Laura Vivanco

I have some free e-print links to this article. Comment below and I'd be happy to share.

In Trump’s world, the authoritarian mindset has been resurrected, bent on exhibiting a contempt for the truth, ethics, and human weakness. Trump is a 21st century man without any virtues for whom success amounts to acting with impunity, using government power to sell or to license his brand, hawking the allure of power and wealth, and finding pleasure in producing a culture of impunity, selfishness, and state sanctioned violence. Trump is master of performance as a form of mass entertainment. As the journalist Matt Taibbi (2017) has pointed out, he has appropriated the mania and violence of pro-wrestling with the survival-of-the fittest ethos of Reality TV. In doing so, he successfully combines the currency of fake reality with an entertainment culture that thrives on extreme violence and cruelty. This approach to politics echoes the merging of the spectacle with an ethical abandonment reminiscent of past fascist regimes. As Naomi Klein (2017, p. 55) rightly argues, Trump ‘approaches everything as a spectacle’ and edits ‘reality to fit his narrative.’

I'm copy-editing an article I'm submitting about Trump and @annaguirre.bsky.social 's Strange Love so I'm checking the quotes from secondary sources. This quote jumped out at me.

Giroux, H. A. (2019). Trump and the legacy of a menacing past. Cultural Studies, 33(4), 711–739. doi.org/10.1080/0950...

What Are the Different Coloured Bins for UK Waste? Learn what the different coloured bins are for in the UK. A complete guide to black, blue, green and other waste bins to avoid contamination.

Could be garden waste, but apparently the colours vary from one council to another.

😂

History | Discover Our Heritage – Join Today — St Barnabas Jericho Explore the rich history and community activities of St Barnabas Jericho, including worship, missions, and special events in Oxford since 1869.

Re the alt-text, yes, according to their website www.sbarnabas.org.uk/history it's a "majestic mosaic of Christ the King" (which is why the figure is crowned, sitting on a throne and carrying an orb, I assume).

Someone else commented upthread with a link to this article, which I thought was interesting and reassuring.

Am 😡 now. Article title says it's about chick lit, a subheading is titled "Theoretical Framework: Chick-Lit as a Genre" + explains how chick lit differs from romance, but then the article casually refers to "the romance novels of the selected sample" and "the romance novels under investigation"

‘The Gospel’: how Israel uses AI to select bombing targets in Gaza Concerns over data-driven ‘factory’ that significantly increases the number of targets for strikes in the Palestinian territory

This isn't the first time AI's been used in fighting a war:

Selinger, Eric Murphy (2026). "Bee-ing and Time: Mortality, Ontology, and Love in Julia Quinn's The Viscount Who Loved Me " Bridgerton and Philosophy: Dukes, Debutantes, and Deep Questions, 62-71. rsdb.vivanco.me.uk/bibliography...

Miller, Jessica (2026). "Vulnerability and Chronic Illness in Three Contemporary Romance Novels." The Journal of Medical Humanities. rsdb.vivanco.me.uk/bibliography...

A good few days for publications by long-time romance scholars @profromance.bsky.social , @jessicatripler.bsky.social and @emselinger.bsky.social:

Kamblé, Jayashree (2026). "Recolouring the romcom: humor, respectability, and race in a 1986 American category romance novel." Comedy Studies.

Lolrus The Lolrus is an offshoot of the lolcat family, a creature that has an unusual attachment to buckets. It is typically seen harassing people that it believes may be in possession of its bucket. Believe...

Time for the lolrus to enter the chat!

Boxergy BOXERGY - AWARD WINNING TRUSTED PARTNER IN RENEWABLE ENERGY SOLUTIONS. WE INSTALL SOLAR PANELS, HEAT PUMPS & BATTERY.

Just to add, we didn't have space indoors for the water tank so we went with boxergy.co.uk because they have a box (hence their name, I think) they can put outside to hold the water tank. Their office seemed a bit chaotic, but the work was done fine.

Home Energy Scotland grant and loan Grants and loans for energy efficient improvements to your home

You can get help with the costs. I'm assuming you're on a ground floor/have a ground floor and you have space indoors for the water tank?

5:10 minutes.

