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mpallen.bsky.social

@mpallen.bsky.social
151 followers 565 following 116 posts
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Reposted by @mpallen.bsky.social
BeijingPalmer @beijingpalmer.bsky.social · 20h
the UK has three industries: higher education, whisky, and Games Workshop.
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mpallen.bsky.social @mpallen.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
FIG. 1.-Forbidden triad
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mpallen.bsky.social @mpallen.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
It’s all too true that none of these stop it entirely. (A schoolgirl was just killed by a speeding minicab in my neighborhood.) I do think it helps, because in many cases (like the road crossing Hampstead Heath), it’s physically impossible for a speeder to get around all the cars going 20.
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Doug Gordon @brooklynspoke.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
Yes, and this is one reason NYC needs to really get moving on implementing Sammy's Law and dropping the speed limit to 20 mph (or lower) everywhere it can. Not that we don't need better infrastructure, but lower speed limits would unlock a lot of bicycle trips and make things safer overall.
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mpallen.bsky.social @mpallen.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
Having moved here from the US, one thing I really notice is the low (20 MPH) speed in almost all of London. So many crashes become near misses, serious crashes become something you can walk away from. It’s just a much more forgiving place whether you are biking or walking or driving.
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mtsw @mtsw.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo put her vision for the city like this: "A city where you can get let go of your child's hand"
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lastpositivist.bsky.social @lastpositivist.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
O thou that with surpassing Glory crownd, Look'st from thy sole Dominion like the God Of this new World; at whose sight all the Starrs Hide thir diminisht heads; to thee I call, But with no friendly voice, and add thy name O Jobs dot Ac dot UK, to tell thee how I hate thy ads
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evacide @evacide.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Meta Muse appears to read your Apple messages and upload them to the cloud even if you explicitly tell it not to: appleinsider.com/articles/26/...
appleinsider.com
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Jean Genet Ramsay @barfsville.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Finally, a movie for people from Somerville
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Matthew L Reznicek @drreznicek.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
News that Netherfield Park is let at last.
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mpallen.bsky.social @mpallen.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
It’s a good column BTW www.nytimes.com/2026/09/23/o...
nytimes.com
Opinion | The Railroads Were Once the Octopus That A.I. Is Now
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mpallen.bsky.social @mpallen.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
A Frank Norris reference in the New York Times!
OPINION
JAMELLE BOUIE
The Railroads Were Once the Octopus That A.I. Is Now
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mpallen.bsky.social @mpallen.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
'Oh, I'm not all English. I've got some bits of Scotch and Irish tucked away somewhere.' 'That proves you're English. No other race ever boasts of being mongrel. I'm quite offensively English myself, because I'm one-sixteenth French, besides all the usual nationalities.’
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BeijingPalmer @beijingpalmer.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
this is part of a wider project of unaccountability that dominates American life
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mpallen.bsky.social @mpallen.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
- Dorothy Sayers’ aristocratic detective in Gaudy Night (1935)
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mpallen.bsky.social @mpallen.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
'Oh, I'm not all English. I've got some bits of Scotch and Irish tucked away somewhere.' 'That proves you're English. No other race ever boasts of being mongrel. I'm quite offensively English myself, because I'm one-sixteenth French, besides all the usual nationalities.’
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BeijingPalmer @beijingpalmer.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
something has gone very, very wrong with the UK
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Kieran Healy @kjhealy.co · 21/09/2026
While we’re here my other fave bit of etymology is that the “gar” in “garlic” is the same as the “gar” in “Gardena”, as in “Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum”. Gardena is the Spear-Danes, and garlic is the sharp or spear-leek.
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Joel @snufkinlib.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
State Philosopher Norman Vincent Peale
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The Dial @thedialmag.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
How is the world reacting to the U.S. in 2026? What can Americans learn from writers and journalists abroad? Join Dial editors Madeleine Schwartz and Hannah Rosefield, journalist Taran Khan, and Proximities editor Barry Malone to discuss these questions and more: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/panel-disc...
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Philip Larkin Society @plsoc.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
‘I do feel defensive about that Bechet line: have they never heard the Beatles singing ‘She loves you – yeah, yeah, yeah—’? Or read the end of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy? Why is it so bad? I thought when I wrote it that it just ‘got’ love & Bechet & everything. Perhaps that’s what’s wrong with it!’
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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 16/09/2026
"I wrote the piece and Claude found the links relevant to my claims" is, even without the AI, such an admission of poor thinking and argumentation. your claims should emerge from the evidence!
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Hannah Rosefield @hannahrosefield.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
The Dial is coming to London! Come and see us talk about how the world sees the U.S., next Tuesday at the Frontline Club www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/panel-disc...
eventbrite.co.uk
Panel discussion: America in the Age of Trump
How are journalists abroad reacting to the United States in 2026?
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lastpositivist.bsky.social @lastpositivist.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
I really don't have a better theory of this than positing mass psychological insecurity, as in the reply post. It is just bizarre to watch our liberal centre roll over and act supine for people *who fucking hate them and will destroy them if ever they get the chance*.
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Jacob T. Levy @jacobtlevy.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
www.chronicle.com/article/harv...
chronicle.com
The Ivy League’s Surrender to AI Is Insane
When college leaders drink the corporate Kool-Aid, the liberal arts die.
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Hetan Shah @hetanshah.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
When asked in the Q&A about arts and humanities he says he personally values them (seems very genuine) but that he is the Science Minister, and it’s for the DCMS Minister to make the case for those. He’s perhaps not yet clocked he is responsible for all R&D. Would Wissenschaft Minister work better?
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Modernism in Metro-Land @modinmetro.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
University of East Anglia, Norwich 1964-68 Denys Lasdun and Partners Image from RIBApix buff.ly/tjljT0N
A black and white photograph of the ziggurat student residences at the University of East Anglia, Norwich
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Hannah Rosefield @hannahrosefield.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
"Before I banned all devices from my lectures, I would walk around the classroom as I spoke, watching my students engage in blatant day trading of cryptocurrency, sports gambling and placing Polymarket bets on everything under the sun." www.thedial.world/articles/new...
thedial.world
Jonathan Swift v. AI — The Dial
Three hundred years ago, the satirist warned of a world in which reading and writing are replaced by the flashy simulation of human knowledge. Can he help us fix it?
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Marisa Kabas @marisakabas.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
AI is not inevitable. resistance works!
motherjones.com
Mamdani issues AI moratorium in NYC schools
Kids "need to wrestle with tough problems on their own,” New York's mayor said Wednesday.
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New-Cleckit Dominie @ncdominie.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
Ah, we've reached "you may only use grading strategies that can be clearly represented on our shiny interface". *jamescscotting intensifies*
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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
And the most astonishing of all, Yeats’s Vision and the Later Plays (Vendler, 1963), with an inscription by Vendler, citing Yeats, that says: “Thought is a garment and the soul’s a bride / that cannot in that trash and tinsel hide. In polemic love, Helen”
Yeats’s Vision and the Later Plays (Vendler, 1963), owned by Harold Bloom,
 Spine Title page, Yeats’s Vision and the Later Plays (Vendler, 1963), owned by Harold BloomInner flyleaf, Yeats’s Vision and the Later Plays (Vendler, 1963), with an inscription by Vendler that says: 

