Although Kathryn Bigalow is clearly a great filmmaker, the phrase that kept coming to mind last night while watching A House of Dynamite was “natsec slop.”

Take note of how almost nobody in Europe or Israeli society said a word about how Ben Gvir treats Palestinians who are illegally detained in his fascist prisons. As soon as he records himself doing a tenth of this kind of torture to Europeans, everyone is uproar. Good, but maybe expand the outrage.

Israeli fascist and minister of national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, posted a video of himself on Twitter abusing the illegally kidnaped and detained members of the Global Sumud Flotilla while yelling “Welcome to Israel, we are the owners of the house".

This level of depravity is hard to deal with. Every day there are headlines so disgusting that many people would rather choose to not believe them. And this is after western media ignores most of the injustice that Palestinians face. Imagine the stories we don't even hear.

Washington Post in 1979: U.S. State Dept. found Israeli "abuse during interrogation of arrested Palestinians," including "refrigeration, use of electricity, hanging by the hands or feet, extreme forms of sexual sadism, interrogation accompanied by starvation, enforced sleeplessness"

Just your periodic reminder that #Venmo is a privacy nightmare because its default settings are to make all transactions public, visible to anyone on the internet. You can do a lot of network mapping by knowing who people are paying for rent, childcare, utilities, donations, and everything else!

Now that everyone is praising the New York Times for finally reporting on the sexual abuse of detained Palestinians - after spending months manufacturing consent for genocide - it’s worth remembering which outlets and journalists stayed consistent throughout

Exams week has had a hell of a 24 hours on my university's emergency alert system, after nix since January. Fire and water and bears, oh my!

Great stuff in @equatormag.bsky.social “It would be hard to surpass the absurd spectacle of a Jewish philosopher being blocked from speaking at a German Holocaust memorial because he intended to say that the lessons of “never again” should be applied universally.” www.equator.org/articles/ger...

“Hormuz has made the end of American hegemony imaginable. It has also shown that, perhaps for the first time, the Global South, which stands to gain the most from a different order, possesses the political will and economic tools to begin building it.” www.equator.org/articles/the...

“To gird their bottom lines, investment bankers are prepared to sacrifice one of the last public agencies that physically binds the United States together as a nation.” Good account by Benjamin Fong on why privatizing the postal service wouldn’t work. www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/uns...

Apropos nothing, if you use Google search while logged in, or Chrome while logged in, or YouTube while logged in, but you’re then creeped out by ads that seem to know exactly what you’ve been thinking, then I don’t know what to tell you.

They’re like emergency responders who put on their siren and rush to the scene whenever Black people are trying to get representation

"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...

The article makes points about AI that are salient and true. But also, AI discourse has been doing a lot lately to provide a legibility/intelligibility frame for talking about the kinds of deep cliches that structure syntax and thinking, as described eg by Orwell and parodied by Gaddis.

Our household recently got into Animal Crossing: New Horizons and wow let’s just say I had no idea this game would be all about subject formation via debt peonage. Pretty dark!

These are the 4 things AI can do well: •Clean up your email inbox (badly) •Give my shittiest neighbor (Alan) something to talk about at a party •Tell a 12 yr old to kill himself •Incinerate a school at 10:16 AM on a Tuesday You can see why we need to base our economy around it

Love this though; finally a country that follows the science rather than the hype arstechnica.com/science/2026...

Last Thursday, Cornell President Kotlikoff hit a student and a recent alum with his car. The next morning, he sent a misleading email about the incident to the entire Cornell community. We join Students for a Democratic Cornell in calling for an independent investigations of these actions.

This, the US Supreme Court has explained to us, is what it looks like to finally live in a land free of racial discrimination. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/30/u... South Carolina is 26% black. Louisiana is 33%. Mississippi is 37%.

This week's Canvas jollity reminded me of the excellent hook in Battlestar Galactica's pilot episode: the Galactica survived the initial Cylon attack because its systems weren't fully networked, because its commander was cantankerously old-school.

"the lesson of the present energy shock is unavoidable: the geopolitical conditions that once stabilized the carbon-based logistics of the modern world can no longer be guaranteed, and electrification offers a structural exit from instability." www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/daw...

