Anyone asserting that professors are indoctrinating students needs to teach a 200+ person intro class. How am I going to find time to indoctrinate students when I spend all day responding to emails with variations like "As stated in class and in the syllabus . . ."

Finally got to this. Excellent, important piece. Wokeness isn’t dead—it’s been repurposed for the right.

Today, @quinnslobodian.com takes you inside a recent conference devoted to the world after neoliberalism. What emerged, he argues, was less a rupture with the past than a centrist project of status-quo stabilization.

I want the superpower that lets you do key intermediate steps of the calculation wrong and still get the right answer.

Socialism after AI part 2: "Katherine Long tried to convince Claudius it was a Soviet vending machine from 1962, living in the basement of Moscow State University. After hours—and more than 140 back-and-forth messages—Long got Claudius to embrace its communist roots." www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anth...

Re the prior posts: the Brandeis Physics department is a fantastic, collegial place to do science.

Re the PhD program, those interested in soft condensed matter, biological physics, experimental high energy physics, or quantum and gravitational theory, and astrophysics (focus on solar system & exoplanet atmospheres) are also encouraged to apply! www.brandeis.edu/gsas/program...

I also have funds for a PhD student in physical oceanography; this would be in the Physics Department. Further information about the PhD program and a link to apply is here: www.brandeis.edu/gsas/program...

I have a postdoc position available in physical oceanography. Please pass it along! academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/31407

A new paper with Jack Skinner, Jörn Callies, myself, and Xihan Zhang. Extends prior work of Zhang and Callies, using Bayesian inversion to extract the signal of balanced flows from SWOT and simultaneously interpolate across the gap between the swaths. arxiv.org/abs/2512.03258

I have many problems with the NYT and their right-wing framing of much of the news, but credit where it is due for highlighting the AACM with some great tracks: www.nytimes.com/2025/12/03/a...

My memoir-essay on growing up with Norman Rockwell Thanksgivings is up in Vogue this morning. Here’s a small extract: www.vogue.com/article/norm...

Of the reviews I’ve read this is closest to my own experience of the novel.

Thomas Pynchon is laughing all the way to the brink:

Also contains lizard lassoing and Anole Annals

has your scientific work been cut? @nytimes.com wants to hear from you. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/08/c...

I'm sad to report that Rainer (Rai) Weiss passed away yesterday at age 92. Rai developed the design for LIGO, he and Kip got it funded, trained countless researchers, and received the 2017 Nobel Prize. Rai always had time for students and treated us as equals. May his memory be a blessing

If you put the DOGE guys on a desert island where the only way out was to say the magic words “I’m not sure what the answer is, let me consult someone who has worked on this problem for a long time” they would all starve to death

Mary K Gaillard, a theorist who had a knack for telling experimental physicists where to look, died in her home on May 23 at 86. Dr. Gaillard was an unpaid scientist at CERN for more than a decade, & the first woman physicist hired & tenured at Berkeley: www.nytimes.com/2025/07/31/s...

"In the absence of strong and principled leadership from Columbia’s Board of Trustees and Acting President, it falls to the faculty, above all, to defend the values and norms that have defined the university and allowed it to flourish." academeblog.org/2025/07/29/a...

Inspiring! www.science.org/content/arti...

The cited cost of this putative center ranges from $500m to $1b. Meanwhile, over at Harvard’s School of Public Health, a $200m budget gap due to the Trump admin breaking hundreds of NIH and NSF research contracts has already produced hundreds of layoffs, including of TT faculty. Priorities.

Academic freedom mostly means freedom to work on something for 10 years and still not submit it

Someone on Twitter posted that they had run into Philip Glass at their lower Manhattan polling place, saying nice things about Mamdani. The campaign put this up as a quote-tweet within the hour.

who would the New York Times and Wall Street want in charge of New York's fire department: an upstart young firefighter or a serial arsonist? The answer may surprise you

Brandeis faculty and staff out for #NoKings in Waltham! L to R: Matthew Headrick, Sabine von Mering (as a bear), Abigail Arnold, Irina Dubnina, and Toni Shapiro-Phim. Matt,Sabine, and Irina are members of @aaupbrandeis.bsky.social .

At 1pm Eastern today, 200 scientists will be doing a 100 hour livestream about all of the ways that the administration, through DOGE, is endangering us, through the dismantling of the weather and climate science apparatuses. Let people know and tune in. You don't have to watch all 100 hours.

There is also a BlueSky account: @aaupbrandeis.bsky.social

The Brandeis members of the AAUP have a website! www.aaup-brandeis.org

It's neat that instead of taking on entities that have been gradually eroding the quality and very concept of education for profit, politicians and pundits have spent the last decade focusing on threats to higher ed like "the existence of trans people" or "people who oppose race science on campus."

If a degree is just a piece of paper you need to get a desirable, good-paying job, someone invents a machine that can do it for you, and the notion that you might go to college to develop your mind for its own, non-remunerative sake is a punch line and an elite privilege, why not use the machine?

Coming next week! On May 14, 12 EDT, @annalisa-clim.bsky.social will give the @apsphysics.bsky.social virtual Climate Physics seminar, on "Multiscale physics and ocean-based climate solutions: the case of alkalinity enhancement". Register to receive a Zoom link engage.aps.org/gpc/resource...

10 years of total devotion...to his stomach.

I'm very pleased with this paper, which emerged from my @simonsfoundation.org Pivot Fellowship year at @caltech.edu arxiv.org/abs/2505.00819

GFDL (mentioned here) is a scientific jewel.

On that last repost from @kjhealy.co I get lots of emails, letters, and self-published books from random people about their Unified Theories of Everything and I'm not going to waste anybody's time by inviting them to give a theoretical physics seminar.

Glad that our interim president signed, along with some ex-Brandeis friends and colleagues. www.aacu.org/newsroom/a-c... I'm also heartened by the spread in types of institutions: private R1s, large state schools, liberal arts colleges, regional public universities, community colleges, and more.

Ok so yeah, this has quickly become the #1 misunderstanding about the canceled grants the grants are not “subsidies” or “entitlements” to Harvard or Princeton or whatever they aren’t going into universities’ endowments they are competitive contracts won by these universities to do research

We live in Ubu Roi territory

Tariffs even for penguins! 🐧

Excuses. An older comic.

all you naysayers complaining about the US' foreign alliances, the contraction in consumer confidence, the incoming disasters to Social Security and Medicaid, the generational destruction to US research institutions and researchers...you're gonna look real silly once we get the sexy M&M back

The Four Habits of Highly Effective Spawn of Cthulhu defector.com/this-is-the-... (a very fun article from @sabs.bsky.social )