Reading through the beautiful testimonies of students & colleagues of Jason Arday is a reminder of all we have lost, but also how much kindness and generosity matters. Thanks @hannahrobbins26.bsky.social for sharing this link. leilacancode.github.io/everythinggo...

It's here! Delighted to receive the first paper copies of my new book, An Injury to All: The Unmaking of the British Working Class, from Verso. An Injury to All is published on 27 October. You can pre-order it here: www.versobooks.com/en-gb/produc...

As ever I would point out that this is good landscape management and there is nothing 'wild' about it and until we stop calling it 'rewilding' people will continue to operate with the ludicrous romantic assumption that 'nature' is self-healing and that human intervention is bad.

Margot Finn@eicathomefinn.bsky.social · 15h ago

'The area of the National Trust’s Holnicote estate where rivers have been returned to their natural courses and wetlands have been restored have remained green and lush during the five heatwaves across the summer.'

Calling all neo-folk & folk horror buffs: I'm hoping to add some readings on this to a new unit on environmentalism. It's for a week identifying new trends/movements, so I'm expecting relevant lit to lie more in social sciences, culture studies, and literature than history. What's good out there?

I got tired of waiting for the journalists at @theharvardcrimson.bsky.social to cover this (it IS summer), but this is to say that ALL the staff members in Women & Gender Studies here were laid off last week, on the top of the cutting of 5 lecturer positions in the program last year.+

🧵I've been writing about communities taking on big heartless corporations for well over 30 years and I have never seen an issue bring together a coalition as wide, or as deep, as the battle against AI data centres. This quote from a Kentucky farmer who refused millions to sell her land says it all:

One week from today, we kick off the fall Greenhouse #envhum book talks with Sara Pritchard @sarabpritchard.bsky.social, Transforming Night: The History and Science of Light Pollution Join us for the live discussion Monday, 24 August 2026, 4pm Central European time! newnatures.org/greenhouse/e...

We placed a tracking device in a shipment of rare books to see which AI company was buying it, and found an Amazon facility where Amazon scans and destroys books.

We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility

We placed a tracking device in a shipment of rare books to see which AI company was buying it, and found an Amazon facility where Amazon scans and destroys books.

404media.co

Call for Contributions to a Sourcebook for Histories of Weather & Weathering teleskopos.wordpress.com/2026/02/05/c... Full details linked and here teleskopos.wordpress.com/wp-content/u... It will be edited by me, @lottaleiwo.bsky.social and Tamara Culkins. Please share! #histSTM #envhist 🗃️📜

Call for Contributions: Histories of Weather & Weathering

Call for Contributions: A Sourcebook for Histories of Weather and Weathering (working title) Editors: Rebekah Higgitt, Tamara Caulkins and Lotta Leiwo We invite contributions to this planned open a…

teleskopos.wordpress.com

i am personally aware of three recent cases, all senior figures who faced credible accusations, none of whom appear to have suffered any consequences

Gabriel S. Jacobs@gsjphd.bsky.social · 7d ago

let's be real: plagiarism scandals in academia happen all the time (not because academics plagiarize a lot, but just because of how many millions of faculty there are around the world) and it is never general-public news unless the culprit is a member of a minority.

Unbearably sad news of Prof Arday’s death. I am thinking of him and everyone close to him. I hope all those who took part in the hunt are ashamed. A broken and heartless media and academic system.

I don’t think there’s ever been a clearer example of the British media bullying someone, who was so clearly vulnerable, to death so shamelessly in my lifetime for engagement and clicks And now we’ll have to watch the people that did it claim they’re shocked, and horrified Revolting

This is the coverage of Arday **just in the Telegraph** in the UK. This is only the first four pages of results, just in one outlet.

My god, what an image. Dead kings in a plastic box, carried off as the world burns.

Reuters@reuters.com · last wk.

Spain removes remains of 11th century kings from monastery as wildfire rages reut.rs/4zAAN4r

And look at the SW bumbling along near the bottom of the chart. There is (rightfully) a lot of focus on the north-south UK divide in opportunity and attainment, but the SW really struggles too. Thank god we have excellent unis in the SW that are definitely not closing programmes and firing staff 🙄

Social Market Foundation@smfthinktank.bsky.social · last wk.

