Tracie McKinney
@mckinneymonkey.bsky.social
Primatologist, anthropology and anatomy lecturer, and Appalachian gal abroad. She/her.
Animals in the wild also don't have butt cheeks. We do because of the posterior shift of gluteal muscles for bipedalism. Sorry hominins: walking upright = you got to wipe your ass.
Ben Collins@bencollins.bsky.social · yesterdayOh my god the dietician who is telling everyone in the White House to only eat steak and sauerkraut doesn't wipe his ass.
i don't like to police genre, but it's not dark academia unless somebody gets squished in one of these bad boys
Relatedly: If you're a college professor, and you assume that all of your students can type quickly, efficiently, and accurately on a keyboard, you're almost certainly wrong.
Jess Calarco@jessicacalarco.com · 3d agoI wonder if students today would be less likely to lean on AI for writing assignments if schools had made sure they could touch-type (at least 60wpm) before having them submit all their assignments online. 1/🧵
Why do we call pigeons "pests" but feed songbirds? 🐦 An environmental ethicist says whether an animal is labeled a pest often has less to do with biology and more to do with humans’ way of thinking. theconversation.com/why-are-some...
I am also in this faculty and, reader, it shows. UK unis are in their bullshit jobs era now: "In my faculty, six administrators support ten managerial roles at faculty level while another six administrators support departments with their 900 FTE academic staff who teach 10,000 students."
Inside Britain's university crisis
As teaching staff face job loss, their bosses have netted pay rises and bought advice from a “vampiric” management consultancy, writes Prof. John Heathershaw of the University of Exeter
open.substack.com
Today university fees rise again, while thousands of academics across the country face job cuts, crushing workloads and shattered morale. Students deserve better than this broken system of unfair repayment that widens inequality. Abolish fees and fund universities properly!
Orchids revived, the corpse ambulant and a poetic ruined abbey. These are the news stories I want to read.
You will pry my beloved em dashes from my cold dead fingers. :) More Typos, Fewer Em Dashes: Writers Are Creating an Anti-AI ‘Literary Counterculture’ www.wired.com/story/more-t...
More Typos, Fewer Em Dashes: Writers Are Creating an Anti-AI ‘Literary Counterculture’
Novelists, journalists, and power LinkedIn posters are embracing first-person narratives and idiosyncrasies to avoid being mistaken for chat bots.
wired.com
*whispers* you know we can do this cultural debate about art thing all the time, right? Websites and news organizations used to have culture critics on staff whose entire job was writing about books, movies, and TV. People read them and then discussed them. We have the technology to do this again.
I hope every day you all are trying to cultivate joy. A kindness to a neighbor. A long walk. Poetry. Birdwatching. Meditation. Being silly and playing peekaboo in a checkout line with a cute baby. These are dark times, and joy is something the bastards cannot take from us. Fight for it.
Some academics turn up their noses at movie adaptations or popular history books, but I call them "gateway drugs" into deeper scholarship. How many of us fell in love with history because a movie (or book) sparked our curiosity first? For me, it was Amadeus - it sent me down an 18thC rabbit hole.
Can you help an MSc student with her research around public awareness of wildlife conservation in the UK? If you live in the UK, are over 18, and have 10 minutes for science, please take her survey here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F... #Science🧪 #Wildlife #Nature
📢 New species of monkey! Check out these little dudes, furious to be discovered living in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which tbh with the way 2026 is currently going I would be too 😤 www.iflscience.com/mysterious-m...
Mysterious Masked Monkey Is The Fifth Discovered In Africa In 75 Years. And It May Already Be Endangered
The species was first heard about in 2008 but not properly described until now.
iflscience.com
we need steel to build all the new shiny buildings on campus, what will happen in those buildings without any staff is anyone's guess but the buildings are what is important
Plashing Vole@plashingvole.bsky.social · 3w agoCongratulations to the government on saving 2700 jobs by nationalising British Steel. Now, about the 18,000 university jobs lost in the last 18 months, with more coming…
Researchers: what do you like to use as compensation for participants' time? I know many researchers use gift cards/vouchers, but what about when working internationally or with multiple diverse communities? I might need some creative ideas here. 🧪#science
Is Animal History radical or not? I have some issues with the way we work and I'd love to hear your opinions about it 😅📗 (thread 🧵) #envhist #animalhistory
‘Thousands of university job cuts in humanities and social sciences are creating widespread cold spots for languages, classics and theology degrees, the British Academy has warned’ www.theguardian.com/education/20...
Humanities among degrees being ‘extinguished’ by hard-up universities
Exclusive: Experts fear rise in education ‘cold spots’ and social immobility as 4,000 academic posts lost in one year
theguardian.com
This is probably typical but still highlights the lack of ethics in CITES meetings.
Mongabay@mongabay.com · 3w agoJennifer Chatfield, a top U.S. Interior Department official with deep ties to commercial wildlife breeding, will head the U.S. delegation at the global CITES meeting. The official faces requests for an ethics probe over potential conflicts of interest and favoring a family business.
You're going to get left behind if you don't use Al." Leave me then. Leave me with my critical thinking skills, my ability to read and write long- form, and books without needing Al summaries.
🐒 Work with primates? Have you observed 3 or more individuals grooming together? Polyadic grooming is barely documented and we know little about its distribution. Please take 1–2 minutes to fill out this short survey and share: forms.gle/cLPB1mnwrjJo...
Polyadic grooming in primates
survey about observations of polyadic grooming in primate species
forms.gle
‘…we need to achieve a minimum of 40% street tree canopy cover, and preferably more, before we start to really feel the benefits of nature’s most advanced air-conditioning technology.’ Me, for Big Issue, on tackling urban #heatwaves…👇 www.bigissue.com/opinion/heat...
Art question 🎨 What painting, photograph, sculpture, or piece of visual art has stayed with you long after you first saw it? Not necessarily your favorite. The one that lingered.
The Cat Ba langur (also known as the golden-headed langur) is one of the rarest primates on Earth. It lives only on Cat Ba Island in Northern Vietnam and nowhere else in the wild. There are only about 70 to 80 individuals left in existence.
imagining a grizzled hardboiled detective saying this while gripping some guy's lapels at a shady bar
NBC News@nbcnews.com · last mo.She has a neck the size of an adult human, legs that are just as long and an unforgettable coat. And she’s missing.
