Natalia Cecire
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ncecire.bsky.social
Natalia Cecire
@ncecire.bsky.social
5.1K followers 2K following 5.1K posts
Academic in Hove.
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ncecire.bsky.social
cc Royal Society
samthielman.com CHOAM Nomsky (thankful) @samthielman.com · 7h
“whatever club he’s invited to join has been devalued by the invitation”
Tweet by Joyce Carol Oates: "wherever he goes, he wants to leave"--that's because when he gets there, he has brought his own self along; & whatever club he's invited to join has been devalued by the invitation. QT of @avidreader1000 Wherever he goes, he wants to leave: SA, Canada, ultimately the U.S. in the long run, based on his behavior. This also includes Earth. A continuous disavowal of your home is odd, to say the least. He seems to have no c...
November 11, 2025 at 7:58 AM
Reposted by Natalia Cecire
cferguson.bsky.social
Solidarity to all of Dundee’s workers as they strike in the face of some of most caricaturishly mismanagement this sector has seen to date (although god knows the competition is heating up). May this venerable institution survive and thrive; victory to the strikers!
ducuuo.bsky.social Dundee UCU @ducuuo.bsky.social · 14h
Day 1 of our 5 day strike done. Thanks to STV for coming along and interviewing members.

Come and have a chat with us at the front of the Tower any day this week.

news.stv.tv/north/dundee...
November 11, 2025 at 7:36 AM
Reposted by Natalia Cecire
annehelen.bsky.social
I am obsessed with this guy in the Rancho Gordo FB Group who decided to spend hours working with AI to figure out "the best" bean recipe instead of.....looking at actual recipes

Truly an abomination — and such a good example of how AI tricks us into thinking we can reinvent the wheel with its help
November 10, 2025 at 6:05 PM
Reposted by Natalia Cecire
tressiemcphd.bsky.social
I got this useful bon mot from a middle school teacher recently.

In response to, “I DONT UNDERSTAND,” he calmly said, “okay what steps have you taken to understand?”

And that’s when I realized that a lot of folks have no steps.
November 10, 2025 at 6:05 PM
Reposted by Natalia Cecire
pjmaciak.bsky.social
WHOA!
pghguild.com Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh @pghguild.com · 17h
BREAKING: We won!

Today the 3rd Circuit Court ordered the @post-gazette.com to restore our contract it illegally tore up 5 years ago. That’s our health care, PTO, right to a 40-hr. work week, short-term disability and so much more we’ve struck for 3+ years.