“Thought is a garment and the soul’s a bride / that cannot in that trash and tinsel hide. 

In polemic love, Helen”
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mtsw @mtsw.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
(the difference was that they like Trump and like him attacking Canada and want to help him but they both hated Biden and hated student loan forgiveness ideologically.)
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Joseph Rezek @rezekjoe.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
Heroes, all ⬇️⬇️⬇️
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mpallen.bsky.social @mpallen.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
Googles: “ASL signs for children” Result 1: “Sign Language for Children: BSL for Kids”
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Natalia Cecire @ncecire.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
Everything goes into the maw of the slop machine but god forbid you should try and get a normal book
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Matthew Kirschenbaum @mkirschenbaum.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
Make Dickens Fiction Again
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Quinta Jurecic @qjurecic.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
Infinite Jest
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noam @noamchompers.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
i think it's about neither. it's about which things contribute to how well someone's life goes. the point is that things external to one's subjective experience contribute to how well one's life goes in a way that is not reducible to effects on subjective experience
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Chance the Lawyer @chancethelawyer.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
say what you will about the myriad valid concerns with current LLMs but I personally will never get over the fact that Aaron Swartz was prosecuted to his literal death for downloading JSTOR and then a decade later, they downloaded & ingested the entire world and our IP laws just went ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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Henry Snow @henrys.now · 17/08/2026
as someone who reads a lot of economically worthless books for (also not particularly financially valuable) research purposes, the tragedy here is not that these are being bought and pulped but that the rest of us can't read the scans that result or share less terminally scanned copies ourselves
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mpallen.bsky.social @mpallen.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
“I am trying to live a life that I do not understand” thepointmag.com/letter/on-ra...
thepointmag.com
On Radical Preservation | The Point Magazine
Our contention is that, if we fail to think through and delimit the role of AI in our lives, we risk undermining the intelligibility of our own guiding cultural concepts, and thus initiating a period ...
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Rachel Coldicutt @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
All I really want from modern technology is the ability to quickly and easily indent a quotation without also indenting all the text above and below it at least twice before I press the magic combination of buttons needed to create a hard return without also leaving a massive space above or below
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Ewan Gibbs @ewangibbs.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
Just remember this message is aimed at your children not theirs.
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Alice Goodman @revdalicegoodman.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
Robert Barron channelling Robert Bly
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Melissa McLeod @melmac.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
I love watching Villette virgins. Can’t wait to see your reaction to the ending.
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Chris Bertram @crookedfootball.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
When I post about how a British person faces deportation from Sweden I get a stream of quote-posts saying "Ha Ha the British deserve it!" Noting that (a) I post a lot about how badly the British state treats migrants and (b) that nobody who works on or is active migrant rights reacts like this.
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The Great Pumpkin Papers 🎃🎃🎃 @professormusgrave.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
I’d love a candidate who talked in the language of the faculty lounge (anti-managerial, precarious, fatalistically devoted to mission)
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Adam Serwer @adamserwer.bsky.social · 01/08/2026
The immigrant union troops who defended their adopted country from slaver traitors are in fact, proof of concept of American higher ideals having nothing to do with “blood” or “heritage” or whatever cowardly euphemism is in vogue among these pathetic losers
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