William Carruthers

1/ I’m going to do a thread of the promotional writing and interviews I’ve done for my book starting with…

A court ordered a leading independent Egyptian news site closed after its editor-in-chief was convicted of running the site without a licence and taken into custody pending bail Lina Attalah of the news site Mada Masr, which has won numerous international awards for its reporting, was fined $53,400

There's a lot of chatter about mobile noise on trains, and I occasionally see comment that things were quieter in the past. The 1960s wants a word. Then, transistor radios were considered a plague, to the extent that British Railway's Western Region produced this poster.

Of course: two wildly varying quotes for work on our car.

Always amazed that ‘these bodies weren’t mummified to be displayed’ doesn’t seem to hold water with some people.

Just received a call in the Channel Tunnel?

It's easy to mock Liz Truss but she doesn't look like a well woman.

LIVE EVENT: Join MERIP contributors Ervand Abrahamian, Heba Gowayed (@hebagowayed.bsky.social), Gabriel Young, Jillian Schwedler (@jillianschwedler.bsk.social) & James Ryan (@jdryan08.bsky.social) at Roosevelt House 11/4 @ 6PM to discuss Human Rights in the Middle East. buff.ly/Zpwr0vf

World Heritage ahead

Convinced the only country that hasn’t gone metric is actually the US

What I’m learning here is that lots of people don’t understand why that’s terrible homework to set anyway

Is it normal for American parents to have to complete homework assignments like this for their kids' teachers

I absolutely love the photos in this. www.londoncentric.media/p/oxford-str...

Not a minute too soon

Forget AI, surely this is also crap teaching?

Vs. no it’s not

I know this is about the Cheesecake Factory, but does anyone remember when Olive Garden discourse went on for a week on Twitter?

'Book promotion plan' scam email from someone called 'Godwin Enoch'

An honestly new problem for the study of ideology & culture is the doom loop whereby job-demolishing AI engines also generate the “entertaining” i.e. psychically demolishing content for the permanent underclass created by them in the first place. We need a Raymond Williams for the era of slop?

For all their faults, very happy that our 7yo will happily read Asterix and Tintin

"If university bots graded bots, you would no longer have a university. You’d have a tomb, an academic mausoleum in which digital phantoms murmured emptily" theconversation.com/friday-essay...

My friend Patrick Prominski and I are working on an edited volume on how now-discredited ideas involving biology (widely construed) were used in scientific fiction from c. 1825-1925. If you have any ideas for anything even broadly along those lines, please pitch them, we'd love to see them!

The solution that most big art museums somehow miss is to write and design signage that is compelling and worth reading

As a fair witness, it should be noted that quote from Liz Truss is about 2040 if her plans had come to fruition. Daniel Hannan levels of magical thinking. "The British Bitcoin boom has meant the end of currency debasement. Several missions to Mars have now been launched from Britain’s space port"

“I’m leaving for the only place that hasn’t been corrupted by Blairism. SPACE!!

He should really be made to teach some generic second year skills module that all the students hate, AND do extra admin, ideally a particularly tedious target-driven bit

That’s bad, and I suspect it’s better for the early modern period than for the modern period in History, but that’s downstream from the collapse of the job market. It doesn’t make any sense to keep churning History PhDs who want to be professors if there are no TT positions for them.

They’re not on Bluesky so you can’t tell from here, but the New York Public Library and the Manhattan borough president are currently locked in an incredible Elgin Marbles situation with the UK over Winnie the Pooh and advancing their positions via social media post www.syracuse.com/us-news/2026...

The only way to operate the child lock on my dishwasher requires you to connect it to an app on your phone. That app is now complaining that I don’t use it enough and it is sad. I just wanted to stop my toddler from turning it off mid-cycle and I’m now getting accused of emotional neglect.

I’m not actually amused, annoyed or baffled by the government suggesting it might be a good idea to stock up in case of emergency. We do face threats from system failure either as a result of irresponsible tech or Russian aggression and it’s fair enough to plan for contingencies.

Snow White, in a long-closed cinema in Winchester, presumably December 1987.

Faux Egyptian temple dictator chic

ok we're letting this guy off cos he's a BBC reporter who's at least posting on here rather than the Nazi site. help the man out

‘Expansion of the Open University’

Storm Austen is coming. If you are a woman of marriagable age do not attempt to travel to Netherfield without a carriage

They certainly don't have any bloody branches left

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?