarlyModern England is available open access: www.cambridge.org/core/books/e... news.exeter.ac.uk/faculty-of-h...

What’s in the drawers of your desk? I have a bureau that I bought when we lived in Cambridge and I was doing my PhD, not-quite 2 decades ago. Today I sat at it and realised it was still full of old UK stuff 🧵1/5

I, however, Have such meagre power, Clutching at a Moment, While you control An hour. But your hour is A stone. My moment is A flower. -Langston Hughes, "Poet to Bigot" #everynightapoem As ever.

three cheers for slow science, each Nobel representing decades of inquiry that paved the way for the technology, treatments, & toys of tomorrow: www.nytimes.com/2025/10/09/s...

#CommunityInWriting Day 2 Book Launch for the new #ShutUpandWrite book Available for pre-order now www.routledge.com/Wellbeing-an...

#CommunityInWriting Symposium Day 1 at Deakin Downtown #SUAW #Shutupandwrite Sneak peek of new book cover ✨📚

Now I know what you’re thinking: Did they make a video abstract for this important study? Reader,

Hope - not as something you have, but something you practice into being. It is what the philosopher Jonathan Lear has called “radical hope” - “directed towards a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is.” Vale Professor Jonathan Lear (1948-2025)

I loved this article (by @jessamysesame.bsky.social, @emmawhatman.bsky.social et al.) Embodied Emotion Work in Feminist Research: Crying, Running, Dancing, Loving We need more crying, more bodies, more running, more dancing, more love doi.org/10.1080/1448...

We pumped up the jam with @luriethereal.bsky.social's punchy exploration of how sports and music became so inextricably intertwined. (You ready for this?)

In London, hate will never win.

Early this morning, daylight saving began in New Zealand for another year. This is, I think, a good opportunity to highlight two Kiwi innovations: it was the first country in the world to establish a national mean time and a New Zealander invented DST. How did that happen? Well, read on... 1/20

Tomas Transtromer's 'Romanesque Arches' - profoundly moving in Robin Fulton's translation for Transtromer's New Collected Poems by @bloodaxebooks.bsky.social. Read it aloud - in Fulton's words each phrase becomes a vividly charged moment in an arc of evolving experience.

Finished typing up the Brontë poems and made a word cloud for your viewing pleasure

Have you read first online #OA article by Amanda McKay, Erin Leif, Kelly Ann Allen & Russell Fox ‘Supporting wellbeing of Australian school leaders through peer supervision' in AER? https://loom.ly/NxIO8dU

One of my favorite poems since childhood, and a poem I share every #autumnequinox. By the 12thc warrior poet Xin Qiji 辛棄疾, sidelined during peacetime, demoted, drifting through a decade of minor posts in remote lands. Poetry, then, is that which is left unsaid. “My, what a cool and lovely autumn.”

"Tools such as ChatGPT can be used to generate almost-identical research papers that pass standard plagiarism checks. Hundreds are thought to have been published." www.nature.com/articles/d41... #research #edchat #HigherEd #University #research

Some pointers to writing a series of papers from the same project patthomson.net/2025/09/21/w...

Basically lived at the WAC during my first PhD and gave the interviews I conducted to it. Quite horrified to learn this, given I was forming a research plan that would take me back - now seems not possible to do…. cstonline.net/is-the-bbc-a...

I miss when Google worked

1/At Macquarie Uni we are losing 50% of our units in my faculty. This is on top of cuts in 2020. We estimate by next year my faculty will be teaching 80% fewer subjects than pre Covid. Disciplines being cut do not have declining enrolments. @jennaprice.bsky.social @michaelwestbiz.bsky.social

“those tools don’t work well, you’ve not learned the skill and you’re still getting crap results, so you’re never going to get better results because you didn’t learn the skill.” www.404media.co/librarians-a...

'And that underlying rhythm probably sounds quite familiar: it’s like a heartbeat. Shakespeare loved iambic pentameter because it sounds very close to natural, heart-felt speech': argh, this kind of thing (from Shakespeare's Globe website) drives me mad: someflowerssoon.substack.com/p/10-reasons...

Inside you are two wolves

‘It is not in Australia’s national interest to enrich multinational companies at the cost of Australian creators. We’re not asking for anything unreasonable – simply that AI companies should license and pay for the copyright content that makes their technology possible.'

An older comic about pigeon nests.

The NYT’s 2018 article on glitter is another classic of the genre. * paywall, but your (academic or public) library login will probably provide free access ** Katherine already knows that; the footnote above is for everyone else 😁 www.nytimes.com/2018/12/21/s...

All I want in this timeline is a series of niche long reads. Today: the best pencil erasers, featuring UV rays, the history of synthetic rubber and Ralph Nader. I don’t know, but I think you’ll like this www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/r...

Just the other day I went on a deep dive searching for new music from one of my long-time favourite focus-music genres, lofi hip hop/chillhop but couldn’t find any. The new stuff doesn’t seem to have any beats & is kind of ambiently fuzzy. This article explains why. www.404media.co/how-lofi-gir...

This year's Jisc HE Digital insight report is now available. What strikes me is that 60% of respondents are still having connectivity issues and 37% don't have a suitable device for learning. digitalinsights.jisc.ac.uk/reports-and-...

Academic authors, here's a peek into the black box of journal publishing from an journal editor if you can bear it:

“As far as I’m concerned, we’re all comrades in a war that has infinite fronts. Nobody can fight on all of them…But there is no neutral territory here. There may be plenty of front lines, but there are no sidelines.” open.substack.com/pub/experime...

“Wikipedia’s first and best line of defense is to explain how Wikipedia works.” Boring neutrality, process process process, and the best of the human web www.theverge.com/cs/features/...

Anthropic to pay $1.5 billion to authors in landmark AI settlement

Almost certainly the best thing I was ever told about owls was when I met an owl handler at an owl sanctuary and he told me that the wild owls who lived near the sanctuary worried about the tame show owls there and sometimes stopped by to leave them shrews and mice as presents.

Note from my notebook (2017).

I'm lightly obsessed with the way Elizabeth Gilbert will blow up her life in the most predictably disastrous ways, and then some time passes and she's like "here's my new book about how my decisions led to disaster but now I've learned from them. I'm enlightened now."

#ThrowbackThursday: In 1980 the 🌍🌎🌏 was declared #smallpox free, thanks to mass vaccination efforts. Smallpox was an acute contagious disease caused by the variola virus. It was one of the most devastating diseases known to humanity. #VaccinesWork

I have this trick when I get edited: I make a copy of the file, and then—without looking—I hit "accept all." Then I read it. I just read the thing I wrote, with "yes!" to all edits. Then I go back to the other file and look at the edits one-by-one. It's game-changing to see it without the red.

I think I'm a pretty good copy editor, and I'd say that an appropriate rate of response to copyediting should be 85 to 90 percent flat-out yes, 5 percent absolutely not, what are you thinking?, and the rest is Oh, interesting, let me do some improvements of my own.

I wrote a cantata, The lilies of the field, which is an Australian take on the Easter story with words by @katherinefirth.bsky.social. I’m pretty proud of it and hope that you enjoy it! youtube.com/watch?v=LX5e...

Does Not Rhyme -through -cough -though -rough -bough Does Rhyme -pony -bologna