@uofcalifornia.bsky.social systemwide Academic Council today: "There can be no clearer attack on academic freedom than [Trump's] attempt to dictate curricular content, research priorities, hiring decisions, & admissions standards." senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/repor...

Creating genealogies of compliance and posting on a website Friday afternoon does not bode well... www.universityofcalifornia.edu/press-room/u...

Meanwhile, student journalists at USC. www.uscannenbergmedia.com/2025/10/01/u...

I thought higher ed journalism should at least be aware of the fate of higher ed. Rufo on this cover looks like Ryan Gosling, in tasteful sepia, when he's actually the hatchet in chief. With friends like these...

The amazing, powerful and charming Kaji Meiko at the Egyptian for screenings of Lady Snowblood. She sang an entire song, a cappella!

ugh, my Nakagami book is in there...listed as not an education work whatever that is...🤒 sounds like people will get some notice of the class action suit, which should have a "Unique #' to keep track of it...

This is a great award—basically, to recognize people who promote collective work & make it happen. Nominate sanyone you may know who routinely does this kind of work, or has a project-based approach where they have really elevated others & collaboration... asianstudies.wufoo.com/forms/2026-s...

Since the Ezra & Ta-Nehisi discussion is still happening: the main point I think most are missing is that Klein is saying the role of the journalist-intellectual is to do strategic politics, whereas Coates says the role of the journalist-intellectual is to tell the truth

this is a fascinating (161pp) read--the suit brought by AAUP chapters, the AFT, and the Middle East Studies Assoc. It has epigraphs and is written in Courier...worth it for the info design as well as contents, a rather distinctive document.

It wasn't enough that he left us a wealth of outstanding work of his own to seed future scholarship, y'all. He wanted to fund yours too. Bless his soul. Please apply!

Our new plan is to rob everyone unless you come to us and specifically asked to not be robbed. But if we don't hear from you, it's your fault for not telling us you don't want to be robbed!

You could give this man an existential crisis by showing him the bottom half of a muppet

audience was apparently largely too young to know this song, but Jarvis Cocker (Pulp) and Nancy Whang (LCD) do a bangup, slightly glitchy, cover of fellow Sheffield band (and early MTV stars, at least on my TV) Heaven 17 "We Don't Need No Fascist Groove Thang."

I made this glossary of Speech Genres in Academia, for my professionalization class. It's genres of writing/speaking that a grad student encounters in their early years--stuff and docs you have to read, write, produce. See what you think, and feel free to comment... docs.google.com/document/d/1...

The fallout over a sexual assault accusation has led to a major split in Japan's biggest student movement throwoutyourbooks.wordpress.com/2025/09/24/z...

On how Hollywood is a real neighborhood (I sublet a place there this year for a few weeks, and grew to like it, and know its rhythms and everyday daily life a bit), and Jimmy Kimmel, who lived there. Another chapter in this admin working to throttle LA.

TIL, from a physicist, that "quarks" came from Finnegan's Wake! Chanda Prescod-Weinstein's The Disordered Cosmos: "Here is how physicists use it [nomenclature]: “my faves, the quarks, get their name from a line in Irish modernist writer James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, ‘Three quarks for Muster Mark!’”

You have shit like Disney/ABC getting blindsided by the backlash to the Jimmy Kimmel suspension because they thought suspending him would be broadly popular because that's what Twitter was saying Everyone with power is addicted to fucking Twitter

A personal archive is great, but it is not the same thing as an LLM! For sure tech deference is part of McConaughey's longing, but also a Very Precious Model of a certain kind of Renaissance Man. People have holed up in studies for centuries musing over their legacies. There's a great book about it

this exists it is called thinking

"Remember, Los Angeles is also on the hook for Olympic overruns. The Convention Center bill starts coming due the very same year we could be forced to absorb those Olympic overages." I asked Yaroslavsky for her prepared remarks because I felt they captured this particular moment in LA so perfectly

Facing a proposed $1.2-billion fine and severe medical research grant cuts at UCLA, the University of California has not gone head-to-head with Trump in court. So on Tuesday, groups representing more than 100,000 of its employees did. www.latimes.com/california/s...

And vinyl. All the things that gave lonely men in the eighties small communities and feelings of smug superiority save lives.

Good for them.

“Did you consider not complying with this request?” Judith Butler spoke to @samtlevin.bsky.social about being reported to the feds by UC Berkeley for supposed antisemitism

UC Berkeley has given the Trump administration the names of 160 students, faculty, and staff as part of an investigation into antisemitism on campus. One of them is Judith Butler. www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/arti...

