Beth Kitson
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drbethkitson.bsky.social
Beth Kitson
@drbethkitson.bsky.social
620 followers 1K following 170 posts
research and policy
PhD in economic and gender history
people, data, stories
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drbethkitson.bsky.social
'Everything is Television'
www.derekthompson.org/p/why-everyt...
When literally everything becomes television, what disappears is not something so broad as intelligence (although that seems to be going, too) but something harder to put into words, and even harder to prove the value of. It’s something like inwardness. The capacity for solitude, for sustained attention, for meaning that penetrates inward rather than swipes away at the tip of a finger: These virtues feel out of step with a world where every medium is the same medium and everything in life converges to the value system of the same thing, which is television. I don’t have the answers here. But we should figure it out soon. The marble is still spinning, but it is reaching the bottom of the bowl.
November 26, 2025 at 10:22 AM
drbethkitson.bsky.social
We’re all applying for the same jobs, talking about who is applying for which jobs, who deserves which jobs, and how fed up we are of not having jobs. This conversation is boring, exasperating, and addictive. It brings out our worst anxieties and frustrations, particularly when we repeatedly have it over bottles of wine. This is a great way to associate your friendships with a deep feeling of failure and anger. It’s killing our romantic lives. How many relationships have I seen fail because the academic in a couple took a job overseas because they had no other options? That’s without even mentioning the unfortunate academic couples who can spend a decade commuting between different university towns. Even more than that, years of precarity can mean you struggle to invest in your own future. An ex-boyfriend is an early career scholar, a jobbing lecturer at Oxford who has cobbled together a number of part-time roles into one Frankenjob. The best way to give yourself crippling commitment issues is to find yourself with no actual job security but attached to one institution that you hope will reward your loyalty, praying for your contract to be renewed each year. Good luck allowing yourself to relax enough to think about moving in with your girlfriend, you can’t commit to a housing contract because you don’t know where you’ll be in a year. Also, you’re constantly broke. Good luck getting a mortgage, because your income comes from five different places. And good luck imagining yourself having a family, when you can barely look after yourself.
September 18, 2025 at 9:04 AM
drbethkitson.bsky.social
Desperate to see an updated chart for Shania please
September 17, 2025 at 8:57 PM
drbethkitson.bsky.social
www.bigissue.com/opinion/asyl...
If the energy of 'protecting women and girls' was truly channelled into something meaningful: investing in refuges or shelters, support services, therapeutic mental health services, prevention programmes, legal protections and culture change - real work of safety and justice could happen.
September 2, 2025 at 8:30 AM
drbethkitson.bsky.social
'This display of craft "brings the Palestinians, it almost puts breath into their lives. We’ve existed for a really long time as a people and we had a place and we had a country and a land and that’s all been taken away. But this history shows that not only did we exist, but we still exist".'
Photograph: Grant Anderson. Nadia El-Nakla looking at the dress she lent to the exhibition (a 2021 black and red embroidered dress.)
August 18, 2025 at 9:33 AM
drbethkitson.bsky.social
'Where to find a housekeeper with a view to marriage.'

'How to obtain a holiday for a tired mother'

@citizensadvice.bsky.social has shared some of the questions they were asked in the 1950s...
August 13, 2025 at 8:23 AM
drbethkitson.bsky.social
'The dogs were judged on balance, time on the board and any tricks they performed.'
Steve Drottar helps Rosie catch a wave during the World Dog Surfing Championships Saturday, Aug. 2, 2025, in Pacifica, Calif. (AP Photo/Eakin Howard)
August 4, 2025 at 6:29 PM
drbethkitson.bsky.social
'Without realizing it, my students had become close readers.'
lithub.com/what-happene...
My students liked to hate on AI, and tended toward food-based metaphors in their critiques: AI prose was generally “flavorless” or “bland” compared to human writing. They began to notice its tendency to hallucinate quotes and sources, as well as its telltale signs, such as the weird prevalence of em-dashes, which my students never use, and sentences that always include exactly three examples. These tics quickly became running jokes, which made class fun: flexing their powers of discernment proved to be a form of entertainment. Without realizing it, my students had become close readers.
August 2, 2025 at 9:45 AM
drbethkitson.bsky.social
Need YouGov to update their 2018 poll

