This is America, speak SPANISH

Today @cato.org published our report providing the first look at the fiscal effects of the wave of legal & illegal immigration over the last 3 decades. It shows immigrants created surpluses every year, by a combined $14.5 trillion, even as deficits grew www.cato.org/white-paper/...

What a surprise, this interview with Daniel Clowes buried in the website of the Museo Nacional de Arte Moderno Reina Sofía: www.museoreinasofia.es/en (You'll have to scroll down a bit to find it.)

New interview with @doughenwood.bsky.social sky.social for the Behind the News podcast about my new book, The Story of Capital. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/b...

I discovered a new vantage point for the murmuration in Limerick and the starlings put on a great show this evening.

📨 CARTA A LOS DONANTES | La decepción Chomsky "El patronato de la Fundación Contexto y Acción decide retirar la presidencia de honor de CTXT al mítico referente intelectual tras conocerse su apoyo al violador en serie Jeffrey Epstein." ✍🏼 Escribe @mikelemora.bsky.social. ctxt.es/es/20260201/...

“There's not a single existing textbook on the market that could be used that would qualify under state law?” Mind blowing interview with FIU @grundrza.bsky.social about the insanity going on at Florida universities. 🤯

We have another exciting CFP! "Noisy Systems: Aesthetics, Epistemology & Computation examines noise across technical, social, and cultural domains, bringing together machine learning, critical AI studies, media theory and archaeology, art history, philosophy, and practice-based research."

Posting this again to remind you you dont have to be an amazing artist to draw comics!

Once again, it turns out “fully autonomous” means “a guy in the Philippines.”

El último n.° del Boletín de la Academia Peruana de la Lengua (78, 2025) incluye un interesante artículo de M.A. García Aranda (@ucm.es) sobre la enseñanza del español en EEUU y el método Pestalozzi revistas.apl.org.pe/index.php/bo... #histlx

Looking forward to seeing the interview with Wendy Brown at Södertörn University today. This is an interesting interview from October 2024.

I think it's best for everyone to understand that the unified class project of billionaires right now is to do to white collar workers what globalization and neoliberalism did to blue collar workers.

1. Noam Chomsky's response to the first tranche of Epstein docs - arrogant, high-handed, obfuscatory and, we now know, dishonest - reminded me of something: his response to my questions about genocide denial, 15 years ago. 🧵 www.monbiot.com/2012/05/21/2...

"Authoritarianism has always targeted public education, the free press, and other institutions of unsupervised knowledge production. (...) If authoritarians are afraid of education and academic publishing, it must not be as powerless as it sometimes seems."

¿A quién demonios se le ocurre encargar un evento sobre el 36 a A. Pérez-Reverte? Y ¿a quién se le ocurriría aceptar su invitación? ¿Qué nos dice de la esfera pública y de quienes hablan en ella del pasado? Escribo con Pablo Sánchez León en @elsaltodiario.com. www.elsaltodiario.com/el-leon-dorm...

The octopus conference is back! 🐙 "Influence, Manipulation & Seduction 3: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Persuasive Language", Nov 19-20, 2026, Tampere University, Finland #LanguageAndPersuasion #Linguistics #OctoConf

"Institutions that once proclaimed their commitment to humanistic inquiry now appear eager to embrace a set of tools whose leading use cases—predictive policing, military targeting, advertising, and porn—stand in profound contradiction to the values they claim to uphold."

Hugo eligibility post! “The Cuddled Little Vice,” my book-length essay on the poison legacy of Sandman, is eligible for Best Related Work.

Again, no-one is ready for the clusterfuck that is coming our way. Look, folks, the conditions for "Science as we knew it" are completely gone. These are uncharted terrains and my prediction is that things won't end well. At least for us. pardoguerra.org/2025/07/15/e...

“Most hazardously, their portrayal of the current state of affairs obscures a long arc of neoliberal restructuring that, over several decades, has transformed universities into corporate brands and data-driven service enterprises”

Encuadre predicativo: quién actúa. Encuadre dialógico: a quién se da voz.

I really wish #OpenAI would stop releasing free stochastic parrots in every community they can think of. They sure look pretty but they are shitting all over the place and you can't have a decent conversation between humans anymore.

The Dig you’ve been waiting for to understand the political economy of AI as it becomes fulcrum of global contests and conflicts over economic and military dominance. My interview w/ @nsrnicek.bsky.social on his book Silicon Empires: The Fight for the Future of AI www.thedigradio.com/podcast/sili...

On being brought back to life by students’ projects.

Bien hecho.

