The court has simply recreated the pre-Brown world in allowing racial discrimination across a broad number fields as long as it is “facially neutral,” gutting the Reconstruction Amendments in the process.

"For too long, the university has ignored the wisdom of the donor class and hired based on academic excellence. Regrettably, this has led to the underrepresentation of discredited viewpoints in elite higher education." www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/wer...

Sign of the times: a university press release that's just a Q&A with a faculty member talking about the termination of the National Science Board.

And then the techbros bumbled their way into creating an entire new mode of computing based on natural language prompts, with remarkable power that only ppl who know how to make themselves understood can properly use. You may not like it, but this is what peak humanities revival looks like.

Once you get the decoder ring of “antisemitism, in its natural form, is coded almost by definition because of its link by conspiracy theories, and is ubiquitous” the entire horseshoe theory issue that’s the discourse subject today becomes easy to understand.

A lot of AI criticism makes me feel like someone says “the automobile has been disastrous for society” and I’m nodding along like “yeah I actually really agree, I think that car centric urban design has-“ and then they add “also it’s a scam, cars break down after more than ten miles anyway”

Chinese researchers have created a bamboo-based plastic as strong as petroleum-based plastics, which can fully biodegrade in soil in just 2 months phys.org/news/2025-10...

The story here is that Congress rejected Trump’s proposal to slash funding for the National Science Foundation, but Trump is gutting the agency anyway. The by-now classic Russ Vought play of treating Congress as an irrelevancy. www.insidehighered.com/news/governm...

www.anthropic.com/features/pro... A surprisingly entertaining read

The ADL permanently sacrificed its reputation to get in good with a massively dangerous antisemite and white nationalist. They defended him and stood up for him even after his Nazi salute. Here's how he repays them. This is what happens when you think you're using bigots. They're always using you.

@rikiwilchins.bsky.social [Texas cont] In an additional attempt to suppress LGBTQ+ speech, the policy includes STUDENTS: "no degree-culminating student research within the TTU System will be permitted to center on SOGI topics,” thus extending "Don't Say Gay" to dissertations and theses. 2/2

Oh look Elijah didn’t just drink the wine, he took the whole cup with him!

OMB has clearly decided to ignore Congressional intent and implement their own preferred budget at NSF. It's outrageous, unconstitutional, and is gutting our scientific capacity.

I am going to be a massive humorless asshole about woo-woo shit, no matter how seemingly harmless, for the rest of my life due to this. astrology, homeopathic medicine, etc etc it's all bullshit and it's not fucking harmless. there are people who will die due to this who would have otherwise lived.

NEW: NSF has been funding research at a fraction of its historic rate. Last week, the agency finally began distributing money to its directorates and is now likely to pick up the grantmaking pace. But these allocations also amount to substantial cuts across the sciences. My reporting:

It was an amazing experience getting to work with Erin as she developed her actuated origami sculptures!

I did some research to try and figure out when my death date would be if there had been no treatment for my cancer. I don't know why I assumed it would be some date in the future, but, in fact, I passed the middle of the "no treatment survival" bell curve more than a year ago. Thanks chemo.

Shortish essay on unintelligibility in CoTs, I liked it though 1a3orn.com/sub/essays-h...

Our PhD student Kennedy Orwa, who studies applications of AI to health care, was hastily deported today to Kenya along with his 13-year-old son without opportunity to speak to legal counsel. King 5 reports that he held a valid visa that was rescinded without explanation.

The man who coined the term genocide, Raphael Lemkin, defined it as a greater atrocity than mass murder explicitly because it involves the intentional killing of a civilization.

I haven't been slain by a video in some time so I thought I'd share.

So what this describes is ethnic cleansing www.nytimes.com/2026/04/01/w...

There’s good historical reason to worry that an authoritarian government leader collecting a registry of Jews, under the pretext of protecting Jews, while that leader has referred to Jews as “disloyal,” may not end up so well for The Jews. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/31/u...

Apparently it's based on LLM-simulated users (and LLM judges). I generally think highly of the FT's reporting but this is is nonsense

Critical for anyone who uses GitHub - if you've used GitHub Copilot at all, Microsoft is about to start putting basically all of your code and the entire trajectory of all actions you took into training. You need to opt out by April 24th. github.blog/news-insight...

Two plus months ago, Graham platner did a guest spot on a white supremacist YouTube channel and declared himself a longtime fan. His supporters must either think he was lying or that it's fine that he's a long time fan of a white supremacist channel. They never say which

Statement by the Senate of Tel Aviv University

Disgusting behavior supporting a Nazi from the leadership of my union @uaw.org

AIPAC has spent money *opposing* both of these senators, while J Street has contributed to both of them guess which senator is jewish

This is maybe a very niche canary in the coal mine but MULTIPLE openly Jewish influencers (largely food/cooking but also lifestyle, history, etc) have reported that they’ve been asked to not refer to Judaism or their Jewish identities in sponsored content and brand deals bc it’s “too political”

@warren.senate.gov, I’ve admired you for most of my adult life, but never again. Your endorsement of this Nazi is a betrayal of every value that you have ever claimed to stand for throughout your career, and disappointing beyond words. He. Is. A. Nazi. There is no getting past that. Fuck you.

As someone who has, by now, taught thousands of undergrads I cannot conceive of imagining one, much less treating one in this way. I'm grateful to Dr. Wachspress for sharing her story. I doubt it will silence some of the usual carping, but it is necessary reading.

I fucking hate that every time violence against Jews happens I feel compelled to go on a threading and re-post spree defending us and begging you to believe we didn’t deserve it. Next time I might not bother, frankly, because the heartless soulless response by non-Jews only gets worse, never better

antisemitism is very very old but its always been very useful to those in power to say "you can't have nice things because of the Jew" in this case "your rent is so high because of the Jew" in the end rent doesn't go down and the Jews get beaten in the streets

I don't really mean to be hyperbolic here, but I think this might be a generational breakthrough

This is astonishing

I'm kinda being constantly tortured online bc I both think 1. It's extremely unlikely current AI models are conscious. 2. Almost every argument I scroll by for my side is insane and is just steamrolling decades of philosophy of mind work.

This thread should be the death-knell for Platner's claim that the army didn't ban him for the Nazi tattoo and for his defenders' claims that he didn't know it was a Nazi tattoo. It's the reason he was barred from re-enlistment, and he knew it. He's a liar who deliberately kept a Nazi tattoo.

Fantastic work from @davekarpf.bsky.social putting some perspective on the notion that AI can do social science research. It can generate passable journal articles, which is not necessarily the same thing. It's a chance to consider what we should be valuing. davekarpf.beehiiv.com/p/can-ai-rep...

I'll say it again: If you're consistently finding ways to rationalize away Graham Platner's Nazi tattoo or embrace of Nazi content creators then you really are no different than those on the right who were trying to explain why Elon really wasn't giving a Heil Hitler

Oh so it does have phd level intelligence

Battle school is a dumb genre, but it is a remarkably less dumb genre if you shift it to a PhD from high school. Consider:

This has gotten even sadder as I’ve dug into it. The agent can see that I’m the tech lead on the project that produced it, and that I’ve said its perf. on this task was poor (about a prototype from a year ago). These are citations to an authoritative primary source so they survive all critique.

To clarify for the non-roboticists out there: Two legged humanoid robots only stay standing when they’re powered and the control loops managing the joints and actively detecting the balance situation are all functioning. Lose power? It keels over. All 120-200 lbs of it.