The rats in the illustration look like they wouldn't make terrible neighbours. I'm not overly keen on the smoking, and I suspect they might drop bits of burger on the sofa, but the throw looks as though it's washed regularly and the smoke probably won't get beyond their own front door.

a little girl in a red jacket is laying on a brick sidewalk covered in leaves Alt: a little girl in a red jacket and striped red-and-black tights, with boots, is lying on a brick road covered in leaves, kicking her legs while throwing a tantrum.

Admittedly, I'm not sure what else I'd call it. But 😭and I only put scholarship about novels into the RSDB, so that's not going in.

The one thing that is clear about audience research, or so we are told, is that it is not textual analysis. Neither, from such a perspective, can textual analysis take the shape of audience research. Textual analysis, after all, focuses on careful consideration of a television series, a novel, a comic book, a game, or so forth—that is to say, not on what people think of these or do with them. However helpful generalizations can be, neither of these is very true. Audience researchers do a fair amount of textual analysis when they work with transcripts of interviews or use online discussions of media texts. Textual analysis, in turn, can benefit from audience research and the reflections of audience members. This chapter will focus on how. As a case study, it offers an example of how audience discussion of the first season of Bridgerton (Netflix, 2020-) allowed for unexpected and valuable insight.

And while I'm being grumpy about things that showed up in my Google Alerts, this www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi... seems like a perfectly fine article about "The Case of Bridgerton’s Daphne Raping the Duke", by Joke Hermes, but I don't think a film is a "text"

Another journal article which has invented works in its list of works cited 😭 I'm going to assume this is due to the use of AI and even if it isn't, I can hardly have confidence in the argument if it's based on work which doesn't exist! Have documented what I found here.

a woman is sitting at a table in a living room talking to a man . Alt: a carefully coiffed older woman is in her expensive home saying "I mean, it's one banana, Michael. What could it cost? 10 dollars?"

It sounds like a meat-diet-advocating version of

Green leader Zack Polanski backs Scottish and Welsh independence ZACK Polanski has backed Scottish and Welsh independence, The National can reveal.

www.thenational.scot/news/2554269...

Agreed, I don't think they're discussing "family voting" in good faith. Personally, I often took my child along because I wanted him to understand how voting works and vote himself when he was older. At some point the polling station workers felt he was too old to go into the booth with me.

Highlands and Islands (Scottish Parliament electoral region) - Wikipedia

To be technical, yes, you're right, because the Green Party of England and Wales is separate from the Scottish Greens and the Green Party Northern Ireland so there's not going to be one UK Green Party. On the other hand, there have been Green Highland & Island MSPs

Single Transferable Vote What is the Single Transferable Vote?The Single Transferable Vote (STV) is a form of proportional representation created in Britain. Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, Ma

Yes, I think that's what I was calling "single transferable vote" electoral-reform.org.uk/voting-syste... but also there seem to be variations (e.g. are you doing the multi-member version or not?)

😡 at Wes Streeting!

Types of Voting System

No, it just means that whoever gets the most votes has won. It works fine in a 2-party system, but when there are more than 2, that's when something like Single Transferable Vote or using a mix of list and constituency candidates to make things more proportional seems like a good idea to me.

Firefighters in Sicily rescue 400 rare books from library after landslide Landslide in Niscemi in January tore away entire slope of town and carved 4km chasm Firefighters in Sicily have rescued about 400 rare books from a library in Niscemi that hangs on the edge of a mudflow, after a devastating landslide in January tore away an entire slope of the town and carved a 4km chasm. The library stands on the lip of the precipice gouged out by the landslide, with part of the building in effect hanging in mid-air. The recovery operation, which began on Monday, was preceded by a detailed study of floor plans and interior photographs to map the position of the books. Continue reading...

Firefighters in Sicily rescue 400 rare books from library after landslide

There is habitat for a range of rare species including the northern brown argus butterfly (Aricia Artaxerxes), the grayling butterfly (Hipparchia semele), otter (Lutra lutra) and several species of bats such as common pipistrelle (Pipistrellus pipistrellus) and soprano pipistrelle (Pipistrellus pygmaeus). These species are all UK Biodiversity Action Plan priority species and northern brown argus is unique to Holyrood Park and not yet found anywhere else in the city.

They're not that much bigger than red foxes, and we have those. Re biodiversity, Holyrood Park is a Site of Special Scientific Interest and edinburghlivinglandscape.org.uk/wp-content/u...

👀 That sounds really intense. Good luck!