I rarely write about Homer, being daunted by the topic, but since the poet is having a moment, here's a piece about the alphabet, writing, and their absence in the epics. Inspired by a chat with @viewsproject.bsky.social, I hesitantly suggest a theory for that absence. dannybate.com/2026/07/24/h...

Homer’s ABCs

Or: Why don’t people in the Iliad and Odyssey write anything down? Sing, goddess, of how Homer is all the rage right now. My timelines have become streams of Nolan-inspired analyses, hot takes and …

dannybate.com

I have a new paper out in Science today with colleagues Damian Blasi, Marcus Hamilton, and Russell Gray. www.science.org/doi/epdf/10....

The rise and fall of language diversity through the Holocene

Characterizing the factors that have shaped linguistic diversity is fundamental for understanding human history, culture, and cognition. In this study, we combined statistical and social computational...

science.org

eet hun taarten mensen!!

ze hebben laatst samen met VluchtelingenWerk NL en A Beautifull Mess de "Ter Apeltaart" gelanceerd, verkrijgbaar bij de horeca-locaties van A Beautifull Mess in Arnhem, Utrecht en Amsterdam. En ze hebben een webwinkel en doen vooral ook zakelijke bestellingen door het land! trashuretaarten.nl

Bakkerij Nijmegen • Trashure Taarten • Verbeter de wereld, eet taart!

Wij zijn de duurzame en sociale bakkerij in Nijmegen. (H)eerlijke taart bestellen kan gemakkelijk bij bakkerij Trashure Taarten!

trashuretaarten.nl

THE LANGUAGE BEAT is here. For more than two decades, I wrote reportage, profiles, essays, and reviews about language. This book, which collects some of those pieces, is on sale now: amzn.to/4aokz3c (I'll announce when it goes onto other platforms.)

ik wil even reclame maken voor Trashure Taarten, een sociale&duurzame bakkerij in Nijmegen van mensen met het hart op de goede plek: taarten van bijna-verspilde groente&fruit, alles plantaardig, productieproces zo duurzaam mogelijk, en met een team van vluchtelingen die aan hun toekomst in NL bouwen

Just learned about this game -- you're given 10 artifacts / day (from The Met's collection) and have to guess where they were made and when. 🏺🧪 And it's hard! I only got top 35%, which is kinda sad as an archaeologist & author of our Astonishing Artifacts column @livescience.com. anthropeum.com

Anthropeum

A daily game that challenges our understanding of human cultures. Ten objects. 5,000 years of human history. Guess where and when each artifact was made. See how you rank.

anthropeum.com

Artificial intelligence is rapidly accelerating scientific output, but risks narrowing inquiry, weakening judgement and undermining how scientists are trained go.nature.com/3RiE5HN

The uncritical adoption of AI in science is alarming — we urgently need guard rails

Artificial intelligence is rapidly accelerating scientific output, but risks narrowing inquiry, weakening judgement and undermining how scientists are trained.

go.nature.com

Petition that demands suspension of #EU - #Israel Association Agreement gathered over 1 million signatures from EU citizens today, in less than 3 months after it was launched eci.ec.europa.eu/055/public/#...

European Citizens' Initiative

Give your support !

eci.ec.europa.eu

happy I found @dingdingpeng.the100.ci's blog recently! this post resonates with me particularly well: www.the100.ci/2018/08/02/w... "if people stop exaggerating their skills, there’s suddenly much more authentic information out there for others to re-calibrate their own relative impostor syndrome."

We should all feel a bit more like impostors

This blog post is going to argue that science would profit if we all suffered more (not less!) from impostor syndrome. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence arguments, so bear with me wh...

the100.ci

Yesterday my friend told me about her PHILOSOPHY students all using ai for their assignments and like come the fuck on man you’re in Uni doing the subject thats Thinking about Thinking and u refuse to Think

well that's a game-changer

Simon J. Greenhill@simongreenhill.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Hey linguists -- chickens can distinguish bouba and kiki: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

things could barely be more hopeless

The Baffler@thebaffler.com · 6mo ago

In Gaza, Israel takes truckloads of Palestinian bodies for DNA testing, to make sure they are not Israeli. They seldom return them. Mary Turfah examines what they are doing with the dead, how it structures Israeli power, and why they get away with it.

Anglo-linguists really need to be slapped.

Geweldige column van Hieke Huistra. www.trouw.nl/wetenschap/u...

Universiteiten zijn er om te doen waar niemand echt op zit te wachten: kritisch denken

trouw.nl

Israel has murdered more than 500 Palestinians in Gaza since it signed the so called ceasefire. One of the latest is a 3 year old child.

