May's been kind of a shitty month in a pretty shitty year so far but here's massive bright spot (neighbor's been babysitting some bottle fed goats, the one that climbed in my lap is named Dot and I love her she is my best friend now)

the fact that israel is straight up raping and torturing flotilla activists from all over the world and it’s not an international crisis it’s not putting a stop to anything, what is going ON

YOU’RE LISTENING TO SISYPHUS FM, THE HOME OF NON-STOP ROCK

Nothing promotes individual liberty quite like a state-mandated indoctrination.

📸

The president of Cornell hit two students with his car, lied about what happened, and got away with it. The story illustrates an under-reported crisis in higher education: administrators and the trustees they answer to are increasingly hostile to the idea of college itself. I wrote about it here:

My friend and comrade Alex Colston has been violently detained again by the Israeli state. Please call to push for his release. Free them all, from the river to the sea.

UC Berkeley Law creates new AI policy that bans AI for "conceptualizing, outlining, drafting, revising, translating, or editing any work submitted for credit" or exams because "thinking remains the sine qua non of good lawyering (and of a quality legal education)." That's what I'm talking about.

@nat.haus they ban you cuz you got nukes?

counterpoint: Democrats like Booker get this and for them it's a feature, not a bug

remember when Google offered unlimited digital storage to colleges and universities and then when adoption reached the right levels rescinded that promise, capped everything, and started pricing those services without the subsidies? idk man just something I think about a lot

back on this. thebugvsghostdubs.bandcamp.com/album/implod...

Militant Mary — Elizabeth Kirkman Fitzhugh, 1914

Ah, my cue to remind everyone that in Iowa more people work in finance or medicine or education than anything ag related.

Keanu Reeves looking good as hell

UPDATE! It is 24 weeks since Dr Prasad claimed, without sharing evidence, that Covid vaccines "caused" 10 child deaths The FDA has now released its analysis; it finds that "no child deaths were directly linked to COVID-19 vaccines" Ugh, Prasad did SO MUCH damage www.biospace.com/fda/fdas-own...

Something i lecture about a lot in Political Comm is topical bias (in addition to framing bias, outlet- specific interests etc): immigration is one of those brutal terrains in the last quarter century

Next year’s NeoLuddite class will be even bigger.

inevitable initial reports notwithstanding, multiple shooters are incredibly rare in any mass shooting. that this actually appears to be the case here, in an attack on a mosque no less, and yet still the coverage is as minimal as it is stateside, is so distressing www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

It is wild/sad how many Bluesky users see this story and then comment that the family deserved to experience this.

back on this. probly should listen to more powerpop, always makes me feel good. www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvPz...

closed out the semester by turning in my grades accompanied by the weather siren as we sheltered in our shitty stupid unfinished basement due to tornado warning. apt, if a bit heavy handed.

Having AI read graduate names in a commencement ceremony deeply depersonalizes something that is profoundly personal & human for these graduates. Why remove personal recognition & connection at a time when the personal can & should be celebrated? This isn't a technical glitch. This is a poor choice

In case you're interested, this is my review of @brian-goldstone.bsky.social's book (tl;dr: book's great, world's awful) buttondown.com/nateholdren/...

currently vacilating wildly between 'my god this is the semester that never ends' and 'maybe this will be the summer I get my whole life together!' and trying to remind myself that both are overdramatic, just gotta keep plugging away

We have a million assistant/ associate vice provosts but not regular classroom cleaning 🤡

Once upon a time, believe it or go Ripley yourself, being anti-antifascist was supposed to mean having a different account of how fascism and capitalism relate, and more to the point of how struggles against the latter could most effectively oppose the former.

again, staying completely silent on the actual merits of ai, the initial ai boosters basically campaigned on "this will eliminate your job, forever, and make me personally rich." it should not surprise *anyone* that this provoked a backlash.

Another banger from The Author Name -

thread

I am a fan of @long-haul-mag.bsky.social! I've been reading it cover to cover since the first issue came out last year, and I've been consistently impressed with both the depth of thinking and the level engagement with the actual lives of workers of all sorts. Also, it's always beautiful!

Look, Middlemarch is a great novel. It complexly mediates class conflict, the commodification of all life, emerging ideological structures in Victorian capitalism. I just personally think it’s more impressive when a novel does that through a story about a guy who hates a weird fish.

Mood

"you're being intolerant to creatives using new tools to make their work" yeah man im intolerant as hell. i hate you and your work

To answer the q in the headline it can be both

Some of the greatest threats to higher education in this country are boards of trustees.

No child should have to grow up in fear of the President’s hatred and power to do them harm.

The guy in the 'we're all trying to find the guy' hot dog suit meme and he should wear the hot dog suit the whole time without it ever being commented on

New polling finds the overwhelming majority of Americans oppose AI construction in their area

The acting head of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's drug center, Tracey Beth Hoeg, is expected to leave the agency just days after Commissioner Marty Makary resigned, according to three people familiar with internal planning.

Leninist, Maoist, Trotskyist, Syndicalist, Liberal, Revanchist

It's horrifying that using the full might of the United States military to murder random impoverished fishermen for no purpose other than creating snuff films isn't treated as a major scandal by US politicians or media.

excited for the summer and finding the time and tasks left between now and the summer excruciating, harrumph. every year's story.

TPUSA was promoting an anti-trans event on Juniper's campus when she was stabbed to death Sunday. I'm pretty well-informed + I only heard about this today on the "It Could Happen Here" podcast. Violence against trans and nonbinary people has skyrocketed in recent years. Media coverage is dismal.

The president of Cornell hit some students with his car, lied about what happened, and cast himself as the victim. Cornell's trustees, palpably aghast at the idea that a powerful man could be held accountable for his actions, have issued an official statement saying fuck the students

Does anyone know if there's a book on the history of Birmingham, England and the music that came from there?

New book review published advance access by @jich.bsky.social Tinni Goswami reviews "Public Health and The Pandemic in Colonial Bengal: An Analysis of The Spanish Influenza (1918–1920)" by Saumitra Basu www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

The controversial "Alligator Alcatraz" camp for detained migrants in Florida is expected to close. https://to.pbs.org/4dqDpr9