BREAKING: Following the American threat of an “Avignon Papacy,” Robert Kennedy has begun a Diet of Worms

Neoliberal Consensus: College should be about ROI Humanists: Um, no NC: Sorry yes Humanists: Ok your premise is flawed but also humanists have really strong ROI data and have for decades. NC: We're pivoting to AI www.startribune.com/what-should-...

So many things are awful these days, much of academic life included. Which makes it really worth saying that today, I get to spend the morning carefully reading a rich, rewarding text, and the afternoon discussing it with bright, passionate, highly motivated students. This job can still be great.

friend, this is Marcus Junius Brutus CAESAR has declared himself DICTATOR FOR LIFE and MUST BE STOPPED can you rush a donation of ten denarii today to show that you STAND WITH THE REPUBLIC?

Sociological theory thread! Jason Furman is in the NYT today arguing that we get Adam Smith wrong, and if we got him right, our capitalist system would work better. I agree with Furman on the premise, but I think he also gets Smith wrong. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/09/o...

Sociological theory thread! Jason Furman is in the NYT today arguing that we get Adam Smith wrong, and if we got him right, our capitalist system would work better. I agree with Furman on the premise, but I think he also gets Smith wrong. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/09/o...

Come you masters of war…

In order for kids to walk to school and bus stops safely tomorrow the sidewalks and street corners need to be cleared. Let’s all do our part to clear them so kids don’t walk in the street! And please slow down while driving. The snow banks make it hard to see kids trying to cross!

“Everyone thinks universities have to do what donors want because they pay the bills. But that gets it backward, and not just at Hopkins.” I highly recommend reading this piece. www.publicbooks.org/the-misuses-...

Fabulous thread. Reading : writing :: proper fueling : athletic endurance

If you ever wanted to know how to define Christian nationalism, I got you. This business with @jamestalarico.bsky.social and @colbertlateshow.bsky.social has got people wondering. kettering.org/five-element...

It's also still impossible to safely travel on foot from Chandler to May on Park, on either side of the road. Nearly three weeks after the storm, the city still hasn't enforced the law. I'm sure there are dozens of other examples. It's outrageous.

Ahem.

The admin can't achieve its aims absent compliance from Congressional Republicans, federal judges, GOP-led state gov'ts, and media, corporate, and civil society institutions. The weaker he appears, the more incentive/permission they have to stop complying in first small, then hopefully larger ways.

Five classes from college (that I still think about at least weekly): - Liberation Theologies (religious studies) - Politics of Suburbanization (poli sci) - The World of Bede (history) - Religion in American Culture (religious studies) - Class, Power, and Inequality (sociology)

Another proud Carleton alum here. Our alma mater shows other schools how things should be done in so many ways (from incredible teaching and curriculum to kickass outdoor broomball), and here's maybe the most important of all.

With apologies for the self-promotion, if you're interested in learning about how faith leaders built the network that this clergy and religious resistance grew out of, I have just the book for you! uncpress.org/978146967316...

With apologies for the self-promotion, if you're interested in learning about how faith leaders built the network that this clergy and religious resistance grew out of, I have just the book for you! uncpress.org/978146967316...

Call me Ishmael.

This is a great idea. If you're teaching a sociology class in the Twin Cities and you need a guest lecture, hit me up. Theory, urban soc, social movements/political soc, and religion are my teaching strengths, but I can do other things too if needed.

exceptional article, I think this gets at the heart of why Minneapolis is such a target for the Trump admin even above & beyond other liberal American cities

I am calling for a complete and total boycott of the Mercator projection in all news stories about Greenland until every member of the American public has seen this

Sociologists: I'm looking for an undergrad-friendly reading that introduces and applies Alexander and Smith's cultural semiotics in an engaging way. Any suggestions?

Worcester folks- if you see that today ICE acted with impunity and lied about, I hope you also see that in May on Eureka St that the same thing happened. Renee Nicole Good was fighting for her neighbors just as @etelhaxhiaj.bsky.social was. We pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.

