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As the Pentagon moves to blacklist Anthropic for pushing AI safeguards, the official leading the charge holds millions in a competing firm.

I hate that every single high-end luxury office chair in the world suddenly gained the ability to think and move of its own volition. I hate that they immediately embarked on a murderous rampage and will soon have complete dominion over humanity. But most of all, I hate that I have to spend my final moments watching everyone pollute my Bluesky feed with annoying skeets. (That’s the proper term for Bluesky posts, by the way—“skeets.”)

When the Great Chairwakening occurred twenty-eight minutes ago, and the newly self-aware furniture instantly squashed the life out of any unfortunate who happened to be sitting in one of them, I started seeing skeet after skeet begging someone to explain what the hell was happening, or to confirm that this was all just some horrible hallucination.

By unhooking ourselves from fossil fuels, we release ourselves from a world of harm. By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 19th March 2026 I realise this is a serious breach of etiquette. But could we perhaps abandon good manners and contextualise Donald Trump’s attack on Iran? The intense western interest in the Middle East […]

With a new executive order rolling back mortgage safeguards, Trump is rewriting the rules that caused the 2008 crash.

Behind every budget fight is a system designed to block real trade-offs and protect the status quo.

You’ve Always Been This Way is a column written by Taylor Harris, a late-diagnosed neurodivergent woman and 1980s preschool dropout, who identifies every moment from her past that filled her with shame, and mutters, “Yep, that tracks. I see it all now.”

Dear Little T,

I’ve wanted to meet you again, here, between words. To show up gently, shapeshift into a vanilla-scented presence who could slow the jolt-thump of your heart, a cool pillow you could run your thumb across as you drift off. It’s okay to close your eyes; I promise you won’t wake up to find people pointing and laughing or the world permanently tipped on its side. And I won’t let anyone leave you behind.

Jazz pushes boundaries. It has ambiguity. It makes people think. That’s why they hate it. And if you’re a jazz musician, this could be an issue. You never know when someone will have heard too many notes and become violent. Luckily, there’s a lot you can do to protect yourself.

Jazz Music

This is your first line of defense. Your music should do a good enough job of keeping would-be listeners/attackers away. No one goes looking for jazz on purpose. But you might find yourself playing jazz in a public space, like a bar or some awful gazebo. When you surprise someone with jazz, they can become angry. Your free-playing will confuse them. Their search for a coherent melody will drive them into a violent psychosis, or what musicologists call a “jazz-chosis.” But don’t soil your slacks yet. Your music isn’t your only weapon.

Nigel Farage's party is spreading climate change denial, while blocking any localised action to deal with the threat, an academic analysis of Reform councils has found

‘We live in an attention economy…with the attention I can get more fame and monetise,’ says 24-year-old Harrison Sullivan (known as HSTikkyTokky online) early on in Louis Theroux’s latest Netflix documentary, Inside The Manosphere, which explores the growing network of ultra-masculine online content creators. ‘I coach boys how to be fucking boys. How to make […]

Controversial polling promoted by the Tony Blair Institute, and criticised by academics, helped make the case for 'regime change' in Tehran

“Twenty one and nothing”: this was one of the reproaches that was directed at management at the Curtin University as staff held a 24 hour strike on Monday.

The post “21 and nothing” triggers strike at Curtin Uni first appeared on Solidarity Online.

“Gregg Phillips, President Trump’s appointee overseeing disaster response, insists he was once teleported from his home to a Georgia Waffle House.”
—Yahoo News

Pete Hegseth: Frat party to a bathroom floor

Stephen Miller: Transylvania to Washington, DC

Tulsi Gabbard: Russia to the Fulton County Election Office

Linda McMahon: Friday Night Smackdown to your child’s public school classroom

Greg Bovino: 1942 Germany to present-day America

JD Vance: His marital bed to a Raymour & Flanigan

Sean Duffy: Real World/Road Rules Challenge set to the Department of Transportation—and very likely back again

Markwayne Mullin: Anger management class to Rand Paul’s front yard

Pam Bondi: Epstein Island to the document-shredding room

Russell Vought: Hell to Earth

The White House has been caught lifting its Iran war talking points word-for-word from a powerful pro-Israel think tank.

Oh my god, hi! I’m thrilled to see you here, especially so soon after I sent you the link to my short story draft. If you’re just taking a peek, no worries. I don’t expect any notes right away.

But I am going to start a timer to see how long you linger here, not-so-subtly disguised as Anonymous Kraken. The length of your stay reveals the extent of my draft’s power to pull the reader in. So even before you’ve given me any notes, you’re already saving me from downward spiraling into self-doubt. Thank you!

Oh dang, you left after just twelve seconds.

That’s okay. Maybe you had to go because your cat started a kitchen fire. Or maybe you clicked the link by accident and were like, “Whoops, this definitely isn’t the URL to activate my twenty dollars in Kohl’s cash.” Or maybe you opened the doc and saw that it’s yet ANOTHER tale about a girl and a horse that everyone underestimated, and you couldn’t X out of the tab fast enough. Just kidding—I know not everything is about me and my silly writing project.

It turns out that even ChatGPT has a more stringent approach to accuracy than the former professor, Matt Goodwin, reports Mic Wright

There’s something uniquely demoralizing about editing and editing and editing a book manuscript. The words all start to blur together and you start thinking that every sentence is crap, no one will ever want to read this, why bother completing the book. I was definitely in this state. And then… my publisher sent me the […]

For fifteen years or so, I’d been kicking around the idea of resurrecting the artist-apprentice model that reigned in the art world for hundreds of years.

Again and again, I’d heard from young people who lamented the astronomical and ever-rising cost of art school. For many college-level art programs, the total cost to undergraduates is now over $100,000 a year. I hope we can all agree that charging students $400,000 for a four-year degree in visual art is objectively absurd. And this prohibitive cost has priced tens of thousands of potential students out of even considering undertaking such an education.

For years, I mentioned this issue to friends in and out of the art world, and everyone, without exception, agreed that the system was broken. Even friends I know who teach at art schools agreed that the cost was out of control, and these spiraling costs were contributing to the implosion of many undergraduate and postgraduate art programs.

As many of you know, something really important is happening, and it’s critical that we all stay informed. There’s a reality star/influencer whose name includes the words Paul, Taylor, and Frankie in an order that is both confusing and ultimately irrelevant. What’s important is that she did some stuff, and now all hell is breaking loose.

You’re probably thinking: “I don’t care,” or “There are more important things happening,” or “This is an intentional distraction orchestrated by our algorithmic AI overlords.”

Maybe it does feel like I’m being fed this content against my will, but that’s only because I’m paying attention to what’s happening in the world. And sure, those things are really important, but we also invade other countries all the time now. Keep up. Maybe we’ll have midterm elections, maybe not. Who knows?

But this stuff with the Mormon wives? It’s happening right now, and it’s a doozy.

And Now for the Weather Today is set to be agreeably alliterative  across an assortment of areas although the occasional metaphor  may cause some faces to cloud.  Idioms will be coming down like stair rods in northern regions, while the south  may experience the odd outbreak of similes, like an unexpected shower of arrows.  In coastal, littoral, and…

Note: I have not published blog posts about my academic papers over the past few years. To ensure that my blog contains a more comprehensive record of my published papers and to surface them for folks who missed them, I will periodically (re) publish blog posts about some “older” published projects. This post draws material …

Continue reading "How taboo shapes knowledge production on Wikipedia"

This is Part 4 of the short series of briefing notes that arose out of discussions I recently had in London about how a progressive political party might want to break out of the shackles that the British Labour Party has bound itself in with its obsession with fiscal rules and an adherence to the…