Michael H Whitworth

"Years and years ago, there was a production of The Tempest, out of doors, at an Oxford college on a lawn, which was the stage, and the lawn went back towards the lake in the grounds of the college, and the play began in natural light. But as it developed, and as it became time for Ariel to say his farewell to the world of The Tempest, the evening had started to close in and there was some artificial lighting coming on. And as Ariel uttered his last speech, he turned and he ran across the grass, and he got to the edge of the lake and he just kept running across the top of the water — the producer having thoughtfully provided a kind of walkway an inch beneath the water. And you could see and you could hear the plish, plash as he ran away from you across the top of the lake, until the gloom enveloped him and he disappeared from your view. And as he did so, from the further shore, a firework rocket was ignited, and it went whoosh into the air, and high up there it burst into lots of sparks, and all the sparks went out, and he had gone. "When you look up the stage directions, it says, 'Exit Ariel.”

Eleven years ago, I wrote to Tom Stoppard to ask about this coup de théâtre from 1949. It took me down an unexpected rabbit hole - in memory of Stoppard, here's what I found.

The most precious commodity you have is your attention. You don’t have to waste it on poor-faith debates or arguments with strangers if you don’t think they’ll be productive. You can prioritize the things that matter to you and make your life richer.

In the 20 odd years since I last saw this play, I have bathed in doom enough to find Godot hilarious and devastating in equal measure. This production was extraordinary, and will stay with me for life.

If you get the chance to see it, take it.

Thank you to @alexwinter.com & co.💙

My company recently unveiled in-house AI tools. Management's encouraging everyone to use them (to justify the probable eyewatering costs)

Meanwhile the database that everyone does constantly use is held together with gum and the development team's tears

The year is 2100, and every house or shop in Oxford has now been demolished to make way for lab space.

We have MA scholarships available for theses on 18th-century/Romantic poetry and/or settler colonialism and Indigenous sovereignty in poetry and other literary forms ... details here!

www.wgtn.ac.nz/scholarships...

NBC: “FDA claims COVID shots killed 10 children and vows new vaccine rules”

When a news outlet puts a reckless, undocumented claim by the Trump regime in the main headline and puts medical experts’ pushback in the smaller type, it’s making a choice. And not a good one.

"Years and years ago, there was a production of The Tempest, out of doors, at an Oxford college on a lawn, which was the stage, and the lawn went back towards the lake in the grounds of the college, and the play began in natural light. But as it developed, and as it became time for Ariel to say his farewell to the world of The Tempest, the evening had started to close in and there was some artificial lighting coming on. And as Ariel uttered his last speech, he turned and he ran across the grass, and he got to the edge of the lake and he just kept running across the top of the water — the producer having thoughtfully provided a kind of walkway an inch beneath the water. And you could see and you could hear the plish, plash as he ran away from you across the top of the lake, until the gloom enveloped him and he disappeared from your view. And as he did so, from the further shore, a firework rocket was ignited, and it went whoosh into the air, and high up there it burst into lots of sparks, and all the sparks went out, and he had gone. "When you look up the stage directions, it says, 'Exit Ariel.”

A story Stoppard told several times, in several places:

The Claims of Close Reading - Boston Review Literary studies have been starved by austerity, but their core methodology remains radical.

I wrote an essay for @bostonreview.bsky.social about what I learned about close reading when I taught at West Virginia University

www.bostonreview.net/articles/the...

Another point of view in education 🧵

Israel has ‘de facto state policy’ of organised torture, says UN report Committee highlights allegations including dog attacks and sexual violence, raising concern about impunity for war crimes

‘The new UN report, covering a two-year period since the beginning of the Gaza war on 7 October 2023, draws attention to the “high proportion of children who are currently detained without charge or on remand”’

www.theguardian.com/world/2025/n...

Terracotta sculpture of a stylised woman's head. She has large eyes and a narrow nose and chin. In the background a panel reads "The Berlin Sculpture Find."

Saw an amazing little exhibition at the new Petri archaeology museum in Berlin - "degenerate" art confiscated by the Nazis and excavated in 2010 during construction of a metro station.

