“.. More than 42 million Americans hold student loans.” @cnbc.com www.cnbc.com/2025/12/23/s...

on a brighter note, my Mother's Day meyer lemon tree is bearing fruit.

$50M to Notre Dame for . . . “faith-based” approaches to AI news.nd.edu/news/notre-d...

Congestion pricing for all

Putting this piece of libertarian drivel out there to respond to "no one ever says that zoning reform or regulatory changes can solve homelessness or deeply affordable housing problems by themselves". And for a takedown of such a "take" I would recommend a piece by Alan Mallach (see 2/2 below) 1/2

Which you already knew, and also her saying this on camera, along with her allowing them to share and circulate her shitty paper? (I don’t believe it only took her 30 minutes, actually. She’s trying to play it cool). She’s an absolute tool. In two senses.

"It is going to get so much worse." For the first of two end-of-the-year episodes of @pandemia.bsky.social, I talked to @drdemetre.bsky.social about what happened in 2025 at the CDC and how he thinks about the future of vaccines and public health in the US. A quick 🧪🧵

So in the UK, they'll arrest you for supporting Palestine, and now we find they'll also arrest you for supporting those who support Palestine. If you hold a Free Greta sign, will they arrest you for supporting someone who supports those who support Palestine? British Matryoshka doll-ass fascism.

Oakland Review of Books calendar of (not just) literary events, December 23 - 28: www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org/calendar/

Since I'm learning to write décimas, I made this one about my favorite topic: lazy bears.

While procuring big raises for themselves, these presidents were dismantling entire departments, firing faculty en masse, and signing expensive contracts with the epistemicide company in defiance of shared governance. Abject betrayal of the university mission. www.currentaffairs.org/news/ai-is-d...

$17M for Sam Altman, 20% raises for Cal State presidents, and selling out students by dismantling the university itself.

2025: Web pages vanished. Links broke. Public data disappeared. But the Internet Archive kept the receipts. From investigative reports to video features, these stories show why preserving the web became one of the year’s defining information battles. ➡️ blog.archive.org/2025/12/22/t... 🧵

This is a list of people who are going to have to pay to repair the damage they have done to a historic structure. I would run on that, I would impose that.

The other reason I knew what was coming down the pike re OU and this instructor, was that I’d see this pattern play out so many times over the years I was there. The one thing you could always rely on was that the administration would abandon you or sacrifice you for the Christian right.

Yes. And her paper was shit.

Absolutely shameful. This is a witch hunt: against trans people, against higher education, even against the very foundations of our democracy.

Rahm Emanuel was mayor most of my life growing up in Chicago and his mayoralty was the longest sustained assault on working class communities and communities of color since the era of Boss Daley in the 50s and 60s

Weiss preemptively suppressing nothing new on the grounds that the information is nothing new makes even clearer that it was not self-censorship but an act of competitive ring kissing, which is considerably grosser

A healthy kingdom does not incite rebellion at every opportunity

Bari Weiss still having the temerity to call herself a "centrist" after openly acting as Trumpworld's highly-placed apparatchik & propagandist is exactly why they gave her the roles of highly-placed apparatchik & propagandist.

Since Ioannidis is quoted in Science today, I'd like to share something many of us probably (mercifully) missed. Six months ago he published the most insane under-estimate of Covid mortality averted by vaccination I've seen: 2.5 million deaths globally in 2020-24 jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

OUT: Striesand Effect IN: Weiss Effect

KC is why my folks rooted for the Celtics in the early 80s—whatever their feelings about Boston and Bird 😆 absolute legend

Rick Carlisle, the president of the NBA Coaches Association, on what it will take to get former Celtics head coach K.C. Jones into the Hall of Fame: “A guy that’s obviously very, very deserving…I would think he’s gotta be right there on the list.”

I left my heart in Seattle Franerisco

JOB!!! Jewish Currents is searching for a new Editor in Chief! This is a pretty important role, and I hope there is a diverse applicant pool. Being Jewish is NOT a requirement. As an advisory board member with no say in the hire, I hope especially that those who are POC and/or trans will apply!

Racism is so expensive when they could just gove Black people money directly, lmao. DAH, WELL!

This is why @emilymbender.bsky.social @alexhanna.bsky.social say to name the specific thing rather than calling it "AI". Right now, ChatGPT is bucketed under the same term as a model train to translate one specific language into another and which is carefully trained through curated data.

The smear campaign against Mustapha Kharbouch -- falsely accused of the Brown shooting and MIT murder by powerful politicians, pundits and plutocrats -- is a prime example of how pervasive racism has become. It's also a story largely ignored by the mainstream media www.thenation.com/article/poli...

If my daughter went there I'd never send her back to that school. Look at this statement. This guy needs to be fired and sued and someone needs to check his hard drive. If a 13 year old student tells you, an adult, that boys are sharing naked photos of you and you wave her off, you're the problem.

especially in the dark hours we need to remember that we are going to win

sometimes I think about that time the historian followed conrad’s footsteps in the Congo and referred to herself as white, she also did the whole “colonialism: not so bad, more nuance pls” thing that folks were doing back in the 00s

Americans need to be more aware of the deep rooted conservatism, racism, classism, casteism and model minority complexes of the Indian diaspora, especially the Hindu Indian diaspora. An uncle once told me "count yourself lucky we count as White"

By decree

He so desperately wants to be a real boy

I feel like this one kinda goes way over the head of someone who thinks a machine spits out a summary, but if you read a text for a purpose, you have to read it yourself to decide what's important according to your purpose. There's not one cliffs notes interpretation. There's your interpretation.

😆

The google AI summary of my most famous piece of writing--a thousand word blog post--misunderstands it on a fundamental level. In doing so, it reproduces the way critical yet lazy scholars misunderstood it, by reading the title and filling in what they thought was the most likely meaning.

That was the idea. I don't think Trump et alia thought Americans would side with them. They expected Americans to fear them. Because as we've seen, they are not stopping with immigrants.

I'm not sure Graeber was right in calling half of all jobs “bullshit jobs,” but every job in which the person occupying it doesn’t care about results and isn’t punished for it profits immensely from even bad AI. Those jobs where accuracy matters—and is part of the professional ethos—do not.

I can't imagine a body representing professional historians recommending this, but here we are... It's completely unacceptable. Here are just a few reasons why.

Waymo has halted service in San Francisco after numerous videos & images showed its autonomous cars snarling traffic during the blackout. With traffic lights down, Waymos across the city stopped dead in their tracks at intersections. missionlocal.org/2025/12/sf-w...

Love watching hummingbirds flutter about their business in the rain

The very practical problem of this approach is manifest every time you actually try to do something like this. If you've written a scholarly book or article, go ask a chatbot for a summary. I guarantee it does a poor job, and even includes a bunch of mistakes. But it will do it with such confidence!

The Abundance movement often points to environmental groups as the obstacles to building. But who actually files the lawsuits blocking projects? It’s not environmental groups. It’s been lawyered-up HOAs protecting property values all along. Regulation by litigation is the problem.

Writing is hard. It can feel lonely too, the process itself and then releasing it to the world. That’s why as much as I can, I love giving writers their flowers

USians don’t know how propagandized they are, and the arrogance in U.S. culture helps to hinder people’s ability or willingness to see that.

Please help—in hospital for long-time condition, and rent and bills and job shit all hitting the end-of-year fan. Honestly, I maybe need double what I’m asking. But help me get as close to $2200 as I can as soon as possible—you’d save more than just Christmas. #FundFriday #MutualAid