Schools can be easily modeled, so are captive audiences for this kind of shoving tech down their throats. Crazy edtech, leading to crazy military.

Yikes, the article compares the volume of censorship to the MacArthur--ie Occupation--era. Not good! "In the US" is true, but most of these on the list are Tennessee 2024...wonder what's up? A smattering of TX, MO, FL as well... source seems to be the Everylibrary institute... interesting site!

Readers have long been frustrated by Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken". Thanks to AI, it is now possible to explore BOTH of the paths described by the speaker

"Harvard can't use race as a factor in admissions, but ICE can use race as a factor in detentions" is a retrenchment essentially to a pre-Civil War understanding of the Constitution. It's vanishingly few steps removed from "Latinos have no rights which the white man is bound to respect."

I truly miss my sub-$200 Huawei phone (bought in Japan, lasting 5+ years). It's a scandal you have to pay 7, $800 for a communications device, then load it up with features you don't really want, to "get some use" out of it. My bill (in 2019) was like 3200 yen/month, like $20, for the same features.

I dunno, should Tickle Me Elmo get legal rights whlie we're at it

I was kinda hoping for a trial, but a slap on the wrist might send a signal. Writers in the pool of pirated things can still sign up as part of the action...I did not know Anthropic was Amazon--yikes!

this poor dude...these Occupation drug laws make Reefer Madness look like a love letter. "TBS announced that it is working toward editing out Shimizu's scenes from the program in light of the news." and the Suntory chief who had to quite because...gummies? whatever "supplements w cannabis" is...

I think a not insignificant # of tech decision-makers pushing AI and visual culture in this vein (some I know & care about!) have trouble reading, themselves. And the "solution" is that they would that prefer the rest of the world watch (celebrity?) videos whose form and pricing they can control.

I started reading the list of Bucknell English dept faculty. I don't think I know any irl or on here but every single bio lists a current book project or a/many published book/s--expected, presumably, for tenure. Will Bucknell--upon closing Bucknell UP--stop expecting their own fac to publish books?

I'm aware that the President likes to go on television and beg me to call him to ask for troops. I find it strange, as Chicago doesn't want troops. I also have experience asking him for assistance – just to have the rug pulled up from underneath me when execution meets reality.

the afterlife of Nakagin tower...nothing if not modular!

I think this is a special fantasy of the managerial class. Hard pressed to think of real machine-users who harbor illusions of their chain saw, deep fryer, truck, sewing machine etc. (ok maybe synthesizers...) becoming "sentient." Also the curse of epistemology over material that steers so much SF.

wow, this includes Middlebury's Monterey language institute, Clark (where Freud first landed in the US), and many many more...a sobering tally.

What if they not letting Trump speak because he had a Reverse Fetterman Stroke and hes woke now

I can

Went to see this amazing space in the "flesh." In the Richmond, a former Christian science church. Anyone can take a tour on a Friday, and see servers humming, hear about open access and digitizing practices, and get treated maybe to ice cream and talks by visitors from Europe.

I don't really care if broke-ass students or people without library access take my work, but Anthropic, nope. Search your stuff and submit a claim to find out if you are part of the settlement for "training" AI on your work without your permission or even knowledge...

I got the complaint in the horrific OpenAI self harm case the the NY Times reported today This is way way worse even than the NYT article makes it out to be OpenAI absolutely deserves to be run out of business

She makes this point about newly formed AI super PAC but the same might be said about crypto lobby. After the FTX collapse and SBF trial, crypto was cooked. Only massive buying of votes revived it. Not surprised a scholar of 1830s-1840s France noted this. It's true "puffery" (and a v big bubble).

the last days of the Ruth Asawa show in SF--here's a walking tour through outdoor installations. I'll likely be there, am seeing the show Friday...LMK if you want to coordinate~

a mystery to me why in 2025 in the era of Unicode rōmaji (Roman alphabet) transliteration of JPN words still rules. If you don't know what アリスは如何に創られなければならないか is, for instance, arisu wa ikani tukuranakerebanaranaika is not gonna help you. You can't even usefully plug rōmaji into Google translate!

I don't think the spice bag has hit the US bigtime yet, but it sure hits all the notes--mala spice, fried, fries, available for takeout. Has anyone come across it around LA, or anywhere really? I see poutine pretty much everywhere, so thought it was an interesting oversight...