OpenAI Loses Key Discovery Battle as It Cedes Ground to Authors in AI Lawsuits The issue has been a major battleground in discovery. OpenAI could be on the hook for hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars if it was aware it was infringing on copyrighted material.

The OpenAI ruling writers should know about 👀 (if your work was scraped for LLM training, this affects you). www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/bus...

‘Unliterary’, vernacular poetry is an underrated source for working-class experience of the First World War & was an acceptable medium for men to describe their feelings. Wide variations of the same poems in private papers & newspapers indicate how far they were often shared orally.

Nethered Regions – An Anatomy of Mina Loy Nethered Regions – An Anatomy of Mina Loy

Everyone is posting about the EUP sale but another hot tip is that it also applies to paperback pre-orders, for example Sara Crangle's two-volume study of Mina Loy edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-nethere...

edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-elevate...

The Modernist Exoskeleton The Modernist Exoskeleton

The Modernist Exoskeleton has been reduced to £11 this weekend: edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-mod...

Applications Now Open for the University of Glasgow Library Visiting Research Fellowship scheme - supporting scholars from across academic disciplines to come to Glasgow to work on our unique research collections. Please RT or pass on:

www.gla.ac.uk/myglasgow/li...

a screenshot of the Australian version of Taste Christmas, a recipe magazine, showing a recipe for a gingerbread house made of something known as "crack", which I think is some kind of mixture of chocolate and salty ingredients like crackers or pretzels. so they've called it "festive crack house"

oh, that's... that's not... you can't call it that

Brain damage, blindness and death: the global trail of trauma left by methanol-laced alcohol Methanol, a cheap relative of ethanol, is entering the supply chain, causing thousands of deaths around the world

Methanol, a cheap relative of ethanol, is entering the supply chain, causing thousands of deaths around the world

Stephen Miller is now arguing that assimilation is fundamentally impossible and that certain cultures are not compatible with Western civilization

Today's 70% fall in net migration to 205,000 was not one of the six stories in BBC ten o'clock news.

Ta massive assymetry in whether rises in immigration and falls in immigration are considered newsworthy by broadcasters

Down by 140k isn't thought to be.

Up by 140k undoubtedly would be.

Somehow this got missed off the "Benefit Street" front pages today

UK universities ‘could cut 10,000 jobs every year’ Academics claim changes made to higher education system a decade ago have divided sector into ‘winners and losers’, with government-imposed limits on income exacerbating financial challenges

'David Maguire and Alex Bols, vice-chancellor and chief of staff respectively at the University of East Anglia, updated their prediction made last autumn that 10,000 jobs could be lost in 2024-25, claiming this same amount could in fact be lost every year going forward.' 1/3

'Slop Evader' Lets You Surf the Web Like It’s 2022 Artist Tega Brain is fighting the internet’s enshittification by turning back the clock to before ChatGPT existed.

Slop Evader is a tool from artist and researcher Tega Brain that lets you search the web for results exclusively before November 30, 2022—the day that ChatGPT was released to the public.

The UK, where the day after a decision to take half a million children out of poverty, the media & political world has been full of sneering at those same children & their families, labelling them as ‘Benefits Street’, while the same people are moaning about a tax on £2m mansions. Shameful stuff.

Tony Smith on Ch4News saying international students should be limited because they’re “economically inactive”.

International students pay around £27k p.a. in fees to their universities, at least half again to landlords and they spend their parents’ hard-earned money in local shops.

The "don't have an extra kid if you can't afford it" brigade get awfully upset when you suggest they don't stay in their £2m house if they can't afford it, don't they?

So we are already back to the levels of migration of the early 2010s and declining faster... let's hope all those new restrictions, based on previous higher numbers, don't make Britain massively unattractive to those migrants the government DOES wish to attract.

PROMOTE YOUR BOOKS! EVERYONE WANTS TO HEAR ABOUT YOUR PUBLISHED BOOKS!

gonna be reposting your books because hoo you made a book!

www.versobooks.com/products/303...

I'm hearing criticisms of the end to the two child limit, because it was done just to mollify Labour backbenchers, at a cost of £billions.

I remember another govt delivering a referendum on EU membership, just to mollify restive backbenchers. That's costing way, way more... A little perspective?