I did an interview with the fab @hardeepmatharu.bsky.social from @bylinetimes.bsky.social and here it is, for those who have not yet heard my lengthy discourse on why genAI often sucks, why techbros definitely suck, and why a U16 social media ban is downright stupid: bylinetimes.com/2026/07/21/t...

‘There’s a Value in What We Produce Because We Feel – and an AI Chatbot Can’t Feel’

Byline Times' Editor in Chief meets Kate Devlin, Professor of AI and Society at King’s College London, to explore how relationships with AI companions aren’t particularly new, why she believes the und...

bylinetimes.com

Don't dream of an electric car society. Instead, dream of a FEWER car society!

@jasoniscursed.bsky.social · 3w ago

I was blown away by a recent trip to Shanghai and how quiet the traffic was since all the cars were electric or had zero engine/exhaust noise. Coming home and hearing the loud cars and motorcycles in my city made me dream of an electric car future.

Child drownings spike during heatwaves – and it’s a serious climate justice issue theconversation.com/child-drowni...

Child drownings spike during heatwaves – and it’s a serious climate justice issue

As the UK gets hotter, children will seek water to cool down. The real question is why so many have so few places to go.

theconversation.com

So we have the Home Secretary's statement on changes to immigration and asylum, and, despite the attempt to spin it otherwise, they are some of the most regressive measures we have seen. 1/ www.gov.uk/government/n...

Mahmood: My reforms will save the asylum system for a generation

New safe and legal refugee routes, alongside reforms to human rights and modern slavery laws, to prevent abuse of the asylum system.

gov.uk

You CAN innovate and make technologies that center people and society's wellbeing. And if you can't, well then maybe you're the problem.

**** This is not a drill **** The Met Office has issued a red warning for parts of the UK this week. That means that you *should not* expect to carry on your normal activities. There is a real danger of power supplies & transport failing. Plan now. weather.metoffice.gov.uk/warnings-and...

This elitist mantra is so pervasive - that bad seeps up from the bottom of society (while good trickles down from the top). It has thoroughly infected life course research for a start.

Mark Chadbourn@chadbourn.bsky.social · 2mo ago

And just three old men are responsible for 90% of the world’s problems.

"At its core is the concept of sufficiency – the idea that people can enjoy a prosperous, healthy life without constantly striving to consume or accumulate more material possessions that degrade the natural world on which all life depends."

The Guardian@theguardian.com · 2mo ago

‘An equal and habitable world is possible’: academics set out sweeping vision for planetary survival

The @theguardian.com publishing junk nonsense on health inequalities is both depressing and illuminating, and indicative of the extent of current challenges in science communication. Should Krieger, Sridhar et al. have even engaged with it? (Cf Brandolini's law on the effort of debunking bullshit).

Michael Hobbes@michaelhobbes.bsky.social · 3mo ago

There's no "study," this is based on a crank manifesto with only four footnotes written by a bunch of health grifters. Why is the Guardian covering this like it has any academic credibility?

"The frenetic AI race is inseparable from the petty, clashing egos of the unfathomably rich, hellbent on dominating one another" - must read from Karen Hao.

Karen Hao@karenhao.bsky.social · 3mo ago

So much attention has been paid to the Musk v. Altman trial. But real accountability for the AI industry will not come from a billionaire mudfight. It will come from the movements around the world resisting the empires of AI. My op-ed for @theguardian.com. www.theguardian.com/technology/c...

I implore everyone to read this brilliant book review of Kathryn Paige Harden new book on the genetics of criminality. It cuts right through the bullshit to state plainly what Harden's project really is: eugenics bullshit and grifting lareviewofbooks.org/article/orig...

Natural Election | Los Angeles Review of Books

Kathryn Paige Harden’s new book offers a defense of a kind of Scientific Calvinism that converges with the eugenicist ideals of the contemporary Far Right.

lareviewofbooks.org

Science has never been neutral. That's clear from its history. Institutions, patrons, & practitioners of science had agendas and prejudices that shaped what they studied, how, and how they interpreted their findings. Those legacies persist, especially when denied. That's History of Science 101. 🗃 1/

Dr. Johnathan Flowers, Bisexual of the Blade (Alt-text or DIE)@shengokai.blacksky.app · 5mo ago

A common example among (some) sciences is that their field is so distant from the Bad Things that emerge from science that they cannot possibly be implicated in them. Zoology, for example, cannot be implicated in queerphobia, despite normalizing that queerness doesn't happen "in the wild."

Oh good, another generation of 'leaders' who will have little incentive to question the existence of billionaires. The idea that 'leaders will generate insights/solutions' suggests #zombieleadership ideas will be central (see www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...)

Margot Finn@eicathomefinn.bsky.social · 4mo ago

'The Rokos School of Government is due to open in the autumn and will aim to prepare future leaders to tackle the “ever-more-challenging demands of both domestic and international politics in a new and complex world of great structural change”.' 1/3

Today, we’re showing up. For our neighbours. Our friends. Our family. And anyone who has been scapegoated by the far-right. Half a million strong. Together. This is just the beginning. #Together

"We are seeing similar trends across borders and local contexts: third places have been progressively lost and the far right has sprouted up in their absence, capitalising on atomisation, disaffection and a sense of being left behind." www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Progressive Paris has many weapons to fight the far right, but the best? Spaces where you can simply hang out | Alexander Hurst

Drop into any of the French capital’s ‘third places’ and you’ll find food, culture, community – and an antidote to the disaffection extremists feed on, says Guardian Europe columnist Alexander Hurst

theguardian.com

Congrats to all those journal editors & peer reviewers who legitimised Lynn’s “national IQ” database by letting it into their journals. Truly, it’s a victory for academic freedom to publish papers which claim that children living in a refugee camp constitute a nationally representative sample 👏👏

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 4mo ago

Trump: "In Minnesota, it's very Somalia-oriented. These people come from a crooked country, disgusting country, one of the worst countries in the world. They come to our country -- low IQs -- and they rob us blind. Stupid people, and they rob us blind."

