Meta is constructing its largest data center yet: a $10 billion facility in Louisiana, as big as 70 football fields, requiring more than twice as much electricity as the City of New Orleans. Louisiana has had to greenlight $3 billion in new energy infrastructure to service Meta's facility.

For anyone wanting to NOT agree to the new Academia.edu Terms of Service, which includes using your work for AI purposes, you don't need to accept the terms to delete your account. Instead, click on the Terms of Service link in the pop-up... 🏺 #AcademicSky

I'm sorry, worldwide, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable permission to my voice and likeness? For what now? In any manner for any purpose??? This is in academia/.edu's new ToS, which you're prompted to agree to on login. Anyway I'll be jumping ship. You can find my stuff at hcommons.org.

If someone’s not mourning the death of Robert Redford in a manner that’s consistent with your views, make sure you set up a database, call their employer, and get them fired.

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

The firing came after State Auditor Shad White, a Republican, tagged the university in a social media post. “To @olemiss, did an Ole Miss employee just repost this insane reaction to Charlie Kirk’s murder? Answer,” White wrote on Thursday morning.

I really, REALLY wish people would internalize the absolute stranglehold voter suppression and gerrymandering have over many red states with high BIPOC populations (who reliably vote blue) before consistently writing off these entire states and saying shit like “they deserved it”.

U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ignored federal data, twisted legislation and pointed to unsubstantiated treatments while addressing topics such as COVID-19 vaccines, rural hospitals and school shootings during a three-hour Senate Committee hearing. buff.ly/dHQxkea

“My dream is to expand once we get the pantry up and running. We are going to expand it with the youth and also a mental health side,” Estina Holder said. “My heart is to serve, so we want to give back to the kids and have the services for people who need mental health services.”

Warnock to RFK jr: "For the first time, we are seeing deaths of children from measles. We haven't seen that in two decades. We're seeing that under your watch. You are a hazard to the health of the American people."

BOOK ANNOUNCEMENT! @mahliann.bsky.social, @marcuscarter.com, and myself have combined our collective brains and written a wide-reaching introduction to the complex and interdisciplinary field of Game Studies in this forthcoming book for Polity. www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?b...

Students being progressive is not a bigger problem than a sustained assault by an authoritarian president, please get a grip www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

Something I didn't get to say yesterday: We heard over and over during the event about "human-centered" approaches to "AI". But if refusal is not on the table (at every level: individual students and teachers right up through UNESCO) then we have in fact centered the technology, not the people.

I maintain this list and celebrate each new addition and funding improvement to allow all to access our discipline. It feels equally important to mark the rollback of past successes. Programs at UVa, Columbia, Cornell, and Rutgers, now no longer exist. RT pls. 1/ livyarrow.org/funded-mas-a...

A video on the hate campaign against Ms. Rachel for being pro-Palestinian children, but really a video about right-wing attacks on children's early education, but really a video about the importance of emotional literacy. Fantastic watch

also, an all timer in the field of game journalism, “Yakuza opining on a Yakuza game”

A year ago, I heard that Oklahoma City had approved a plan to build Legends Tower, the tallest skyscraper in the entire Western hemisphere. Why were we building the Tower of Babel in the Heartland? I decided to investigate. This essay is the result. (gift link) thepickup.com/whats-so-wro...

“The state of Texas is only 40 percent white, but white voters control over 73 percent of the state’s congressional seats,” Derrick Johnson, President and CEO of the NAACP, said.

I wrote about God and Cracker Barrel johnpaulbrammer.substack.com/p/christ-in-...

surprise i just dropped a new article! i had a lot of thoughts about how people don't know how to engage with fiction, which ties into chatgpt delusion & book bans among other things. big thanks to @cxorlando.bsky.social for telling me to write about it when i posted a throwaway insta story

Well, not that I had a big presence on here, but it looks like I might be even less present 🥴

BREAKING: BlueSky is blocking access to Mississippi. This is the No. 1 platform for @mississippifreepress.org. We ditched X for BlueSky early this year. And now, at 3 pm on a Friday, poof. I don't know what we'll do next. Keep up with us using our newsletter at mfp.ms/subscribe.

