For an ongoing ed activity in our peer writing center, mentors met in pairs to discuss this post. Here are the discussion prompts we used--please use and adapt as you like! marksheaappliedlinguistics.com/2025/11/19/g...

"Julio" is pruning orange tree in Fresno CA. "I earn min wage and work 7 hrs a day. I get very tired. I'm working from my knees a lot of the time and I need to cut thick trunks so my hands hurt. But this work is necessary so there will be a good harvest next season. #WeFeedYou

"Val" sent us this video of where she would normally be pruning almond trees saying, "The rainy season has arrived in the San Joaquin Valley. This means we aren't able to work. Without this salary we are worried that we won't be able to pay our rent or buy food." #WeFeedYou

Workers in the Soledad area are harvesting celery. These workers often develop chronic back pain due to the repetitive motion. "Raul" shares, "We don't have time to rest or stand for more than two or three seconds." #WeFeedYou

"Julio" shares: wine harvesting work is very meticulous. The quality of the finished wine is determined by the condition of the grapes we pick. We need to carefully get rid of the leaves without damageing the grapes. Our skill produces great tasting wine. #WeFeedYou

"Marie" sent us this photo saying: "Here we are harvesting sweet potatoes in Merced County CA. We begin working at 4am. It is hard to see at this hour as we sort the potatoes and distinguish their size and shape just using lamps." #WeFeedYou

take a moment, close your eyes, inhale deeply, exhale, and then imagine hearing "livvy" in RFK jr's voice

"Eri" sent this pic saying, "There's a cold rain here in Soledad CA, but we're still out in the field harvesting broccoli, so families across the country can eat. Farm workers deserve dignity, protection and respect for our work." #WeFeedYou

"Martin" is cultivating young lettuce plants in Gonzalez CA. His skilled work allows the soil to better utilize water so the lettuce grows larger and fuller. #WeFeedYou

Musk: i reada da frankenstein Mary Shelley: motherfucker Shelley: you better not get this one wrong Shelley: i literally could not spell it out any more obviously Mus: itsa about how meddling in da domain ova god is good! Shelley: MOTHER Shelley: FUCKER

The funniest thing happening in Houston is that the personal injury Pusch-Nguyen has broken up in spectacular fashion,and Pusch replaced Nguyen with a guy named Wynne.

Since I read @gretchenmcc.bsky.social and @superlinguo.bsky.social on lingcomm last year, I’ve been keeping an eye out for examples of curiosity in public discourse. This is nice one (McCulloch and Gawne link in reply)

"Tomas" shared this video from Madera County, CA. "The almond harvesting season is ending, but right now there is still work. We are paid minimum wage to chop up the trees that fell or broke due to the weather or the shaker machines." #WeFeedYou

For any unfamiliar with the quality of journalism at Teen Vogue, it's well known for hard-hitting stories on "politically sensitive" topics including climate. Then there's CBS: the only major network to increase climate coverage in the last few years. They just axed nearly their whole climate team.

For the record, Melissa's main targets of Jamaica, Haiti, Cuba, and the Bahamas account for, respectively, 0.016%, 0.0089%, 0.064%, and 0.0038% of the global annual total of CO2 emissions.

I feel validated and also this just made me hate the iPhone EVEN MORE

"Joaquin" shared this pic from where he is harvesting olives in Tulare County. He earns $6.50 per bucket. “This is my 1st season and I find the work dangerous as I continuously need to go up and down a ladder rapidly to harvest the olives." #WeFeedYou

"He screams about you in his sleep ..." - a perfect spooky season interpretation of a classic that was already a little on the spooky side

As the bull market turns 3 years old and becomes ever more concentrated in a handful of companies building a speculative technology, the Trump administration is systematically removing guardrails in every major risk category. Fun. www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/fragility-...

Why do so many French words end in a silent x? ‘Cheveux’, ‘voix’, ‘paix’, ‘deux’, ‘mieux’, ‘faux’, ‘doux’ – the list is endless. There’s a fascinating story behind this x’s – or actually two stories. Click and zoom in on my new graphic to read about medieval abbreviations and imitating Latin:

I just put online the chapter from my book that talks about all the myths and mysteries about QWERTY and Dvorak. You can read it here: aresluna.org/the-primitiv...

Tonight’s dumb napkin cartoon…

This is a terrible take, starting with the assumption that models based on *text* accurately reflect Language, snd that Language itself is an amodal, arbitrary, symbolic system, which it’s not. Language is inherently multimodal and polysemiotic, and text is not natural language production

In 1965, the government recruited thousands of strapping high-school boys to replace Mexican workers on farms in Texas and California. A lot of the boys went on strike. Others quit. The program "was considered a giant failure and was never tried again." www.npr.org/sections/the...

