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Tommy Lynch @tommylynch.bsky.social · 5h

I wonder how many post-apocalyptic films have a character named Jebediah.

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By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 01/10/2026

The reduction of politics to voting is part of the 50 year neoliberal project whose foremost goal is to make you think of yourself as an atomized individual and not as a member of a polity.

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Tommy Lynch @tommylynch.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

It seemed like a normal, friendly dispute apart from the man dressed like he is prepared to do violence.

An extract from a Guardian piece about migrant protests in the English city of Crowborough: 'The two groups look at each other. There is no overt hostility. One protester is dressed in black paramilitary gear, a mask covering most of his face, the initials on his uniform identifying him as a member of a “community safety” group called the British Security Project. That aside, a casual passerby might interpret the scene as neighbours having a polite disagreement. Because the numbers are small, the music is blaring and the weather is mild, the atmosphere is relatively laid-back.'

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Tommy Lynch @tommylynch.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Whatever you make of Moonfall's artistic merits, it deserves to be celebrated on the basis of annoying Neil deGrasse Tyson alone.

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Tommy Lynch @tommylynch.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

I've spent the last couple of years systematically working my way through a list of every mainstream post-apocalyptic film and it's pretty disconcerting how much the news today sounds like the voice overs that start those movies.

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Tommy Lynch @tommylynch.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

The whole 'rationalism is a religion' thing is missing the point. The problem isn't that some rationalist communities (and other communities in the world of tech) share traits with things we often classify as religion. It's the ethical and political ends towards which they work.

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Tommy Lynch @tommylynch.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Combined with the criminalisation of protest, this significantly limits the ability of dual nationals to participate in British politics.

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Tommy Lynch @tommylynch.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Is the Matrix Resurrections really about courtly love?

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Tommy Lynch @tommylynch.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Telling my kids that this is Ted,

A movie still from the 2001 film A.I. Artificial Intelligence showing David (Haley Joel Osment) carrying his animated stuffed bear Teddy and holding hands with Gigolo Joe (Jude Law).

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Jamie McKelvie @mckelvie.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Feel like it should be a bigger priority for the government that higher education is collapsing.

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Tommy Lynch @tommylynch.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

I'm looking at Nick Roddick's in many ways useful essay on disaster films and he describes Zardoz as one in which 'the basic social, political and moral structures of the world depicted closely resemble those of the period in which the film was made.'

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Tommy Lynch @tommylynch.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

This is unhinged on so many levels, but the line I find most confusing is '[he'll] finish his 40-hour work week by Tuesday noon and then put in another 72 hours.' At 1200 on Tuesday, there's only been 36 hours in the week.

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Peter Whitewood @pwhitewood.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Why is the answer to employers wanting more work ready graduates always that universities should provide more workplace training, rather than employers providing more training in the workplace?

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Tommy Lynch @tommylynch.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Looking forward to giving the opening keynote at the @asleuki.bsky.social postgrad conference this morning. We're going to be discussing Mathias Thaler's eco-miserabilism, the possibility of hope and the challenges of apocalyptic questions.

cambridge.org

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Anna Kornbluh @annakornbluh.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

predictably excellent from hollingshead, every word "Against the forces of antiintellectual fascists+AI tech lords, self-flagellating academics+immediacy fetishists alike, we need to champion the difficulties+pleasures of humanities scholarship with our whole chests." defector.com/humanists-ha...

defector.com

Humanists Have Done Nothing Wrong | Defector

For many years, I’ve held a pet theory that cultural consumers can be grouped into two broad categories: Primary Source People and Secondary Source People. The former are the book lovers, cinephiles, ...

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Tommy Lynch @tommylynch.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

The latest issue of Apocalyptica is out: heiup.uni-heidelberg.de/journals/apo... Some really interesting challenges to those of us who find something useful in apocalypticism.

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Tommy Lynch @tommylynch.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

It's wild that Schwarzenegger became governor the same year that Terminator 3 came out.

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Tommy Lynch @tommylynch.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

Watching the BBC's adaptation of Jensen's The Rapture. It's a little unnerving how they show this near future climate emergency with periodic wide shots of arid land and it just looks like outside.

