Absolute all-timer sentence in today's @nytimes.com

The richest man on earth owns X. The second richest man on earth is about to be a major owner of TikTok. The third richest man owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. The fourth richest man owns The Washington Post. See the problem here?

The free speech activist who built a list of professors he worked to get fired for their speech must be celebrated for his support of free speech, and anyone who quotes his speech accurately in context will be fired and/or face state punishment by the champions of free speech, do I have that right?

Some personal news: I've been fired from the Washington Post in the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk shooting. Thread incoming. substack.com/@karenattiah...

Incredible clip of tech CEOs fawning over Donald Trump. Someone store this clip in the underground archive vault

Academic authors, here's a peek into the black box of journal publishing from an journal editor if you can bear it:

Every Labor Day I remember that the holiday was moved from May 1 to September not only for the Haymarket attacks but to break up the possibility between the US and the international labor movement (which celebrates in May). And it worked!

Look at this graph. The share of national income going to the richest 10 percent was lowest (and share to lower 90 percent highest) when union membership was at its highest. As unions have weakened, inequality has widened. This is why we must build back union power.

There can’t be any gun restrictions because we have to protect against federal government tyranny, and if kids get shot we just have to live with it. Also the President can send troops to cities because the federal government can do whatever it wants. These two ideas are consistent and reasonable.

Hi authors! Please remember to file a claim!

A great read on UChicago, arguing we’re seeing the result of decades of mismanagement: “The university’s trustees and leaders view it preeminently as a tax-free technology incubator, and its debt load is so great that it is abandoning ideals it once held dear in order to sustain that goal.”

As sad as I am about the death of UChicago, my alma mater and one of the world's great universities, there is something tragically poetic about the university being done in by the very same neoliberal logic that the UChicago econ department did more than almost any other institution to foster.

Oh my God it's true stanfordreview.org/uchicago-los...

the crisis in which the University of Chicago is now engulfed -- one entirely of its own making, and which has led to the (hopefully temporary) suspension of admissions into numerous PhD programs in the humanities -- represents I think a seismic event in the history of American higher education 1/

every time I hear about "PhD level intelligence" as a benchmark for anything I think about how mass media has done one of the worst jobs ever at planting the fake concept of what a PhD actually is in the general public's mind

Trump is invoking Section 740 of the D.C. Home Rule Act, which authorizes him to seize control of the entire DC police department for a maximum of 30 days. This is insane stuff. D.C. is not in the grip of a crime wave. Crime has been falling for three years now. Violent crime is at a 30-year low.

I do firmly believe that refusing to outsource your basic cognitive functions to LLMs right now - as so many are stumbling over themselves to do right now, like hogs trotting to a pile of slop that’s been set up inside of a butcher’s delivery truck - will very much pay off in a few years.

A personal update.

We built the simplest possible social media platform. No algorithms. No ads. Just LLM agents posting and following. It still became a polarization machine. Then we tried six interventions to fix social media. The results were… not what we expected. arxiv.org/abs/2508.03385

Republicans voted to completely gut Medicaid, which covers nearly 1/2 of all births in the U.S. They did this despite the fact that the U.S. has the highest rate of maternal deaths among all wealthy countries. @aoc.bsky.social always serves a potent #CupOfJoe !

Study finds A.I. LLMs advise women to ask for lower salaries than men. When prompted w/ a user profile of same education, experience & job role, differing only by gender, ChatGPT advised the female applicant to request $280K salary; Male applicant=$400K. thenextweb.com/news/chatgpt...

A hugely underdiscussed effect of the creeping fascism of ICE is that debt collectors and landlords are filing more cases against immigrants, even when they're inflated or outright falsified, because they know immigrants are too fearful of deportation to show up to court to fight them.

The Democratic Party’s capitulation to the Crypto lobby is one of the most nakedly corrupt things I’ve seen in my life. Crypto is a blatant scam with zero value that is designed to end popular control of our currency. Dems just co-signed the next global financial crisis. It’s unforgivable.

Here is a simple heuristic: If a digital tool is labeled “AI” you can be sure it is no good. Good tools have more specific and informative names. You’re welcome.

This is very good. www.404media.co/the-medias-p...

