This sign is a great example for helping to explain why chatbots present such a potent illusion. A probably not short thread 🧵>>

This conversation, which compares the harms plagiarism, biographical fabulism and academic fraud is very good. There are also good replies on the different values of academics, journalists and others re: these misdeeds and their relative harm.

@lastpositivist.bsky.social · 19h ago

Jason Stanley makes the case that the stuff that was most obviously in fact a lie in Arday's case was also not stuff which academic institutions care about when employing someone, whereas by the metrics academics care about Arday was doing well. jasonstanleyantifascist.substack.com/p/it-sure-lo...

Marmot researchers take in €85,000 worth of memecoins via OnlyFans.

elDiario.es@eldiario.es · 12h ago

Los científicos que abrieron un OnlyFans para financiar su estudio sobre marmotas consiguen 85.000 euros en 'memecoins'

Fascinating piece this - the answer is a (slight) corrective for boring trads like me:

Does AI stop children from learning?

New data show the peril and promise of the technology

economist.com

My 14yo likes to play with thou/thee/thy, but has no idea which one is which case, a grievous gap in our education...I kid; like "whomst" it's obviously playful. But when he says he's come into my office to mess around with "with thy", meaning "thee", ie me, I'm struck by it...

Amnesty UL supports a law that would legally cap the number of articles published "on one person within a timeframe". How does this not amount to massive censorship? I await details from our human-rights defenders. www.change.org/p/proposal-f... www.amnesty.org.uk/get-involved...

Our collective statement on the death of Professor Jason Arday

Amnesty UK's Disabled People's Human Rights Network, Student Action Network, Anti-Racism Network, Feminist Network and Queer Rights Network issue a joint statement following the death of Professor Jas...

amnesty.org.uk

I saw a nice video naming a fourth factor in this: Russian and European Portuguese are both heavily stress-timed, meaning stressed syllables come at regular intervals, requiring other syllables to be reduced, their vowels weak or disappearing. In this, PT is unlike Spanish, French or Italian...

Lane Greene@lanegreene.bsky.social · 4d ago

I've picked out 3 things that I think make everyone say European Portuguese sound like Russian: 1) prominent sh- and zh- (shared with Brazilian PT) but also 2) "dark L" at the ends of words like "Portugal", a sound shared with Russian 3) the /ɨ/ vowel, found frequently in EP & Russian but not BP

Well said, Hugh Muir and @theguardian.com. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Link: www.economist.com/graphic-deta... The vertical axis cut off in Henry's post is test scores. Homework scores predict test scores. But as that red line in his post shows, for those who use AI to get the best homework scores, that link breaks and they do worse on tests.

Does AI stop children from learning?

New data show the peril and promise of the technology

economist.com

Henry Mance@henrymance.ft.com · 2d ago

Woah.

Trump's feed is filled with the usual list of cards displaying "So-and-so WINS... Endorsed by President Trump!" for primary candidates, despite the fact that he had a bad night last night (WY governor endorsee lost by 15 points along w/ 2 FL candidates).

Great column (en español). Sure, tourists are annoying, and annoying tourists even more so. Easy to moan about the worst Camino walkers entering Santiago. But the only reason it was built was to attract visitors...

Antonia de Oñate 🇪🇺@piamonte.eurosky.social · 2d ago

¡Puntazo de @sergiodelmolino.bsky.social en esta pieza de opinión, de la que destaco por su guasa lo que os capturo en la imagen! «Santiago de Compostela quiere tirar a los peregrinos al pilón». elpais.com/opinion/2026...

As we say in the south, "Damn, brother, I don't believe I'd'a told that."

Raider@iwillnotbesilenced.bsky.social · 2d ago

Senator Darline Graham - the Senator who was appointed to replace her dead brother Lindsey Graham - just admitted on live television that she knows nothing about national security. "But I do support the military." Graham is running to serve a full term in the U.S. Senate despite having zero office.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the bedroom, the vaginal performance review awaits. overmatter.substack.com/p/the-vagina...

The vaginal league table that nobody asked for

The department of muff metrics is now issuing reports

overmatter.substack.com

"Myriad" is, to be sure, an adjective as well, but a myriad of people will insist that it's *only* an adjective, and that's. not. true. And it was a noun first.

I'm a critic of the NYT's refusal to print swears etc where other papers would. But when I looked up what Brandon Herrera said about Shannon Watts (of Moms Demand Action) it was so appalling that for once I actually thought, nope I wouldn't print that either. www.nytimes.com/2026/08/16/u...

How Republicans Embraced Brandon Herrera, a Texas Republican Candidate and Gun Influencer

Brandon Herrera, long an anti-establishment outsider, is trying to help the party defend a red-leaning House district in West Texas. It’s proving messy.

nytimes.com

It's gotten so much easier to start learning so many more languages, you used to be limited to the 3-5 major languages that a local bookstore or educational institution had decided it was worth making available, and now you can just like, look things up in hundreds of them

Constantine@ajaxsinger.bsky.social · 2w ago

Food, man. Food is so much better than it was in 1986. All of it. Poor-people food, restaurant food, fresh food, frozen food. Food is just a hell of a lot better.