"Those who failed to correctly pronounce the trilled –r, as in the shibboleth perejil ‘parsley’, were deemed to be Haitian and, as a consequence, were murdered.” Bullock & Toribio. 2014. "From Trujillo to the terremoto." Int'l Jrl of the soc. of lng, 227: 83-100. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsley...

Good news everyone, _Nature_ has published 66 Open Access articles to date in 2026! This means Springer-Nature has gobbled up USD$837,540 of science funding this year. I'm sure we couldn't think of anything better to do with that money. #OpenScience

on the road to nowhere

Raphael Wimmer@raphaelwimmer.bsky.social · 6mo ago

OpenAI just released Prism, a LaTeX editor with embedded ChatGPT for free. Writing a paper has never been easier. Clogging the scientific publishing pipeline has never been easier. It took me 54 seconds to write up an experiment I did not actually conduct. prism.openai.com

Some tools for thinking about AI in a time when the companies making them are trying to destroy teaching and learning itself... 1/n 🧵

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ@olivia.science · 8mo ago

First off we pluralise L to accentuate there's no 1 approach. And we position ourselves in this interdisciplinary field of critically examining AI & reflecting on harms. We give 5 non-exhaustive angles: conceptual clarity, critical thinking, decoloniality, respecting expertise, slow science. 2/

If you feel bad for not having published all the papers from your PhD yet... This paper is the discussion of my thesis, and it took me about 6 years to publish it! Thank you to my lovely collaborators @geoffreymesbahi.bsky.social and @maelmleroux.bsky.social for the (much-needed) final push!

Mélissa Berthet@berthetmelissa.bsky.social · 7mo ago

🚨New animal linguistics paper🚨 Together with @geoffreymesbahi.bsky.social and @maelmleroux.bsky.social, we tried to finally answer this question: Do titi monkeys have complex syntactic skills? onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Instead of withdrawing from Gaza, Israel has imposed a so-called "Yellow-Line," leaving its military occupying 58% of Gaza and forcibly confining Palestinians to the remaining 42 percent. This largely unmarked and lethal boundary functions as de facto annexation... 1/3

such an exciting topic!!

Maarten Kossmann@maartenkossmann.bsky.social · 7mo ago

It was a great honor to act as the promotor (together with Prof Gijsbert Rutten) at the PhD defence by Kefan Bao: Language policy and planning of Amazigh languages in Morocco. Congratulations to Kefan on a great piece of work! scholarlypublications.universiteitleiden.nl/handle/1887/...

Wrote about sweet Tsova-Tush children's book project, trying to revive a dying language, for @ocmedia.bsky.social oc-media.org/the-tsova-tu...

The Tsova-Tush children’s book aiming to save one of Georgia’s most endangered languages

A 2019 documentary failed to find anyone under the age of 30 who knew Tsova–Tush.

oc-media.org

"Free societies are under assault from a resurgent fascism. Across the world, fears about immigration have been one of the main—arguably the main—weapon used. And across the world, there has been a timidity on the part of progressives about countering these arguments."

We Need to Get Off the Defensive About Immigration

Free movement is a fantastic thing, and we should say it.

liberalcurrents.com

Arabische cartoonisten hebben een field day.

In 2025 I spent 19 full nights or large parts of the day on a train travelling through Europe. There’s so much to improve still (looking at you, Germany) but it’s exciting to see the growing number of possibilities the European rail network offers!

Waar is het protest van de NRC-redactie tegen alle bizarre beslissingen vd leiding?

Vera Moreijn@veramoreijn.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Hertzberger heeft geprobeerd de medische en persoonsgegevens van trans mensen met de Tweede Kamer te delen, ze heeft gestemd voor de strafbaarstelling van het helpen van ongedocumenteerden, en ze heeft geruime tijd een fascistisch kabinet omhoog helpen houden. Nu direct weer in dienst bij @nrc.nl

Francesca Albanese: "This is the genocide that continues through other means. Israel has zero intention to relinquish control of the Gaza strip.. what has been sold to the world as the peace plan.. is a way to push the intl community to have an alibi not to continue to engage with Gaza"

Israel hunted a 70 year old lady down with a gun drone and then hoovered above to make sure she bled out next to her dying son. They both join almost 1,000 Palestinians Israel has massacred or maimed in its genocide during the "ceasefire". www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/12...

Israeli drone chases and kills elderly woman in Gaza as attacks continue

At least seven Palestinians killed in Israeli attacks as military pushes deeper beyond truce demarcation line.

aljazeera.com