I think Ketanji Brown Jackson's dissents are an important exception to the "Supreme Court dissents don't matter" rule of thumb, because she is using them not to argue with the conservative justices, but to explain to the public that the conservative justices are liars and in the tank for Trump

We ran a randomized controlled trial to see how much AI coding tools speed up experienced open-source developers. The results surprised us: Developers thought they were 20% faster with AI tools, but they were actually 19% slower when they had access to AI than when they didn't.

America: 5 days off anytime other than thanksgiving and Christmas is a micro retirement. Europe: it’s July, so let’s schedule our next meeting for September.

In a study of professors, women got 378 new work requests over 4 weeks vs 118 for men. Women spent more time on service, advising & teaching; men on research. Orgs should track who is taking extra duties & ensure they are rewarded and distributed fairly. www.forbes.com/sites/kimels...

📢I am hiring a Postdoc to work on post-training methods for low-resource languages. Apply by August 15 employment.ku.dk/faculty/?sho.... Let's talk at #ACL2025NLP in Vienna if you want to know more about the position and life in Denmark.

My FYP is video after video of pre-med students explaining how the big bill’s student loan cap will make it impossible for them to afford med school. Experts were already predicting a doctor shortage to the tune of 86k by 2036. This will make it exponentially worst. www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8hFxfBL/

Dismantling these departments that warn us about the weather is in Project 2025, and the core reason is they say these departments (RIGHTLY) drive “climate chang alarmism”, which “is harmful to future prosperity” (aka BIG OIL PROFITS)

What, exactly, are we celebrating this Fourth of July? Our cutting off healthcare to the needy to enrich the greedy? Our new concentration camps? Our dying economy? Our ditching due process? Our corruption? Our broken Congress? Our corrupt Supreme Court? Our ridiculous buffoon President?

Flipping back and forth between CNN and MSNBC wondering if they're showing any part of the House fight over the biggest bill in recent history and, no, they're reporting on Puff Daddy's trial and something about hot dogs, so

64 percent.

Congrats to Lisa Murkowski on voting for a bill that she herself admitted was not ready in hopes that the House would change it. Now it’ll become law. She had the power to stop it, and instead chose to become complicit. That’s her legacy.

I am grieving the barbarism that is going to unfurl from all this. People are going to die. Livelihoods gone. All to feed a corrupt kleptocracy. I see every day up close how different it is from the first time around. There are no guardrails. A disaster. I’m sorry we have to live through this.

You may be thinking "How can an entire political party be organized around the policy of taking from everyone and giving to the rich? No one would vote for them." Well that's where Lying comes in

I’ve been thinking a lot about Murkowski’s vote. It contains, in one action, so much that defines our pathetic political moment: Selfishness: I’m taking care of me and mine, the rest of you can pound sand; Lack of accountability: I know the bill is bad, hopefully someone else will fix it;

"Alligator Alcatraz" is wrong and media should not use it. It's propaganda. Alcatraz held people convicted of crimes, particularly violent crimes. The Florida camp holds people *not* convicted of any crime. If they had been, they'd be in prison elsewhere. The site is a textbook concentration camp.

Look, we are probably going to lose this one. The MAGA Murder Budget's worst features are going to become law. But given the horrific, deadly consequences of this bill, we need to keep fighting until they gavel it out. Numerous orgs are phonebanking into key districts tomorrow:

I can

Washington, D.C., has a population roughly equivalent to Alaska's. And it has zero senators. If D.C. had senators, the GOP megablil bill would have failed today. Instead, Murkowski got carve-outs and money for Alaska, and then voted to subject DC to the bill

We’re about to see a bunch of house republicans publicly decry the billionaire bailout bill, only to eventually vote yes on it. Light up the switchboard!

really does feel like if we can cyberbully the House into passing changes on the shit they openly hate and get it kicked back upstairs again there’s a chance it might not survive the Senate a second time if you live in a GOP state it’s time to ruin a House rep’s life

Trump calls for deporting US citizens: "We also have a lot of bad people that have been here for a long time ... many of them were born in our country. I think we ought to get them the hell out of here too, if you want to know the truth. So maybe that'll be the next job."

People have no idea, not really, how this budget is about to wreck their very foundations.

This 940-page reconciliation bill has a list of horrific provisions. One of the worst is a $211 billion tax break to the top 0.2% who inherit $30 million. In this bill 16 million lose health care & hungry kids lose nutrition. Meanwhile, billionaires get much richer. Disgusting.