pghguild.com/2025/11/10/p...
A yellow bridge in front of a city background with three banners reading "POST-GAZETTE STRIKERS WILL WIN".
November 10, 2025 at 6:30 PM
Reposted by Natalia Cecire
racheledini.bsky.social
The whole piece is excellent but these paragraphs here are absolute bangers. And boy but it’s refreshing to see the New Yorker critique centrist views (here’s the archived version if you haven’t got a subscription: archive.ph/UNdFj).
Women, it should be noted, have dominated the teaching profession since the nineteenth century not because it's a misandrist job-protection racket but because early public-education advocates found that they could expand the school system more quickly by hiring women teachers, whom they could pay less than men. One might ask if difficult, essential work might be well paid, at this moment in history, regardless of a person's sex. But then much of the centrist manosphere's rhetoric is predicated on refusing to see half of what's in front of you. Newsom's executive order concerning men and boys acknowledges the strong correlation between social-media usage and mental-health disorders such as depression and anxiety, but it doesn't note that these effects manifest in girls at significantly higher rates. In "Notes on Being a Man," Galloway writes, "The deliberate transfer of wealth from the young to the old in the United States over the past century has led to unaffordable and indefensible costs for education and housing, and skyrocketing student debt, all of which directly affect young men." He could have said "young people," unless college bursars and landlords run a discount program for the ladies which I haven't heard about. Emanuel, in his Washington Post op-ed, endorses a double standard with even greater frankness. The cost of housing, he writes, "is, of course, a problem for all Americans—men and women alike. But, unpopular as it might be to say in some quarters of my party, the crisis affects one gender with particular potency." In other words, men and women pay the same bill, but we are obligated to understand that the social and spiritual price it extracts from men is higher. (If women want an emergency to call their own, it can be that they are not having enough babies.) What these pundits are nudging us to do, ever so politely, is accept that women, in the main, are accustomed to being a little degraded, a little underpaid and ignored and dampened in their ambitions, in ways that men are not and never will be. The "female-coded" person, to borrow Krugman's terminology, may feel overwhelmed by child-care costs, ashamed that she can't acquire a mortgage, or hollowed out by long hours as an I.C.U. nurse, but such feelings do not disturb the order of the universe. This person's duties to protect, provide, and procreate are real, but they do not take the capital "P."This person's opinions matter, but not decisively. The Times pundit Ezra Klein has lately suggested that Democrats consider running anti-abortion candidates in red states, even though more than three-quarters of Gen Z women support abortion rights. Rights, like jobs, can be gender-coded, and these rights are valued accordingly. "You need Dad," Galloway, who has two sons, said on a recent podcast. The nuclear family he imagines seems to be one in which the mom is the default parent ("They look to her for nurturing. When they really have a problem, I find they go to Mom"), while the necessary dad is the authority figure to whom Mom can appeal as the occasion demands. "There are certain moments when my partner needs me to weigh in," Galloway explained. "I don't know if it's the depth of my voice, my physical size." Boys, he went on, "begin tuning out their mom over time." One might wonder how boys lose these frequencies in the first place. One might long for a deep voice to explain it. Reeves frets that fatherless homes will beget more lost boys, more twentysomething men living in their childhood bedrooms, and more fractured families. If we do not update our "obsolete model of the breadwinner father," he warns, "we will continue to see more and more men being left out of family life." As for what authority has decreed that these absent fathers should be "left out" of their own families, Reeves never says—the culprit's identity is shrouded in passive voice. Nor does Reeves explain how women's attainment of economic independence would cause their husbands to be "stripped" of anything, much less the many non-economic aspects of being a spouse or parent. The notion that fathers wander away from their families owing to some gnawing sense of existential dislocation—some humiliating certainty of their own uselessness or usurpation—s especially pungent when one takes into account the enormous gender gap in housework and child-rearing in heterosexual marriages. According to the Gender Equity Policy Institute, mothers who work full time do almost twice as much household labor as fathers. Research by the Nobel-winning economist Claudia Goldin has suggested that married men's disinclination toward housework and other "draggy business of family life" may be holding back birth rates, which should pique the interest of Republican pronatalists such as J. D. Vance. The deeper one sinks into our nation's alleged man-boy problem and its potential solutions, the more the woman reader may begin to feel something stronger than resentment or intellectual disdain. She may begin to feel a chauvinistic gratitude in her sex. The familiar flatness of feeling a little degraded seems preferable to the anger, entitlement, and alienation that (we are told over and over) gnaws away at so many male specimens. What a gift it is, really, to have no choice in the matter. To have to move out of your parents' house, to show up for your shift, to change the diaper, not because any of it…
November 10, 2025 at 5:05 PM
ncecire.bsky.social
Southern Rail...at it again
November 10, 2025 at 9:15 AM
Reposted by Natalia Cecire
qmucu.bsky.social
We've had 2 massive mergers in 2 years. In both cases, QMUL refused to hear students (staff was told not to talk about it with students for fear of repercussions), and *after* both of them, management said 'our bad, we'll talk to students next time'.

#UKHE managers don't prioritise students.
November 9, 2025 at 10:56 AM
ncecire.bsky.social
"And what’s also interesting about all of these things is how much internal resistance I seem to have to allowing myself to do them; an odd sense of shame, or audacity. Like, how embarrassing to make little bowls or sketches, as if I thought I could create something worthwhile."
November 10, 2025 at 7:06 AM
Reposted by Natalia Cecire
phdhurtbrain.bsky.social
Hobbes must’ve felt like a fucking god telling the illustrator about this insane cover concept
The sovereign megazord from Hobbes’ Leviathan
November 9, 2025 at 7:37 PM
ncecire.bsky.social
I don't know who needs to hear this but if you make a batch of apple crisp topping and put it in your freezer you can make yourself a little apple crisp with one apple in a ramekin when the need arises
November 9, 2025 at 7:50 PM
Reposted by Natalia Cecire
heykellyjensen.bsky.social
The People Want to Read: on the massive budget cuts proposed for Chicago Public Library. What's at stake and what you can do, whether or not you live in Chicago.

buttondown.com/wellsourced/...
The People Want To Read: On Massive Budget Cuts Proposed in Chicago
If passed, Chicago Public Library will lose half their budget for acquiring new books and materials.
buttondown.com
November 8, 2025 at 1:03 PM
Reposted by Natalia Cecire
susieoftraken.bsky.social
My students have set up a petition to persuade the University of Nottingham not to close our Plant Biology BSc course
c.org/VPhzVVrHPS

Please consider signing
November 8, 2025 at 12:46 PM
Reposted by Natalia Cecire
emilyhughes.bsky.social
pre-writing a devastating obituary for your enemy is god-tier hating of a kind you don’t often see anymore. renaissance haterism. beautiful stuff.
brittanytrang.com Brittany Trang @brittanytrang.com · 2d
A Sharon Begley byline, almost 5 years after her death.

Upon hearing the news James Watson had died, a STAT reporter said in our Slack, "I wish I could read what Sharon would have written."

