1. In the wake on Mamdani’s win, we’ll see a lot more far right anti-urban sentiment. Here’s a thread on its roots and evolution.

The idea that the city is evil and corrupt, and the countryside innocent and pure, goes back a long way: to Theocritus in Alexandria, and to the Old Testament. 🧵

"Mister Sturluson, I presume?"
"You can call me Snorri. Mister Sturluson is my father."

Welche Rolle spielt ihr in einem Weihnachtsfilm?

Ich bin die kinderreiche Freundin der Hauptfigur in einer abgelegenen Community, die ihr hilft die Freude an Winter und Weihnachten wiederzuentdecken.

"Many of the deals OpenAI has struck — with chipmakers, cloud computing companies and others — are strangely circular. OpenAI receives billions from tech companies before sending those billions back to the same companies to pay for computing power and other services." www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Announcing a brand new series launching this #Halloween 👻

Manchester Studies in the Supernatural explores how the #supernatural shapes human experience across time and place.

Bridging disciplines and challenging boundaries, it welcomes bold new research on the #occult and the #unseen

New preprint alert! 🚨

“Let Them Eat Large Language Models: Artificial Intelligence and Austerity in the Neoliberal University”

"Listen, in some ways, I get it. When I came on the scene in 2001, I probably seemed pretty unsavory compared to the competitors. But that was when academic research happened in libraries and George W. Bush was considered the stupidest president."

Went to watch Frankenstein last night. It was visually stunning and the score was fantastic, but it lost me during the last bit. I have to admit it's been years since I read the book, but it felt like the moral ambiguity of the monster was flattened? Also wtf was that Byron quote at the end???

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

My blog post with the ADAM network has now been published. It's about precarity, the future of small subjects, and communal approaches to academic work. I hope it will resonate with some. #IchBinHanna #KleineFaecher #SkandiRetten
difficultmedieval.com/2025/10/23/h...

... & the way that the precaritization of the academy leads to disabling of more & more scholars

[from www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi..., pp. 100-01]

Im nächsten Jahr am 24. Oktober ist übrigens 50. Jahrestag des großen isländischen Frauenstreiks.
Einige hoffen hier, dass sich der Streik zum Jahrestag über die Grenzen Íslands ausbreitet.