OSU departments are prohibited from recruiting at many professional meetings, but ICE can come recruit on our campus?

You may also remember Lewiston as the site of a mass shooting at a Bowling alley in 2023. Here's a piece from my colleague Jaed Coffin with a portrait of Lewiston, post shooting, through the eyes of an immigrant family.

BREAKING — Mayor of Lewiston, Maine posts on FB that ICE is coming to the city imminently. This confirms my reporting the agency is planning a surge in the city and state generally. Lewiston is home to a large Somali-American population, which made up 4.6% of the population as of the 2020 census.

Hey everyone, We literally just added 100 more trans girl scouts to the trans girl scout cookie list. The list is bigger than it has ever been in EITM history. Go get some cookies and make a trans scout's day!

Woke up to more texts that ICE is in Portland, Maine. According to a message I received, they are expected to be here for a week. Stay safe, local friends.

If you don’t know, I am not sure I can fully describe the entire universe of losing a Torah — the spiritual injury, the communal injury, the stress and financial strain of acquiring a replacement for this extremely expensive and difficult-to-ensure holy ritual object…

Renee Macklin Good's wife, Becca Good, released a statement and it moved me to sobbing tears: archive.is/ur35j

Martin Peterson's creative response to being banned from teaching Plato (shared with his permission).

My first experience with Princess Mononoke was watching it in Japanese, no subtitles, late at night at a sleep over with my friend and her attempting to tell me what was going on, based on her memory of her (Japanese) mom translating for her. I had zero idea what was going on, but I was hooked

kind of darkly funny that "gender studies" is the stereotypical "useless degree" because gender studies will help you understand a large and important chunk of the current psychosis in american life

The author of a viral Reddit thread alleging fraud at a food delivery company tried to back up his claim by sending me AI-generated documents. Today I'm publishing those documents in the hopes that it helps other reporter see what we're up against in the age of AI www.platformer.news/fake-uber-ea...

there's a whole chapter about using a whale's penis skin as a raincoat. one chapter is just the second mate telling the third mate he had a dream about captain ahab hitting him with his pegleg. the longest chapter is a discourse on inaccurately insisting a whale is a fish,

people think moby dick is a stern adventure novel heavy on the plot. i can't emphasize how much it's not. it's supergay chaos with 3 plot points. there's an entire chapter that's just a chowder recipe. sometimes it turns into a play. the main character is covered in whale dinension tattoos.

If NH wants to have a public university system, it needs to fund said public university system.

OMG

24 seconds of the late Isiah Whitlock Jr saying shit on The Wire youtu.be/5mgCoesUZwI

Santa Claus, the Elijah the Prophet of American Christmas - Di Forverts, 1917

/ UR SUNSET IS @ 4:15 PM 2DAY / 4 MINUTES LATER THAN IT WAS ON DECEMBER 13TH

The Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina has finally received full federal recognition, which it has sought since 1888. Tribal leaders were moved to tears after President Trump signed the measure. n.pr/3L95mJU

ICE whistles work.

Photographer Christopher Anderson on the Vanity Fair photoshoot

A story I found about Haiti: In 1999, a group of Haitians were tired of political disorder and dreamed of a better life in the United States. So they built a small, 23-foot boat by hand using pine trees, scrap wood, and used nails. They called the boat "Believe in God."

Had to explain Ea-Nasir to my therapist

did you know: the American Dialect Society is the oldest "word of the year" event in the States, and the words are chosen by several hundred linguists who get raucous in a big meeting room in January. you can submit nominations for us to consider! great activity for classrooms!

Steve isn’t here anymore, but he always posted this picture on Hanukkah so I thought we could carry on his tradition and remember him.

abolish geniuses

Some closing thoughts for my students this semester on LLMs and learning #rstats datavizf25.classes.andrewheiss.com/news/2025-12...

UNC made me take an upper-level Social Studies class which I groused about because Linguistics didn't count (it was classified as Humanities). I took a course on the Medieval Church which was (1) awesome, and (2) was necessary background when I took a bunch of medieval languages in grad school

Reposted with alt text at least partially because I wanted to attempt to describe this masterpiece

Important update: Hittitologist colleague has pointed out that this is actually a modified version of the Ugaritic alphabet, so, still not quite right, but not quite as wrong as I initially thought. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugariti...

second dialect acquisition in The Atlantic! I'm quoted in this piece (along w/@abbyjwalker.bsky.social & other linguists) #linguistics

The first day of Starbucks strikes in New Hampshire is tomorrow, and they want as much community support on picket lines as possible for the first day.

Saw this worksheet and immediately volunteered to come in and talk to the kid's class about writing systems and anyway I guess I need to ask my colleague if I can borrow a tablet for show and tell???

Do you know Zoom & other companies are encouraging discrimination against employees for things like "pausing too long" or not sounding sufficiently "charismatic"? Read all about our dystopian present in my new paper, out today in JASA! (Seriously, read it. It's important) doi.org/10.1121/10.0...

Adding alt text to this because this is fucking amazing and everyone deserves to read it.

I had a joke about Jacob/Yisrael, but I really wrestled with posting it

Linguistics DDRIG is also archived 🐦🐦 this could mean it will be replaced by some new program, but at this point in time we have to assume many DDRIG opportunities that are "out of alignment" with admin priorities are just being discontinued.

Postdoc position in Stuttgart, Germany (TV-L 13, 100%) for 18 months, on authority presuppositions in AI systems with Dr. Agnieszka Faleńska and me. For more information and application info, see here: safety.https://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/documents/team/falensaa/aphic_postoc.pdf

Absolutely beautiful piece about training for a half marathon when you're no longer quite so young

A friend who teaches theology shared with me a post about CS Lewis's Mere Christianity, which discusses foundational Christian logic across denominations. It reminded me of Dale's tweet below, and I wanted to share some thoughts here regarding modesty and respectability, which are often hot topics.

The best kitties, Gandalf (2010-2023) and Carrot (2011-2025), world champions at snuggling and synchronized lounging, who are both sorely missed.

In case anyone is wondering they are really, truly arguing that if too many women are in a field it will "erode" but only in some cases because reasons. It's maybe OK if we have too many female veterinarians but not, heaven forbid, historians.

Next step is to take Mario Cuomo's name off the goddamn Tappan Zee Bridge.

if you liked the lenition hypercube, you'll love the phonological feature crystaline entity

One of these shapes is called boo-ba and one is kiki. Which is which?

The children long for a female protagonist with a braid and magical powers singing a queer coded "don't hide your true self away" anthem. (I am very glad the kiddo didn't see KPDH until about two weeks ago so I was able to side step making a costume for Halloween but it is now on deck for Purim.)

I present, the lenition hypercube

Sharing for awareness: For those able and willing to help, the Embassy of Jamaica in DC is coordinating disaster relief in the U.S. They have asked folks to reach out to them at [email protected] to coordinate support. The government has info on donations supportjamaica.gov.jm