Incredible news: Sharon in fact did pre-write a Watson obit. And it is masterful and excoriating.
🧪🧬🧫
James Watson, dead at 97, was a scientific legend and a pariah among his peers
James Watson, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA who died Thursday at 97, was a scientific legend and a pariah among his peers.
www.statnews.com
November 9, 2025 at 12:55 AM
Reposted by Natalia Cecire
runwithskizzers.bsky.social
This entire piece is very, very good and well worth your time to read — but this bit had me rolling

lithub.com/maybe-dont-t...
“People read Foucault,” the redoubtable David Brooks once wrote, in an actual column that I’ve all but committed to memory, “and develop an alienated view of the world.” God, did I love this. An “alienated view of the world”! Not by, like, trying to pay rent or having an insurance claim denied—no, no, it was probably the Foucault you read in 2003.
November 8, 2025 at 4:40 PM
ncecire.bsky.social
Thousands of university workers around the country losing jobs and careers, whole degree programs lost, areas of expertise lost, student opportunities lost. Yes, it's life-changing, and the consequences will be with us for a long time.
edpoole1975.bsky.social Ed Poole @edpoole1975.bsky.social · 2d
As a Safety manager in the NHS, Labour is most likely making me redundant, and I could lose my house. Making NHS patients less safe in the process.

How are Labour policies changing your life?
labourlist.bsky.social LabourList @labourlist.bsky.social · 3d
Why aren't Labour's life-changing policies connecting with voters - and what can the party do? It's down to messaging, how it's told, and the messengers...
November 8, 2025 at 11:03 PM
Reposted by Natalia Cecire
bakerdphd.bsky.social
What an amazing essay from the former chair of Africana Studies at Bowdoin. I'll share a few sections in the reply but seriously, read the whole thing. It's all insightful and beautifully written.

lithub.com/maybe-dont-t...
Maybe Don’t Talk to the New York Times About Zohran Mamdani
It’s remarkable, the people you’ll hear from. Teach for even a little while at an expensive institution—the term they tend to prefer is “elite”—and odds are that eventually someone who was a studen…
lithub.com
November 8, 2025 at 7:11 PM
Reposted by Natalia Cecire
kristingrogan.bsky.social
A week from today, @keegancf.bsky.social and I will be in conversation with Chris Nealon about our books at Red Emma's in Baltimore - come talk poetry and work and the state and feminism and so much else with us? 💗 redemmas.org/events/keega...
Keegan Cook Finberg and Kristin Grogan present "Poetry in General: How a Literary Form Became Public" and "Stitch, Unstitch Modernist Poetry and the World of Work" in conversation w/ Christopher Nealo...
Join us for an evening of rethinking the power and labor of poetry in everyday spaces.
redemmas.org
November 8, 2025 at 4:20 PM
Reposted by Natalia Cecire
greenwell.bsky.social
Hi hello, your friendly neighborhood museumhead here with a PSA that if you live in NYC or have ANY opportunity to get to NYC before February, the Ruth Asawa exhibition at MoMA is the best thing I’ve seen all year.
three long vertical Ruth Asawa wire sculptures four hanging Ruth Asawa sculptures a Ruth Asawa painting of eggplants two Ruth Asawa drawings of branches
November 8, 2025 at 6:41 PM
ncecire.bsky.social
Basically all quotations produced by LLMs are fake, right? Like by design
rebeccasolnit.bsky.social Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 2d
Here's some more AI making up a quote from me. It's gonna be a nightmare, so let's pray the bubble pops soon and big.
November 8, 2025 at 7:06 PM
Reposted by Natalia Cecire
noethematt.bsky.social
"If discovery tools return hallucinated results, the credibility of the library itself could be undermined. Students may come to see the library’s systems as just another unreliable search engine."

BINGO
November 7, 2025 at 9:06 PM
Reposted by Natalia Cecire
noethematt.bsky.social
There is no bandwidth left to take on the new thing, to deal with the new thing.

There is no money for these new, more expensive, and frankly WORSE, products that vendors are trying to sell us.

But because library workers - particularly in admin roles - are terrified of saying no... here we are.
November 7, 2025 at 9:05 PM
Reposted by Natalia Cecire
noethematt.bsky.social
Aside from my "was this really written in 2025, not two years ago" snarky response, I couldn't help thinking throughout this entire blog post that a huge part of why so many libraries are STUCK on dealing with AI is because we literally don't have the staff time or funding to deal with it.
November 7, 2025 at 9:05 PM
Reposted by Natalia Cecire
hetanshah.bsky.social
Such a key point about cutting back on language provision - it’s not good for science and it’s not good for growth
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
Max Hegarty, who is studying aerospace engineering, said the proposals also affect students on other courses. He has taken modules in German, and said this enabled him to do an internship in Germany. "So much of our European engineering is based in Germany," he said. "While a lot of people are willing to learn English, not returning that effort to them is not great for that collaboration, for that international co-operation that we need. "Cutting funding for modern languages courses serves only to paralyse our growth as a country."
November 8, 2025 at 10:46 AM
ncecire.bsky.social
All of this. I literally cannot think of a use case for me.
tressiemcphd.bsky.social Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 2d
Anyway, AI doesn’t have any value for me in anything I do. I understand this says something about *what* I do. But also? It’s only practically existed for maybe 18 months. I loved and worked almost 45 years without it so yeah, I’m cool.
November 8, 2025 at 12:55 PM