Nick Bingham

Education cuts in prisons ultimately endanger the public, watchdog says Charlie Taylor hits out at risk of real-terms spending cuts in prisons in England and Wales derailing work to break cycle of reoffending Cuts to education in prisons are derailing offenders’ work and training and ultimately endangering the public, the prisons watchdog has warned. Repeat offenders “cause mayhem” in their communities because of the failure of prisons to provide education, training and work that could help to break the cycle of offending, the chief inspector of prisons, Charlie Taylor, said. Continue reading...

Education cuts in prisons ultimately endanger the public, watchdog says

Stewart Lee: The thugs have taken my flag. So I’ve taken theirs What do you do with a lot of cheap banners hanging from motorway bridges once you’ve torn them down?

“I’m old enough to remember when mainstream British politicians, who should know better, stirred up racial hatred as a path to power. You’re old enough to remember too because it was last Tuesday. And it was Robert Jenrick”

Cathartic anger at flag-flying racism.

www.thenerve.news/p/stewart-le...

‘Brummies united against racism’: poster campaign takes on the far right A message of neighbourly solidarity is thriving in Birmingham against a backdrop of racist intimidation When Mus unfurled the leaflet lying on her driveway, she was left shocked, angry and upset. “White Britons are already a minority in London … it is clear that if these trends continue white people will become a minority in Britain,” it read. The leaflet, written by a far-right group, was distributed along her street three years ago in Moseley, a leafy suburb of Birmingham. It went on to blame NHS waiting lists, a shortage of social housing and even traffic on “the rising population”. Continue reading...

‘Brummies united against racism’: poster campaign takes on the far right

I think more people should be aware of how much cool stuff Link does in real life. He’s not just a poster.

Is the Media Studies Cabal in the Room With Us Right Now? I read The Stack in 2020 as a grad student in ANU's Applied Cybernetics program. I give it credit for directing my attention to the interaction between layers of digital and physical infrastructures. ...

Accdg to Bratton, "the intellectuals + artists of this critique industry have seized the public's imagination with its scrutiny of AI, which permeate universities and the arts. Such questions stand in the way of progress." Glad Eryk articulated critiques *within media studies* about StackTheory™️

Fun living in a world where every new email — hell, every interaction online — is a Voight-Kampff test

Photograph of Birmingham Mail front page. Fury as flags gang gets ‘police protection ‘

Great work from
@janerockhouse.bsky.social

www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midland...

🚨🚨 My dear friend and fellow academic, the Palestinian American sociologist @emanabdelhadi.bsky.social has been taken by the Cook County Sheriff near Chicago. They have not mirandized her. Please signal boost. All eyes on Broadview for Eman and the community she was defending 🚨🚨

Imagining Indigenous Futures | MoMA How do we relate to the world around us? How do we dream new worlds to life? How do we resist in times of upheaval? In his new book Speculative Relations: Indigenous Worlding and Repair, Joseph M. Pie...

Friends and colleagues,

I will be speaking at MoMA next Tuesday, Oct. 7 at 6:30pm, alongside Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Candice Hopkins, on a panel called Imagining Indigenous Futures.The event description and registration can be found below

Hope you see you soon! www.moma.org/calendar/eve...

Farage plays the everyman, but he’s not harmless, he’s not honest, and he’s not on your side. ❌

Israel’s ecocide in Gaza sends this message: even if we stopped dropping bombs, you couldn’t live here | George Monbiot Consider the annihilation of agricultural land alongside the genocide – and grasp the chilling totality of this attempt to eliminate all life, says Guardian columnist George Monbiot

“When you consider the ecocide alongside the genocide, you begin to grasp the totality of the Israeli state’s attempt to eliminate both the Palestinians & their homeland”

Hugely powerful from @georgemonbiot.bsky.social

Appreciate these insights from @emollick.bsky.social.

But the "wizard problem" isn't that AI is too opaque. It's that we're designing systems that hide their processes. We could build AI that shows its work, explains, and lets us intervene. Instead we're choosing black boxes and calling it magic.

Congresswoman Claudia Tenney Calls on Syracuse University to Fire Professors Who Celebrated Charlie Kirk's Murder or Face Loss of Federal Funding September 17, 2025 | Press Release Washington, DC - Congresswoman Claudia Tenney (NY-24) today issued the following statement after reports surfaced o that two professors at Syracuse University mocked the brutal murder of conservative leader Charlie Kirk: "While Americans across the country are mourning the tragic murder of Charle Kirk, two Syracuse University professors, Jenn Jackson and Farhana Sultana, used their platforms to celebrate and mock his death," said Congresswoman Tenney. Their appalling remarks included comments such as 'rest in piss, 'give him what he valued: no empathy, referring to him as 'trash, and even thanking a so-called 'witch' for cursing his life." = tenney.house.gov

We'll deliver breaking news directly to your inbox. Sign up today. By Mark Weiner | mweiner@syracuse.com Syracuse, N.Y. - Syracuse University said Wednesday it had taken swift action to address an uproar over social media posts made by two professors about the fatal shooting of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. In a statement, the university implied it had placed both professors on leave and promised to treat the matter "with utmost seriousness.

