Feminism win!

Nico Muhly: ‘What would tempt any 18-year-old to study English or history?’ The musician once dubbed ‘the hottest composer on the planet’ is inaugurating Oxford’s £185m centre for humanities — and fighting the march of Stem

Must do better: 'fighting the march of Stem' is SUCH an unhelpful way to frame this. It's both/and, not either/or. We want and need to understand quarks and bell hooks and to have access to (and a willingness to take up) vaccines as well as foreign languages.

"POLIO IS NOT 'SITMAXXING'"

Right: [reviles academia for generations, celebrates deportations for writing op-eds and protesting, dismantles departments it doesn’t like, enacts de jure speech codes]

Left: [is sometimes annoying and unserious]

Some Academics:

The real failure to look in the mirror is academics falling back on comfortable “we’re partly responsible because we enforced left wing orthodoxy“ thinking rather than the less comfortable truth that Trump/MAGA are bad faith actors who will only be satisfied with resegregated MAGA academies

surely no army in military history has ever been laid low by disease, a famously uncommon problem among people living in enforced close quarters

the Labour Party will never love its actual voters as much as it loves its imagined ideal voters (who do not, in fact, vote for them)

Scenes from a personalist regime: A nominee to an independent federal body refuses to acknowledge that the President ever lost an election.

thing about the Trump administration's24/7 stream of funds from the public exchequer into private hands is that you no longer have to explain colonial wealth extraction or tell people to read Dadabhai Naorojiwhen they are doing a live demo of how the British operated in Asia and Africa but at home

I still can't understand why "getting a sustainable HE funding system in place" isn't a/the KPI for all VCs.
Instead, we get constant shrugging of shoulders while saying "my pockets are so stuffed full of cash that I can barely raise my shoulders. So really, I'm the one who deserves some sympathy!"

“Something without a brain scrabbled around and found stuff that looks like content but isn’t, because it wasn’t chosen, analyzed, and written by a person. Frankenstein’s monster copy-paste jobs from a bunch of different places? That’s not a summary. That’s word salad” — @drsurekhadavies.bsky.social

Grim. I'm so sorry.

They may well have tried. I suspect the customs of normal workplaces don't operate in the Trump regime

some tech bro hears that people in Mesopotamia "invented zero" but misinterprets

The Government: expect to be shocked to your core at Uni
Me: next week I’d like you to read two texts for seminar
Students: THEY TRIED TO WARN ME BUT I NEVER KNEW HOW OUTRAGEOUS THIS WOULD BE

The Office for Students was only ever the "I want to be wildly offensive and not face any consequences for my bigotry" office (cf: Toby Young being handpicked to lead it) but, dear god, @bphillipsonmp.bsky.social, you don't have better things to do?

Multiple universities on the verge of collapse.

Every AI commercial is like "Hey AI, what goes good on a sandwich?" and then the AI is like "Have you considered... cheese?" And then the narrator is like: THE FUTURE IS HERE.

Absolutely incredible.

NASA Astronaut Reid Wiseman, who commanded Artemis II, took this footage from the far side of the Moon with his iPhone.

Watch with sound on.

Looking across history, in fairness these are core characteristics of rulers in “the West”

Trump's spending the rest of his term starting wars and suing for peace until he gets the Nobel seems like the type thing that's too absurd to be true, and yet, there's a non-zero chance.

OpenAI: We’re burning money like the Joker. A miracle needs to happen for us to turn a profit

Microsoft: Please please use our AI systems, we’re teetering on the edge here

Anthropic: I wonder what’ll kill us first: lawsuits, regulations or model collapse

Media and universities: AI is here to stay

With AI, the concern is not so much that the allegedly well-dressed emperor is in fact naked, but that he is openly angling for the power to compel you to strip off all your clothes, and sign an affidavit saying you've never felt warmer.

Vance is not wrong that the papacy has been very pro-war at times in its history. But the "1000 years" bit only takes us back to theological theorising on *holy* war, not *just* war (latter is much older, and much more defensive, iirc). Can't tell if mistake/conflation is deliberate

A very stocky Exmoor Horn ram.

Happy 8th anniversary to the tweet that changed us forever. Look at this absolute unit.

If you have a DVD set like the UK release, I recommend one disc (~2 hours) per night for six nights

IT’S OUR TIME. EVERYBODY CELEBRATE THE WEDDING THIS MOMENT CREATED www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPCJ...