Here’s the beef industry celebrating that bison will no longer be allowed to graze on BLM land. Conservationists who bought land parcels in patchwork were using public land to create enough habitat for the bison. Another awful example of agricultural exceptionalism and ranchers being extractive.

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Bob and I were among the hundreds of researchers that were supposed to conduct the 6th U.S. National Climate Assessment. Now it looks like they're gonna produce it with a few people and Grok? Communities need rigorous and accurate information about climate change. This will put communities at risk.

A barred owl is hooting outside - I can hear it in the house. This gives me hope. Be loud. Make noise.

please let “bugs bunnying” become the slang for manipulating an LLM into ignoring its guardrails, i have never seen a more succinct and evocative term for it

Shout out to all the fools who fell for the free speech grift. You helped this along.

In 2018 I fell in love with the Central Park mandarin duck, and I think of them as the most gorgeous waterfowl ever. You can see why here.

She will kill future pieces for political reasons. And this very public spike was done intentionally as a signal to the staff and to the industry to expect it.

What a lovely solstice day post. May these monarchs always reign over North America.

Donovan Metayer, a survivor of the 2018 Parkland school shooting in Florida, died by suicide at age 26 on Dec. 15. Even after a mental health hold, he was allowed to purchase the gun with which he ended his life.

A solstice sunrise over Lake Winnipeg.

GenAI is destroying research mechanisms before our very eyes.

Once, a respected person in my field shared a link to one of my articles, alongside enthusiastic agreement with a "quote" from me that does not appear anywhere within the article, or elsewhere in my corpus. Frequently, others yell at me for "saying" things that likewise do not appear in the text.

This is the outcome of a UMich coach getting fired or something like that right? Also don’t look at the interior pictures if you do not want your sense of taste to be overwhelmed.

A lil rain makes the desert roar

Marx: "Capitalists are vampires." Capitalists:

PG&E has already collected hundreds of millions of dollars from ratepayers to take down this dam. Requiring continued maintenance of deteriorating infrastructure increases the cost of electricity.

Here’s some Saturday cropaganda! Note that in all the Mississippi watershed, only in Iowa a university co-leads the policy program to reduce water pollution. “Farm Bureau says it is working with scientists at Iowa State University to more accurately track waterway nutrients levels in real time.”

“The Trump administration wants to destroy it. Why? Because NCAR attempts to understand the inequitable impacts of human-caused climate change on the poorest and most vulnerable.”

Our responsibility as faculty, tenured and otherwise, includes scholarly activities or some equivalent. Under the logic below, wouldn’t research ALSO count as a “directed work” not unlike a syllabus?

This 🧵 is a nightmare. We need very strong ethical guidelines and real consequences for authors, editors and journals putting this type of slop out there.

Huuuuuuuuuuuuuge power grab that makes every instructor’s job directly more dangerous

What i said just yesterday- administrators who just got graduate degrees to become administrators. They aren’t scholars and they never planned to be, all they want to do is administer, they can’t do anything else and they don’t get what scholars do. bsky.app/profile/prof...

I 💯 agree! In Iowa, Grant Wood was director of the Public Works of Art Program, part of the Works Progress Administration. The Iowa State University murals are an outcome of that. They help me think critically about the history of US farming, plus are amazing teaching aids. whitney.org/media/36821

Once again a reminder: We can have trans rights, bodily autonomy, gender nonconformity, and freedom of expression, or we can have none of these things. There’s no third option.