Hey, people who work on climate especially, you should know this is happening.

Has anyone written or read something on the US right’s demonisation of ‘ANTIFA’? The demonisation and the construction of ‘ANTIFA’ as threat is now crossing over into the U.K. right (and I can’t get over the stunning dissonance of it all)

Ursula K. Le Guin, wearing a white button-down shirt, sits amid a pile of cushions, resting her head on her fist. Image by Marion Wood Kolisch | Courtesy Portland Art Museum

This fall brings not just one but two exhibitions about Ursula and her work.

In Portland, A Larger Reality: Ursula K. Le Guin opens October 31st at Oregon Contemporary.

In London, The Word for World: The Maps of Ursula K. Le Guin opens October 10th at the AA Gallery.

Call for Applications: Gender, Place and Culture New and Emerging Scholars Award for 2026

Application closing date: 31 January 2026 The editorial team of Gender, Place and Culture is pleased to announce the annual award valued at a maximum… Call for Applications: Gender, Place and Culture New and…

Prisons in England and Wales to cut spending on education courses by up to 50% Move comes despite election manifesto promises from Keir Starmer to improve ‘access to learning’

Educational courses in prisons have been shown, repeatedly, over the years to reduce recidivism and increase individual's chances of finding employment and building lives after leaving prison.

Cutting those courses is fundamentally counterproductive.

www.theguardian.com/society/2025...

Not just gay penguins: on the importance of queer/trans ecologies for critical geography Queer/trans Ecologies names a growing and trans-disciplinary body of thought that applies perspectives and sensibilities drawn from queer/trans experience and theory to thinking critically about na...

Interested in queer and trans ecologies? Critical geographies of nature and the natural? I’m so pleased this graphic format article finally published and free to read (or better yet - download) at doi.org/10.1080/0966...

The Washington Post Fired Me — But My Voice Will Not Be Silenced. I spoke out against hatred and violence in America — and it cost me my job.

Some personal news:

I've been fired from the Washington Post in the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk shooting.

Thread incoming.

substack.com/@karenattiah...

⚠️ The Moseley and Kings Heath LTN phase 2 consultation is now open. You can see all the detailed designs on the link below. All responses must be received by 6 October 2025.
Any questions? please contact: KingsHeathandMoseleyTRO@birmingham.gov.uk
www.birminghambeheard.org.uk/bcc/kheath-m...

YouTube video by The Nation Ursula K. Le Guin: Listening to the Unheard Voices

"A future where I can live"
www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_vz...

"We are told that AI is inevitable, that we must adapt or be left behind. But universities are not tech companies. Our role is to foster critical thinking, not to follow industry trends uncritically." www.ru.nl/en/research/...

Judith Butler: “We have a right to know the charges against us, to know who has made the charges and to review them and defend ourselves...But none of that has happened, which is why we’re in Kafka-land…It is an enormous breach of trust.” Isn't Butler working on a book on Kafka right now?

Colourful poster with the words ‘Brum Together’ on a heart & various Brum landmarks in the background

“We are proud to live in Birmingham — a city built by many cultures, stories and traditions.”

200 people have now signed the Brum Together statement.

Add your name here:
tinyurl.com/brumtogether...

#BrumTogether #RefugeesWelcome #StopTheFarRight #StandUpToRacism #Pride #Unity #Grassroots

Insightful conversation on resurgent racism between @nesrinemalik.bsky.social and Gary Younge in @theguardian.com’s The Long Wave www.theguardian.com/news/2025/se...

NOTHING will prepare you for this 45-second story arc. From "I'm just doing this because I love the flag, it's totally grassroots, and I'm not part of anything political"... to who actually gave him the flags the night before.

Anyone who believes it is an innocent movement needs to see this.

‘It’s a monster’: How generative AI is forcing university professors to rethink learning As students turn to ChatGPT, educators warn that critical thinking, academic integrity and the future of the humanities are at stake

I spoke to the Irish Times for this very good and rounded piece on the real-world effects of C***GPT in the humanities classroom: www.irishtimes.com/ireland/educ...

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
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