Happy birthday 🥳!

Piercing the Professional Imaginarium? Educational Lessons from The Post Office Project The following is the written text of a keynote address delivered last week to the Association of Law Teacher’s Conference 2026

I gave a short keynote at the Association of Law Teachers Annual Conference last week. Why law degrees need to take lawyering more seriously... substack.com/home/post/p-...

He said: "By shifting the vast majority of university funding into the hands of the aggregate decisions of 17-year-olds, the English system of choice has become an enormous machine for finding out who has the best marketing department, with some world-leading research sprinkled in certain places."

Quite the quote from the John Blake, the former director of fair access at the Office for Students
www.thetimes.com/article/1cb6...

Maybe it’s because you’re worth it
#rightbrand

These NY Times oral histories—of what the Trump administration is doing to federal agencies—are a public service. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Job Opportunity at University of Leeds: Lecturer in Law Do you have expertise and experience of teaching law at undergraduate and postgraduate level? Are you an outstanding individual with the ambition to join a thriving law school and to contribute to the...

We are advertising a Grade 8 teaching and scholarship permanent lectureship at the School of Law, University of Leeds. Deadline 26 April. One of the few UK HEIs that is hiring right now...!

jobs.leeds.ac.uk/vacancy.aspx...

"Unlike Parisians or the Latin peoples, we have no taste for great barracks divided into apartments, which give the streets of Paris such a uniform air. We like to climb our own staircase. Like our cousin the Anglo-Saxon, we have a love of 'home', the familial hearth" - Brussels mayor Charles Buls

was that Melania speech one of Iran’s demands

Over 100 freshly dug graves in Minab for the schoolgirls are seen from above with families gathered around in mourning

Many networks saying Trump is about to escalate to war crimes, ignoring the 165 schoolgirls he killed in a double tap strike. On day one.

The single greatest US military atrocity since My Lai in Vietnam has been relegated to an afterthought.

Mainstream media has horrifically failed us.

Before playing Kamancheh, he says: 'Hello, I'm Mohammad-Reza Afarideh, the director of the ed. institute that has now been destroyed. I wanted the last sound coming from my institute not to be of missiles and war; (I want the) final sound to be of the instrument that I played in it. Thank you'.

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List of all the countries in the world that ban all Afghan women from studying in their sovereign Higher Education institutions:

1. Afghanistan
2. United Kingdom

Must make you proud to wave your flags, UK patriots with legitimate concerns. Wave them!!!

Food banks - specifically the 1,600 run by Trussel...just how busy are they?

Here is the annual data for 2015 to 2025.

Other than a blip due to the 1st year of COVID, usage went up in each full year under a Tory government.

2024 was half-Tory, half-Labour - and usage fell.

2025 fell even more.

I really, really need academic organizations to think more critically about travel (conferences, talks, and meetings) during the Trump administration. Sadly, most are not.

MANCHESTER!
👇👇👇
www.coldwarsteve.com/2026/03/20/o...

Classic 😐

Thanks, Ryan, and congrats on your win! Would you mind sending this message to legislators and college presidents across the country?

Signed,
Professors everywhere

A picture of a packet of instant mash mix titled "smooth mashed potato"

[Sade voice 🎵]

Are we falling out of love with nonfiction? In the early 2020s, readers flocked to books to explain political turbulence. But is the world now too grim to read about – and are podcasters taking the place of authors?

my view on this is that publishers should stop it with the 80k wordcount obsession, so many contemporary non-fic books are obviously 40-50k pieces of work stretched to the extent that they become very boring to read - just let people write cheaper, shorter books! www.theguardian.com/books/2025/d...

Spanish PM Sánchez responds to Trump:

"Spain is against this disaster... Govts are here to improve people's lives... It is absolutely unacceptable that those leaders who are unable to fulfill that mission use the smoke of war to hide their failure, and in the process, fill the pockets of a few."

The international boycott of ChatGPT has absolutely exploded.

2.5M people have already joined, and this is just the beginning.

Go to quitgpt.org.
Cancel your subscription, delete your account.
And tell at least one person why.

My op-ed: www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

I have seen a lot of cursed stuff in my time in academia but this is among the *most* cursed.
Grammarly is generating miniature LLMs based on academic work so that users can have their writing ‘reviewed’ by experts like David Abulafia, who died less than two months ago.

Jeez - this is awful. Absolute crooks and grifters.

the 'Fest' run by Connecting Legal Education's wonderful bunch, @dohertylawteach.bsky.social, @veronanid.bsky.social and @parkendlydia.bsky.social

Read the full article, here: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

(Presentation skills can be found here: www.ishankolhatkar.com/presentation...)

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It's March and conference season is just around the corner. More details this week of where I will be appearing over the next few months. In the meantime, here's my view on chairing conferences from this article on what was the most fun conference I've ever attended (and Chaired)...

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Trump in 2011: “Our president will start a war with Iran because he has absolutely no ability to negotiate. He’s weak and he’s ineffective.”

Mocking people for their class is discrimination – so why don’t we treat it as such? ‘Banter’ about where you’re from or how you speak is harder to define than racism or sexism, but it is damaging.

💬 "Regardless of economic or social mobility, class-based cultural markers such as accent continue to shape how people are perceived and treated."

Our research on the pervasive issue of accent bias in the workplace cited in The Conversation ⤵️

Eusébio buying soul LPs in Harlow's Startime record shop in 1968

a year is a long time in politics