Last week I wrote about Andy Burnham, the first man in Number 10 to have an accent like millions of his countrymen: a northern English one. Thanks to Amanda Cole, @robdrummond.bsky.social and Geoff Lindsey for their insight. www.economist.com/britain/2026...

Andy Burnham and the politics of accents

His way of speaking marks him out in a long line of posh-sounding PMs

economist.com

My wife went to Zambia as an EU observer for this election and it made me really happy to hear her describe people walking a day through the bush to get to the polling station and vote. People like democracy!

AFP News Agency@en.afp.com · 4d ago

Incumbent Hakainde Hichilema pulled ahead in Zambia's presidential election with more than half of constituencies tallied, the electoral commission said, putting him on course for an outright win in the first round. u.afp.com/SHEa

Greenlanders breathing a brief sigh of relief.

Timothy McBride@mcbridetd.bsky.social · 6d ago

Unhinged POTUS says he will soon declare the Strait of Hormuz a U.S. territory www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-pre...

Like her, I’m in awe of the fact checking process and my colleagues who lead it. There’s nothing like working with good researchers, as I’ve been lucky to do for more than two decades.

Molly Crabapple@mollycrabapple.bsky.social · 6d ago

Today I learned that peer reviewed articles in academic journals aren‘t fact checked by an independent fact checker the way magazine articles are If this is the case, how can any journal article be considered accurate? it’s so easy to make small errors even on subjects you know up and down

Maybe 'the media' is a blanket term that covers thousands of outlets and millions of journalists of very different kinds, so isn't very useful as a descriptor

Davenant 📸@marcdavenant.bsky.social · 6d ago

There are some good people working in the media but there are also those who can only be described as inhumane soulless scum, who will do anything for clicks and headlines with zero regard for the consequences and no remorse. We shouldn’t shy away from this.

If Pangram is this good (9,999 / 10,000 accuracy claimed), I want a browser extension. Just something that turns all AI text the least appealing possible color, like the one the EU uses on cigarette packs. www.nytimes.com/2026/08/13/t...

I Tested a Popular A.I. Slop Detector. It Felt Empowering.

Pangram excels at distinguishing chatbot-generated words from human writing. But it’s not reliable for spotting artificial images.

nytimes.com

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

Reuters@reuters.com · 7d ago

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

Beautiful hasn’t always been ‘beautiful’. In Old English, one of the words for it was ‘sċēne’. This word became ‘sheen’, but as an adjective, it’s all but dead. Its Germanic cognates include German ‘schön’, Dutch ‘schoon’, and Swedish ‘skön’. They were derived from a verb related to ‘show’: 1/

Not stereotypical, but typical: a big candy section in a small Danish supermarket. Adults eat plenty of candy here too. (The adult here is my wife.) The candy is weird to my American palate — oddly savory and lots of licorice flavors. But it’s t is a strangely big part of the culture.

That Times Square sucks has been a commonplace for so long I’m amazed that tourists are till accidentally lured there. But here’s El País quoting them: “this is it?” Yep, that’s it.

EL PAÍS@elpais.com · 2w ago

Opinión | “¿Cómo, es solo esto?', el chasco es casi unánime cuando los viajeros llegan por primera vez a la plaza más famosa de la ciudad más famosa del mundo: Times Square". Por Paco Nadal

As a reporter I cannot accept swag from any organization I might cover worth more than about $50: “a bottle of wine may be OK. A case is not.” And I don’t have regulatory power over them.

ProPublica@propublica.org · 2w ago

FCC Chair Brendan Carr’s latest financial report said Paramount gave him tickets to the 2025 Kennedy Center gala worth $12,390. He and his wife sat in skybox seats. Such seats sold for $125,000 a piece, according to Kennedy Center guidelines.

this was a total surprise to me. twitter is a sort of dumpster in which evidently increasingly mainstream media rummages for the flotsam & jetsam of pseudo-news. quoting people instead of inviting them to write a serious, thoughtful prose piece & paying them a modest fee has become common.

Joe Adalian@tvmojoe.bsky.social · 3w ago

I love that @theguardian.com put the whole @joycecaroloates.bsky.social vs. Wilson thing in the main news section of Friday’s paper.

Fun fact! If you ask a bunch of social-science grad students—spefically St. Antony's College, Oxford—to design an electoral system they will go for ranked-choice, as we did in 1997 for student government positions. So I was elected Social Secretary (yes really) by RCV.

Lane Greene@lanegreene.bsky.social · 3w ago

Here's some advice: ask Americans not "do you support ranked-choice voting?" (what's that?) but "would you like to not only vote for the candidate you like most, but have a second vote against the one you hate most?" Landslide.

Here's some advice: ask Americans not "do you support ranked-choice voting?" (what's that?) but "would you like to not only vote for the candidate you like most, but have a second vote against the one you hate most?" Landslide.

Andy Craig@andycraig.bsky.social · 3w ago

For our mega-survey on populist attitudes, we asked whether people would prefer a more multi-party system or a two-party system. The former blew the latter out of the water. Asked about specific reforms to get there, people are less sure. Also, Trump populists are the most fond of the status quo.