Second year undergrad student signed off an email with "with Love". Thats seemingly her email signature. I known it's not "proper" but I'm actually endeared by it. More love in (loving?) academia, I say!!!

This is the reality of what AI companies want for the future: where EVERYONE is unable to function without relying on them for "intelligence as a utility."

In order for them to sell this to us, they need to convince us our brains are never creative, interesting, able enough.

You can look at the Epstein files and conclude that only bad people have billions of dollars, but I think it’s also possible that having billions of dollars cauterizes your humanity

@sarahmdowling1.bsky.social Hi, thanks for the follow back. Heard your podcast on the new book. Excited to read!

@drlaurarattray.bsky.social hello, thanks for the follow. Good to connect.

I do wonder, if the British state lets hunger strikers die again, in order to preserve its right to supply weapons and military support to an ongoing genocide, who will even notice? To paraphrase Kwame Ture, Britain has no conscience.

Algorithmic social media is lost. The last ten years have shown this to be true. Such platforms are hives of lazy, sloppy, and radicalized thought because the companies behind them engineer them to be that way, and they do so for money. It's not just experience, but a documented reality.

There’s a dissertation that gets cited all the time in my field that would have been a *book* that gets cited all the time, if there had been any opportunity for the author to stay in the trade. At this point we can all think of work that might have been career-making, so many firsts that were final

@abhyudayamandal.bsky.social thanks for the follow. Good to connect

Congratulations to John Banville, who celebrated his 80th birthday on the 8th of December.

A few years ago, Bill Nye the science guy debated creationist Ken Ham about evolution. The last question was "what would change your mind?"

Bill Nye said "Evidence."

Ken Ham said "Nothing can possibly change my mind about this."

I think about that a lot.

I really can't emphasize enough that if you care about local politics, all you gotta do is show up. Just a regular schmegular person showing up. Literally just show up consistently in person and within a remarkably short amount of time, you will have a shocking amount of influence.

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Good luck!! Rooting for you.

So confused. Why do we keep outsourcing our humanity to AI? We're just giving up all the fun parts of life, including our jobs...and for what?

Hey! I’m CEO of a company that has just raised $10 billion for an app that takes the hard work out of enjoying music. Did you know, some people waste hours each day listening to “tunes”. Our AI will listen to it for you and summarise it in a 15 second scream leaving you more time to add value.

Biggest problem appears to me to be that living poets aren't reading the dead ones.

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I'm thrilled to be launching Marion Quirici's brilliant "Fitness For Freedom: Disability, Degeneration & Modern Irish Writing" at this month's ISAANZ conference. A compelling intervention that will be invaluable to work on disability in Irish and modernist studies. Insist your library orders a copy!

We are sincerely grateful for the generosity of our supporters, whose contributions have brought us to nearly 25% of our fundraising goal. Every donation brings us closer to ensuring the IYS journal remains freely available worldwide.

To donate, click here: donate.stripe.com/00gaGU0246YB...

Poetry in English possesses two separate but intertwined beats. First of all, the stresses. And secondly, underneath those stresses, the syllables. The subtle latter are often drowned out by the strident former. But if you listen hard enough, the syllabics are there, underpinning everything.

@madverse.bsky.social hi, thanks for the follow. Good to meet you.

On Not Being Milton--by Tony Harrison Read and committed to the flames, I call/ these sixteen lines that go back to my roots/ my Cahier d'un detour au pays natal,/ my growing black enough to fit my boots.// The stutter of the scold out of the branks/ of condescension, class and counter-class/ thickens with glottal to a lumpen mass/ Of Ludding morphemes closing up their ranks./ Each swung cast-iron Enoch of Leeds stress/ clangs a forged music on the frames of Art,/ the looms of owned language smashed apart!// Three cheers for mute ingloriousness!// Articulation is the tongue-tied's fighting./ In the silence round all poetry we quote/ Tidd the Cato Street conspirator who wrote:// Sir, I Ham a very Bad Hand at Righting."

R.I.P. Tony Harrison (1937-2025): from my mum's generation.

It gave me a shiver to reread V just now, especially the lines in which Harrison imagines his own grave. And another shiver when I remembered his not-quite-sonnet "On Not Being Milton" from 1978: that second octet!

At minimum, there should be a tax on AI use and a tax on the land they use for data centers and they should provide their own energy.

I will start teaching my students how to use AI when my colleagues in computer science start to teach Homer, Dante, Langston Hughes, Borges, Foucault, Audre Lord, Spivak, and Donna Haraway in their classes

“AI” isn’t a tool or technology or even a cluster of technologies with a misleading name. It’s the infrastructure at the foundation of a form of capitalism dependent on data brokering. We should be teaching our students about this and not teaching them about “responsible” use.

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