Matthew Archer

Something in the latest LRB. It's not the cheeriest of pieces but I hope some find it worthwhile. Thanks for reading.

Publication date: Nov 4, 2025 🎉

My article is out! On how ‘ecosystem services’ went from a word for those aspects of nature that economics cannot express to a word for nature's economic value, and how concerns for planetary habitability disappeared from the environmentalist vocabulary.

www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

Agentic AI and education - Education Technology Society Carlo Perrotta (University of Oxford) was researching GenAI in education long before it hit the headlines. We talk about the latest hype around ‘Agentic AI’ and whether this is genuinely a game-c...

Agentic AI in education is a "ruse" - its promises of efficiency and productivity will really lead to an intensification of educators' work. Great to have @carloper.bsky.social on here now, and this is a smart short conversation with @neilselwyn.bsky.social www.buzzsprout.com/1301377/epis...

The Digital Turn in Food Studies

📱🍏 How are researchers studying food’s digital turn?

My new chapter in ‘The Handbook of Digital & Computational Research Methods’ (ed. @Anders Koed Madsen & @akmunk.bsky.social) charts inventive methods for exploring food’s datafication, algorithmisation & platformisation.

🔗 tinyurl.com/4su87xnz

Ventilation of the North Atlantic is Weakening 20 January 2026 / Kiel. The renewal of deep waters in the North Atlantic has slowed markedly over the past three decades. This is shown by a new study from the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Resear...

"The results also indicate that current #climate models underestimate the magnitude of the observed changes. This is caused most likely by a too simplistic representation of deep mixing processes in the ocean in numerical models"

#AMOC
#FasterThanExpected

WeTransfer TOS says they can use all your uploaded content for genAI

Bye forever, WeTransfer.

GHOST JOBS - Columbia Law Review Introduction A tight employment market, economic uncertainty, and the rising (and often clumsy) use of artificial intelligence in hiring have coagulated into a witches’ brew of turmoil for job seekers...

"ghost jobs" -- positions companies advertise that they never plan to fill, just to harvest your data, make themselves look like they're growing, etc.

columbialawreview.org/content/ghos...

nice thread about recent attempts to make environmental collapse a security issue (cf the icelandic report from nov.)

i'd add a 3rd issue, which is that it's actually very dangerous to frame this as a security issue because it invites military "solutions" and delegitimizes other kinds of responses.

exactly. bush's navy secretary was saying this at least twenty years ago

“.. He cared about people deeply ..,” said Michael Pretti, Alex’s father. “He thought it was terrible, you know, kidnapping children, just grabbing people off the street. He cared about those people, and he knew it was wrong ..”

@washingtonpost.com
www.washingtonpost.com/national/202...

YouTube video by Cultural Economy in the Kitchen Crypto imaginaries, crypto escapes

'Crypto imaginaries, crypto escapes' @jcultecon.bsky.social youtu.be/0_gWAJrjkD4

"It’s far from unreasonable to expect scientists and the academic community to act in line with their own knowledge and warnings, and I think it’s fair to say that (like most other parts of society) academia isn’t responding robustly to a world that’s literally and metaphorically on fire."

Herbert Marcuse, 5 Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Politics and Utopia

To understand today’s social malaise and generalized burn-out, I’m increasingly drawn to Herbert Marcuse’s strand of Freudian critical theory. A devastating critique of the work ethic and mass media manipulation that doesn’t dwell on melancholy but is actually serious about changing the world.

It's genuinely astonishing to me the number of people willing to claim with a straight face that this word association tshotchke that didn't exist a few years ago is absolutely necessary for the conduct of science.

EU green rules fail to boost funds’ ESG credentials, research finds SFDR also did not boost flows to more sustainable funds, say academics

Feels almost quaint, at this point, to be reporting things like disclosure requirements and stricter labelling rules ‘did not materially alter the sustainability of [mutual fund] portfolios’.

www.ft.com/content/7535...

Letter to the informateur proposing national AI board signed by 60 academics & experts – AI, Media & Democracy Lab AI, Media & Democracy Lab

📢 A national AI board is needed in the Netherlands!
Our lab directors @natalihelberger.bsky.social and @claesdevreese.bsky.social, and our board member Pascal Wiggers, have signed an open letter asking the government to establish a regulatory body for AI.
Read more: www.aim4dem.nl/letter-to-th...

congrats 🥳

An Introduction to Contemporary Italian Thought Over the past three decades, Italian thought has emerged as a major field within continental philosophy. But what are the latest developments since Italian theo…

New book officially out 🚨

If you ever wanted to know what Italian philosophy has been up to in the last 10-20 years, look no further. “An introduction to Contemporary Italian Thought” is out today with chapters on cyberfascism, technology & work, pandemic biopolitics, and posthumanism.

Our paper on the mysterious Devonian organism Prototaxites has now finally been published! See the paper here (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...) and our explainer thread below!
Prototaxites reconstruction by Matt Humpage

Microsoft vows to cover full power costs for energy-hungry AI data centers Company responds to community concerns over electricity bills and water use.

It's a sign of the times that Big Tech has switched from greenwashing to datacentre-washing. In actual fact, the AI industry has revitalised fossil fuel and the imperialist credo that burning as much energy as possible is the route to worldly power. arstechnica.com/ai/2026/01/m...

Science personnel and funding gutted at astonishing scale in the US:

www.nature.com/immersive/d4...

followed by the fun task of explaining what you mean by “cheese”

"Meticulously researched and lucidly written, 'Hard Work' uncovers the multiplicitous meanings and manifestations of work among the Mengen of Papua New Guinea."
- Dr. Sophie Chao, University of Sydney

Find Tuomas Tammisto's 'Hard Work' (2024) at: doi.org/10.33134/HUP.... It's fully #openaccess!

Out now!

I've edited a special issue of New Political Economy on 'Centring exploitation in global political economy'.

Link to the intro:
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Other articles (all brilliant!) and a short summary 👇

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Valentino, fashion designer to the jet set, dies aged 93 in Rome Valentino Garavani, the iconic Italian designer known for his glamorous gowns and signature "Valentino red," has died at 93.

Valentino Garavani, the iconic Italian designer known for his glamorous gowns and signature "Valentino red," has died at 93.

The cover of Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (1983), only teal and black, with mostly horizontal stripes

RIP German anthropologist Johannes Fabian, who passed away last Tuesday. Fabian was most widely known as the author of "Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object" (1983), a then-radical & still-influential critique of anthropological writing, knowledge-making & fieldwork relations. RIP.

a bright spot: jill scott has a new album coming soon

‘We regularly call the cops on our students. Now we’ve sold them to Microsoft’.

Are farms in short food supply chains more resilient to external shocks? The assessment of Polish farmers’ perception - Agricultural and Food Economics The aim of the study is to indicate perceived resilience of Polish farms during the COVID-19 pandemic and post-pandemic crisis. Hence, one of our research question is: do farmers involved in short foo...

#Poland: A sample of #farmers who diversified, i.e. who sell 15-50% of their products into short food #supplychains (and not only into normal/long food supply chains), have higher perceived #resilience, i.e. higher perceived adaptability & transformability of their farms: doi.org/10.1186/s401...