One time the yoofs made Premee and me BOTH cry and we were trying hard not to be choked up over this writing prompt that was so finely wrought and deeply poignant. it was heart-shaking but in all the right ways. then the kiddo was okay bye ttyl gg everybody and we were left in an empty meeting room

Premee Mohamed@premeemohamed.com · 20h ago

What's interesting about this to me is that whenever I work with teens in like... Writer Cafe situations, they are writing the WILDEST and DARKEST most depressing stuff I have ever seen. Me to @lectio.bsky.social : Why is there so much cannibalism and genocide and mutilation from these yoofs

Today, August 4, 2026, is the setting of Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” about a fully automated house continuing on after the family who lived there and the world around it died in a nuclear blast.

THREAD/ORIGINAL ART GIVEAWAY This hare linoprint is by my mum, Jo. I'll be sending an original of this to one randomly chosen person who reposts this link to my recently updated website & pops a reply below. www.tom-cox.com The offer is open worldwide. I also have some more art to give away...

@premeemohamed.com What if we had superworms that ate ALL the plastic. Not just some but ALL of it. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32374590/

Biodegradation of Polystyrene by Pseudomonas sp. Isolated from the Gut of Superworms (Larvae of Zophobas atratus) - PubMed

Recently, various attempts have been made to solve plastic waste problems, such as development of biodegradation without producing pollution. Polystyrene (PS) is the fifth most used plastic in many in...

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

A conversation science communicators need to have about AI art 🧪🐙🐡🧵

@premeemohamed.com we're on the way! Remember it's yahoo and not yeehaw!

Jeromy Farkas@jeromyyyc.bsky.social · last wk.

Edmonton, we're on our way. Tomorrow morning, Calgary emergency crews will arrive to help with disaster recovery after recent devastating storms. We're sending specialized crews and equipment to clear dangerous trees, remove debris, and help our neighbours recover.

17 books left on my candidacy reading list. The office space I'm assigned as a grad student is pretty awful, so I decided to rent a desk at a co-working company downtown. I go after work and on the weekends, and it's been incredibly productive.

Content will never make you feel as alive as does this holy trinity of “yet agains”

"Yet again, we watch a male character’s desperate quest to recover and/or avenge a female love object." Emily Wilson's review of the Nolan film is a masterclass in literary review. lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Emily Wilson · An Uncomplicated Man

As they say at the awards shows, I was humbled to learn that Christopher Nolan has read at least the first line of my...

lrb.co.uk

My reading list is getting closer and closer to being done. I started talking about my thesis proposal for my dissertation. Holy moly, holy moly.

My university has shifted our landscape back to natural prairie grasses and plants instead of bluegrass turf and it's pretty magical in the summer.

"The Life and Times of the Extraterrestrial Potoo" in the latest @clarkesworldmagazine.com is such a lovely and poignant little story. clarkesworldmagazine.com/khan_07_26/

The Life and Times of the Extraterrestrial Potoo by K. J. Khan

Clarkesworld Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine and Podcast.

clarkesworldmagazine.com

The ultimate tldr on the OpenAI "rogue model" hacking incident 😅 (h/t @linege1 on X) But it would be useful to know the prompts OpenAI gave to the model....

"These include honey, down for stuffing pillows, bedsheets, horsehair, flowers, chandeliers, fake beards, cameras, and “mosses and lichens.” You better believe I won't be buying any American fake beards. No sir. (gift link) www.theglobeandmail.com/gift/992d7a1...

Trump to impose new tariffs on Canadian exports over auto, dairy and alcohol disputes

His administration estimates the new levies would affect about 5 per cent of Canadian exports, with no exemptions for goods compliant with the USMCA

theglobeandmail.com

Given that all faculty have presumably made it through the snake fight portion of their thesis defense, this would be quite the contest.

FAQ: The “Snake Fight” Portion of Your Thesis Defense

Q: Are the snakes big? A: We have lots of different snakes. The quality of your work determines which snake you will fight. The better your thesis is, the sm...

mcsweeneys.net

This is a very useful resource for understanding the racist and useless referendum questions on offer to Albertans this fall. knowthenine.ca

Stay in Canada. No to the Nine.

