Toby Bennett

I suppose a lot of this is about recommendation, personalisation and how ideas circulate; but also the strategic use of (living) history to create interpersonal narrative bonds; and then the interpretive difficulty of doing justice to the thing you encounter, without reducing it to those narratives.

"DAD it's the SPOOKY PARTY after school so I NEED you to make a Yoshi out of pipe cleaners IMMEDIATELY, it's VERY IMPORTANT." Love a good ten-minute breakfast surprise crafts challenge.

See @tgpb.bsky.social actually brilliant walk through in @jcultecon.bsky.social of how books like the Story of the Walkman were part of a creative, political and collective pedagogy that is now lost to us www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

I wrote this thing because i'm struggling to write things in a tidy way lizmcfall.substack.com/p/big-shed-e...

The introduction to my book is now available online, thanks @dukepress.bsky.social 🫶 The official pub date is in October www.dukeupress.edu/content-mach....

"I think it has become much, much more professional in the technique you use now. You just had echo chambers in our time but now it is much, much more professional." "So good luck to your pop groups. They do very well for us for export [...] these days, my goodness me, there are some smart ones."

This is interesting, both in itself, and also because it echoes Bernard Stiegler's various arguments (deindividuation, short circuits), and some of his reference points (Carr, Wolf), as well as Catherine Malabou (plasticity) - but without naming them - both of whom I thought had gone out of fashion.

Very proud to have recorded this interview with feminist cultural studies pioneer, Angela McRobbie: culturepowerpolitics.org/2026/08/07/a... (You can find it by searching for Culture, Power, Politics in any podcast app) @angelamcrobbie.bsky.social

In 1985, the CIA published a research paper titled “France: Defection of the Leftist Intellectuals.” Its basic thesis was that the inner logic of French Theory was the critical demolition of Marxist theory in France and the United States. It remains an interesting read: www.cia.gov/readingroom/...

What do Malcolm Bradbury, Wang Xiaobo and Bernadine Evaristo have in common? Is retromania being superseded by algorithmically-curated extended microtonal folk? Has management critique run out of steam? Is the He Man film any good? All this and plenty more: tgpbennett.wordpress.com?p=1107

What do Malcolm Bradbury, Wang Xiaobo and Bernadine Evaristo have in common? Is retromania being superseded by algorithmically-curated extended microtonal folk? Has management critique run out of steam? Is the He Man film any good? All this and plenty more: tgpbennett.wordpress.com?p=1107

Part 1 of this is a very clear and useful historical and policy analysis of how we got here. Part 2 is more "epochal diagnosis", perhaps more open to quibble, but still very good. Hopefully part 3 is the 5-step "what is to be done" we all need.

Has anyone else taken a decades' long delayed gratification strategy to music? e.g. I've spent 20 years looking forward to getting into Jimi Hendrix and Pet Shop Boys later in life. Not sure why, but I feel like it might finally be time for me to get into my New Wave of British Heavy Metal phase.

The problem is that there a long history of the methods of textual analysis, knowledge production, and information retrieval central to the humanities that was practiced in completely non-pedagogical contexts, like government & business, that is consistently obscured in these discussions.

What might the UK Government's new 'priority pathways' measure mean for the creative industries talent pipeline? In this new blog, Policy Director Bernard Hay reflects on the need for a more nuanced approach to creative higher education, drawing on Creative PEC and wider research. 👇

People like to have a go at the algorithm don't they. But tiktok has introduced me to Maddie Ashman's glitchy microtonal folk, which is pretty successful niche-targeting if you ask me. open.spotify.com/album/7EJGHA...

"If using AI to write is, at its worst, an industrialization of the mind, then AI detection, at its worst, becomes a surveillance system for thought." Great read and really useful reflections as coursework tumbles in (here in Germany anyway).

While public tastes are moving away from tighter regulation and audit culture in the information sphere, higher education moves inexorably towards it substack.com/home/post/p-...

You can access the analysis here - three briefings on the key findings, an explanation of the policy context, and of course, a map for you to explore. www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/policy-and-r...

"I don't like maths. They always ask us: blipblop buys 25 bananas & bloopy buys 32 bananas; what's the difference between blipblop & bloopy? But why should I get all up in their business? They can buy as many bananas as they like. Not my business." When did you realise YOUR 8yo was a libertarian?

It’s incomprehensible to me that universities imagine their decimation of humanities follows “market forces” when they are so manifestly behind the curve of even the most corporate decisions. Universities are stuck in spent logic of “we must embrace AI” when frontier labs are hiring philosophers 1/

"The AI build-out... is increasingly financed not by selling overpriced equity but by contracting future cash flows and borrowing against hardware.... That is not the architecture of 2000. That is the architecture of 2008." www.groundbrkr.com/p/the-second...

of course someone wrote a paper on bairenfan! Digital gastronationalism: how “white people food” discourse constructs national identity on Douyin: Social Semiotics: Vol 0, No 0 - Get Access www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

A very lovely and apt tribute to he much missed Caspar Melville at SOAS this evening. Someone who showed how important it is to use a university as a tool to make things happen for people, and to be generous and open and human while you're at it.

British Academy President's statement on the UK's higher education crisis, July 2026.

Interregnum still ongoing, symptoms still morbid

Saddened to hear this. An influential writer for me. And the post is a useful reminder - for those who would want to make grander claims about the way of the world - of the difference between (i) the world of work and management, and (ii) what management thinkers want us to think about that world.

"So no: we are not living in a time where the algorithm has rotted creativity and culture has come to a standstill. We weren’t in 2001, we weren’t in 2010, and we’re not now." This is so obvious it shouldn't need saying. And yet here we are, still bemoaning "the slow cancellation of the future".

I wouldn't mind this job. I kind of want to administrate things in an office again.

...and the third: bsky.app/profile/tgpb...

...the second one: bsky.app/profile/tgpb...

There’s a permanent modern British history post going at Manchester 🎉Come and join a great department and please share with anyone who might be interested. (Don’t let the short deadline put you off). #skystorians 🗃️

I'm always suspicious of binaries so I want more cultural materialism and material culture-ism. But I absolutely agree we need more criticism that isn't entirely reduced to pessimism. This is really generative.

There's so much talk about "future making" these days. So Karl Palmås and I set out to briefly map how this notion has been used in futures research, tracing its cross-disciplinary roots and stakes across sociology, anthropology, design, and organization studies. doi.org/10.1016/j.fu...

Important from @profserious.bsky.social; 'proportional changes in input do not necessarily yield proportional changes in output, and small changes in conditions can sometimes produce qualitatively different patterns of behaviour.' parenthetically it's why historians & engineers have much in common