important thing to note here is dr oz cites a current american replacement rate of 1.5, which is not true. the american replacement level in 2025 was 1.79. interestingly, the white replacement rate is in fact at 1.5 though

a primal scream that captures a moment

I encountered this thread at bedtime, so I didn't chime in, but this is my adopted field (by practice), which means I have some things to say about it. I won't cover every aspect because I don't work with every aspect, but I do think about these aspects. Let's talk about the effort involved. 1/22

Introducing the May/June 2026 issue of Texas Observer magazine, with cover story by @jessicawluther.com and art by Adrià Voltà. Visit our site to become a member and receive our magazine, six times per year.

Lady Audley's Secret

thinking about how learning and playfulness are fundamentally intertwined

Gonna die on this hill but efficiency is the opposite of education. Learning is not efficient.

In wretched body news, I leaned forward while kneeling and my knee popped out of its joint and then right back in and I felt like I was going to throw up. Thank you, hypermobile joints. Helpful contribution to the discourse.

What I wish for everybody to remember when Canvas comes back online: The reason OUR data can be held for ransom is because Instructure, their owners (KKR private equity & Dragoneer venture capital), & our own employers (see ASU Atomic) monetize it. It's Canvas that hacked education & stole our IP.

Yup. Your job as regular person is not to parse whether particular policies are 'realistic' or 'possible.' You are supposed to actually demand what you need to live a dignified life.

*repeatedly punching you in the face* "You just don't get it. You claim I'm a violent person but you keep putting your head in front of my punchy fist. Sometimes I have to punch the air, for medical reasons, and you keep getting in the way. I'm a pacifist."

Goddamn

The despair at living in a world where so many people would rather get murdered in the society they made than live freely and happily if other people might also get to live freely and happily

Got an unsolicited message on LinkedIn from a "Joseph McCarthy." Nice try, anti-communist agenda.

<Coughs in the history of piracy> It is an extremely recent phenomenon that most shipping no longer had to pay protection money to traverse the major straits. This was the opposite on an unforeseeable outcome, unfortunately.

I slept poorly last night, and I've reached the part of the day where witnessing anything hopeful or kind makes me weepy.

I don't only think that college should be FREE but I think young people should also receive living stipends while in school. Finally, I do not care what they major in because education needs to actually BE DECOUPLED from a future job. You are welcome. You should have 4 years to study anything.

If this shit and these people weren’t doing so much material harm, these sort of secular prayers/spells would be fascinating.

Language tip: If the unqualified, dogmatic secretary of health is trying to take necessary drugs away from millions of people, the verb to describe what he’s doing is not “help.”

there is no reason to include "good behavior" in article 3 if not to signal a non-impeachment mechanism for removal. congress can and should define good behavior and a mechanism for enforcing it

How do you go as Madame X with your hair down?

My son just referred to rabbits as "ontologically wicked," but I would argue that Conundrum fails this measure of rabbitdom.

Nature retracted a paper that claimed ChatGPT had a positive impact on student learning. it's not the only paper making this claim that has this problem www.404media.co/nature-retra...

Petty math: Elon Musk testified in court that he works "80 to 100 hours a week." There are 168 hours in a week. He spends, conservatively, 22.4 hours a week tweeting. (Number derived from this post from 2025, which notes that it is very likely an underestimate. I assume it's gone up since then.)

"Let's name it for a concept that got a lot of people killed"

I want to be gainfully employed again for many reasons, but one big one is that I want to be able to donate money to people and causes once more, even if it's not much money.

Disabled lady crowdsourcing: I would like to get a pair of jeans, but I have arthritic knees, and stiff or tight pants of any sort leave me with a lot of pain at the end of the day. Tell me about comfortable pants that are either jeans or have the functionality of jeans (casual, go with everything).

If we seriously believed Ai is a useful tool, we’d want to educate children without it so they would have the tools to use it judiciously and understand the output. Instead, we’re rushing to make the children train it while derailing the acquisition of essential skills. This is a gold rush.

AI is "just a tool" but also "every child on the planet must be forced to learn to prompt (train) the machines and edit its output and that is the future of education" do not make sense. If it is "just a tool," we do not have to repurpose the entire architecture, goals, of education.

For anyone who might need this: pureinfotech.com/disable-ai-m...

60% of Louisiana's unhoused are Black, although only 30% of all Louisiana residents are Black.

These are Jim Crow vagrancy laws.

They kept slavery going for six years after it “ended” (“apprenticeship”) because enslaved people were meant to help pay for their emancipation via more slavery. They had to end it early because when you put an end date on slavery, slave owners try to work people to death on purpose.

Related: one of the surprises for people learning the history of abolitionism in the British Empire is that there was a gigantic payout of reparations upon emancipation, something like £16 billion in today’s money—and every cent of it went to the slaveowners

Boys Go to Jupiter (recommend)

I have mostly cleared my mending pile and it is always sobering to realize I put off for at least two years tasks that took under half an hour combined.

the love song of j. alfred prufrock the power ballad of j. alfred prufrock the country-western crossover hit of j. alfred prufrock espresso [remix] feat. j. alfred prufrock the love song (j. alfred prufrock's version)

A few, in no order: Arc of Justice by Kevin Boyle Lose Your Mother by Saidiya Hartman The Pig Farmer’s Daughter by Mary Frances Berry Staying Power by Peter Fryer Tropicapolitans by Srinivas Aravamudan

I understand why food is so fraught, but oof, it’s made us so vulnerable.

people like to pretend that orthorexia (being obsessed with “healthy” unprocessed, “clean” food) is a virtue rather than an eating disorder

Hot take into the void: "ultra-processed food" is basically the antivaxx conspiracy theory for people who think they're far too well informed to get hooked into anything like antivaxx.

5 out of the 6 Supreme Court Justices who gutted the Voting Rights Act were nominated by a president who came into office having lost the popular vote. 70% of Americans support the John Lewis VRA. The Supreme Court is historically unpopular. It is not a democratically legitimate institution.

Oh my god, I can’t believe I forgot the worse one: The Fountainhead. I found it so offensive and poorly written and assumed everyone else would, too, but in general the other kids liked it and I was horrified.

I don’t know if I’d feel this way now, but I dropped out of AP English to stop reading The Sound and the Fury. The (female) teacher kept saying “Caddy’s a dirty girl. She’s a dirty girl” to make sure we noticed that her underwear was muddy.

I go through these depressive cycles where I believe I’ve alienated everyone who ever liked me and I’ve gone through it enough to just sort of ride them out most of the time, but the latest round has lasted so long.

The United States, starring John Roberts as Roger B. Taney

This isn’t how any of this works. Like, even with software that could actually do this. When you’re tired at the end of a bad day, you don’t generally want to write (even in prompt form) and direct the movie you’re going to watch.

Please use alt-text on your images, and if you need reminders, you can go into your settings & activate the option to have it automatically require you to add alt-text before it'll let you post. Let's keep this place meaningfully accessible.

“…a transcript of every word Kamrass had typed to her psychologist using the app Talkspace” “…one of the largest mental health data banks in the world…140 million message exchanges…. a soon-to-be-released AI therapy companion bot..” h/t @proofnews.bsky.social www.proofnews.org/womans-talks...