And these regional gaps have widened. Since 2019, the proportion of 18-year-olds entering university has risen by 7.3 percentage points in London, compared with just 1.2 points in the North East. The gap between the two regions has grown from 12 percentage points to 18 points.

ARGH. There are many causes of the UKHE crisis, and the governmental underfunding is undoubtedly the most harmful one. But let’s not let that big one draw sole attention, so we forget the harm done by the pure disrespect of managers for staff & their disdain for meaningful conversation with them.

Dr Susan Greaney@suegreaney.bsky.social · last wk.

My uni have just withdrawn Geography, History & Geography and Politics & Geography undergrad courses run from our Penryn campus. Terrible for Cornwall. How did the staff find out? When UCAS clearing opened at 8am 😡

My uni have just withdrawn Geography, History & Geography and Politics & Geography undergrad courses run from our Penryn campus. Terrible for Cornwall. How did the staff find out? When UCAS clearing opened at 8am 😡

Happy #worldcatday! Remembering my one experience of going viral, all thanks to a very sweet little philosopher-cat

The one cloud of summer. We booked it for North Essex this evening, and it is scheduled to hover over Hull tomorrow morning.

Nice to hear Scout on 6music this morning @lsangha.bsky.social ! My ears pricked at the name, but it was the gifts from outdoors that meant it could only be her!

Delighted to hear today that the answer to ‘who will supervise PhDs whose supervisors are being sacked?’ is ‘hire hourly-paid supervisors who were sacked in the previous round of sackings’. This rather whiffs of fake redundancies.

Great wee creature in the National Museum of Scotland

This is extraordinarily bad, as even the UK copyright libraries (e.g. Cambridge) have moved over to frequently only acquiring the ebook version of new publications. If you don't own the hard copy, you're just renting and you are at the mercy of the publisher.

Reminder that unis/academic staff are judged on graduate employment rates so we will be both blamed (sometimes as individuals!) and punished for this. Yet another of the many things that we are forced to take responsibility for despite having no control over it.

Margot Finn@eicathomefinn.bsky.social · 3w ago

New graduate posts down 7% from last year's figures, at lowest level since 2020. Overall UK job postings are down 11% since the start of the year. This decline stretches across almost all occupations. War in Middle East and AI adduced as potential drivers.

Have you been to Jorvik? Do you remember the smells?

Will Tullett@willtullett.bsky.social · 3w ago

One of the best things about Jorvik is that was semi-compulsory for all children who grew up in Britain in the mid 1980s to early 2000s to visit it, so those smells are stuck in the memories of so many people.

One thing that doesn't seem to have really cut through is that if the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation collapses - which in recent years has gone from "very distant possibility" to "uh, guys" - we don't get a Mediterranean climate, we freeze.

Twlldun@twlldun.bsky.social · 3w ago

*One* undiscussed problem with embracing a Mediterranean lifestyle as advocated by this piece is we don’t have the Mediterranean, we have the North Sea, and the impact of climate change on the currents and weather patterns of the North Sea is…well, it’s not turning it into the Med, is it?

All reports in this thread are from the collections of Northwestern University's Transportation Library. Materials we've digitized can generally be found in HathiTrust. Learn more and search our catalog here: www.library.northwestern.edu/libraries-co...

As a historian of Jodrell Bank, I agree! And the reason it is important is that it has been made to mean different things to different people at different times. Who's up for a mega thread on how and why? (I'm off for lunch now, but I'll do it after. I'll need the energy...)

John Grindrod@grindrod.bsky.social · 3w ago

Really one of the most important postwar sites in Britain

Apparently there’s some kind of revival of interest in Homer which reminds me I saw him live in Thrace in 790BC I bet most of these posers can’t even name three of his epics

little moan about Scrivener - I was an early adopter and bought S2 for my laptop, later also buying it for an iPad. The laptop died and my old purchase doesn't get me S3. I'll have to buy it again. Not sure any app is worth a total spend of £75+ in this economy!