Microplastics are here to stay; that's why we need to eat them responsibly in the classroom

One hundred times over, this. I'm all about reading great books, and no one should assume they amount to some kind of indoctrination program. The point is to get students thinking about the big questions, which is what these books excel at. Every college student deserves this.

Eric Adams is going to use cryptocurrency to fight antisemitism. Eric Adams is going to use samurai swords to fight food waste. Eric Adams is going to use 100 rubber duckies to fight prostate cancer. I would believe literally any combo of words hellgatenyc.com/eric-adams-s...

THIS THIS THIS. ALL OF THIS THIS is why faculty resist technological strategies for teaching. There is no engaging with Edtech without this context

“We are all humanists now.”

Semiotic paradox alert!

Among important details picked up by @emptywheel.bsky.social: the pipe bomber started wiping his phone on Dec 15, 2020, one day after a visit to Capitol Hill mentioned in his arrest affidavit, but disappeared from his detention affidavit. www.emptywheel.net/2025/12/28/j...

It’s not just “we decided to name our company after the personification of evil.” It’s also “we decided to name our home security company after the personification of evil who was so vainly proud of his vigilance that he let his home get invaded in the most catastrophic way possible.”

it's sad to see someone wrong on the internet like this. I never thought I would see the day, but here it is.

My review of Ross Douthat's BELIEVE is up at @nybooks.com: www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

Hey, film people: any idea how to stream Evald Schorm's The End of a Priest (1969), [Original title: Farářův konec] in the US?

lol "capitalism"

Me, age 6: How come all the grown-ups in my life are so sad around Christmas? Don't they like presents? Me, age 36: Oh

please let “bugs bunnying” become the slang for manipulating an LLM into ignoring its guardrails, i have never seen a more succinct and evocative term for it

Amazing! It’s the first natural sighting of Elon Musk using irony appropriately! <Pinter pause> Uh, I’m just being told that my interpretation may be incorrect.

The Red Deer Advocate, April 1983. Alberta scientists know about bull trout declines because an Indigenous PhD drop out dedicated his time to researching this species instead of climbing the academic ladder in the 70s. They don’t cite him but his legacy still matters.

“Siri, what’s the best way to keep the Epstein files in the news for the next six months, while also juicing the conspiracy theories?”

The Times should not pretend to be surprised by David Brooks’s proximity to Epstein & the edgelords Epstein sponsored. Brooks was one of them. I originally published this in Wired in 6 years ago.

Evergreen

So when you watch horror pay attention to that: where the threat comes from, who has the knowledge to eliminate that threat, and what the role of Black or Indigenous people are in the story. Sometimes we're invisible, the savage other. Other times we're explicitly present.

tell me more about this “dean in the department”

I know what it’s like to go on the job market and discover that your areas of specialty are not really what people are hiring, but that is not the result of whatever boogie man you’ve imagined, it’s the result of pressures that have effectively throttled academic hiring.

Have you considered reading an excellent short story instead of listening to this horrible speech?

CBS News staffers might want to check into how things are going at their boss’s anti-woke “university” in Austin. Via @ngluckman.bsky.social www.chronicle.com/article/at-t...

please take a moment to appreciate Tesla's epic accomplishment of coming dead last in the auto industry in reliability, despite making relatively expensive cars with a tiny fraction of the moving parts www.consumerreports.org/cars/which-b...

ChatGPT is full spectrum terrible! Gemini is I am very stupid terrible! Grok is fun drunk uncle terrible! Which of these are we supposed to be so scared of??

me to grad students: share your work with each other, talk, exchange ideas! me to me: no one can ever see this draft it's garbage and they'll think i'm garbage and then i'll have to move into a dumpster where i belong

holds up

Insane story about Jack Posobiec threatening a reporter over a Pentagon official's cuckolding books on Goodreads. www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

"Why the Railway Mania is Nothing Like the Tulip Frenzy" by Augustus Reginald Dunshunner and Bob M'Corkindale

"AI is the asbestos in the walls of our technological society, stuffed there with wild abandon by a finance sector and tech monopolists run amok. We will be excavating it for a generation or more." This piece on AI by Cory Doctorow is spectactular. pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/p...

Of course, “scotch tape” has its origins in the same ethnic stereotype.

Shout out to Princeton Sociology. More rigorous than every other discipline besides History lmao.

On Aug 24, 1869, Ohio Rep. John Bingham, principal framer of the 14th amendment, gave a remarkable speech on “Equal Rights-Impartial Suffrage,” in which he said of those who sought to reject the principal of birthright citizenship, “no greater political atrocity than this can possibly be committed.”

Artemy Magun reviews The Democratic Sublime. On Aesthetics and Popular Assembly by Jason Frank

Michaelle Browers reviews Jeanne Morefield's Unsettling the World: Edward Said and Political Theory

Vicki Hsueh on Black Grief/White Grievance: The Politics of Loss by Juliet Hooker

Jeanne Morefield reviews Edward Said: The Politics of an Oppositional Intellectual, by Nubar Hovsepian

Colonial white possessive society (Moreton-Robinson 2015) is always looking for a particle (spokesperson, celebrity) to avoid having to deal with us in our wave-based solidarities and ungovernable collectivities. Celebrity culture is inherently linear, extractive, flat, boring. And easily weaponized

Still working on my book about the pornification of politics . . . but apparently I need to start one on the pornification of 4th grade English. LLMs are destroying education.

Why is nobody asking if Brian Cole, Jr., is already pardoned?

"All is lost" narratives are popular because people generally do not want to take action. Taking action is tiring so if all is lost, you are off the hook. Nothing is more seductive than not having to do anything.

Since this seems to be the week to discuss war crimes, has anyone seen reference to the (historically) first written description of killing shipwrecked sailors as an act contrary to the laws of war? Article 31 in The Rolls of Oléron seems close.

A recap of tonight's special election in TN-07 (plus a WAY-TOO-EARLY model of the 2026 midterms). A swing of 13 points would put Dems over 250 seats in the U.S. House. A more reasonable scenario—say, D+6—still gives them the House, and maybe the Senate. www.gelliottmorris.com/p/what-the-s...

Uh this is surprisingly close

where are my TN 07 obsessives hiding?

For real. In her response video, she takes offense at me saying she denies the reality of dinosaurs and then....immediately denies the reality of dinosaurs.

Oh yeah, at work someone advised me to remove em dashes from something I’d written because it implies AI wrote it. So now this shit between me and AI is fuckin personal