A few days ago, Byron Ahn drew our attention to an excerpt from a new, six-hour audiobook, Inside Voice by Lake Bell, credited as an “actress/writer/director/producer.” Bell is a friend of author and podcaster Malcolm Gladwell, and Gladwell agreed to serve as a kind of sounding board for Bell’s ideas about something she calls “sexy baby voice,” pointing to the voices of Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian as paradigm examples of it. Gladwell, whose

The construction of gothic cathedrals like Chartres was governed not by blueprints but by “talk, tradition, and templates” — at least that is what Turnbull has compellingly argued. When you come across such a neatly alliterative triad, there are two ways you can go. You can adopt the terms in an unexamined way and rely on their alliterative power.

As many of you know, I have been involved for the past few months in a campaign to get Evusheld – a protective/prophylactic drug for immunocompromised people who do not respond well to Covid vaccines – available on the NHS in the UK. We have not succeeded on that front yet and I am not giving up. However, for my own protection, since AstraZeneca made the drug privately available last week, I have been able to procure it privately.

The other day I wrote about the response that we had from the UK’s Department of Health and Social Care. In that reply the DHSC said that it had a problem with some of the evidence we had put forward because “it should also be noted that most of these studies are pre-prints (therefore have not been scrutinised through peer review)”. A few further notes on this.

This week has been one in which my personal and professional lives have aligned in interesting ways. As you may know, one strand of my work focuses on the study of academic publishing, including peer review. This has featured discussions of the idea of “excellence” but also how preprints are viewed in the world.

There’s a lot of focus in the scholarly communications space on transformative agreements for the mega-publishers. Indeed, most of the discourse, most of the time, is about the big publishers in this space. They play Big Bad Wolf with their exorbitant profit margins and make for an easy target.

I was lucky enough, recently, to get a slightly-ahead-of-general-release opportunity to openly peer review Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s most recent book manuscript, Leading Generously . It’s over on HCommons for those who want to take a look and feed in. While there’s much, content-wise, in the book on which I might remark, I wanted, instead, to take a few minutes to reflect on the process of “open peer review” here and how it led me to act.

The title of this post refers not to the classic 1987 single by Run-DMC but, instead, to the trickiness of rheumatoid arthritis and vasculitis as multisystem inflammatory disorders with a range of diverse outcomes.

The next few months mark a series of “10“s for me. On the 10th September, it will be 10 years since my Ph.D. viva. In November, it will be 10 years since I got my first lecturing position (TT Assistant Prof) at the University of Lincoln. It’s 10 years since I met Dr Caroline Edwards and we began publishing Alluvium together. And it’s 10 years since we began planning the Open Library of Humanities.

Affect Theory To be blunt, the past two and a half years have been terrible for me. Certainly, they have been worse for others. But I have spent the last two years feeling that basic activities in public pose an existential threat. The isolation of shielding is bad – but I do have my lovely wife and our little dog, so I am fortunate in that respect.