They were students' worst nightmare because they were an emblem of the exam itself, a physical proxy for test anxiety

34 years ago today. Suburban Station, Philadelphia, Christmas Eve 1991

thinkin about stuff

Every now and then they slip a paragraph in that is like the "blink twice if you are in distress" signal for journalists www.nytimes.com/2025/12/24/b...

Same energy #KavanaughStop

The postwar economic expansion and the Warren Court coincided to warp the baby boomers' understanding of what is politically normal in ways we will be dealing with for decades to come

Whe @theonion.com nails it boy do they nail it

He's a real King Midas of shit. Any institution he joins is instantly ruined by his membership. There's never been a more self-negating desire to become culturally elite.

Yes Mr. President please resign the office so you can devote your full efforts to next year's show, that Rob Schneider summary isn't going to write itself

Can you fucking imagine the reaction if like David Axelrod's wife in 2010 had started tweeting that some private company's employee should be fired for insubordination?

Deacon Blues Clues, is this anything?

*taps mic* Project Heritas

Duffy would have been first in line to impeach a Democratic cabinet secretary who made these kinds of threats when he was a Congressman

This was a literal plot point in a Swedish tv comedy series about inept foreign ministry employees

Classic "individual solutions to systemic problems" fallacy

It's stunning that this is even statistically possible

woof

There has never been a more accurate explanation of Bari Weiss.

Gotta imagine Weiss is fielding some angry calls from 60 Minutes' advertisers as she spikes their good content only for it to leak online

If there was an academic version of Blonde On Blonde it would have a song entitled Unfortunately Five Letters

A political movement preparing to hitch itself to this man is a political movement bound for brutal defeat

This for sure, but I think she's also incurious and self-involved enough to believe that speaking truth to power means forcing liberals to take scientific racism seriously, not uncovering the literal crimes of the U.S. President and his cabinet

Again, from Michael Grynbaum, here is Sharyn Alfonsi's full email. It must be read:

Weiss has obviously done nothing to earn the benefit of the doubt, but I think the "anything legitimately significant will leak" bit is even more pernicious. Those norms and rules and responsible adults are precisely what's under attack.

“These men risked their lives to speak with us. We have a moral and professional obligation to the sources who entrusted us with their stories. Abandoning them now is a betrayal of the most basic tenet of journalism: giving voice to the voiceless.”

“When it fails to air without a credible explanation, the public will correctly identify this as corporate censorship. We are trading 50 years of ‘gold standard’ reputation for a single week of political quiet.” www.nytimes.com/2025/12/21/b...

Huge opening for anyone with power to do a single right thing

Worth noting, I guess, that inside of a year we've gone from administration officials taking selfies of themselves at CECOT and bragging about how it's hell on earth to now getting their horrible little media worms to kill stories about it

The New York Giants have had a bad decade, but this fact cheered me up. “The Cowboys' Super Bowl drought has reached 30 years. Every NFC team has made it to a conference championship game during that span except the Cowboys.” www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/...

She's managed to create a scandal that is all cover-up, no crime. It's almost impressive

Handwaving away your party’s embrace of antisemitic conspiracy theories by saying “at least we’re not controlled by George Soros” is the most ridiculously quiet-part-loud thing I’ve ever seen.

I think this is also part of what is meaningful to people about languages. Each one has its own ways of imperfectly capturing thought and feeling, and those imperfections become familiar and important and part of the feeling itself.

Haven't posted this on here yet

Kash Patel must have the most insane fomo rn

Congrats again to everyone for pretending the far right authoritarian party’s assault on higher education was really about fighting antisemitism

I have more of a Jewish comment than a Jewish question

Listening notes: Cripple Creek Ferry is exactly the kind of corny little ditty that Paul McCartney could never write without being fatally insipid, but Neil Young fuckin nails it

The thing about the Hall and Oates hits is that even at their most overproduced and phoned in, there will still be a killer pre-chorus hook or other element (see: "Say It Isn't So")

The last lines of the piece are also important, re how we have made parenting more intensive and expensive in recent decades through both norms and law (you actually can't let your kids run free around the neighborhood the way parents did two generations earlier or you may be arrested for neglect.)

Sabrina Tavernise did a nice job reporting this. She quoted people talking about everything from vacations to eating out to their closet, but really she's tracing the cultural reverberations of the fact that housing costs too much. The average first-time homebuyer is now 40 (up from 28 in 1991).

It’s the entire point. There’s no plan to make this meaningful for students. No plan to use it administratively. Its design and implementation signals its only real intent. It’s best and easiest use case is for systematic harassment and to scare faculty into complying in advance.

Professional sports is also the only analogy that works in response to the "did you apply to work at any schools here in town?" thing

If UNC is claiming that course syllabi are its own intellectual property and posting them to the web to automate the harassment process, then good luck getting instructors to include anything beyond these items

to spin off Tyler Burge's example: you get to tell your doctor whether or not your knee hurts, your doctor gets to tell you whether or not you have arthritis. these are just reports about different things and weighing one against the other is confused

Five seconds’ reflection reveals that what this really means is “every student should have access to an education that is about nothing and changes every five seconds at the whim of rich airheads”

The BOV must be high on its own supply. He could ~*~literally~*~ be the best person for the job and this sham of a search has tainted it. Though, again, given that he said yes, the idea that he's good at making decisions is called into question. www.chronicle.com/article/amid...

Maria has been accused over the years of fabricating her story that she had gone to the FBI. After finding the document in the trove, I called her. She broke down in tears. “I’ve waited 30 years. I can’t believe it. They can’t call me a liar anymore.” www.nytimes.com/2025/12/19/u...

Stefanik is a soulless careerist so this speaks volumes about the GOP's prospects in 2026/28.