Today a land grant university scholar published a paper on how the census of agriculture underrepresents women farmers. If you read this piece & the article it’s based on you understand the issue is much bigger than that and its political economy implications. But land grants are great at avoiding…

Why stop there? Pacific Ocean = Trump Ocean, because nothing says peace and pacifism like Trump; District of Columbia = District of Trump; FIFA World Cup = FIFA Trump Cup; Tour de France = Tour de Trump (oh, we've already had that? nevermind); any university that wants federal funding = Trump Univ.

amazing how the times is able to create things like this, where the maximum quotient of awful ideas & unserious people are convened, amalgamated, and spit out in the shape of a single artifact —hats off! or is this somehow a parody

In US higher ed + adjacent there’s now so many administrators who just got graduate degrees to become administrators. They aren’t scholars and they never planned to be. I think it’s a real problem b/c all they want to do is administer, they can’t do anything else and they don’t get what scholars do.

That is a heck of a twist

All the centers they’re cutting add up to less than $7 million in spending. UNC athletics budget is $185.4 million for the 2025-26 fiscal year.

This is great news for the Lumbee but also a sign of the abysmal state of the US Congress and its (in)capacity to do its job, that is pass laws: nowadays important pieces of legislation can only get passed if attached to stuff like budget and defense bill. Absolutely dysfunctional.

Denationalization quotas “The guidance, issued on Tuesday to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services field offices, asks that they ‘supply Office of Immigration Litigation with 100-200 denaturalization cases per month’” www.nytimes.com/2025/12/17/u...

Excellent writeup about why NCAR is so precious. yaleclimateconnections.org/2025/12/trum...

This @ninaelkadi.com piece hits close to home for me b/c our two children were born in Iowa. We left in 2008 and made the decision to come back in 2017. I’ve studied the environmental impacts of our extractive ag system for 25 years. I wonder often about the cost of living here on our kids’ health.

We otterposting? We're otter posting. Yes. That's it.

Best use of SSRN's preprints ever

“the GOP measures would overhaul EPA’s machinery for setting NAAQS, give […] Trump more power to exempt polluting industries from existing air regulations & weaken implementation of a stronger soot standard put in place last year”. It’s SO awful and I’ll be teaching env’l policy next semester 😩☹️😫

Juvenile coho salmon have been spotted in a tributary of the Russian River for the first time since 1991 apnews.com/article/anim...

In a new piece for the JHI forum on political economy, Federico D’Onofrio discusses the rise of a class of "agricultural economists" as part of a broader trend intersecting with and going beyond "rural modernism" in twentieth-century Europe. @fdonoff.bsky.social

The thing is that empirics don’t matter for racism. Doesn’t matter ultimately if it’s the shooter who is Muslim or the savior or if both are. If those intent on our destruction cared about the facts we wouldn’t be here.

this, from @kevinbaker.bsky.social, is a better analysis of the intersection between LLMs and academic science than 98% of what's out there.

Tonight it has been eye-opening to see how rumors spread on social media in real time, while at the same time Brown’s student journalists have maintained the highest standards of reporting under heartbreaking circumstances

There is really only one 2025 Climate-Insurance Policy Year in Review that you need to read, and you bet your ass @clicabedu.bsky.social has got it from the inimitable @jordanhaedtler.bsky.social right flippin here. Read it or live with incurable FOMO. climatecabineteducation.org/wp-content/u...

The student journalists at the @browndailyherald.bsky.social are doing amazing live updates on the situation with the Brown shooting: www.browndailyherald.com/article/2025...

This fucking country

When you combine agricultural exceptionalism, manifest destiny, centuries of extractive ag policies, and climate change (plus its denial) you get hot messes like this. Inappropriate farming practices started with white settlement - with government support - and continue to this day.

It’s 5 degrees (Fahrenheit) and snowing in Iowa City rn

Elephant seals travel thousands of miles to the Gulf of Alaska and North Pacific, almost into the Bering Sea, and reliably return to familiar stretches of coast every December. This bull probably weighs close to 2 tons.. More migration magic. ✨🦭

🧵ICE cut off her wedding ring. Sue Tincher is a 55-year-old US citizen, a grandmother, 5’4’, and white. She walked to her neighbor’s house after getting alerts that ICE was nearby. She stood across the street and asked an officer if they were ICE. They told her to “get back.” She didn’t move.