Good to see the NYT call the Iran war a loss, but I'd like to also see headlines along the lines of:
THE ART OF SURRENDER
Make it really sting.
This seems likely. Or even some combination, like deliberately prompting AI to make some promotion that mocks democracy activists and victims of the dictatorship.
Today's www.collocateswordgame.com word is "conference", which is a neat coincidence after returning from LTRC 2026 in Montreal last night.
I did okay on this one - the obvious verb collocates got me 86 points. The rest needed a bit more careful thinking on my part.
Give it a shot!
Some very unsettling trends in linguistics hiring. I don't know how much this captures what's going on in applied linguistics (which does post jobs on LL, but also other places), but certainly some of it.
profling.beehiiv.com/p/the-academ...
New English test score requirements (mostly higher) from HRSA for health care workers seeking to enter the USA. Also: TOEIC scores are no longer accepted.
www.hrsa.gov/office-globa...
Out now in International Journal of Applied Linguistics, my new paper, "Unrealistic Feedback in Socially Prescriptive Speech Technologies". tl;dr LLMs are terrible at evaluating speech, and you should not use them unless you'd like a class-action lawsuit. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10....
Cambridge has been fined quite a lot of money for incorrectly grading some IELTS tests for a couple of years.
www.gov.uk/government/n...
As an ocean scientist, I'm frankly amazed at the attention the dismantlement of OOI has gotten, while the removal of the RVIB Nathaniel B. Palmer (our only Antarctic icebreaker) and the failure to replace the JOIDES Resolution (our only scientific drilling ship) were met with near silence. 🌊
Associate Professor of Second Language Studies, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, specializing in language assessment. Associate Editor at Language Learning journal (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/14679922). Views own. https://isbell.github.io/
the AI claim is very likely a lie here. Korean right-wingers have a history of trying to put their horrible shit into popular culture and the CEO of the group is a well-known chud.
foreignpolicy.com/2026/06/09/s...
foreignpolicy.com
Far-right meme politics shows how strong anti-democratic forces remain.
You will never guess how this mad story is related to AI slop…
www.theguardian.com/world/2026/j...
Smart glasses used for cheating on the TOEIC exam in Korea.
(Another reason to dislike smart glasses and ban them in many/most places)
www.koreatimes.co.kr/southkorea/s...
The closures, so employees can watch a recorded lecture, will cost the company an estimated 2.1bn won ($1.4m) in sales