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Tommy Lynch @tommylynch.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

Alan Klima's Ethnography #9 is a life-changingly good book. Fitting that a book about ghosts* haunts me now. *This is both generally true and wildly insufficient.

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Tommy Lynch @tommylynch.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

I guess the screaming guy hooked up to the giant machine at Duke UP has moved over to McSweeney's.

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Tommy Lynch @tommylynch.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

I'm watching 2016's Cell and this movie must have been huge with the 5G crowd.

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Tommy Lynch @tommylynch.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

This may be true, but it does assume that the energy defending these subjects at elite institutions is going to extend to the rest of the sector. It's like trickle down economics - I'm not sure that success at the top is going to trickle down to post-92s.

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Stephen Shapiro @stephenshapiro.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

zeitung.faz.net/data/863/rea...

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Tommy Lynch @tommylynch.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

I need a Love Actually intro style video of British people walking into air conditioned Aldis today.

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Teresa Heffernan @tjheffernan.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

"Billions of dollars have backed AI and the immortality industry with their fiction-fueled dreams of sentient robots, space colonies, uplifted animals, and downloaded brains while science-based climate research has met resistance, deferral, and denial as the world burns." doi.org/10.17885/hei...

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Katherine Ibbett @eparpillee.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

Deeply enticing CFP: Feminanimals: women as/and animals - April 2027 in Oxford, with the fabulous Fanny Clemente and Greta Colombani organising and Kaori Nagai and Chloe Taylor as keynotes - www.mod-langs.ox.ac.uk/events/2027/...

mod-langs.ox.ac.uk

FEMINANIMALS: Representations of Women and/as Animals in Literature, Arts, and Other Media

FEMINANIMALS is a three-day international conference investigating representations of women as non-human animals and of the relationship between women and non-human animals in literature, arts, and ot...

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Tommy Lynch @tommylynch.bsky.social · 08/06/2026

Well, I know how I'll be starting my Philosophy and the Theory of Religion class next year.

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Nick Spencer @nickebs.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

In our current @Theosthinktank Reading our Times series on the rise of religious nationalism, we come to one of the most difficult topics, in conversation with Hannah Strømmen, namely how the far right weaponises the Bible. Sober listening. tinyurl.com/2nr9893a

tinyurl.com

How does the Far Right weaponise the Bible? In conversation with Hannah Strømmen

Podcast Episode · Reading Our Times · 2 June · 42min

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John Sabapathy @jwwsabapathy.bsky.social · 27/04/2026

What emerges in emergencies? A major @anthropoceneucl.bsky.social & #UCL200 series on 'Emergence | Emergencies' will ask some big questions in this critical series. UCL 1-12 June. www.ucl.ac.uk/anthropocene #Anthropocene #Emergency @ucl.ac.uk @ucl-ias.bsky.social @uclhistory.bsky.social

The UCL Anthropocene series poster for Emergence | Emergency at UCL 1-12 June. Details at ucl.ac.uk/anthropocene

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Tommy Lynch @tommylynch.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

Tony Blair increasingly looks like one of the aliens from They Live whose camoflauge is malfunctioning.

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Marika Rose @marika.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

New issue of the Sikh Research Journal is out; this one's a special forum on Gil Anidjar's "On the Sovereignty of Mothers" with a piece by me alongside lots of other brilliant people: sikhresearchjournal.org/index.php/sr...

Foreword
Rajbir Judge
Foreword: Mothers and Sikh Studies: An Introduction to Forum on Gil Anidjar’s On the Sovereignty of Mothers: The Political as Maternal

Sara-Maria Sorentino
Twos, Ones, and Zeros: Mothers, Sovereigns, Slaves

Timothy Snediker
Hagar and History

Marika Rose
Mother Wolf

Leah Kaplan
Neither Mother nor slave: Reading On the Sovereignty of Mothers: The Political as Maternal

Roy Cherian
Umi Says

Theresa Gregor
We Are Because She Was/Is: A Review of Gil Anidjar’s On the Sovereignty of Mothers through Kumeyaay Creation, Maternal Creatrixes, and Rematriation