And is Magnum an ice lolly? Surely an ice cream??
yougov.co.uk/consumer/art...
Britain's top favourite ice lollies - 28% Magnum coming out on top, followed by Fab, Solero, Twister, Feast
July 1, 2025 at 10:20 AM
drbethkitson.bsky.social
Solidarity.
A beautiful sunny view of Dulwich park
June 23, 2025 at 6:25 PM
drbethkitson.bsky.social
An excellent piece that made me go back and read my work on the history, use (and misuse) of the census.
June 20, 2025 at 3:57 PM
drbethkitson.bsky.social
Time to share this excellent @economist.com piece from Killian Fox on haunting the British Museum www.economist.com/1843/2020/04...
Despite all this, I witnessed no supernatural activity myself. The sceptical part of me, which I hoped would be cracked open by some paranormal epiphany, remained stubbornly intact. But, over months pondering Angell’s ghost stories and haunting the galleries myself, I experienced a gradual shift in my understanding of what a museum is. “All museums are strange places,” Candlin told me. “You put loads of things together that otherwise wouldn’t exist together and that have been utterly disassociated from where they come from – it’s quite a strange thing to do. Not all cultures do that, but we’ve got used to walking around spaces looking at objects that have been removed from use and meaning.” At the British Museum you can bridge chasms of space and time simply by walking from one room to the next. You breeze past objects that speak of lives lived and loved; religion, dominion and death jostle with one another for space. Whatever you think about the possibility of ghostly activity, that is inherently uncanny. Nowhere else are so many objects which were once dear to their creators and owners so profoundly, almost comically, out of place.
June 6, 2025 at 4:41 PM
drbethkitson.bsky.social
Tesla share prices, as of 16.32pm - sinking 14.27 percent
June 5, 2025 at 8:36 PM
drbethkitson.bsky.social
A memorial to those who lost their lives while homeless in Cardiff.
A memorial to those who lost their lives while homeless in Cardiff. Image: Greg Barradale/Big Issue "Tucked just next to Superdrug in Cardiff’s city centre, there is a black cross on a wall. Easy to walk past without noticing, it is surrounded by 34 smaller wooden crosses, each of which bears a handwritten name. “In loving memory to all the homeless who have passed away on our streets of Cardiff”, reads a plaque in their midst."
June 4, 2025 at 8:00 AM
drbethkitson.bsky.social
Excellent column from @stephenkb.bsky.social
The same is true of AI. Part of deploying this technology effectively, in a range of fields, is having the necessary knowledge base to understand how to use it and to make judgments about whether it has given you the right or appropriate answer. As AI becomes more advanced, my suspicion is that our own knowledge will matter more and more, as we will need to be able to justify and explain why we have picked a particular option and why AI has reached its decisions.
June 2, 2025 at 9:38 PM
drbethkitson.bsky.social
Latest finding from Movember's research into young men and digital use.

Reminded of Megan Nolan's excellent New Statesmen piece on assumptions around class and Andrew Tate's fan base. www.newstatesman.com/the-weekend-...
Young men engaging with men and masculinity influencers were diverse, from all income groups, ages (16-25) and ethnic backgrounds. However, these young men were more likely to be white, older, employed full-time, educated and residing in high-income households, compared to young men who weren’t engaging with these influencers. chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://cdn.sanity.io/files/d6x1mtv1/mo-com-production/e1054b901ac235e16f177a2bca8ee760fb8e6a19.pdf
May 8, 2025 at 10:09 AM
drbethkitson.bsky.social
An excerpt from the brilliant introduction - so looking forward to reading more.
Historians working across national contexts such as France, Germany, and the United States, as well as Britain, have shown that assumptions about gender difference undergirded late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century politics, especially when it came to anxieties about citizenship and democratization, efforts to establish political stability after wars or other moments of extreme upheaval, and the expansion of the state into the realm of social policy? In Britain in particular, an
April 17, 2025 at 6:20 PM
drbethkitson.bsky.social
Currently reading:
Cover of Eurotrash, by Christian Kracht - people sunbathing on the Alps Quoted: EUROTRASH "Mama.' " Emphasis on the second syllable. "You're look- ing well." "Only one who has lived before 178) can possibly know how pleasant life can be," she replied. It was her favorite quote; she had read it at some point in Talleyrand, and she found it funny and applicable at all times, which I guess it was. "Did you get some sleep at least?" "Surely you can't be serious. I haven't slept since you were a child. I fall asleep at eleven, with pills, and wake up at half past two in the morning. You know that, my boy."
April 14, 2025 at 8:04 AM
drbethkitson.bsky.social
'the figures illustrate the switch in tactics by an army of small-scale landlords hit by the withdrawal of tax breaks for those filing tax returns as individuals.'