Unfortunately, Bluesky is unavailable in Mississippi right now, due to a new state law that requires age verification for all users. While intended for child safety, we think this law poses broader challenges & creates significant barriers that limit free speech & harm smaller platforms like ours.

"How bad slavery was" is worse. Much worse. Much worse than you think, much worse than you're taught, much worse than museums depict. Worse.

I swear you will not find a funnier, straight-faced text today than this *official* article by the totes-real University of Austin that wants you to know that there's a place where students debate Aristotle... over brisket. uatx.substack.com/p/if-you-don...

Hello. I wrote a nice long essay about AI and this very strange moment where we're constantly told we're living in the dawn of a strange new future but the only thing that's actually clear is that everyone feels pretty unmoored and uncertain. I hope you'll read it

In case it's of use to anyone else trying to decide how to address AI in their course syllabi, here's the policy I came up with last Friday while mad at 5:30am. With citations!

I was explaining a treatment plan to a patient, and their partner told me to talk slowly because they were typing what I was saying into chatgpt to "verify" there wasn't a better alternative. In case you are wondering the stage of mess we are in with LLMs. www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-ne...

PhD-level, y'all.

I share this syllabus bc I'm one of a tiny handful of university faculty in the UK who teach trans history at a specialist level, & I'd like there to be more of us! I learned the field from scratch post-PhD, bc at my prev institution it was politically necessary - which means that you can too!

people tend to conceptualize slavery as something that happened at sites far away from most people, and as a discrete activity, rather than as an integrated part of a national economy and an important source of wealth and value. the closest analogue is something like homeownership.

"Three people were killed in this crime, three human beings. We don’t know their names." Read KUT Austin's coverage of EJI's community remembrance work, in partnership with the Austin NAACP, that honors the victims of racial terror lynching.

I wrote about how AI chatbots are pumping out fake quotes, attributed to real people, at scale, and polluting our public disourse with potemkin pontification and made-up appeals to authority. And the AIs are not just misquoting famous people—it happened to me and it could happen to you. Gift link:

As always, Ted Chiang is great in this interview. cdh.princeton.edu/blog/2025/08...

Hello it is possible to have a background in both the humanities and STEM (👋) and I'd argue that being interdisciplinary leads to a more broad-ranging set of ideas. The STEM/Hums boundaries are imposed top-down and we need all of us to advance human knowledge.

Made it to Jackson MS and Millsaps, and to my brand new office. So excited to meet my new batch of students in the coming days!!! And teach Greek and Latin!!! And a bit terrified.

Looking for a postdoc position in quantitative palaeoecology with focus on vegetation? Come to work in my interdisciplinary project in Prague (full-time for 2 years).

Four Al Jazeera staff, including reporter Anas Al Sharif, were killed in an Israeli attack on a tent for journalists outside the main gate of Gaza's al-Shifa hospital aje.io/onll19

Ons thing that's really bugging me about the "PhD level intelligence" is that a PhD isn't a measure of intelligence, it's a measure of commitment to study and specialisation in a narrow field (and opportunity to do so). "PhD level intelligence" isn't really a meaningful phrase

I have always joked that the bathroom graffiti in the bathroom on my office floor deserves an ethnography, and while I can’t do that I can at least share some golden examples. So, in honor of me leaving Waggener Hall for more humid pastures, please enjoy one+ piece of graffiti per day until I move.

Obviously.

Call for Papers 👇 Consider sending an abstract in for our TRAC 2025 session panel 'Beyond Binaries'! Deadline August 31st

Seven years, one lawsuit, one global pandemic, and many many good and bad days later, I’m happy to share that I passed my dissertation defense (with revisions), and will be joining the faculty at Millsaps College in a few short weeks as a visiting assistant professor! 🎉

Hey #classicsBlueSky, what is your best singular advice for someone preparing to defend their dissertation? Asking for a friend (me, I’m the friend)

they're calling it history's most vindicated podcast

You find the damndest things while sorting

Dissertation officially submitted to my committee!!!! And I even spell checked it twice and only cried once 😎

biblically accurate chicago

It’s not like I didn’t already think this situation was really fucking bad, but I was beginning to think it was way fucking worse.