Every time I see something like this, I am reminded of a talk I gave where one of the other speakers was a researcher who claimed that his AI/ML algorithm could accurately read emotions based on an fine-grained analysis of someone's speech patterns. /1

Stock videos of people eating in reverse

@prisonculture.bsky.social and I have been encouraging people to read chapter six of our book, Let This Radicalize You, which deals with the question of "violence" in social movements. We have decided to share the chapter publicly, to offer some context and grounding for the current conversation.

THREAD. A lot of attention is rightly going to Medicaid cuts and other very bad things in Trump's bill passed by the House, but there's something else that isn't getting enough attention, that is very difficult to find in any news coverage, but that will fundamentally alter life for all of us.

Raul shared this pic with us of an orchard after they labored to put the nets over the citrus trees. The nets ensures the flowers are not pollinated by the bees. Because of this hard work kids across America get to enjoy seedless mandarin oranges in their lunch box. #WeFeedYou

A report from the scene of a horrifying kidnapping on the streets of Worcester, MA today by @billshaner.bsky.social www.welcometohellworld.com/they-dont-ne...

"You know, as an example, red lead was used to make cheddar... A can of coffee could be coffee, but it could be ground bone, or charred shells, or dirt." Deborah Blum on our bad food past -- and how to avoid it being our future: buttondown.com/theswordandt...

ERIC database is being shut down. I hope someone somewhere is archiving its contents now—but one comfort is that much in it was published in hard copy. But that's only comforting if libraries haven't pulped old journals... (Still time to download stuff!) www.governing.com/policy/major...

“Please, think about how long every hour feels for a third grader in a detention center. The wait had already been too long a week ago.”

Planting lettuce requires precise work. A machine carrying 4-6 persons will drop the seedlings into pre dug holes in each row but there is a farm worker who follows behind to esnure the plants are grounded and also to catch any missed holes. #WeFeedYou

Parents of cis children who object to trans children in sports are also teaching their kids a piss poor lesson about how to lose with grace and how to recognize where we have strengths and where we do not They are literally undercutting their kids, while attacking other kids. Fucking losers

And somehow it’s never the people wringing their hands about young men’s lack of masculine role models who post this amazing shit.

It's my spring break, and I'm gathering some thoughts on the Constructed Languages course I'm currently teaching. Here's a post on how @riacheyne.bsky.social essay on "Created Languages in SF" has helped our class discussions of Delany's Babel-17 marksheaappliedlinguistics.com/2025/03/17/u...

Confusing or misleading 5-calls info? It says the senate rejected house CR, but the link just takes you to Schumers 3/12 statement—it’s not about a vote that happened

Aside from the obvious direct harm, what's so irritating is that a handful of spoiled ignorant assholes are breaking things that we all built together. They weren't content to own almost everything, they had to wreck what little they didn't own. It's vandalism on a mass scale and has to be punished

The Alphabet in Alphabetical Order. Aich (H) Arr (R) Ay (A) Aye (I) Bee (B) Dee (D) Djee (G) Double-you (W) Ee (E) Eff (F) El (L) Em (M) En (N) Ess (S) Ex (X) Jay (J) Kay (K) Kew (Q) Oh (O) Pee (P) See (C) Tee (T) Vee (V) Wye (Y) You (U) Zed/Zee (Z) Source www.goines.net/Writing/the_...

A good endowment and research cost explainer: open.substack.com/pub/donmoyni...

Look up the climate and infrastructure projects in your neighborhood funded under Biden! Within a 20 mile radius of my ZIP code, there is $432,251,261.99 😯 invested in projects that'll make my city and county better! grist.org/accountabili...

A quick resistance task: 1. Google Gulf of Mexico 2. “Gulf of America" is the top 3. Click on the three little dots to the right of it 4. Select "Send Feedback" 5. Click on "Gulf Of America" 6. Select "Inaccurate content" 7. Select "Incorrect" and type in "The correct name is “Gulf of Mexico"

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold

Watch a uvula in slow motion thanks to The Slow Mo Guys: @slowmoguys https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWgfFYCAsX8 (L)

I highly recommend catching @mixedlinguist.bsky.social on March 1st, giving a talk to the International Linguistics Association about her super interesting and timely research on the biases inherent in speech technology. www.ilaword.org/lectures

Listen, Broligarchy is not some cute synonym for oligarchy. It's genuinely different & WAY more dangerous. I'm a sociologist who's been studying the ultra-rich globally for 17 yrs, entering their world as an offshore wealth mgr. Published 2 books abt them. 🧵Broligarchs are distinct in 3 ways:

The NYT asked me to write an op-ed on Musk and the Treasury and then took a pass. I hope it will still get read.