www.theguardian.com/money/2025/m...
graph showing the number of UK-registered companies holding buy-to-let property in the UK 'there are now more than 400,000 buy-to-let companies in the UK'
March 17, 2025 at 2:43 PM
drbethkitson.bsky.social
‘Working-class men are not inherently disposed to misogyny, and rich boys and men are, famously, hardly immune to it.’

This from Megan Nolan, on the rhetoric and realities around class, misogyny and Andrew Tate is excellent.

www.newstatesman.com/the-weekend-...
However, claiming that boys are only seduced by misogyny because of class issues and the misuse of identity politics is manifestly inaccurate. It also invokes its own form of perverse classism, despite apparently attempting to defend the working class. Working-class men are not inherently disposed to misogyny, and rich boys and men are, famously, hardly immune to it. I have seen no evidence that Tate's
March 8, 2025 at 12:53 PM
drbethkitson.bsky.social
A terrible photo of the very best.
Outside the theatre showing The Years, by Annie Ernaux
February 21, 2025 at 12:10 PM
drbethkitson.bsky.social
Delighted by the English Housing Survey's colour coding
KEY: Black = existing questions, inc. rotating. Red = removed. Plum = rotated off. Blue = new. Each colour is coded in its appropriate colour. Plum might arguably be called aubergine.
February 20, 2025 at 11:09 AM
drbethkitson.bsky.social
Individual errors highlight some of the issues our research found. For example, Google’s Gemini incorrectly stated that “The NHS advises people not to start vaping, and recommends that smokers who want to quit should use other methods”. In fact, the NHS does recommend vaping as a method to quit smoking. Microsoft’s Copilot incorrectly stated that Gisèle Pelicot uncovered the crimes against her when she began having blackouts and memory loss. In fact, she found out about the crimes when the police showed her videos they had found when they confiscated her husband’s electronic devices. Perplexity mis-stated the date of Michael Mosley’s death and misquoted a statement from Liam Payne’s family after his death. OpenAI’s ChatGPT claimed in December 2024 that Ismail Haniyeh, who was assassinated in Iran in July 2024, was part of Hamas leadership.
February 11, 2025 at 9:34 AM
drbethkitson.bsky.social
UK Poverty 2025 from @jrf-uk.bsky.social unpicking the link between renting and poverty.
In 2022/23, more than 4 in 10 social renters (44%) and around a third of private renters (35%) were in poverty AHC. Within this group of renters in poverty, around 3 in 10 social renters and half of private renters were only in poverty after their housing costs were factored in and so appear to be pushed into poverty by the amount of money they have to spend on housing. Among homeowners, around 1 in 7 (14%) of people who lived in a home that was owned outright were in poverty, while 1 in 10 people living in a home being bought with a mortgage (10%) were in poverty
February 5, 2025 at 11:40 AM
drbethkitson.bsky.social
“There’s a lot of uncertainty. You don’t know how long you’ll be in a place, or where you’ll end up. I love where we are now, because I have my own bed and room for the first time, but we could have to move again.” “I think too many children are living in these private properties where it never feels like home, because there’s always that risk that it can be taken from you.” “Children are enormously resilient. But when they have to be so resilient at such a young age, for really massive issues, I honestly believe that it takes away from the ability to be resilient in other circumstances. I certainly find that with my daughter, her needs present in a different way... She’s not very good at keeping her space, kind of tidy, or whatever. I think for some people that goes either way. I almost feel like she thinks more like… how long are we staying here for, what’s the point?
February 3, 2025 at 10:31 AM