It's the 7-year anniversary of Book Moon this month! Last winter we were lucky enough to be able to buy the building, which is key to the survival of any independent bookstore. Now we're hoping to pay off some of our loan with an Indiegogo campaign offering 2 new T-shirts, a tea towel, & much more.

We're Shooting for the Moon by Gavin Grant - Indiegogo

We had a chance to buy the building our bookstore is in and we were on it faster than you can say there's a monster at the end of this book!

indiegogo.com

The Ofcom words thing coming out the day after the NHS published anti-trans guidance and every civil service department was also issued anti-trans guidance. Busy little bigot beavers.

I'm not the first to say this obviously, Black writers led the way as usual. C. Riley Snorton and Jin Haritaworn have written about necropolitics applied to trans women of colour and the transmisogynoir or otherwise racialised transphobia that they face. transreads.org/wp-content/u...

At this point it's important to think about Butler's concept of grievability, because that ties into all this too. Butler asks us, whose life do we find grievable? Whom would we mourn after, if they were lost? To whom do we give that fullness, that care, which is manifested in the counting of death?

TERF now a slur somewhere between cis and batty boy, for those keeping up at home.

Mike Knell@blat.at · yesterday

Good news, everybody! Ofcom have updated the quick-reference sweary book! www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/r...

So much respect for the Coastal Lines Press project of creating zines with Palestinian writers in Gaza so that sales go to fully support the writers. A zine by Samah Yaqut: www.coastallinespress.com/p/a-diary-of...

A Diary of Darkness

A follow-up to the award-winning zine, In the Depth of Gaza, this collection of poetry and narrative articles is a profound and unnerving portrait of a genocide administered through successive wars an...

coastallinespress.com

Well, I wrote a lengthy email to Anna Ganley / @societyofauthors.bsky.social for what it's worth. tl;dr no I do not think you can decide for your entire membership what ethical use of GenAI in publishing looks like, or that it exists and is achievable.

The billionaires warning that AI could end humanity are the same ones lobbying to write its rules. In a major new essay, Arundhati Roy argues that artificial intelligence is capitalism’s final destination www.equator.org/articles/aru...

Apocalypse Now and Then • EQUATOR

Artificial intelligence is capitalism’s final destination

equator.org

All welcome! Looking forward to this 🙂 RSVP link: housmans.com/event/book-l...

Latest episode is full on claaaaaaas, featuring great reflections on Starfleet Academy as a response to catastrophe, race and queerness in trek, the good bits of strange new worlds, plenty of reflection on communities under siege, and why DS9 empathised with Kira but stopped short of understanding.

Resistance Is Fertile@thestartrekpod.bsky.social · 2d ago

🖖 New Episode Alert! 🖖 We, carla & @ayoub.bsky.social, had such a wonderful time exploring the potentials of liberatory futures (and so much more!) with the amazing @chanda.blacksky.app! ✨ listen here ➡️ www.cawshinythings.com/edges-of-lib...

Some thoughts about AI, book bans, information, and access in anticipation of a conversation I'm looking forward to having with students. sonjadrimmer.com/blog-1/2026/...

AI Is a Book Ban — Sonja Drimmer

When access to books is actually a book ban. The student-run Amnesty International Club at Williams College has invited me to participate in a conversation with them this weekend about technology, AI...

sonjadrimmer.com

Aaron Swartz, coding prodigy and hacktivist who helped develop RSS and was a co-founder of Reddit, died by suicide after facing $1 million in fines and 35 years in prison for felony charges, just for downloading pdfs of research papers with the intention of making them accessible to the public.

Julie S. Lalonde@julieslalonde.bsky.social · 2d ago

Being GenX/Millennial is such a trip. In our lifetimes, we saw people our age getting wild criminal penalties for pirating music and now have to sit and watch as companies gobble up our work with impunity.

Someday, when the bubble bursts and the AHA comes crashing down, historians will come begging on their knees for primary sources. Philologists will be waiting, and they will not forget all the times they were told "editions aren't real publications." Still they will say: "Here, it's open access."

Laprofmme@laprofmme.bsky.social · 3d ago

This essay by Jordan Sand on how LLM chatbots—including the officially licensed “expert” campus version—produced entirely false versions of a primary source should be required reading for every history student #skystorians 🗃️

Productivity as an adult is just an endless process of applying new psychological tricks and operant conditioning to yourself until an acceptable number of tasks are completed.

Our book of the week this week is May Ziadeh's MUSINGS OF A YOUNG WOMAN, a genre-defying book that combines essays, reflections, poems, even a microplay. MUSINGS OF A YOUNG WOMAN is out now from our friends at @arablit.bsky.social. Order your copy now, directly from their shop!

I think there’s a unifying explanation for why all these Nazis keep having that thrill, that frisson, by indulging in their psychosexual compulsions to violate social norms bsky.app/profile/nate...

