I think part of the lure of these chatbots is the illusion that there's an easily accessible answer to every question. I'm a busy man, just tell me what the best laundry detergent is, and also whether climate change is real

The final statement by Al Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif, written months ago in anticipation of his likely death, posted on Twitter/X by a friend. Israel assassinated him tonight along with his reporting team in an airstrike in Gaza.

An aerial view of what the Gaza City area looked like this week. Taken from a Jordanian military aircraft, by our colleague Heidi Levine.

More than 40 students with full scholarships to UK Universities are currently trapped in Gaza and are facing an administrative block to enable them to take up their places. If you are an academic based in the UK, please consider signing this letter. docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

You may not be interested in Prime Minister Farage, but Prime Minister Farage is interested in you.

Im seeing endless workshops on "how to use AI/incorporate AI in the classroom" etc, does anyone know of workshops on how to refuse AI?
Not even be critical of AI (which is often just one or two slides of handwaving-but-it-is-here) but to refuse it in the classroom and in our research?

The world's richest man stole food from the world's poorest children. Now they are beginning to die
www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

It's funny how the government's difficult decisions are always difficult for poor people.

Poetry Foundation not fucking around with today's poem of the day
www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/89897/...

NEW: 2024 has just been confirmed as the warmest year on record, and the first to breach the 1.5C threshold.

We used a ridgeline (Joy Division inspired) chart to visualise daily temperature anomalies since 1940.

2024 clearly stands out with 100% of its days above 1.3C and 75% above 1.5C.

One of the things I still don’t understand is how these tech bros can be pro-technology and anti science.

'This process includes the replacement of all first-rate talents, regardless of their political loyalties, with crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is the best guarantee of their loyalty.' (The Origins of Totalitarianism, renewed version, A Harvest Book New York, 1976, 339)

We're still kicking as a small magazine that found an audience on Twitter. But we're not there anymore, and it's much harder for pubs like Contingent to find and grow an audience, so if you like our stuff--tell someone about it!

Read a random article here! contingentmagazine.org?redirect_to=...

So much commentary analysing Megalopolis with reference to Ayn Rand or the Catilinarian conspiracy and yet not a single mention of Bernard's Watch.

1923: The world's richest man is an antisemite. The hot new music on the street is experimental jazz flute.

2023: The world's richest man is an antisemite. The hot new music on the street is experimental jazz flute.

Just learned that a friend on a Cambridge postdoc is paying to live in a faculty member's garden shed, and I can't work out if the better analogy is the company town or medieval fosterage.

Holding your party conference in Manchester's former Central Train Station, and using it to announce the scrapping of a major rail investment in Manchester is just outstanding. 10/10

gotta hand it to truss, if I'd mulishly immolated the world's fifth largest economy I'd be secreted in a Hebridean croft wearing a stick-on moustache, but she's right out there in the policy all be-bopping and a-scatting. chapeau