Instead of tinkering at the margins, isn't the polycrisis the moment to reconsider whether some parts of our economy are really worth the earth's finite resources? (Some candidates for 'more damaging than beneficial' include fast fashion, aviation, luxury goods...)

> The question is not whether Cofnas should be permitted to hold his views[. It's] whether a public research university in Belgium should be [granting] credibility to those views, funding their dissemination, and providing them the cover of academic legitimacy. www.brusselstimes.com/2020728/the-...

The danger of legitimising hate through academia

brusselstimes.com

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ@olivia.science · 5mo ago

anw sign here: www.change.org/p/stop-the-h... > In these venues he has repeatedly advanced claims about the supposed cognitive inferiority of Black people , along with broader arguments about the “feminization” of academia and suggestions that eugenic ideas deserve renewed scientific consideration.

An example of why I'm allergic to 'Gen' narratives. The article inadvertently highlights that it's just corporate jargon (it's about hiring and selling, not rounded humans or citizens). And it puts the explanatory power on the individual, not the societal context. www.theguardian.com/society/2026...

Why is everyone so obsessed with gen Z?

Is there something different about people born between 1997 and 2012 or is it all just marketing nonsense and hysteria?

theguardian.com

There are people out there who think it's ridiculous to say that killing 100,000 Palestinians and expelling 100,000s more from their land is a genocide, but that describing people coming to your country to work and start a family as genocide is totally reasonable.

Sunder Katwala (sundersays)@sundersays.bsky.social · 5mo ago

GB News is both broadcasting + clipping "there is a genocide happening in this island" due to immigration and demographic change, by Thomas Corbett-Dillon, a former digital campaign adviser to Johnson's Conservatives.

Reactionary centrism is a scourge on legacy media and a threat to liberal democracy.

The Economist@economist.com · 5mo ago

Their policies would make Britain poorer. Both are sceptical of multinationals, trade and building anything anywhere near anyone. For the parties of the centre, the sensible response would be to offer policies to boost growth

(Reasonable Q to ask why, over a decade later are international institutions still failing, and why nation states are unwilling/unable to work together to deal with root causes)

Antony Carpen@acarpen.bsky.social · 5mo ago

"I spent three days at a refugee camp. Here’s what I learned" www.newstatesman.com/politics/201... From Oct 2015. "Shabana Mahmood, MP for Birmingham Ladywood, reflects on her recent visit to refugee camps in Greece." @newstatesman1913.bsky.social article Referred to by @zackpolanski.bsky.social

NEW: Until we center children fully, fiercely, and without compromise, no liberation is complete. Every policy, every system, every movement must begin with one question: What does this mean for the children?

Center the Children: A Manifesto for True Liberation

“I don’t like kids,” people openly say. They are the most vulnerable, yet the least protected; the most valuable, yet the most expendable. Their lives are shaped by power they do …

hilaryagro.com

a thing historians will marvel about when they study this era is the extent to which the "war is a thing that happens to poorer, browner people" class went about systematically dismantling every aspect of the global political order that confined the costs of war to poorer and browner people

Emma Yeomans@yeomans.bsky.social · 5mo ago

"The trade was not that you were getting exposed to geopolitics when moving to Dubai."

Utterly cruel, pointless and harmful. It does not minimise how bad Conservatives were to say Labour are now the most anti-asylum government in most people's living memory. This prevents people feeling any sense of safety and security after fleeing persecution. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

Shabana Mahmood to limit refugees to 30 months in UK

Shorter asylum period can be renewed under hardline policy aimed at stopping rise of Reform UK

theguardian.com

Good to see journalists covering the links between University of Buckingham’s Centre for Heterodox Science and race science networks. It ought to be pretty shocking to see a university openly affiliate with pseudoscience peddlers such as Aporia

Revealed: Reform UK Matt Goodwin's Academic Ties to Rebranded Nazi Eugenics Front

Reform's Gorton and Denton candidate, who has said that genetics will expose the "inherent differences between groups" has links to multiple organisations tied to discredited racist pseudoscience

bylinetimes.com

Maybe, just maybe, it's about reclaiming the vast amounts of public space that we've devoted to motor vehicles? One day our public service broadcaster might actually start to grapple with motornormativity (and the automobile industrial complex), but apparently not today.

Unofficial BBCNews (UK) Bot@bbcnews-uk-rss.bsky.social · 5mo ago

There's a solution for e-bike parking chaos - but its not problem free

And again while we can and should condemn the individuals involved, my work as a feminist theorist says that we are called to understand the systemic issues, which was that Epstein had an ideological agenda that was enabled by the habits of disciplinary thought leaders who are used to being coddled

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein 🌌@chanda.blacksky.app · 6mo ago

MUST READ: The best synthesis I have seen so far of things I knew or had put together from various sources but had not really seen pulled together 🧪 Importantly, I don’t think these academics were an aberration. I think a lot of scientists would have entered these circles, given the option.