Nate O@nateo.bsky.social · 3mo ago

With these sorts of cries of 'fascists are secretly gay', read Klaus Theweleit's Male Fantasies (vol. 2, p. 339) for a far more interesting interpretation: fascists replace sexual freedom and dismantling of social norms with the psychosexual compulsion to must do what is forbidden, but also obey

If you understand that political antisemitism was not just the hatred of the Jew qua Jew, but an entire worldview in which the Jew stands in for border-crossing cosmopolitan ideologies that threaten the nation-state, then you understand why the Israeli right had to reinvent it from first principles.

Ah yes, perhaps the most beloved literary trope of all: the classic McMuffin

So, what's in the latest issue — 3.1.1. you say? — of Draught, which is made at the School of Arts and Humanities at the @royalcollegeofart.bsky.social? Well, we have a new feature on not writing a short story by the brilliant @aminamemorycain.bsky.social www.draughtjournal.com/article/a-ri...

A Ritual for Not Writing a Short Story

<p>I don’t usually follow one – a ritual for writing – but something must have been different that month of May. I’d finished revisions on my novel an

draughtjournal.com

I'm so excited to share Layli Long Soldier's return to the show, and our discussion of her latest marvel of a poetry collection WE/WÉ. Don't miss this one! Audio🌿: milkweed.org/between-the-... @graywolfpress.bsky.social

There was that article that was titled something like everyone is beautiful but no one is horny re movies. I was thinking that process is being treated similarly? AI tools = fast, no effort. Advertising no gap between skill/creation Desire and yearning in relation to creativity (not sexually) is

Meanwhile... bsky.app/profile/alan...

Alan Baxter@alanbaxter.bsky.social · 3d ago

With data centres being rushed in production at alarming speed everywhere, Zelensky has done the world a massive service by highlighting exactly this. Slava Ukraini!

Can’t show “Protect The Dolls” on BBC but you can make a fluff propaganda film supporting the world’s greatest transphobe, its impartial cause we can all agree trans people are subhuman scum obviously

Elizabeth Taylor@elizabethtaylor47.bsky.social · 3d ago

Just saw that BBC Scotland are apparently making a documentary about JK Rowling and I honestly just crossed myself x

We urgently need to speak back to the anti-trans EHRC guidance and stand firm for the rights of trans people in the arts. I'm running two in person sessions at Barbican on Oct 22nd, and two online - Nov 10th & 16th - listening, gathering data, creating a joint Call to Action - will you come?

CN Lester 🏳️‍⚧️@cnlester.bsky.social · 5d ago

Could you help us spread the word to as many trans arts freelancers as possible? We urgently need an industry response and roadmap following the anti-trans changes made by the EHRC - so grateful that @freelancersmake.bsky.social is working with me to make this happen - please, join us?

Given the timing (Salem was charged BEFORE the first essays on Arday appeared) I am persuaded that Arday's public lynching was intended to distract from Salem's crimes and her relationship with Gove, which only ended a few days ago.

Laleh Khalili@lalehkhalili.bsky.social · 5d ago

It is amazing that the right wing press were salivating over an Oxford prof getting caught w paedophilic images, and then as soon as they figured that she is Michael Gove's (ex) girlfriend, they all memory holes their articles about her.

fish have existed for ~510 million years, manifested the first fully recognizable three division brain, and some scientists STILL insist they do not feel pain and do not have complex emotions or intelligence. but statistical analysis software dressed up in mythology is automatically sentient?

Emily M. Bender@emilymbender.bsky.social · last wk.

Anthropic is out with new nonsense about Claude (or the collection of models called Claude) deserving moral consideration and/or be able to feel distress, so my inbox is filling up with journos asking me to comment. I've also got a day job, so here is a brief set of public comments on this: >>

THIRTY THOUSAND. Thirty THOUSAND. THIRTY thousand. And the government does nothing why?

Karen Gregory@karengregory.bsky.social · 5d ago

"Pointing to estimates of about 30,000 job losses in the past three years..." www.ft.com/content/ded7...

Lithuania's prime minister says European countries should ask Zelensky to strike more data centers in Russia, arguing that the attacks could help protect their elections from interference. meduza.io/en/news/2026...

Lithuanian prime minister says more Ukrainian strikes on Russian data centers could help safeguard European elections from interference — Meduza

Lithuanian Prime Minister Mindaugas Sinkevičius suggested more strikes on Russian data centers when asked at the Warsaw Security Forum how European countries could protect their elections from…

meduza.io

On October 10 2026, The Daily Telegraph (7am), Daily Mail (5.20pm), and GB News (12.25pm) all published news reports that a University of Oxford lecturer had been charged with possessing indecent images of children; three classed as category B (the second most serious category)

Sometimes I’ll read something about HarperCollins and wonder: do folks not know it’s been a Rupert Murdoch property for 40 years? Why would you expect him to uphold the dignity of the literary?