*faculty, dammit

whose house is this?

wrong answers only

woke facility and snowflake students who any case don’t exist are not The Problem in HigherEd

orientalismist does orientalism 😂

either way I saw Dinner Rush at the Tabernacle and it was sensational

does anyone else remember the London Food Film Festival?

or was it the London Film Food Festival?

umm, aren’t you still in Asia 🤔

rocketman

visa-runs

I never encountered this phenomenon until I lived in Kyrgyzstan and here’s the thing it only ever seemed to be white westerners who a) did it and b) never got hassled for doing it

and I really mean “renewal of visa-free status”

and they were all working

Orta #1 - Aralash - yaxshiyan - 14.04.2026 The first edition of ORTA is called Aralash, which means “mix” in Kyrgyz and is also the name of a popular Central Asian fizzy drink. This episode shakes things up with an eclectic outburst of tunes f

Recorded the first episode of my new monthly Central Asia infused musical radio hour at Sphere Radio, an independent radio station in Leipzig

The first mix includes some of my favorite retro gems from Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Afghanistan

on.soundcloud.com/29fjCOYHfGzS...

Because it works

Ooh, surprise spot, Viktoria-Luise-Platz, Berlin 🎥 🇩🇪

underrated comment

many thanks to @nikokontovas.bsky.social for his superb hosting and demonstrating his unbelievable polyglot skills

conferencing with Oysara Madaliyeva who is one of the best Navayi scholars in Uzbekistan

I just love hearing her talk about the stemmatics of Navayi’s divans

seeing what’s happening at a place not too far from where I am now

As Sen. Clay Davis would say if he knew Qazaq

бұл өте ұят

I was lucky to live in Bethlehem for a year where Nablus soap in its lovely wax-paper wrappers was widely available

this is the thing about modern universities

you write something in an email
you send it to someone else
they receive it
and that’s their job

universities are bureaucratic organisations first
everything else is secondary

every time I think of an academic department closing I think of the final scene of the final episode of Blackadder Goes Forth and how Edmund Blackadder has been doing it not just for himself but everyone under his command the whole time

cats would have us believe that we are *always* bad cat parents

2026 is the 💩 that just keeps on 💩ing

learned today in the family chat that one of my parents’ closest friends and whom I’ve known and whose children me and my sister have known since year-forever is in Stage-4 and has weeks to live and her husband has suffered from dementia for several years

Just read that the Pope is legally entitled to run for the office of US President in 2028 and now I can't stop giggling. 🤭

(The only problem is that he is currently the head of state of another country, but it's just possible that no one thought of that possibility when writing the law)

in what world is it okay to berate colleagues for allegedly “not doing their job” when they’re still processing a very abrupt and hurtful redundancy?

there really are people in academia who confirm to the stereotype of sociopathic intellectual careerists with absolutely zero soft-skills

Melanie Phillips having a pop at the Pope while defending Trump for being merely “kitsch” and then triggering Godwin’s Law while invoking the Holocaust because 🤷

yes I am in a department that just received some crushing news so why would anyone add to the stress by implying that unnamed colleagues aren’t doing their job based purely on hearsay

more than anything it’s bad management and reveals a leadership vacuum

why oh why do faculty who should know better send an email to all their colleagues saying things like “I have heard from students that ….” in which they repeat unsubstantiated allegations against their colleagues often related to deadlines or grading or assignments

no just no

reading that book that everyone’s reading

quite often bad books make good and even great films but Absolute Beginners was as bad as a book as it was as a film

This is the Peak Nagihan

until there’s a Jean Rhys Colloquium in Mozambique