Just had meeting with kiddo's school. She has been fully supported, treated with full equality & dignity for years. All of that changes from September. Full segregation & humiliation across the board. The school staff cried in the meeting. This will absolutely lead to children's deaths 1/2

1. After pushing anti-trans laws to ‘protect women’s sports’, Project 2025’s Heritage Foundation now wants women’s sports gone to ‘assist fertility.’ Turns out it was about women’s sports all along—if getting rid of women's sports counts, that is.

England is slowly defunding the “English” major. I remember thinking that something had gone wrong at my first job, when Catholic University started to close down-not a joke-Italian Studies and Catholic Studies.

Heterosexuality seems EXHAUSTING, you guys

Megan Rapinoe losing out on a world cup advertising brand deal for being an outspoken trans ally as a result of AI decision making underlines how these tools function as mechanisms for censorship and blanding culture into nothingness.

Just like the “ask Gemini” button on YouTube, I can’t tell if these companies actually want to sell revenue generating things like ad rolls or books when they release tools to let people skip all that. Seems self-defeating?

Andy Serkis turning into an Onion article is an unnecessary heel turn

As celebs like Kylie Jenner promote Ray-Ban Meta glasses, Lorde made it known at her concert: "Fuck the glasses." 404 Media has reported on how its been used by ICE officers, by people filming secretly at massage parlors and how some have hacked the recording light. www.404media.co/whats-the-di...

Gender studies: totally vindicated

Hmm, should I root for the nasty xenophobes or the snobby TERFs? I really don’t want either team to have a good time.

“.. I asked a few AI researchers whether they could name any other real-world software that scales so poorly. None of them could think of any. “.. By economic and engineering measures, generative AI might be the worst technology ever deployed.” @theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

Appearing nowhere in this retrospective: - safety - bots/propaganda/misinformation - CSAM - revenge porn - xAI’s own nudifiers - any mention of harassment outside of #MeToo - the Arab Spring This isn’t a history, it’s earned media for Elon.

I think a lot of America in the 21st century can be defined as a unconstrained gender panic

hegseth endorsing treatments that can lead to impotence or sterility for soldiers is big news for our nation's brave class of soldiers' wives' boyfriends

That is a really high quantity of Gender taking place in that Xeet

I was kinda hoping that moving east would give me a break from the oppressive wildfire smoke we’d get every year in Denver, but… I guess not 😒

The problem with listening to Radiohead while you work is that you can’t work while listening to Radiohead.

My new challenge on this topic: Identify a single “AI first” company that has not built its product offering on broad-spectrum theft. Can you?

i had no idea this would become so literal

I would love for any major news outlet to put real money into an actual critical piece on how life really works on campus. There's a real news story underneath all this real estate glamor. Heck, if you need an alum to write it, like nymag apparently did, there are dozens of us.

Framed as earned media for Vandy’s comms team, this is a roaring success (within certain parameters). I might even build a case study module out of it for a PR class next year, since the “benefit society” part of the PRSA ethics code seems to be incidental. But as a piece of journalism? Abysmal.

Considering that management at Ford and GM freely chose to ignore the obvious global shift to EVs and have since pivoted with temporary domestic political winds... maybe "let Detroit go bankrupt" would not be such a politically unpalatable phrase if things reach that point again.

I love this because George Lucas is a great example of what happens when someone is surrounded by yes-men who are paid to not say no and then creates a turgid movie filled with inhuman, off-puttingly didactic space wizards. It’s a nice analog for how LLMs interact with the creative process.

Anyway, here’s a really good rundown of why LaTeX is a thing from @acollierastro.bsky.social

One of these core memories I have is seeing Machu Picchu for the first time in the late teens and noticing that several people were playing Pokémon Go at the summit. It felt dislocating in a way I still can’t quite articulate.

I think “LaTeX hygiene” is my new favorite term

First I’ve heard of this and now I need to play it

“What do you mean, you’re stinging me? We’ll both drown!” “Yeah, dude, I dunno, I’m a scorpion, I sting things.”

