Google defaulting all Gmail users to a setting that enables Google to harvest all your emails into chatbot training is straight-up evil and invasive. www.huffpost.com/entry/opt-ou...

PSA: take your turkey out of the freezer, kittens.

I’m going to show this article to my students next semester, get them to read it, get mad, then say ‘now swap lecturers for students in the story’. Get in losers, we’re developing empathy

Good morning everyone! Democracy Docket v. Washington Post.

First trial of a vaccine against lung cancer will be starting soon. #ShareGoodNewsToo www.cancer.ox.ac.uk/news/world20...

Had a great time consulting with the “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” team over the past couple months, and they kindly gave my book a shoutout during the episode.

mr president sir theres a story coming about how you intervened to help a sex criminal. no sir, not that sex criminal you helped….no not that one either…sir, please stop guessing sex criminals that you helped. ill give you a hint sir, hes a trafficker. no sir, not that trafficker a different one

New issue of Studies in Late Antiquity Vol. 9, No. 4 (2025) online.ucpress.edu/SLA/issue/9/4 Paleoscience and the Study of Late Antiquity @ucpress.bsky.social @janetekay.bsky.social @shakenbeck.bsky.social @r-c-jackson.bsky.social

So, no, what I wrote above isn’t actually about owning this schmuck on the grounds of “AI” actually having the power to eliminate jobs. As I’ve said time and again, “AI” is merely a permission structure for antilabor decisions that businesses wanted to make in the first place.

Here’s a kitten in a box that’s too small for him if anyone needs it.

Maybe it's minor, maybe it's not, but there are social media posts about my scholarship that are clearly using AI-generated summaries, which COMPLETELY MISREPRESENT WHAT I HAVE WRITTEN. And because they're being shared on social media, those misrepresentations are getting magnified.

As this is reported, you’ll hear “UCLA won,” and every time you hear that I want you to remember WHO TF UCLA IS

again, I beg ppl to not frame war in venezuela as some sort of effort to distract from the epstein files. Trump likes the idea of a strong US military murdering people on his whim. he's made this very clear.

that thing where talking to smart people makes you smarter — more of that please

“Market intelligence firms that assist institutions with optimizing degree offerings often identify small interdisciplinary programs as an asset. These data…have increasingly led firms to question strategies such as cutting small programs simply because they are small.”

📢 Hope our colleagues across the country recognize—just as with Texas’s ban on DEI in higher education—this will NOT remain in Texas. What is happening here is a blueprint for the rest of the country.

If you have to get permission to teach in your area of expertise from people who are definitionally not qualified to adjudicate your expertise then you are no longer working at a university. You’re working at a state propaganda factory.

"Morals are bad because they won't help your cause," an article by someone who hates your cause and wants your cause to fail.

Kevin Hassett on the October jobs report: "We'll maybe be able to concoct something, but we'll never actually know for sure what the unemployment rate was in October."

Hannity: When did you notice Biden’s cognitive decline? Miller: I think it was through all of the times that Trump has fallen asleep in public and talked about magnets getting wet.

We started Indivisible in 2016 because a future Trump appointee was talking about the WWII Japanese internment camps as a model for immigrants at the same time that Schumer was talking about finding common ground with Trump.

It begins. Clearly incriminating evidence against president of the United States. Epstein to Maxwell, April 2, 2011: "i want you to realize that that dog that hasn't barked is trump. [VICTIM] spent hours at my house with him ,, he has never once been mentioned. police chief. etc."

NEW: Trump’s crackdown on immigrant work visas is spurring a Wall Street hiring boom … *in India.* www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

Good news from Germany. A court has ruled in favor of the music industry in its legal battle against OpenAI, saying that the company has violated copyright laws.

Every week is Watergate.

Regular reminder that Axios stories saying Dems are about to cave are likely sourced from GOP staffers trying to make it happen. Doesn't mean it definitely won't happen. But it's like those NYT stories that Harvard is considering caving (they haven't). The anonymous source was trying to manifest it.

Posting a photo of Ceausescu’s bathroom for no apparent reason.

Axios tried to bust James Talarico for following adult content creators on Instagram and I'm genuinely impressed by his campaign's response

Republicans: we're going to privatize on base commissaries, and mess halls to bring innovation and efficiency to military life. Also Republicans: we're not going to pay our bills/contracts so then the private companies stop feeding our military and their families

Days without a federal judge finding DHS/ICE/CBP/FPS lies: 0

Flaws and glitches are minor concerns easily dismissed. Being “mid” is fine because someone can promise this will get less mid and plenty of people are willing to believe. GenAI isn’t mid. It’s linear algebraic sociopathy.

You cannot run the basic infrastructures of a functioning society- healthcare to education-on systems that cut out human empathy & negotiation. So we have to reassert over and over again that the problems aren’t glitches or errors—even big ones. The problems are fundamental, systematic, endemic.

I think we need to stop calling it empathy and go back to calling it decency. It isn't a favour you're doing someone else, it's you proving that you aren't a fucking ghoul

Oh?

If you aren't seeing skeets from some of your fave people, they might have been labeled "Rude" by bsky mods. Idk what they are thinking, I don't need a mommy to tell me who to be buddies with. Anyway, go into Settings > moderation > bluesky moderation (advanced) and turn Rude off.

My expert political opinion is that killing the job market, raising grocery prices, kicking people off their health care, stealing taxpayer money, and trying to starve 40 million Americans is pretty damn unpopular.

The FAA is about to slash air traffic by 10% on Friday if the shutdown keeps going. Maybe House Republicans could drag themselves back to work and stop it. Just like with SNAP, this mess is a direct result of Speaker Johnson refusing to call his members back.

“They want you to get mad at the trans child who wants to play sports so that you don’t pay attention to the billionaires who want to pick your pocket.”

We're all going to write pieces about what you can learn from tonight but it's actually pretty simple: The frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward.

If you run into any problems or have questions when casting your vote today, call the Election Protection Hotline.

how to run programs like SNAP is often defined as reasonable policy disagreement; this is what good faith conservatism is. but then conservatives just flat out lie about the program and try to undermine it with racist smears.

Absolutely. Violent political threats are political violence, both legally & practically. They serve the same purpose and they have similar effects, esp in combination with a political context that has lots of salient violent political acts, which makes the threats feel more credible.

They gutted the Washington Post. CBS. NYT. Now Teen Vogue. The point isn't to bring in more conservatives. They've reached that saturation point. They are killing the fourth estate and buying up the social media to control the messages we see. These were all targeted to disarm the left of truth.

but here Kurtz is making a dumb straw man argument. like, this is just simply not true. not at all. not even a little bit. THERE ARE TONS OF COURSES ON EUROPE/ THE AMERICAS IN HISTORY DEPARTMENTS AT LITERALLY EVERY UNIVERSITY AND COLLEGE IN THE COUNTRY (there are ~ 40+ at my uni alone) 4/

If there were a competent opposition party in this country, the only message we’d get is that a starving, desperate country where your only hope of safety is blind allegiance to a violent, capricious autocrat and prosperity exists for only his inner circle is what GOP governance looks like

On Caribbean boat strikes, and many other things with Trump Term 2, “this didn’t come totally out of nowhere, it built on some things from the past” and “this is new, different, and worse” not only can exist simultaneously, they should. Both true at once. It’s a mistake to treat them as either/or.

One of the major fruits of research is delight. Think of how often you’ve read about a discovery and really enjoyed it. Often the most pleasurable kind of news. Public delight isn’t discussed enough as one of the major outputs of funding research.