I think a lot about Parmy Olson's observation that AI companies actively push everyone to talk about existential risk, because it distracts from more prosaic current day concerns like copyright theft, conditions for data workers, energy & water use, and their financial situation

Agentic AI in education is a "ruse" - its promises of efficiency and productivity will really lead to an intensification of educators' work. Great to have @carloper.bsky.social on here now, and this is a smart short conversation with @neilselwyn.bsky.social www.buzzsprout.com/1301377/epis...

My version of close reading for the 21st century. open.substack.com/pub/theameri...

As I've written before, people don’t trust institutions because institutions aren't doing the job. Democracy rests on three pillars: Verification, Deliberation, Accountability, which can be understood as being substantial, performative, and simulated. demos.co.uk/research/ver...

Essential read on the move of a wide segment of AI-training data annotation out of South-South into the wealthy countries. The industry is exploiting job market precarity & paying advanced degree holders (well!) to eliminate the jobs they would otherwise have held. share.google/pbfnMi1nnaR4...

If you are a committed educator, of any kind at any level, under these conditions, you are revolutionary ipso facto. As long as we continue to exist, they lose.

Using or teaching literature in the language classroom? Come and talk to us in Nottingham: 30th March

This is the most astonishing graph of what the Trump regime has done to US science. They have destroyed the federal science workforce across the board. The negative impacts on Americans will be felt for generations, and the US might never be the same again. www.nature.com/immersive/d4...

New — I wrote about ChongLy Scott Thao, the elderly Hmong American wrongly arrested and forced out of his home by ICE in his underwear during the punishing Minnesota winter, what witnesses saw, and DHS's racist claim that he fit the description of another Asian man they were looking for. My story:

La Estrategia Nacional d Seguridad de Trump plantea 2 preguntas: ¿Quién diablos ha escrito esto? Y ¿qué demonios significa? Para descifrar este ¿manifiesto vanguardista? ¿manual de autoayuda? ¿comunicación interna para vendedores d coches? acudimos a Greg Grandin. @ctxt.es ctxt.es/es/20260101/...

A thought: @jamellebouie.net and @lioneltrolling.bsky.social's podcast is the "From Caligari to Hitler" of our time. jamellebouie.net/unclear-and-...

Córy Doctorow with another verbal bullseye: pluralistic.net/2026/01/13/n...

The “anglosphere”, for having been the bedrock of the internet rise (& the huge linguistic corpus it generated & offers to NPL and AI model training), is now most nervous about where this is going. There’s a long read in this alone! (Stats from an uncritical FT article on China closing the AI gap)

"I looked at the AI-created paper, and while I’m not qualified to judge its methodological rigor, it looks like the typical quant paper I might find in a peer-reviewed journal. I would never read it, but someone interested in the subject might. What do we do with this?"

This new paper by @hartzog.bsky.social and @jessicasilbey.bsky.social makes "one simple point: AI systems are built to function in ways that degrade and are likely to destroy our crucial civic institutions." Grim but important reading: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

In the past decade or two, predatory publishers have built a parallel universe of publication opportunities preying on the least privileged & most vulnerable of our colleagues I got my hands on what passes for peer review at one such journal ideophone.org/on-plagiaris...

Straight to the syllabus. While some of what is said here is peculiar to Grok & the aspirational models of profit & power around it, @mkirschenbaum.bsky.social quotes @hbcompass.bsky.social to reinforce that any proprietary LLM has the potential to be "weaponized" in these or more subtle ways.

The targeting of immersion schools points changing racial logic. Under neoliberal multiculturalism the teaching of racialized languages was permissible if done in ways that benefited white people. Under neofascism the very idea of racialized languages being taught in school is being criminalized.

My latest for @techpolicypress.bsky.social, in which I argue that Grok stands as the clearest example yet of a weaponized AI honed—through specific affordances of its integration with the X platform—as a legitimate epistemic threat.

How Generative AI Destroys Institutions. Killer opening line: "If you wanted to create a tool that would enable the destruction of institutions that prop up democratic life, you could not do better than artificial intelligence."

Se acaba de publicar la segunda parte del articulo divulgativo que escribí para MIRCO (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid) sobre el murciano, el humor y la glotofobia. Espero que os guste: mircouam.com/archivos/9077

"The narrative of the “crisis of masculinity ” and the alleged victimisation of men has served as fertile ground for gaining the sympathy of disillusioned young men who consume misogynistic content online." Great @voxeurop.bsky.social piece on the threat of masculinist terror in Europe. 🚨

Tagging @melhogan.bsky.social

⚡ New Conference! Historical and Philosophical Foundations of Artificial Intelligence. March 9 – 10, 2026 This workshop will bring together philosophers and historians to investigate the foundations of contemporary AI. Spaces are limited! buff.ly/FlhrDn1 #philevent #knowledgecrisis #philsky