Simon Frankel Pratt

Congrats @alvinahoffmann.bsky.social! 👏 Check out her award-winning article here: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

This is the case for large research universities in the UK, Canada, and Australia too. We are one populist government away from rapid ruin, and a (more probable) succession of opportunistic governments away from irreversible decline.

The state should fund universities better.

Poland is sliding back towards populism. Democrats elsewhere should heed our mistakes | Karolina Wigura and Jarosław Kuisz Donald Tusk has failed to offer a positive vision for the future. Without one, liberals will just be an interval between populist acts, say historian Karolina Wigura and journalist Jarosław Kuisz

Modern populism is a global phenomenon that for some reason is largely treated as a response to national policy failure (that is arguably no worse than it ever was). www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Sudanese journalist Yousra El Bagir has managed to get some footage out of Al Fashir in Darfur, Sudan. The RSF siege of the city has cut it off from food supply and medical assistance for months. One reason you hear very little about Sudan is that the RSF kills anyone who tries to document the war.

Israel’s Last Chance Flooding Gaza with food is the only way out of a crisis largely created by Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister.

Franklin Foer: “The fact that Hamas ignited this chain of events, and that it could end the war if wanted to, does nothing to absolve Israel of its primary role in the food crisis.”

Sorry to be a wet blanket, but while this administration is both stupid and evil, nuclear reactors for the Moon have been in planning and testing for ages and are basically necessary if we want a science base on the moon. There's a bit more on this in A City on Mars.

Alex on twitter writes: "Someone on Twitter writes: "You’re a menswear writer. You don’t know anything about manufacturing in America, or steel mills, or metallurgy, or CNC machining, or how anything is produced from raw material into a finished product in this country or anywhere. Stick to writing about “men’s fashion."" I reply: "i actually had a career in knifemaking before this. the reason why you can't avoid tariffs in knifemaking is because everyone relies on Gobelin machinery. are you aware of this?" Alex replies: "Gobelin machinery? What exactly are you referring to?" I reply: "you Gobelin DEEZ NUTS!"

"stick to menswear"

Why I, an Arab writer, hesitate to compare Gaza to the Holocaust | Opinion ***

Rightly so.

“.. an Arab writer, I personally am not comfortable equating what is happening in Gaza to the Holocaust. I'm indeed appalled by what the Israeli government is doing, but I remain reluctant to compare the scale of destruction in Gaza to the Holocaust.”

www.haaretz.com/opinion/2025...

A Canadian Hercules aircraft conducted its first aid drop early this morning after departing Jordan. This is the first time Canada has conducted independent airdrops into an active conflict zone in decades previous Canadian aid was dropped by Jordan into Gaza.

Don't make me defend Netanyahu. The news today is that it is NOW the policy after not having been for almost two years despite pressure from Netanyahu's right wing coalition partners

Ugh, I just saw the clip of Tristan Harris telling Bill Maher that only in the last two years has AI started to demonstrate self-awareness because it blackmails people, and I just want to rip all of my hair out followed by his. None of that is true, in any sense of how we understand those words!

World chess just placed restrictions on both trans women and trans men The International Chess Federation will stop allowing transgender women to participate in women's tournaments. The group said changing genders has a "significant impact" on a player's status.

All you need to know about transphobes/terfs/gender critical people is that they think trans people have an unfair advantage in chess.

No citizenry can aspire to democratic governance if they do not understand what the effects of policy are or are likely to be. That means free access to good data and the education to understand their implications (or trusted interpreters).

In Canada, Australia, and the UK, international students are an easy target for populist and xenophobic restrictions, from both the right and nominal left. I wish more people understood that our universities are effectively a very lucrative export service that massively enrich our communities.

From the outside, one gets the impression that in the US de-democratisation into 'competitive authoritarianism' was held back by a couple of weak norms, and the moment those were safely ignored, all other democratic mechanisms simply started to fail. Important lessons for the rest of the world.

Jutel argues that Disinfo Studies is rooted in a NatSec-administrative paradigm and reflects a broader historical struggle in communications theory. That framing may be worth examining, but flattening the entire field into a proxy for state power skips a lot of nuance.

Bike helmet hair is no deterrence to an enthusiastic and well caffeinated start to week 2 of the semester!

NEW: Heavily armed gangs control 95% of Haiti's capital and are expanding their campaign of murder, rape and extortion across the country. Better armed than the Haitian police, it is weapons smuggled from the US than have enabled their dominance. We tracked how Haitian gangs get their guns.

This is why I harp on the media political economy so much. Right wing messaging has *deep* pockets with no equivalent on the left. Progressive and liberal donors just don’t want to fund information ecosystems to counter this.

The truth is that the hostages could have been home a long time ago. The catastrophe in Gaza could have been stopped. Instead, the horror is being purposefully, cruelly dragged out by the extremists in power, and we all just got a terrible reminder. (4/5)

The fact that the one game made by an explicitly communist co-op game studio now has three successor studios making a self-proclaimed sequel to it, and dispute the legitimacy of the other two is, of course, the most communist outcome possible.

Right, I mean, it was tongue in cheek. But 'help me say this better' is something that people want. Classroom settings or even just conversations with those close to us are places where we can offer that help, but the people we give it to know it's not perpetual. LLMs promise a permanent crutch.

Worth noting too that many of those buildings still standing will need to be demolished during reconstruction as they are too damaged to be safely inhabited.

Incidentally an ex called this 'the thesaurus thing' and I felt proud to help a partner better express their perspective to me and to themselves. Same ex also helped me better understand the value of AI as detailed here. I think we can forget how hard words are for a lot of (even thoughtful!) people

Because students can actually learn from AI-written things! AI often supplies an effective way to express certain thoughts by comparison to how most people write or speak. But learning requires the effort of internalising a habit, and if AI is aalways available, there's no incentive to do that. 3/3

But our ultimate goal is to provide students with better ways of expressing themselves, so that they develop and retain that capacity and can use it without our ongoing help. It's mentorship rather than supplementation. The risk with AI is that people use it without learning from it. 2/3

I have complex thoughts on this actually. One of the things we do as teachers is recognise what students are trying to say and suggest better ways of saying it: 'it seems like you really want to say X' 'yes exactly!'. Expression is hard and we are professionally good at it within certain fields. 1/3

bagel bagel bagel! gosh I miss proper bagels :(

You couldn't pay me enough to install one of these things on my door

there's an interesting set of questions we can ask about how misogyny can become a mechanism for homosocial bonding that might tie in some analogous dynamics to nationalism and out-group hate, along with the deep potency of shame as the glue holding together gendered hierarchies