Absolutely despicable move by UT.

The tide is hopefully turning on data centers. www.opb.org/article/2026...

The goal of "viewpoint diversity" hucksters is to create precisely the kind of corporate (and fascism) friendly misinformation that leads to survey results like this.

It’s remarkable how the NYT is already trying to cook this survey with a deeply flawed question (basic rights shouldn’t be a leftwing issue, and the party is in the center of public opinion 10 years ago) and STILL young people are pushing. Even the paper’s plainspoken bigotry can’t swing opinion.

It’s remarkable how this administration has done every single thing conservatives pretended liberals were doing when Biden was in charge.

The fact that Sulzberger made this bald-faced lie at the Yale center specifically named after Floyd Abrams, the lawyer who represented Mitch McConnell in that Citizens United Supreme Court case, is so sickening and cruel. He's trying to rub it in our faces that he can play both sides and pull ahead

The thing that infuriates me about this statement is that under AG Sulzberger, The New York Times has been the most useful propaganda partner setting the stage for Donald Trump, the Supreme Court, and Christian Nationalists to carry out an anti-trans and anti-Palestinian pogrom

When did “making your own almond milk” become coded as trad femme? Until very recently that was very much Boulder-Boomer coded. How did that get appropriated by the far right?

🧵 The idea that other rich democratic countries are going to wholesale poach 🇺🇸 academia because of Trump is laughable, because other countries are also in the process of dismantling their universities & research funding infrastructure.

I’m sure there’s no connection

Writing Game Histories edited by Esther Wright, Iain Donald & Nick Webber explores how games shape—and are shaped by—our understanding of the past, offering a clear introduction to the fast‑growing field of Historical Game Studies. Discover the book https://bit.ly/4sAXVLm

Publication day. Thank you to @enwright.bsky.social, Iain, and Nick for making this so. I think this is a meaningful contribution to the field of historical games. My chapter is on historical rhetoric and board games, with a case study on Crisis: 1914. lnkd.in/evi5Z7Nw

Fascinating, and oddly beautiful, story of how an Ithaca cemetery was/is home to a colony of some 5.5 million subterranean bees: but also a sign of how animals have needed to adapt to human presence and action that threatens their own survival. www.wired.com/story/millio...

In the book Computer Power and Human Reason, Josepeh Weizenbaum wrote about “civil courage”: “Every individual must act as if the whole future of the world, of humanity itself, depends on him. Anything less is a shirking of responsibility and is itself a dehumanizing force..."

This is what Republicans are working towards, attacks against transgender people the vanguard.

Oh Star City is out! It better be worth nerfing For All Mankind’s budget and getting us stuck on Mars for too many seasons.

I’ve come around on this. I still think Patagonia is going to take a hit reputationally given the discourse I’m seeing, but reading more about the complaint really doesn’t look good for Pattie. She basically dared them to sue and their claim is narrow. I think they did the right thing in suing.

Read the thread. This sucks. Stop donating to NPR, they aren’t funding journalism, just the tech fantasies of a few large donors and the CEO funneling a hundred million dollars into tech while shoving good journalists out the door and knee-capping its public journalism mission. More below 👇

It’s truly astonishing to see how comprehensively the US government is tearing down every part of the system that has made it up until now a world-leading power in science, research, and technological development. The entire world will suffer from this wanton destruction.

Jem and Holograms are OUT

You may not "do politics" as a scientist, but politics is doing you. Might as well start fighting now! events.standupforscience.net/stand-up-for...

there's the money quote. surprised to hear it so bluntly, but everyone I know has been saying this for the last year.

I think it’s important that we call this out as shitty-looking bad-faith lies designed to white wash history.

The reason that we call the MAGA movement fascist is that they seek to insert their political views into everything. They are forcing their bias on the media. They are politicizing science and academia. They have weaponized the justice system. They retaliate against anyone who criticizes them.

The spam is getting better at evading filters, and I suspect this is an aspect of the AI content wars few journalists are paying close attention to yet.

The contrast between PBS (consistently doing excellent work that does not flatter conservative ideology) and NPR (consistently doing poor work that twists itself to flatter conservative ideology) is stark. Donate to PBS! They’re great.

“…But a paper published last week…” No, SSRN papers are preprints or early stage work seeking feedback. They aren’t “published” and aren’t peer reviewed. I really wish journalists did a better job of handling this; media presenting preprints as settled studies did real damage during COVID.

Wikimedia Foundation just fired a long time lead developer of MediaWiki as well as its entire community team for unionizing. If you’re a donor, email [email protected] to protest this move. medium.com/@jakeorlowit...

That copypasta that your uncle posts on Facebook once a year has come true!

Grief is the most apt description of how I feel. It's not just because I've lost a job and probably a career, but because I am watching something I love and deeply care about, namely teaching and learning, being utterly and deliberately destroyed.

I had the great pleasure to talk to the wonderful AMY THOMAS about her book "Copyright, Contract, and Video Games. Terms of Play" (Bloomsbury) on my podcast GAME STUDIES. Please tune in & share our conversation! #gamestudies #podcast /cc @newbooksnetwork.bsky.social @bloomsburybooksuk.bsky.social

highly uneven adoption of AI tools in social sciences, predictably (i think) stratified by career stage and thus risk exposure to collapse in academic job market: www.anthropic.com/research/cod...

Scathing - and excellent - opening paragraph from @benjamin-clark.bsky.social in today’s edition of @prospectmagazine.co.uk’s Lightbulb. substack.com/@prospectmag...

WOW

Life comes at you pretty fast

Lysenkoism

“Everyone is doing it,” the famously legitimate principle we learn as children

For those unfamiliar with actual faculty hiring this is grotesquely unethical practice by Harvard

Again: academia isn’t “liberal” in any functional way and the cries to label it such are really efforts to bully industry gatekeepers to apply lower standards to right wing projects in the name of “balance.” This is true of journalism, as well.

This is also the plot to this season’s finale of For All Mankind

I am simply not going to get over “peer review is woke” today, I’m sorry.

One interesting thing is that save for the usual suspects (Cuellar, Golden, MGP), Democrats have held fast on trans people. Usually Republicans only get eight Democrats all from Trump districts to join them in meaningless House messaging votes. Compare that to immigration.

“If I’m getting you a six-figure book advance, I don’t want you to be putting it into ChatGPT,” said a top literary agent. “Go to the fucking library.” nymag.com/intelligence...

There is a really interesting gap building between the many lawyers who think there is merit to Patagonia’s lawsuit and almost literally everyone else, who correctly see this as a branding disaster guaranteed to make the company worse off and with a smaller customer base.

Why was a public university offering a completely fungible president a $1 million retention bonus? Who does that serve? What was being eliminated to make room for it, considering the Michigan legislature is planning to cut $199m from its budget?

This is North Korea level bullshit, and a total fucking disaster for science and for the United States alike. It doesn't matter whether it fails to pass; this kind of thinking is already penetrating NIH, NSF, NASA, etc and causing severe harm. NASEM, AAAS, AAUP, etc must condemn unequivocally.

This is what Google is replacing search with, and it’s baffling to me that it isn’t causing an absolute revolt among both users and staff.

#MurdochJournal attacks peer review as, uh, woke "group think." If the academy is so left-wing, it's amazing how easy it for the Journal, Times, and Post to find right-wing profs to write op-eds. A Way to Challenge the Groupthink of Scholarly Journals www.wsj.com/opinion/a-wa...