Huge congratulations, Noel. A beautiful cover, and an exciting invitation to begin the art of knowing everything.

Explaining Famine in the British Empire: Agricultural Science, Food Security, and the Rise of Statistics Abstract. This book is about the famines and food shortages that struck India and Britain at the close of the eighteenth century, and it explores how these

My book is out and is open access!

academic.oup.com/book/61892

I first encountered The Mummy! during my doctoral research and I've worried about it for ten years. I bet lots of other historians of science worry about it too. Here's my best effort to understand Webb Loudon's gothic tale and what it means for science history: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Clocking in at three volumes, The Mummy! probably isn't an overlooked masterpiece of science fiction or a lost gem you should put on a reading list. But what can it tell us about early 19th century conceptions of the future? And did readers even view it as a novel about 'the future'?

There are thousands of science fiction novels that no longer find readers (or never did)-- and amongst those unlucky novels is what might be the second (or third?) British science fiction novel written after Frankenstein, Jane Webb Loudon's The Mummy! (1827)...

Other times we hold on to these novels because they gave direction to how we think about society / human nature (1984) or they're still providing what appear to us as possible pathways into space exploration, the development of artificial intelligence (and then, some of them are just good books)...

Science fiction (good and bad) plays a lot of roles in public culture: one of those roles is to provide a repository for guesses + prognostications on what the future might hold. Sometimes science fiction becomes self-fulfilling (see Zuckerberg's choice of the term 'metaverse')... 🧵

An email from Martin Peterson to university administrators.

Martin Peterson's creative response to being banned from teaching Plato (shared with his permission).

We should have listened when the modems screamed at us.

Archbishop McArchbishopface

University of Manchester logo: 'Knowledge, wisdom and humanity'. Features Victorian buildings with a rainbow behind them on the right side.

At a time when so many UK universities are closing Humanities courses and limiting so-called 'unfunded' Humanities research, this investment in 14 three-year postdoctoral fellowships by @official-uom.bsky.social 's Faculty of Humanities is especially impressive. Deadline 7 March.

Because it doesn’t actually look comfortable. And it makes a terrible swishy noise whenever they move their arms.

Is the oxford college jacket not about status or even utility— is it an expression of loneliness, a hope that someone between the library and the lecture hall might recognise them and wave, or say hello.

But, over time, I’ve begun to wonder if they’re much lonelier than other generations, and the jacket also serves as an invitation to others from the college to say hello or even acknowledge them on the street outside.

My first thought was that the social status of being an Oxford student was becoming more important to the young people who come to study here— and maybe also a confusion about how to dress at uni? The jacket is utilitarian and offers anonymity.

I’ve lived in Oxford for fifteen years, and a lot of stylistic changes have happened in how undergraduates dress over that time. But for the last few years, they’re increasingly all wearing these plain black puffy jackets that feature a college crest. During term, they’re everywhere.

Found the review of Capital that led Marx to write that he was not interested in "writing recipes...for the cook-shops of the future"

I am one of these NSF postdocs. NSF has frozen everyone’s access to their salaries and research stipends (that were already awarded) with no information about when they might be expected to be unfrozen. It still appears like we are expected to continue doing our work though.

It's all about promoting "meritocracy," we've been repeatedly told . . .

can you believe that it's the 459th day of January 2025 and yet there are still two more days in which you can make a January visit to The Museum of English Rural Life?

Stefan Collini · The future was social: Karl Polanyi’s Predictions The Great Transformation was an exceptionally bold effort to make sense of contemporary developments on an international...

‘Perhaps the most critical judgment that might be made of this noted critic of market fundamentalism is that he badly underestimated the resilience of capitalism.’

Stefan Collini on Karl Polanyi’s 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘎𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘵 𝘛𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘴𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘮𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Clarion Weekly, 24 January 2025 Botley Road to reopen in August 2026 The Botley Road rail bridge will remain closed for another 18 months. Network Rail announced an August 2026 completion date this morning (Friday) at a meeting wit...

All the Oxford news you need in our weekly newsletter:
🚧 Botley Road to reopen in August 2026
🏙 Oxpens development gets go-ahead
🚌 New orbital bus for Oxford
🪧 Radcliffe Camera occupied
🐈 A lovely picture of a cat
Read online or direct to your inbox: oxfordclarion.uk/clarion-week...

We don’t lose all the students— but I’m worried we lose the ones that we would have been in a position to help the most.

Meanwhile the teacher / convenor / marker is left trying to articulate something important about actually reading and writing that at best will sound spiritual and metaphysical, and at worst like naïve misunderstanding of the powers in google notebook.

The idiosyncrasies of student writing and the evidence of their individual strength and weaknesses as readers and thinkers is masked, there’s no point in reading the essay because it bears no relationship to the student’s potential.

And at that juncture where a student might go back and read a source, why not merely delay and ask more questions of LM? The return to the text is delayed again, and then again…

The best students will ignore it because it offers an endless regression of bullet point summaries. But many students will see google notebook LM (falsely) as doing a better job at reading and comprehending than they ever could.

Any feelings on what it means to assign an essay in the age of google notebook lm? Does assigning an essay no longer require time spent reading?

Very excited to announce the release of my new book today, Land Power! Based on 15 years of work, it tells the story of how land shapes societies, from racial hierarchy to inequality, development, gender & the environment.
In hardcover/eBook/audiobook. More in 🧵