Use Alberta's Voice's interactive ballot guide to review all 10 referendum ballots before you vote.

knowthenine.ca

This was the only result at #Exoplanets6 that I saw get a spontaneous round of applause from the audience: THE FIRST ROCKY PLANET IN A HABITABLE ZONE* WITH EVIDENCE** OF AN ATMOSPHERE!!! *Of an M dwarf, which are the only such planets currently accessible **If it's real, its' a weird one!

Space.com@space.com · 3w ago

Astronomers discover 1st atmosphere around a rocky Earth-like planet in the habitable zone www.space.com/astronomy/ex...

If you’re voting or recommending works for the @bsfa.bsky.social awards, I would wholeheartedly ask you to consider “These Marbles Were Never White” for the Short Non-Fiction category. It’s about the importance of Greek and BIPOC voices in Greek myth retellings. www.khoreomag.com/non-fiction/...

These Marbles Were Never White

The year is 2025. Matt Damon wears a red broom on his head in his first promotional image as the protagonist in Christopher Nolan’s upcoming film adaptation of The Odyssey,1 and I’m already too exhaus...

khoreomag.com

I went for a makeup lesson today and a wee little gen Z casually mentioned not to mix oil and water based foundation and concealer and I was like wait what omg

We're still prepping material for an official launch, but an anthology that @premeemohamed.com and I edited is up and ready for reading: books.lib.uoguelph.ca/manufactured...!

Manufactured Ecosystems

Manufactured Ecosystems offers seven visions of ecosystems services in the future by science fiction writers from across Canada and North America. Featuring stories by Chinelo Onwualu, Jennifer Gougé,...

books.lib.uoguelph.ca

[Shutting the car door behind me] “They didn’t have oysters in this gas station either” [Family of otters in the back seat pointing angrily at the next exit sign]

I have two online workshops this week: one for opinion writing and one for personal essay. You can register here: www.elizabethspiers.com/workshops/

Workshops

Learn to write professional op-eds and personal essays with Elizabeth Spiers, a contributing writer for The New York Times opinion section, former columnist at Fortune and Fast Company, and opinion co...

elizabethspiers.com

We're mainly sharing the link to the rather more digestible blog post, but if you want to jump to the straight our AI report:

The Machines Are Coming For Your Masthead — AI Report — Bona Books

🤖📚 *Small Press Publishing in the Age of AI* Bona Books' research reveals the hidden risks of Generative AI in the slush pile. This report exposes how AI fraudsters infiltrate small presses and prov...

bona-books.com

Silence is the wrong response. That’s why today we are publishing ‘The Machines Are Coming For Your Masthead”, a report on our experiences, small press publishing in the age of AI. Read the blog. Download the report. Share your thoughts - we want to hear them. (20/20 - fin)

Honey, We Bought an AI Story — Bona Books

Bona Books share a hard-learned lesson: we accidentally bought AI-generated fiction. This deep dive into our experience with submission fraud covers the "red flags" we missed, the toll it took on our ...

bona-books.com

It's Tuesday and I still can't find that book...at this point, I'm just going to order myself another copy.

It's Sunday night...do you know where your copy of Bruno Latour's Laboratory Life is? (I sure don't and I know I have a copy...searching all my stacks of books). #phdlife

For context for our non-Canadian friends, The Tragically Hip's very last concert was broadcast by our national broadcaster; it was estimated that 1/3 of all Canadians watched. Gord Downie died from glioblastoma a little more than a year later.

Although on second thought, that's a visit my local record store to pick up the album kind of release.

The Tragically Hip's 'Live July 22 – August 20, 2016' is going to drop on Aug 21, and CBC is going to air the live concert on Aug 22. Pardon me while I go block off my calendar and pre-order the album (also how has it been ten years?). mediacentre.cbc.ca/announcement...

The Tragically Hip to release live album and CBC to air The Tragically Hip: A National Celebration Concert in full | CBC Media Centre

Relive the night Canada stood still for the live broadcast of The Tragically Hip’s 2016 Man Machine Poem Kingston show, re-broadcasting and streaming commercial-free on Saturday, August 22, 2026 at 7 ...

mediacentre.cbc.ca