Happy Halloween

15 million Americans are going to lose their health care.

If you've never been to any kind of community music making event, I guarentee it will restore your faith in humanity. (And maybe inspire you to fairly compensate music educators 🙃)

It's paying off though. Most of the students who chose my medium/heavy AI track are discovering that the technology is extremely limited.

It's funny to me that this has basically led to a search for "is there a culture group that does not do this?" and so far the answer seems genuinely to be "no".

Jesus Christ if you don’t want to live next to people who speak a different language why on earth is it incumbent on those people and not you to go somewhere else

I will never forgive generative AI for making me question every “Dog being silly” compilation. Like how bad does does something have to be to suck the joy out of dogs being idiots.

The amount of time I've spent trying to at least semi-ethically account for LLMs in my classes with minimal support is soul-crushing.

It drives me absolutely mad when people say the way to get elected is to … take popular positions. This is the genius of people who ran for class president on a platform of longer recess. Unless being elected is an end in itself, this answers nothing.

Two pieces of advice to aspiring academics: -Be specific. -Write in a straight line. Once you've mastered that, you're 80% of the way there.

My gut feeling is that "people overworked and tired" accounts for 90% of what appears to be apathy.

I’m not a Trekkie but I’ve done enough basic research into the Star Trek fandom to know women basically invented it, and are why the show even continued to exist. This kind of writing is part of institutional sexism that denies women’s accomplishments and role in history and it infuriates me

I knew Busby Berkeley was due to make a comeback! youtu.be/IsXf6a_X7Lo?...

Seriously. It becomes at least 50% funnier in fullscreen.

Fortunately, I'm careful with my social media feeds so I don't see a lot of this kind of thing. But this is still pretty funny.

the aws outage should be evidence that running half the internet on a single company's servers is a terrible idea but i fear nothing will change

Randall Munroe once noted that more Californians than Texans voted for Trump and more Texans than New Yorkers voted for Harris.

For Tolkien fans, a timely passage for No Kings Eve, from WH Auden’s review of Lord of the Rings.

As Churchill said of the US in general: it turns out American institutions of higher education can be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.

I want social media to 1) let me keep up with far away friends and family 2) help me keep up with developments in my field and 3) be a place where I can share interesting things I read and read what other people find interesting.

15 years ago the NYT and every other provost insisted MOOCs were the hotness. Today it’s the machine that cannot accurately tell me basic historical facts or reliably tabulate a spreadsheet.

"Jewish Americans told us —by a margin of nearly 3 to 1— that Trump manipulates antisemitism dishonestly, using it as an excuse to pause or cut university funding. Only about one-fourth of all Jews nationwide believe the president “truly cares about protecting Jewish students on college campuses.”"

Quite a few of these kids are also somehow occupying adult positions of import within the Republican Party.

Not usually a fan of Lacan, but I found this essay very compelling.

Whenever anyone says how much of the U.S. economy is tied to AI right now, I'm like...damn, what if a single rich person had any idea other than "try to zero out labor costs through theft."

Oh shit, ANTIFA is suiting up

Please read

Or how about a public one!

As Trump declares war on American cities, just remember that this is because of the left and cancel culture.

I think it’s very interesting how emphatically these conversations are about inevitability—it’s time, it’s happening, like it or not, and in particular, a sense of: “You have to.” When it comes to treating an AI product as a person, I assure you that I do not have to. And you do not have to.

I sure hope the ADL is proud that they stuck up for Elon Musk when he did a Nazi salute back in January.

No. Your friends don't secretly hate you. You're just dehydrated.

Talk Of Fascism Dangerous, Warns Ministry Of Compliance

Every NYT or Atlantic campus culture screed should be prefaced by the author’s credentials, including the precise number of days since they last taught or studied in a college classroom. I am not kidding.

I VOLUNTEER AS TRIBUTE!

The night of Trump's first inauguration, I went to a midnight screening of this film.

Everyone is always willing to throw someone else's rights under the bus for the sake of "getting along.'

As usual with this issue, Harris is calling for a compromise that already exists. Every sporting body has standards for how long athletes must be on hormones before they can compete as women. The problem isn’t that we’re ignoring ‘reasonable concerns,’ the problem is that republicans are lying.

It's not just that they assume it looks like 20th-century totalitarianism. They assume it looks specifically like Germany.

Yeah, if you're feeling that level of despair, do yourself and everyone else a favor and log off. I'm going to start blocking the doomers outright.

Mr Rogers (stay with me) said “look for the helpers.” Are these posters helping you to see the political landscape of our world clearly? Or are they intentionally causing you distress? Are they telling you that your situation is hopeless, that nothing can be done, that your power is gone?

American Jews are the single most pro-trans rights religious group in the US. forward.com/fast-forward... Meanwhile, the Tikvah Fund, which is getting millions of dollars to represent Jews on campus on behalf of the state, has an explicitly anti-trans agenda and denies trans identities.

Hey trans friends: you're in my thoughts these days. It's been an especially awful news cycle for y'all. Sending love and light your way.

Amazing world we live in when Bill Kristol says something basic about human rights that many leading Democrats wouldn’t dare say.

NEW: @nytimes.com: a senior official said the report from ATF saying the rifle that killed Charlie Kirk "expressing transgender and anti-fascist ideology" had not been verified by ATF, did not match other summaries, and might turn out to have been misread www.nytimes.com/live/2025/09...

This. A reputable news organization would not print this without providing additional detail. Again, we have a case of a major news organization abandoning basic journalistic standards when the reporting is about trans people.

quick, let's convince the tech bros that trans people are actually robots

"no more than one God" , yep

Just once, I'd like someone to ask me to do less with less.