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...

This is insane. This is *literally* doing the same mechanics of the housing crisis and 2008 recession but to create debt to finance construction of AI data centers www.nytimes.com/2025/11/08/b...

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.

If *your department head and your dean* can be removed for supporting your colleague in teaching in their area of expertise, then you have no academic freedom. In a functional sense, you don't work at a university at all.

I don't want to start a thing so I'll just say that there will never be a good argument for privatizing USPS. That would be like privatizing libraries. The aim of services isn't to be run for profit, they are for serving the greater good, which USPS has been extremely successful at.

Death cult. There’s nothing else to say. Utter madness.

This. America is, if anything, a dramatically stifled society because everyone is afraid to engage in acts of human goodwill lest they be torted into oblivion.

Two things can be true: 1) I hope Cristian Roldan starts next to Tyler Adams in the USMNT's pair of friendlies this month. 2) It's hilarious that the tenure of the USMNT's highest-profile, highest-paid foreign manager is actively being defined by his love for MLS players.

thinking about the fast, efficient driverless cars we should’ve had decades ago

We built a calculator that doesn't work, but don't worry, it's also a plagiarism machine that will tell you to kill yourself. It runs on the world's oceans and costs 10 trillion dollars.

This isn't just a political claim, it's an empirical one. If "the problem is not guns" then we shouldn't see any correlation between gun ownership and oh wait platform.vox.com/wp-content/u...

Paul Virilio has that devastating line about how the invention of the ship implies the invention of the shipwreck, how the latter—as “accidental”—betrays the true substance of the former. I can’t stop thinking about guns and school shootings through the same schema.

You know it’s back to school season in America because we are back to having school shootings.

The young people who would have been most likely to lead the domestic anti-fascist fight in 2025 were repeatedly arrested, beat, jailed, mocked by elites and non-elites over the past 5 years. This was bipartisan. I find it interesting whenever some people ask 'where the young people are' now.

Great charts from the Atlanta Fed showing small businesses are getting hit hardest by the trade war (largely because they are more exposed to Chinese imports and have less ability to borrow money while they shift supply chains) www.atlantafed.org/blogs/macrob...

Reading an article titled "Why didn't Brazilian democracy die?" and a key part of the story is a Supreme Court that actually did its job

When geographers say maps are weapons of state and capital power, this is what they mean

Marcuse, in one of my all time favorite bits of writing: monoskop.org/images/5/57/...

reposted this today because the inverse is also true: if you abandon trans people right now, you are abandoning civil rights period. if you can't stand up for trans people when it matters, no one should, or will, ever trust you when the bullseye moves to the next target.

this iconic advertising copywriter named Kathy Hepinstall Parks died over the weekend and I wanted to share something from her website I thought Bluesky would like

Huh, so I guess they haven't all fled the state

I’m kind of speechless with this one. I can’t imagine the kind of person who continues to make the argument that it doesn’t count as real starvation if the kids were already sick.

The people dominating our political landscape, culture, and economy are just so stupid and full of shit it's almost impossible to describe

Climate models since the 1970s nailed it—most predicted global warming almost exactly as it happened.

A terrorist targeted federal workers last week. There wasn’t much reporting on it. But I’m not finished thinking about it! 🧵 An anti-vaxxer fired more than 500 gunshots into CDC Atlanta, shattering 150 “blast-proof” windows on 6 buildings. Employees were pinned down in terror.

I swear to god, a pedal steel could get me to do just about anything.

It’s a difficult proposition for undergrads to work through, but choosing a major isn’t really about what kind of jobs you want to do so much as what sorts of questions you want to think about or *how* you want to think about questions throughout your life.

every “ancient tradition” was invented between 1848-1870 and every “modern perversion” is so ancient as to predate writing

What if we vilified billionaires and their corporations the way the poor have long been stigmatized: as the "parasite class"—Musk's own favored term—trapped in an "endless cycle of dependency." www.nytimes.com/2025/08/15/t...

Reading Brecht again

effective altruism is so embarrassing, it's like if a 14-year-old mrbeast told you that he read the wikipedia entry for ethics and came up with a school of thought that "solves it" and now billionaires are funding him and making up jobs and careers for people willing to embarrass themselves for $$$

Once again, Pritzker the only one out there who seems to get it

The Tesla Diner is a perfect metaphor for the whole Tesla brand: a bad facsimile of something that already exists, made by people who don't understand what they're recreating, with a thin veneer of superficial futurism on top, for people with no taste or self-respect www.nytimes.com/2025/08/05/d...

AI filmmaking is peeing. It’s pooping. It’s throwing up. It’s a new kind of liquid coming out. It’s hated by the establishment. It’s what goes in the toilet. It’s wet. It’s what’s in the bathroom.

Seriously, fuck off. I say that with all due gravity.

in Feb 1947, Marcuse writes 33 Theses on the libertarian communist anti-program for postwar critical theory, which Horkheimer will use as a foundation for his own marginal reflections on class, revolution, & freedom for 2+ years. Translated for the 1st time here (🔗⬇️)

i have been thinking a lot about how the entire concept of “the deal” is antithetical to transparency, fair play and rule of law, as larry notes. the deal is necessarily nonstandard, ad hoc and dependent on the whims of the dealmaker

Ruth Wilson Gilmore said, “No abolitionist who is a true abolitionist wants to save money. What we want is for the money to be spent, to enhance, and support human life so that it can flourish in a way that doesn’t destroy the planet. We’re not about cost-savings.” Save lives, not money.

I know it’s trite to say at this point, but I just don’t know how you get anywhere with this sort of epistemic collapse/social ignorance. Makes me want to revisit Tom Slater’s excellent agnotology work.

Can't imagine anything that would destroy children's imagination, creativity and curiosity about the world faster than mandated use of LLMs and GenAI.