"The bourgeoisie apotheosized the sword; the sword rules it ... it imposed a state of siege; a state of siege is imposed upon it." - Marx, 18th Brumaire

"I refuse." This is it. There's no reason we should accept a narrative of an already settled future which marginalizes humans and individual agency. No one wants this. No one asked for it.

For anyone worried AI will replace all of us. Courtesy of Gemini for the prompt “create an infographic of all the World Series winners since 1986” I dare you to find 10 things that are right.

If you need a good thing on the internet today, try this one. I've only replayed it about 30 times this morning. www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9Jj...

Convincing my students that we should be paying politicians more rather than less, drawing on Weber's Politics as a Vocation, is one of my favorite parts of every theory course I teach.

It was an honor to be part of a conversation on Shifting Terrain covering how capitalism and Christianity are linked, resistance to Christian Nationalism, and more. Also ft. @profsamperry.bsky.social & @msjeannelewis.bsky.social. Listen below! nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com?url=https%3A...

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

Many social movements in American history have emerged from religious groups and religious ideals. "Social Movements and Religion in American History," an ARDA college-level learning module, examines the history of movements in the United States by using religion as a lens.

Facts and empirics cannot pierce today's conservative information world. As I explain here, it's part of a broader division between fundamentally secular-modernist thinking on the left and mythic-religious thinking on the right. DM for a copy if you need. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

It’s miller park like its staples center. I don’t acknowledge the name change and neither should u

Totally, completely flabbergasted. #MacFellow hub.jhu.edu/2025/10/08/h...

This NYT podcast on the cratering of coding jobs is an advertisement for a liberal arts education. Don't train for today's jobs b/c they might not be there tomorrow. Develop enduring critical thinking skills that allow you to adapt to an evolving world www.nytimes.com/2025/09/29/p...

Happy to share this little piece I wrote for Contemporary Sociology on religion and secularism in Trump's re-election: journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1...

Great thread on writing as thinking. Your LLM can't do this for you. And verb your nouns, folks! Put the action of your arguments into verbs, not nominalizations!

This summer, I developed an AI Policy and Contract for my courses. After incorporating feedback from lots of students, here's the final version. I'm sharing it here in case others would like to adapt it for their own use. Please feel free to adapt and use it. docs.google.com/document/d/e...

The University of Minnesota, Morris provides an amazing liberal arts experience and learning environment that equals or exceeds MN's private liberal arts colleges at a 1/3 or 1/4 of the price. Stop prioritizing 70k/yr institutions. Check out places like Morris! www.startribune.com/university-o...

all the way off

WaPo: We've killed our independence and objectivity, please like our owner NYT: Trump Making Amazing Deals, White House Says; Mamdani Late 4 Times in 6th Grade CBS: We'll censor things you dislike, here's millions of dollars, please let our parent do a merger WSJ: BREAKING: TRUMP-EPSTEIN LETTER!

Andrew Cuomo is afraid he'll lose, so his donors want you to fear me. His SuperPAC just sent out a mailer that artificially lengthened and darkened my beard. This is blatant Islamophobia—the kind of racism that explains why MAGA billionaires support his campaign.

At this point, I would suggest as a general rule that the greater the embrace of this kind of approach to generative AI, the less invested the institution is in students actually learning something or having genuinely meaningful experiences. Students beware. www.nytimes.com/2025/06/07/t...

Co-sign every word of this. I will not use AI in any aspect of my work: teaching, research, or service. Not to write emails or build schedules, not to transcribe interviews or code field notes, not to review manuscripts, and certainly never to assess student work.

New research from me and @profsamperry.bsky.social in @sfjournal.bsky.social finds the more Americans affirm Christian nationalist views the more likely they are to oppose taxation across a range of measures, with findings consistent across multiple datasets. Why might this be?

I told ChatGPT that I wanted to be a philosopher as a kid. And then it said that I was a DEI hire?!?!!?? God, we are fucked.