@wikipedia.org getting spicy today, with the Nuremberg Trials as the featured article of the day on the English-language homepage: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

“Mamdani's coalition are the New Yorkers whom the NYPD kettle, pepper spray, nightstick and shoot, and the NYPD is not going to let that coalition wield power just because it won an election.” Good stuff from @attackerman.bsky.social www.forever-wars.com/mamdanis-nyc...

Been noticing something in the world of children’s books lately: YA novels assigned to 6th graders / 11 year olds are often now in verse, for no evident aesthetic reason. Seems basically like prose with big font and more frequent line breaks. What’s this about?

Of all the distortions of language and sense in this gem from Rubio, somehow his inability to correctly use “ascribe” is funniest. Idiot 🤡

TIRED: using a leaf-blower (noisy, CO2 pollution, you look like an asshole) WIRED: raking the leaves (no emissions, aesthetically pleasing, minor workout) INSPIRED: leaving the leaves where they lie to support fireflies

Question for Germanists (and others)—can anyone recommend good scholarship on the discourse of "die soziale Frage" / "the social question" around 1900ish?

It got overshadowed by the pipeline news, but NYS’s deal to allow Greenidge Generation to keep operating an upstate gas plant *for the sole purpose of mining bitcoin* might be almost as big of a reversal gothamist.com/news/upstate...

The announced integration of AI tools into my uni's LMS (DTL/Dimspace) has accelerated my timeline for no longer using the LMS for my courses. Has anyone broken up with Brightspace/Canvas/etc. and lived to tell the tale? Grateful for lessons learned, suggestions, unexpected consequences!

Fairly horrific article on text scams in the @lrb.co.uk. Next time you get one of those annoying confidence scheme SMSs, consider that the worker sending it might be enslaved, texting you from a forced labor compound in the borderlands of SE Asia. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

bezos somehow made an editorial page worse than the one at the wall street journal

"Grantsmanship" is a cursed word whose existence I've just learned of and one that by rights shouldn't exist.

Peter Coviello isn't on Bluesky, but this definitely should be: lithub.com/maybe-dont-t...

A must read

With a return to the Pliocene locked-in, the only meaningful question is, will we stop there or maintain BAU until a return to the Middle Miocene becomes inevitable or - ultimately - the early Eocene? If the latter, this is what the UK will eventually look like

Nuremburg trials is the moderate position

I absolutely fucking refuse to allow this monstrosity into my classroom. And will not be changing my mind until it is not merrily aiding people into psychotic breaks and death by suicide, and is not administered by technofascists willing to let the world burn

remember all those hot takes during the primary about how Mamdani was the candidate for rich white liberals? a "champagne socialist" ? yeah, about that

Alright now let’s do Schumer next!

All day, many of you have been asking for a Cheney obituary from me. Get ready:

hug your war criminals a little tighter today

Dick Cheney’s legacy is that he turned 9/11 from a national tragedy into a global disaster. He did so through a mixture of arrogance, stupidity and greed and blighted the last quarter century.

“Individuals on the ground sent a message that reached us Monday morning that 1,200 were dead,” Nathaniel Raymond, the lab’s executive director, said. “By that evening, they said 10,000. By Tuesday, we couldn’t reach them anymore. We assume our ground contacts are dead.”

Maybe the thing that gives me a pulse-pounding throbbing headache is when I think of how techbros sold ChatGPT to universities as ‘revolutionizing’ higher education and our institutions just forked over money without even asking for actual evidence

Hell is other people (mowing their lawns).

"If de Waal is anywhere close to right, this conflict will have killed 7.5 percent of the prewar population of Gaza in just two years. It already is, in proportional terms, deadlier than the wars in Yemen, Syria, Sudan and Ukraine."

The whataboutism on Gaza really rankles, especially for those of us who have spent our careers reporting on the crises Israel's defenders cynically invoke as so much worse than Gaza. I wrote about how it actually compares, and what the true toll may be. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/23/o...

Behold the ubermenschen bsky.app/profile/bgru...

Not just bigots; we’re also fucking stupid. That’s the ICE Promise™️

From the Daily Texan, the UT student newspaper: Academic freedom should not be for sale. thedailytexan.com/2025/10/16/a...

white house has joined bluesky click here to block all official us government accounts instantly bsky.app/profile/did:...

BOOM! After over a thousand students, faculty, & workers gathered on campus to demand a rejection of Trump’s bribe, UVA SAYS NO LOYALTY OATH! ✊🏼✊🏿✊🏻✊🏾 M.I.T. ☑️ BROWN ☑️ PENN ☑️ USC☑️ UVA ☑️ This is People Power in Action. #DefendHigherEd

Feeling grateful to be in this space reading really weird shit this week.

ICE kidnapped a 7th-grader with a pending asylum claim and spirited him out of state without notifying his parents, seemingly with the cooperation of the local police in Everett, MA. www.bostonglobe.com/2025/10/12/m...

continuing to develop cautious optimism around kettlebell guy

Important essay on denial from Omer Bartov. www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/world/israel...

Just rewatched Ghostbusters for the first time in maybe 30 years. Completely forgot / never realized that A) it starts at the NYPL B) the Ghostbusters get fired from Columbia C) the EPA is the real enemy

We will need Nuremberg-like trials

“It would be absurd to seek hope in Trump and Trumpism, but perhaps stupidity on such a world-historical level can at least offer an opportunity for “true” understanding. Nothing — markets, bots, or machines — can rescue us, except our imagination.” www.nplusonemag.com/issue-51/pol...

🚨🚨 @utaustin.bsky.social is working to eliminate its Black studies, Latin studies, and gender studies depts -- utterly reneging on its mission and depriving students of the full educational opportunities they deserve. Please--scholars AND publishers--share & write to UT leaders. #SaveUT

"A [...] poll from mid-August found that 43 % of Americans believe Israel is committing genocide. According to a WaPo poll, 61 % of American Jews consider that Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza and nearly 40 per cent think that its conduct amounts to a genocide." www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/oc...

Hey hey, German Studies in the news again!

NEW: David Adler—a Jewish American on the Gaza aid Flotilla—details Israeli detention. At one point, he says, he was forced to his knees for a photo op with the Israeli flag, as Ben Gvir yelled in his face, calling him a terrorist. Says US "hung up" on families of Americans, veterans seeking help.

This is *spectacularly* incoherent gibberish from Louis CK. There's hardly even a recognizable phoneme in any of the quotations from him in this article. www.theguardian.com/culture/2025...

NEW: Extraordinary scenes in Amsterdam this afternoon (Sunday, Oct 5). An estimated 250,000 bring the city to a standstill; people all wearing red to show solidarity with Palestine 🇵🇸 (🎥 Ahmed Zantac)

I said what I said: Kristi Noem should be tried at The Hague for crimes against humanity.

Really shouldn’t be 80° in upstate NY in October! Beneath and above all the acute nightmares of these days, this world-ending catastrophe keeps ticking.

“There’s a baby!” Guns drawn. Windows smashed. With a 1 month old in the car. (They did this as he was coming home from an immigration court appointment— which is illegal in Colorado: coloradosun.com/2025/10/01/i...)

the usual story. rich guy wants to punish universities for not clamping down on pro-palestinian protests and for doing too much to recruit minorities. at base these guys want the top tier of american universities to become, once more, safe-spaces for their dunderheaded failsons