Sumer is icumen in! And with it, the unfurling leaves of more Guild events! 🌱
Join us for more Making Space sessions, and a special workshop on modular haiku comics.
Not a member yet? Join us (for free) via out website: www.guildmedmak.com/join-the-guild
Dreadful, dreadful news, I'm sorry.
Palantir are about six months away from ordering their employees to leave audio logs scattered around their offices
Ancient Exchanges have finally managed to re-upload their archive of past issues after moving website host.
This means my translations of the Old Norse visionary poem "Sólarljóð" and Old English lyric "The Wanderer" are now available again:
exchanges.uiowa.edu/ancient-exch...
Victor Glover and Christina Koch in orange spacesuits sit in the doorway of the rescue helicopter
Commander Reid Wiseman and Jeremy Hansen sit in the doorway of the rescue chopper
Going to get some great images from NASA in the coming days. Here’s a couple of post-splashdown snaps of actual heroes.
all these universities kept axing medieval history departments as if they thought tyrants beefing with the Pope was going to stop being relevant
'[...] the canon takes on a malleable, almost organic quality, like a network of cells that keep self-replicating.'
Our latest Meet a Medievalist Maker blogpost is by the creative writer and performance artist Dr Clare Mulley, who writes about her experience responding to Völuspá 👇
i guess those celebrating soras death didnt get the memo that some of us need daily personalized greetings from james bond—for mental health
This week over 100,000 ALCS members will receive their share of £34m. Let's celebrate the value of human creativity, something that isn't going anywhere 💡📖🌳
The University of Essex has proposed to discontinue most of their undergraduate language provisions as well as the Languages for All programme as part of large-scale restructuring.
Sign their petition to urge the Executive Committee to reconsider the proposal: docs.google.com/document/d/1...
An image divided into three parts. In the top half is the opening of my poem Living Somewhere. In the bottom left corner is the cover of the journal it was published in, Northampton Poetry Review. In the bottom right is the end of the poem.
Had my first piece of original poetry published in Northampton Poetry Review last year and finally got my hands on a hard copy.
It’s about Corby, my hometown, and I started it way back in lockdown. I think it’s quite sprawling and messy but I do like the penultimate stanza.
Look, you’re cutting it fine now. Registration deadline is 20 March for on-campus attendance.
‘Teaching Literature in the Language Classroom’, University of Nottingham or online.
tinyurl.com/teachlanglit
Final programme is up here:
Great piece from @stephenkb.bsky.social, who speaks to my own personal policy hobby horse better than most.
Also includes an astounding chart comparing England's tuition fees to other OECD countries.
www.ft.com/content/a067...
This is the best lede I've seen in a tech story in...years? There should be an award just for ledes.
Good piece from WonkHE on how we might help graduates talk about their skills and experience better.
I always look at industry reports about lack of work readiness with a dose of scepticism, because it's often unclear what, exactly, they're talking about.
wonkhe.com/blogs/do-stu...
Irish coins of different sizes, showing a horse, salmon, bull, hare, hound, hen, pig and woodcock
In 1926, as a member of the Irish Senate, W.B. Yeats enthusiastically took charge of the committee designing new coinage for the Irish Free State. Yeats decided the different denominations should be symbolised by different animals (was he consciously thinking of this as the “tails” side?) 1/2
I'm one of many professors quoted in this report from Alice Speri. I really appreciate The Guardian taking an angle which has basically eluded every other major outlet.
a drawing of a monk wearing dark glasses and rolling dice at a table
gambling monk, germany, 15th century
Good news that the digitised Beowulf manuscript has survived the digital equivalent of the Cottonian Library fire, the British Library cyberattack of 2023
"If I was to use ChatGPT for my designs rather than our designer Sean, that's taking money out of the local area into the hands of a multibillionaire ... removing value from the local community and local artists [and] into the hands of some of the richest people in the world."
#AIslop #refuseresist
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...
I feel like David Graeber really captured something about lefty academia because the concept of “bullshit job” is very resonant and has a lot of intuitive appeal but his exploration of it is totally hamstrung by the fact that he’s never left campus and is very vague on the mechanics of actual work
I once taught Old Norse to the re-enactors at the Jorvik Viking Centre.
"You wont find runes as interesting when you realise most inscriptions are thoroughly mundane or post conversion!"
me looking at a comb that says comb:
Taught a class on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion today, and every one of my students said they've seen content on TikTok that comes directly from it, without knowing before today what the source was.
Macro photo of a brown stink bug in face view on a leaf, guarding a tightly-clustered bunch of eggs that are shaped and colored exactly like a full tray of dark beer with foam on top.
Finally, the bug is back with a round of the Guinness.
Warm glow and clearing skies
25th February 2026 07.07
"it's time for ideas, people, and critical thinkers to flourish. That means that, after years of mocking, English majors are finally getting recognized for their usefulness."
www.businessinsider.com/ai-job-marke...
Karen Ashe The Sound of an Iceberg Calving It’s not the crack you expect. It’s more a soft whump, then an elegant leaving, like a grand piano dropped from a silent-movie window, a slow-motion school bus over a soap-opera cliff, Falling Man falling forever on prime-time news then the kettle clicks to a rapid boil as a small finger presses a button, the screen flickers and blurs, and the iceberg is replaced by slimming ads and payday loans, super-fast fibre-optic wifi, high-speed trains, and the tea bleeds into the water and milk delivered unseen in early hours from cows in distant misty pastures stays fresh for nine days in fat plastic bottles that go in the recycling and the baby shudders inside half a month from completion and the buy-now-pay-later sofa is wobbly in the leg already and the interest-free 42-inch telly is frozen on an ad for wonga.com and the dunked biscuit dissolves in the tea in the time it takes to change channels and in some faraway dark cold country of slavering bears and wandering herdsmen the iceberg is still calving.
It’s not the crack you expect.
It’s more a soft whump,
then an elegant leaving, like
a grand piano dropped
from a silent-movie window…
—Karen Ashe, “The Sound of an Iceberg Calving”
in SOUND OF AN ICEBERG: New Writing Scotland 37 (ASL, 2019)
#poem #poetry
asls.org.uk/publications...