Graham Platner's collapse is an indictment of what Twitter has done to people's brains, and a major W for this platform and the general idea of "not spending time in Elon Musk's sandbox" slate.com/technology/2...

There are three challenges this piece fails: 1) an old man obsessing over trans women; 2) demanding the Democrats do the exact immigration policy they had under Obama and Biden but pretending they didn’t; and 3) conceding right wing lies about crime Seriously: stop being lazy weirdos about this!

This is so cool and inspiring — if you also spent thousands on custom gear and thousands more on a team of nutritionists and coaches, and never looked at your phone, you too can have a great night’s sleep. Love the innovation!

See, this is what happens when you refuse to use air conditioning

Democrats really could win a trifecta by enforcing the law against tech companies. Hammer the right wing capture of the SEC, FTC, FCC, EPA, and IRS, promise to give them fangs, and people will turn out to vote. But the Gillibrands of the party will lose money so they will fight and refuse. It sucks.

roberts et al have a mental model of racism as being defined entirely by the most atavistic mania of the jim crow south. if it isn’t that, if it wears suits and ties and speaks the language of national security and executive authority, then it not only doesn’t count, *it’s not racism*

The Roberts Court campaign to re-segregate public life is proceeding apace. Unlike their other racist rulings, this one to segregate higher education has shocking amounts of buy-in from mainstream society thanks to decades of propaganda amplified by sloppy or unethical media coverage.

One thing I like to do is to check clickhouse to see what lexicons have been the most active over the last two months. That's how you learn that a Japanese study app (studynext.app) is the second most active Atproto application right now.

For the record, I absolutely support the fight to keep physical media around as long as possible, but at this point for me the real battleground going forward is increased digital media rights. My latest for @pcmag.com www.pcmag.com/opinions/im-...

Merely abolishing ICE is the moderate, restrained position. The moral position is prosecutions, a truth commission, and fundamental constitutional reform so a rogue court run by extremists can never again approve secret police death saques occupying our cities.

Still adore him for doing Jeffrey the same year TNG ended

Transphobia IS misogyny. They’re coterminous, indistinguishable, concurring beliefs, one cultivating the other like an ideological symbiosis.

Over on Whatever today I'm talking about GMail has turned into a spam farm so completely that a) most email I get from there is spam/scam, b) I can't assume a GMail I get is from a real person, c) people seriously need to get their own email domains these days. whatever.scalzi.com/2026/07/13/i...

The cautious centrists and center-left politicians who have dominated the Democratic Party for so long have failed. Voters see this, which is why the uprising within the Democratic Party is unlikely to be contained. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/14/o...

I kind of think this could be a long term good, demonstrating these systems don’t work and will make firms worse off. Then again, anti-diversity and mass layoffs are demonstrably bad for companies, too (decades of data) and executives still do both because they are irrational, ideological actors.

Something tells me the outdoors industry won’t mobilize over this again — everyone institutional is out of fight

Fancy learning more about the history of AI in education? This is a nice little event on the past and present of the "automated classroom" with Barbara Hof, Apolline Taillandier and me next Monday 20 July (in Edinburgh or online) www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/automated-...

This is a new one: I’m populating my review portfolio and noticed a student pasted a 15-year-old Mark Ames hit piece on me where he claims I was an unregistered agent for the Uzbek intelligence services. I’m not sure what they meant to accomplish, but I’m FASCINATED by the research effort it took.

The complete disconnect between performance and outcomes in this industry really will kill it. Everything will become soulless generative F2P gacha slop, like a matching game in the app store. It’s just not sustainable.

Krugman: "there is no legitimate use case for crypto. They’ve had 18 years to come up with one. ... Every one of them has turned out to be baseless. The only real use for crypto is tax evasion, money laundering, and crime." open.substack.com/pub/paulkrug...

Pundits have a special disdain for political science because political science specializes in explaining the vacuity and incoherence of pundits

I wrote about Florida Governor DeSantis' getting rebuked by the 11th Circuit for his tyrannical (and unconstitutional) "Stop WOKE Act." Hopefully, this will serve as a warning to other GOP states (but I doubt it). www.ms.now/opinion/flor...