Richard Sudell: a man of his time

📌 buff.ly/EK0YPKF
📚 buff.ly/L6CW8Ts

Dr. Samantha Fladd co-edited an issue in Advances in Archaeological Practice. The issue “Beyond Leaky Pipelines” highlights barriers shaping inequality in the field and Dr. Fladd provides actionable strategies in her contributions. Read the press release here: www.eurekalert.org/news-release...

It's open season for refusing AI There's been a wave of successful efforts to ban, reject and shut down AI.

Movements to shut down or ban data centers are amassing power and notching victories. Wikipedia has banned AI-generated content in articles. Publishers and entertainment studios are being pushed to reject AI-produced content outright.

In other words: It's open season for refusing AI.

Volume 14, Issue 2 Published in The AAG Review of Books (Vol. 14, No. 2, 2026)

AAG Review of Books vol. 14, issue 2 now available! Featuring two important forums about contemporary Palestine by distinguished scholars, Noel Castree’s review of Slavery and Capitalism, Catherine Walker’s review of Climate Justice and the University, and 2 reviews by Cincinnati grad students

1/13 Check out our new chapter, Philosophy and Race Science, co-authored with Sahotra Sarkar for The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Race. In it, we track the historical development, the temporary retreat, and the subsequent reincarnation of race as a biological concept: doi.org/10.4324/9781...

“We explore because we are curious, not because we wish to develop grand views of reality or better widgets. The widgets and the grand views come, but they are a consequence of the exploration, not the cause.”

— Brian Cox

👁️

Assembling the list of new books for geographers is one of the great joys of my editorship.

I mean it’s more like the Curve of Hormuz

Congratulations to one of our authors, Subodhana Wijeyeratne, on the publication of his nonfiction book about Japan’s space programs and global space exploration! 🚀

Congratulations to the authors and contributors to this important issue of the journal. Their message moves the discipline, and the academy as a whole, closer to a more just and equitable institution. There’s still work to be done, and I offer my thanks to the authors for moving the needle.

How inclusive is archaeological data? Carrie Heitman’s latest digital review examines #feminist data science. She highlights how power and bias shape everything from collection to interpretation, outlining approaches for more transparent and equitable #research. 🏺
www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

“Nation-states are people too, my friend.” - Mitt Romney, probably

"Sweet Land, Bitter Deal: Immigrant Detention and Unbreathable Air in Florida's Sugarcane Heartland" -- the Antipode Foundation is honoured to be among the funders of this important new report earthjustice.org/press/2026/a...

“An intellectually serious investigation of our ambivalent attitudes towards work... lays the conceptual groundwork for thinking of work as a space for the play of collective freedom.”

@impractknow.bsky.social on 'Working for Each Other' by Deryn Thomas

Out 5th March
👀👇
bit.ly/3ZWz0WD
#philsky

I hope OpenAI gets sued into the sun

“…we advocate for a metaphorical shift focused on care, inclusivity, and diversity—that of a garden. The garden metaphor provides a way to express and explore the complex and intertwined ways disciplinary norms, institutions, and individuals structure and shape experiences in archaeology.”

Maps on Vinyl: An Atlas of Album Cover Maps, Volume No. 1 Published in The AAG Review of Books (Ahead of Print, 2026)

Joe Hedges, my colleague at WSU, writes, “this book makes clear the ways that physical locations and geography inform songwriting…what a magical thing-that this art form [album cover art] invites me into the heart and mind of the lyricist…”
A wonderfully curated collection by Damien Saunder.

The Guardian view on AI: safety staff departures raise worries about industry pursuing profit at all costs | Editorial Editorial: Cash-hungry Silicon Valley firms are scrambling for revenue. Regulate them now before the tech becomes too big to fail

"It is harder to evaluate more specialised systems being built for social purposes such as education and government. But since the frenetic pursuit of profit tends to introduce irresistible bias to every human system we have, the same will be true of AI."

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Meta is putting a "Name Tag" feature in Ray-Bans - facial recognition through the glasses' camera. You look at someone, AI tells you who they are.
In an internal document, the company wrote that the timing is good because civil society groups are busy with politics and won't cause problems.

New study finds AI depictions of Neanderthals are outdated and wrong New research shows AI often depicts Neanderthals using outdated science, raising concerns about bias and misinformation.

“When AI is asked to show daily life in the deep past, does it reflect modern science or outdated ideas?” Matthew Magnani reveals how many AI depictions of Neanderthals rely on outdated assumptions, reinforcing old stereotypes instead of current research.
www.thebrighterside.news/post/new-stu...

Freedom to Roam: Fell-Walking and the Life Geographic Published in The AAG Review of Books (Ahead of Print, 2026)

Just published: my review of Wil Gesler’s career retrospective Freedom to Roam: Fell-Walking and the Life Geographic
Books like this are “important works because they reflect on the process of becoming a professional geographer and the meaning of geographic knowledge.”

“To more fully integrate gender into our field, US-based archaeologists could address underrepresentation of women authors in journals, reluctance to engage with politics and activism, privileging of quantitative data, academic hiring, and strategic uses of different kinds of journals.”

LLM companies make the academic dishonesty equivalent of heroin, and we do not have academic honesty equivalents of methadone yet

The impact of Harvard closing its geography department still reverberates through the academy. I’ve heard people point to it as an example of why geography is best chopped up and absorbed into other disciplines without knowing why Harvard made the decision to dissolve the department

Time for university administrators to stop buying AI hype. None of my very smart and eager-to-learn students wanted anything to do with chatbots.

Cover of I’ll Samba Someplace Else: A Spatial History of Race, Ethnicity, and Displacement in São Paulo by Andrew G. Britt. The cover features a yellow and orange duotone of a crowd of people walking down a dirt road. This photograph overlays a yellow and orange map that is fully visible in the top right corner. A circle appears on the right side, inverting the image, making the yellow map orange. The title is written in a bold white aligned left. The subtitle is directly below in a smaller white font, separated from the title by a thick yellow line. The author’s name is in the top left in a burnt orange.

"I’ll Samba Someplace Else" by Andrew G. Britt charts how spatial projects sustain popular ideologies of post-racialism despite enduringly high levels of racialized inequity in Brazil and beyond. Read the intro for free now: buff.ly/LipCcpS

“Conference participation is a source of economic, social, and cultural capital that translates into opportunities and future career success…gender plays a strong role in determining who occupies positions of prestige and that decisions about who is “qualified” affect distributions of capital...”

From the Stacks with the Librarian is now on the air until 1pm PST. Playing selections from the vinyl collection at Holland and Terrell Libraries on the beautiful campus of Washington State University
KZUU.org for streaming