Zehra Mehdi
To Grieve or not to Grieve? : Reflections on Gil Anidjar’s On the Sovereignty of Mothers

Gil Anidjar
Maternal Difference

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Tommy Lynch @tommylynch.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

'Discomfort is not a bad thing if it is designed, managed, and made desirable. We will be discomforted either by design or by default, as the terrors of an uninhabitable Earth make themselves increasingly felt.'

jstor.org

After Comfort on JSTOR

Daniel A. Barber, After Comfort, Log, No. 47, Overcoming Carbon Form (Fall 2019), pp. 45-50

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Tommy Lynch @tommylynch.bsky.social · 16/05/2026

Watching Snyder's Dawn of the Dead and that credit sequence... cutting from a zombie attack to people in a mosque praying?!?!

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Ursula K. Le Guin Bot @leguinbot.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?

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Tommy Lynch @tommylynch.bsky.social · 13/05/2026

Dienstag's aphorisms on friendship are really moving: 'Friendship is our best model of an arena that is meant to harbor randomness and chaos, while channeling it into a relatively stable association. If I knew at all times what to expect from my friends, their friendship would be valueless...

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Ulrich Schmiedel @ulrich-schmiedel.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

My review of Hans Joas' "Universalism" (@suhrkamp.de) is out: "To write a global history of universalism requires more than a measure of daredevilry. This is what Joas has done..., putting him in line with the giants of sociology, philosophy, and theology, on whose shoulders he stands."

tandfonline.com

Universalismus: Weltherrschaft und Menschheitsethos (Universalism: World Domination and Humanist Ethics): Journal of Contemporary Religion: Vol 0, No 0 - Get Access

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Aidan McGlynn @aidanmcglynn.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

A trip I’ve been meaning to make for a while - took the boys down to the New Town to see the first Stolperstein stone in Scotland, in memory of Jane Haining

Some paving stones with a small plaque embedded in one

A close up of the plaque, which reads: IN EDINBURGH LIVED
JANE HAINING
BORN 1897
ARRESTED 14,5.1944
BUDAPEST DEPORTED
AUSCHWITZ- BIRKENAU MURDERED 17. 7.1944

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Tommy Lynch @tommylynch.bsky.social · 04/05/2026

The Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies at Heidelberg University has just posted its call for applicants for 2027-28. The theme for this round is vulnerabilities. If you work on anything related to the end of the world (or what happens after the end), you should check it out!

capas.uni-heidelberg.de

Call for Applications - CAPAS

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Tommy Lynch @tommylynch.bsky.social · 03/05/2026

Managed to finish Wim Wenders Until the End of the World and Southland Tales today. I'm almost positive that they are the two longest films in my apocalyptic cinema project and certainly among the most challenging. Southland Tales is both a mess and a perfect imagining of our present.

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Tommy Lynch @tommylynch.bsky.social · 02/05/2026

Finally reached Southland Tales in my apocalyptic film project and oof.

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South Downs National Park @southdownsnp.bsky.social · 01/05/2026

Our annual photo competition is back! 🤩 The main theme is “Serene South Downs: Back to Nature.” As always, there will be a separate wildlife category and a youth competition. Plus, this year introduces a special monochrome category. Full details here: buff.ly/vTzyanH 🔗 📸: Simon Grinyer

Wildflowers and red poppies fill the scene, with five trees in the background under a pale blue sky.

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Tommy Lynch @tommylynch.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

I know The Thing is, deservedly, a classic. I've just finished Last Winter, a film I've never heard anyone discuss, and I think it's very interesting! Clearly borrowing a lot from The Thing, but also doing it's own... thing.

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Tommy Lynch @tommylynch.bsky.social · 29/04/2026

'we can bottle some of that Kirk juice and take it over to Britain. We need to work out what the DNA is and try to replicate it as best we can.”'

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Tommy Lynch @tommylynch.bsky.social · 29/04/2026

Jennings book sounds interesting and I look forward to reading it, but I think it's tricky to get the right balance of historical continuity while being able to identify what's genuinely novel. I'm not sure that there is anything 'sudden' about prophetic ideas influencing American foreign policy.

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