Thomas Cheney

Now that I've signed the contract and its properly official, very excited to announce that I'm writing a book for Bloomsbury Academic titled: Space, the Final Resource Frontier? The Governance of Planetary and Extraplanetary Natural Resources which should be published sometime in 2028 (ish)

Diplomacy meets distrust. At the UN last week, states outlined a strong agenda for #SpaceSecurity. And, the US accused Russia's Kosmos 2612 of behaviour “consistent with an on-orbit weapons operation.” @rcw4disarmament.bsky.social recap pg. 11: reachingcriticalwill.org/images/docum...

if HMG actually looked at the economy like a CEO theyd wack up taxes and cut services

I do think a 'practical' leftyism could make a bigger thing about the social licence to operate idea - the original idea of corporate personhood was that it was a social contract not a licence to do whatever the hell you wanted, you got limited liability but you had to be a good citizen!

If you want to go for dodgy medical metaphors, it’s not about reopening Brexit wounds, it’s about breaking and resetting the broken bones of Brexit, which have never healed properly.

cats not on board with clock change

Do you have a good book planned to read over your holidays? Why not one of these new books (that you can review for H-Environment)? #envhist #envhum #ecocrit #envphil #conservation #sustainability #climate #envtech #envhealth #plants 🌱🏜️🌋🏞️🛤️🐋☔🌞 docs.google.com/document/d/1...

It was a particularly cruel trick to have a storm and horrifically miserable conditions on the last day of British Summer Time. We should resist winter. Really show it that we don't want it. Not now. Not ever. (I may be cross-pollinating winter and fascism.)

it is a tad damp, and a bit windy

I keep forgetting, and will probably keep forgetting until i look at my watch on Monday morning because its mechanical

Star Wars: Phantom Menace - only film showing at the one screen cinema in the small PA town wed just moved to, I saw it at least once a week all summer, and it was awesome

The national academies came out with recommendations for non-polar sites for astronauts, and they recommended one of my favorite projects, a lunar gravitational wave observatory. They said in Orientale Basin, but it could go anywhere. 🧪🛰️ #PlanetaryScience www.nationalacademies.org/projects/DEP...

'The library writes: “Next year we’ll...begin work on repurposing our Science and Social Sciences Reading Rooms to become a flexible workspace and generate a new revenue stream.”'

So the UK government wants us to prepare ourselves for climate and other impacts. More water and tinned food, that kind of thing. While they approve a new gas field. So, essentially: "Get ready on your own for problems we're not trying to avoid."

University of Nottingham, right now, is cutting 560 jobs. Do we need to rebrand universities as very large, very clean, land-based oil rigs to get government support?

fell victim to the @princetonupress.bsky.social sale, i mean 70% off is basically free so how could i not

Guardian: "Andy Burnham is kicking hippies again" The hippie's: "hey actually we're respected scientists pointing out that all these new wildfires are completely avoidable. Why do you keep calling us hippies? Would you like to look at some hockey stick graphs?"

theres a whole chapter in my book on space mining as speculative imaginary for this reason, like its a real idea but its also absurd and quite frankly needs naming as such

Can't wait for this thing to take my job, collapse my job's industry, hopelessly lose money on my job, then need a taxpayer bailout from me despite me having no job anymore.

We have advertised a 3-year postdoctoral position in environmental humanities, to develop and run the Greenhouse Games Lab, a new initiative for research, development, education and innovation in environmentally themed board games. #envhum #boardgames

Excellent, I mean its the week my daughter is due so will not get to play if for a while but basically my biggest complaint about seapower has been the lack of this campaign - its THE war for a game about "naval combat in the missile age" www.youtube.com/watch?v=swnR...

Ooh thank you for the marketing idea. You heard him, folks: The Originalism Trap is *the* rival of Alito's book Learn why his opinions deserve to be dunked on, how they became the law of the land anyway, and what we can do about it! www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/735353...

fantastic

Alongside the decades-long gutting of institutional funding, I believe part of what has happened is the system-wide pressures to de-skill and modularize core curriculum so that the foundational courses are taught by the cheapest, largest, and least-protected population of instructors.

Good scholarship emerges from curiosity mixed with the chance to engage and ask questions of the dozens of fascinatingly intelligent faculty members who populate any given campus.

Great discourse on intellectual community this morning, and I just want to add that pushing course caps, teaching loads, and the institutional churn of structural precarity increasingly forces scholars into narrower, lonelier working conditions.

oh...