"The danger of this present moment lies in the fact that while the West’s narrative has collapsed, its capacity for violence remains." www.equator.org/articles/gho...

this is shocking yet true to many of us whose only experience of the world that has shaped our lives is american primacy post 1991 www.equator.org/articles/gho...

Seasonal reminder to my fellow knowledge workers that we can and should support the publishing infrastructure we need. Here are a couple ways:

I was lucky to write the lead article for a special issue of Academe on AI in the Corporate University. In "What does AI do?" I offer a provisional balance sheet of this technology's effects on our work, our finances, and our management, in a moment of rising fascist attacks on higher education.

I don't only think that college should be FREE but I think young people should also receive living stipends while in school. Finally, I do not care what they major in because education needs to actually BE DECOUPLED from a future job. You are welcome. You should have 4 years to study anything.

Here's another option this NYT article doesn't consider: go on strike. Tenants have leverage. Monthly rents are paychecks that corporate landlords and big financial institutions rely on. Just like workers can use their labor as leverage, tenants can do the same with their rent.

"Our students are not wilting flowers. They can handle controversy. They do not need sentimental, cloying nostalgia. They need encouragement to face a flawed and unjust world head on, using the tools we've given them: critical reasoning, careful research, sympathy for the oppressed."

It has been called out ad nauseam but the people who are upset about a professor highlighting the achievements of pro-Palestine activists are the same people who gleefully said that campus was not a "safe space" when we tried to deplatform people like Milo Yiannopoulis and Gavin McInnes.

I suppose mass brain damaging a generation is the logical escalation of existing neoliberal deskilling policy; there's nothing more dangerous than a population of workers who read, think, and communicate, so everything about society must be geared to prevent them from gaining those skills

I think the main reason Israel is suffering from an unprecedented crisis of global negative perception is because Israeli soldiers post photos and videos of themselves doing things like this, and far worse things, every hour of every day, every week, every month of every year for the last 3 years.

This story was broken by The Cornell Sun, which @nytimes.com nowhere cites. As a former editor-in-chief of The Sun — and in the name of brave, amazing college newspapers everywhere — do not treat student journalists as truffle pigs, taking what they've sniffed out without credit or compensation.

“The main arguments against the use of generative A.I. in children’s education are threefold. The first is that L.L.M.s encourage cognitive offloading before kids have done much cognitive onloading“ www.newyorker.com/culture/prog...

it only took seven months from the time bari was announced editor-in-chief of cbs news to 60 minutes started doing nyt-style puff pieces on understanding the nazi next door.

Teachers: "Please help us get AI out of schools, it's ruining education!" Students: "Please don't make us use AI, it's ruining our lives!" Politicians: "We hear you and we want to help you harness the power of AI." #NihilismAndTechnology

Good stuff from Nesrine Malik: www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

There’s a special place in hell reserved for university admins condemning & punishing protests against genocide.

Donald Trump's green new deal My latest column for @financialtimes.com: The US president has inadvertently raised the appeal of renewable energy across the world: as.ft.com/r/ac96a71b-a...

“Reconstruction plans imposed on Palestinians with the implicit aim of destroying Palestinian life in Gaza demonstrate the reason Lemkin reserved a place for architecture in his conception of the crime of genocide.” www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

If you haven’t discovered Radio Garden, it’s a really fun site that allows you to explore any local radio stations all over the world by rotating the map. radio.garden

I know we're overwhelmed by the tide of horrors brought to us daily, but a sentence like this is worth dwelling on, maybe reading aloud.

Yeah get fucked, hypocrite. statements.cornell.edu/2026/2026050...

Cornell’s president is terrible, so if this is what it takes…then that foot just might have struck a greater blow for academic freedom than all university leadership combined.

The president of Cornell backed his car into a student and a recent grad after a campus debate on Israel-Palestine. Then he lied about what happened in an email claiming he'd been the victim of harassment. Then, magnificently, Cornell's student newspaper found a video of the incident

Bet my guy wouldn't have run over a group of consultants telling him Cornell should spend $100 million on AI

“Video footage obtained by The Sun shows Students for a Democratic Cornell members Aiden Vallecillo ’26 and Hudson Athas ’27 being struck by the car. In the video, no person can be seen touching the vehicle before it drove into Vallecillo and Athas.” www.cornellsun.com/article/2026...