"Universal health coverage is not merely a technical goal to be achieved; it is primarily a moral imperative for societies that wish to call themselves just." —Pope Leo XIV

Yes, that’s the issue. I’ve been trying to find a way to articulate this: to the extent that LLMs serve a purpose in education, it’s an indictment of the education system, not a praiseworthy feature of LLMs.

I was in a 2 hour briefing today on the Iran War. All the briefings are closed, because Trump can't defend this war in public. I obviously can't disclose classified info, but you deserve to know how incoherent and incomplete these war plans are. 1/ Here's what I can share:

I've been working out the ideas that would eventually become this paper since 2020 or so. Really pleased to see it out in the world. "Make Buckhead great again: Phantasmagoria and the geographies of authoritarian urbanism" journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

OMG they released the deposition videos where they revealed that these two DOGE bros were just feeding grants into ChatGPT and saying "tell me if this is DEI in less than 120 characters." www.techdirt.com/2026/02/19/d...

Playing the hits, I see

This is not just cursed, its monstrous. The digital resurrection of a historian who died in January of this year, all so Grammarly can get some more clicks and engagement from students and/or scholars and/or others. It feels so wrong on so many levels, these ghosts enslaved to AI forever

Once again, in actual democracies, people do not need to engage in permanent litigation & political mobilization to retain the basic right to vote, because none of the major political parties make restricting suffrage the central pillar of their policy platform. We also don't have to live like this.

Crazy moment to be teaching about the Nuremberg Laws…

Until this country reckons with police and policing, nothing will improve.

The pace at which US wealth concentration is rising is simply staggering The concentration of AI wealth into the hands of a few tech barons + plutocratic capture ==> unchartered territory

The Supreme Court:

This is the kind of thing white supremacists have been doing to Emmett Till’s memorial for decades. It’s wild to see them do this to a white woman who the entire world saw extrajudicially murdered.

Outrageous

“The U.S. no longer has emission standards of any meaning,” said Margo T. Oge, who served as the E.P.A.’s top vehicle emissions regulator under three presidents and has since advised both automakers and environmental groups. “Nothing. Zero,” she added. “Not many countries have zero.”

This bit about the Mellon Foundation happening at the same time as the Epstein files is a coincidence but they are connected in that they are both about how under capitalism intellectual work is dependent on the largesse of robber baron tax shells and when one does something useful, they’re policed

FAMU can't use the word Black on anything posted around campus related to Black History Month, to stay in compliance with Florida state laws against DEI. Black students can't use the word Black at their Historically Black College during Black History Month.

so much of our present misery is just a giant, prolonged backlash to integration

We're recruiting 2 PhD candidates in human geography here in Uppsala, one position focused on urban/housing issues and one in political ecology. Please spread the word/repost etc. Being a PhD student in Sweden is a good gig.

I genuinely have no idea how to convey this to the American people, but I think the biggest impediment to any kind of immigration reform is that people are convinced that "legal" and "illegal" are immutable, intrinsic categories instead of a rapidly-shifting arbitrary constellation of regulations.

Full rights and citizenship actually means they’re not a “foreign labor class.” And that’s what he’s angry about. He’s mad citizenship is universal rather than restricted to white people like before the civil war bsky.app/profile/gbbr...

I don't think it is a coincidence that I don't see my Italian or other Continental European colleagues demonstrating the same anxiety over GenAI - given how prevalent oral and in-person exams are there (that is, GenAI-proof methods of assessments)

The people of Minnesota have executed one of the most impressive civil resistance campaigns I can remember: - Organized a city wide general strike - Maintained nonviolent discipline amidst violence - Mobilized 10,000s in subzero temps to protest and watch ICE - Flipped public opinion against ICE

Happy to have some moral clarity at the head of my union these days. Join AAUP. Your dues pay for these legal victories we keep wrapping up and these trainings that have taught a thousand new organizers how to do the work.

Wrote this last night: colemanallums.net/blog/2026/1/... Poetry is so we don’t forget.

It's time to abolish Trump’s ICE.

Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 (over Truman's veto) to make general strikes so incredibly difficult to organize that there hasn't been one since. That there is a general strike happening in a major US city on such short notice is nothing short of a miracle.

We already have this data. It’s from when everybody used to die because there were no vaccines.

The latest Duke CFO survey shows that the vast majority of CFOs are seeing no impact from AI on labor productivity, decision-making speed, customer satisfaction, or time spent on high-value-added tasks Torsten at Apollo

“what if”

Now that America has attacked and destabilized Venezuela (like so many countries before) many of its people will end up heading north seeking safety and stability and the US and Canada alike will respond with anger at “too many immigrants!” The US fucks up the world then blames its people 😡

Somebody pay me to go to Bristol and teach Kevin Negandhi about epistemology.

You could teach an entire grad seminar on social science methods just using ESPN’s attempts to project/justify the College Football Playoff field.

The USPS posting a NINE BILLION DOLLAR LOSS!!! sounds terrible. Certainly worse than if you said "USPS costs thirty dollars per person per year" even though that means the same thing and more accurately describes a government service

We really do live in hell

Everything about this might be the saddest thing I’ve ever seen

🚨We analyzed 138 million geocoded property tax records to quantify how municipal boundaries spatially overlap onto economic segregation in every US metro area—creating disparities in localities’ ability to fund public goods. And we made an interactive map of our results! [1/16]

I, personally, will never forget or forgive the careless terrorism of this exercise. I know too many whose personal and professional lives were mutilated by a handful of incurious ideologues, saw too much good, careful, lifesaving work go up in smoke.

If I were sick, I would simply choose to be healthy. Bing bang boom bsky.app/profile/atru...

Reminds me of one of my all time favorite books:

If I could solve one ubiquitous problem, it’d be the public’s manifestly inadequate understanding of what ‘politics’ is.

On Hiking Without Maps open.substack.com/pub/jaaronsi...

Wrote this in The Sirens Call about mass shootings as the darkest, most violent form of extreme trolling and think it likely applies here as well.

A threat to authoritarianism anywhere is a threat to authoritarianism everywhere

You will never be able to make "data driven" decisions until you realize just how much your decisions are driven by emotions: fear of missing out, defensiveness of your favorite idea, apprehension over something unusual. That's because there's no such thing as "the data" - only interpretations.