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Waiting for Frances

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Characters • LEX – a tired lecturer holding a placard. • PAT – another lecturer, equally tired, eating a slightly stale biscuit. • A PASSING ADMINISTRATOR – occasionally appears with confusing updates. • A VOICE FROM MANAGEMENT EMAILS – disembodied. Outside the gates of the university. A picket line. A banner flaps in the wind: “SAVE OUR JOBS.” A coffee thermos sits between them like a sacred object. LEX: Well? PAT: Well what? LEX: Has she gone yet? PAT: No. LEX: Ah. (Pause.) PAT: Maybe today. LEX: You said that yesterday. PAT: Yesterday had promise. LEX: So does a restructuring document, apparently. (Pause.) PAT: What are we waiting for again? LEX: Frances. PAT: Right. (They stare at the university buildings.) PAT: You’d think if someone threatened half the place with redundancy and hinted at shutting a campus, they might… I don’t know… appear? LEX: Communication is happening. PAT: Where? LEX: In principle. (Pause.) PAT: I heard she said she can’t take a pay cut. LEX: Yes. PAT...
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Islam as Rhizome: Heresiology after Deleuze

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Michael Muhammad Knight’s Sufi Deleuze: Secretions of Islamic Atheism arrives less as a contribution to “Islam and philosophy” than as an intervention into how theory travels, who it forgets, and what it cannot see from where it stands. Published by Fordham University Press in 2023, the book refuses the polite format of comparative theology. It stages instead a set of collisions: between shrine and seminar, baraka and assemblage, the Qur’an and the Orientalist residue sedimented even in radical European thought. If Deleuze once treated the Qur’an as the exemplary authoritarian “root-book,” Knight answers not by defending Islam within Deleuze’s schema but by prying Deleuze loose from his own archive and forcing him to think from the dargah outward. The book opens at a tomb. Knight purchases the musty orange paperbacks of the Inayati order and approaches the grave of Inayat Khan, remembering that his former mentor Hakim Bey had stood there decades earlier. The scene is intimate and crac...
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When the Factory Disappears. Does the Most Developed Explain the World?”

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Today we’re reading two sections from Workers and Capital : “Marx Yesterday and Today” and “Factory and Society” by Mario Tronti. What strikes me immediately is that Tronti is not trying to interpret Marx historically. He’s issuing a methodological and political challenge. He writes that any research project concerned with the contemporary validity of Marxism “has to engage with Marx not in his time, but in our own.” Capital should be judged on the basis of the capitalism of today. So the question is not: what did Marx mean in 1867? But: what does Marxism become when confronted with the most developed form of capitalism now? Tronti insists on a key methodological principle taken from Marx: it is the most developed point that explains the backward, not vice versa. Capital explains ground rent, not the reverse. This becomes a way of thinking politically: the highest development of capitalism reveals its inner structure most clearly. That means analysis must begin from the advanced forms ...
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Attendance Is Not Achievement: Rethinking Causality in UK Schools

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Some thoughts scribbled in the free response box of another survey, responding to school's obsession with measuring attendance data (and poor discussion of other underlying performance factors) Across the UK, school leaders and policymakers increasingly repeat a simple mantra: attendance equals attainment. Parents are routinely asked to agree with statements such as, “Good school attendance is directly linked to better academic achievement for my child.” On the surface, this appears unobjectionable. Who could be against children attending school? Yet the language used – “directly linked” – reveals a deeper problem. It blurs the crucial distinction between correlation and causation, reducing a complex educational ecosystem to a crude behavioural metric. “Linked” is a deliberately vague word. In statistical terms, attendance and attainment are correlated: pupils who attend more often, on average, achieve higher grades. But correlation does not demonstrate that attendance itself cause...
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Let’s Go… East Bay, Dublin, Reading…

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To say that Rancid’s second album Let’s Go is the punk equivalent of James Joyce’s short story collection Dubliners might initially sound like either overreach or playful provocation. It is meant neither way. Rather, it is an attempt to take both works seriously as realist cartographies of working-class life: as composite portraits in which the true protagonist is not any singular character but the city itself, understood as a collective subject and structuring space of experience. James Joyce gives us Dublin not as romantic capital but as dense social atmosphere: clerks, daughters, drunks, minor political operatives, each moving through the muted light of empire’s periphery. The stories of Dubliners are individually modest. Their power lies in accumulation. Paralysis is not simply a theme; it is a climate. The famous snow of “The Dead” falls “general all over Ireland,” dissolving the distinction between living and dead, success and failure, into a shared condition. Rancid’s Let’s G...
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Reply-All at the End of the World

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A Parable About Unpaid Labor... Composed After Being Asked to Peer Review Too Many Times... And written after the Author Was Caught Engaged in Labor During A Strike Day... The last unpaid reviewer died on a Tuesday, sometime after the armistice bells began to ring across the Perseid Belt. No one knew their name. The archives listed them only as External_Reviewer_7, field of expertise: “science fiction, trans* studies, or both.” Cause of death: exhaustion induced by recursive footnotes. Time of death: indeterminate. They had been revising their comments for thirty-six standard cycles when the war finally ended and the galaxy abolished the practice that had sustained it. For decades, the Intergalactic Consortium of Journals had broadcast its calls into deep space: We are looking for reviewers with publication experience and expertise in either science fiction, trans studies, or both…* The calls traveled faster than light, faster than mercy. They slipped through wormholes and into the sof...
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Carnivorous “Death-Ball” Sponge to Assist in Addressing University Financial Crisis

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BREAKING NEWS! Carnivorous “Death-Ball” Sponge to Assist in Addressing University Financial Crisis In a bold demonstration of Essex’s legendary rule-breaking spirit, the University is delighted to announce a breakthrough in both oceanic science and HR innovation. Amid the ongoing financial crisis that has made traditional redundancies regrettably unaffordable, researchers have instead discovered a more cost-effective— and far more carnivorous — solution: a newly identified “death-ball” sponge. This compact, spherical organism, bristling with hooks and an admirable appetite, will be repurposed as part of our revised staffing strategy. Employees previously marked for redundancy will now be “absorbed” into the University’s structural transformation in a more literal sense. While most universities timidly rely on consultations and severance packages, Essex is once again ahead of the curve, pioneering symbiotic approaches to workforce reduction. The discovery team, led by Essex scientist Dr...
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