williamcarruthers.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

Pity the poor potential PhD student who apparently just emailed half of UK academia

submitted 7 hours ago • 2 comments

This is a seriously smart column by @martinsandbu.ft.com on why Europe should be flattered by US administration attacks - because we do still matter, not least in offering an alternative model. www.ft.com/content/86ec...

submitted 7 hours ago • 7 comments

At what point will companies realise that people don’t like chatbots/AI/customer service that doesn’t involve speaking to an actual person in an actual place?

submitted 8 hours ago • 2 comments

What is even more mad about this is that, a couple of years ago, Dutch universities were hiring really aggressively

submitted 8 hours ago • 1 comment

Rainy day

submitted 9 hours ago • 0 comments

What is notable here (amidst the editorialising) is that Nandy comes across as far more positive than in that recent op-ed. Are government comms really this poor? The mixed-messaging is terrible.

submitted 9 hours ago • 0 comments

Remarkable assessment by an incoming German chancellor. “for me it is an absolute priority to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible, so that we achieve independence from the US, step by step.” www.dw.com/en/german-el...

submitted 18 hours ago • 68 comments

I’d ask Herodotus how much of it he made up

submitted 19 hours ago • 2 comments

In my latest, I discuss how Rousseau's high IQ collides and mixes with mass low IQ to produce the French Revolution. I conclude that it's this admixture of the low that makes the French Revolution less awesome than the American. Next, I'll discuss the high IQ miracle of 1776.

submitted 19 hours ago • 7 comments

What Gove gets wrong, too, is that lots of people still believe in multilateral institutions. They don’t need to be dismissed as a ‘false hope’ unless member-states continue to degrade them.

submitted 20 hours ago • 0 comments

In much of Europe there appears to be a roughly 15-20% constituency for the far right. It's bad but imo it's still in the territory of "mainstream parties handling this poorly is what's going to make this a disaster". Obvs in Germany there's the heavy symbolism but it seems in line with the trend.

submitted 22 hours ago • 1 comment

Bizarrely Nate S giving me an excuse to promote my recent review article about what happens if we write great men histories: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

submitted 22 hours ago • 1 comment

Wondering if there was a precise point that children clearly started spending more time in nursery/school than they used to?

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

I think it’s probably worth remembering that the Rand Corporation published this in, er, 2007. None of this is necessarily new. www.rand.org/pubs/monogra...

submitted 1 day ago • 1 comment

All those history lessons about WW2 weren’t how-to guides.

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

Major events in human history are shaped by average-IQ people (though often with ludicrously inflated views of their own genius) not really knowing what they’re doing and blundering into situations they neither understand nor control.

submitted 1 day ago • 2 comments

‘History is important!’ say all pundits who know next-to-nothing about what historians do. Presumably this will be the next episode of the Rst is Hst%ry, though…

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

New paper re-up! It covers: - how natural history & world cultures #museums can learn from each other. - examples of questions natural history museums can ask when researching legacies of colonialism in their collections. - a discussion about repatriation. - environmental legacies of #colonialism 👇

submitted 7 days ago • 2 comments

the rise of the fascist nerds was anticipated by Ellen Ullman's 1995 essay "Out of Time: Reflections on the Programming Life."

submitted 1 day ago • 35 comments

Obviously not the usual line, but don't envy Starmer, Macron etc going into the White House this week, because they know most of what Trump has said is lunacy, on economics and security, but also don't know what he really means, yet know how thin skinned he is. Hence, intelligence gathering...

submitted 1 day ago • 20 comments

I'm old enough to remember when China doing deals with African countries exchanging minerals for infrastructure was a dangerous kind of exploitation and imperialism.

submitted 1 day ago • 2 comments

Can’t help but feel that the issue for UK universities is that everyone thinks they’re money-grubbing and filthy rich, and no one has any idea about how they actually work. It’s not a recipe for public sympathy.

submitted 1 day ago • 5 comments

"Utterly delusional" does not even come close. archive.ph/OVHMg

submitted 1 day ago • 96 comments

Wow. The Bessent FT op-ed on the US economic development plan for Ukraine is quite something. This is a nineteenth century great power behaviour. www.ft.com/content/91a7...

submitted 1 day ago • 45 comments

This is what will be influencing government in the run up to the Spending Review. Universities must realise that there is no knight in shining armour about to ride in to make the sector financially sustainable - its up to us in the sector to do this

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

The thing is I would trust the NHS to deliver lifesaving emergency care then deliver extremely poor aftercare that makes things worse.

submitted 1 day ago • 1 comment

former Tory chief whip Simon Hart on the party’s current leader

submitted 1 day ago • 51 comments

If you write about Egypt you become a magnet for this stuff

submitted 2 days ago • 3 comments

espionage novel where unjustly-fired park rangers activate the grizzly bear convergence plan

submitted 2 days ago • 4 comments

Re-sharing – now without the editorializing! “On Friday, Penn notified department chairs that it will cut admissions across graduate programs, a decision faculty members say was made after programs had already accepted students.”

submitted 2 days ago • 8 comments