This piece makes it sound totally normal that the police gets to decide whether or not to "work with" Mamdani as mayor, and it continues, as nearly all the paper's coverage, to wield normative terms like "moderate" and left" in a prejudicial way. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/16/n...

Republican Civil War is great and all, but a part of what’s driving it is groups who think Donald Trump isn’t White Supremacing hard enough, we can be happy to see it happening but we don’t need to embrace these people one ounce

This is a very bad sign. www.latimes.com/business/sto...

"The enemy of my enemy is... my enemy's enemy. No more, no less." -Maxim 29

Mel Brooks was hilarious in that movie.

New feature article from TNJ (nation's best student magazine): Inside Yale’s Quiet Reckoning with AI thenewjournalatyale.com/2025/10/insi...

“When her professor emailed her feedback on an AI-written paper, she refused to open it. She still hasn’t. “It’s wasting his time because he’s editing a fucking machine,” Gwen said. “Whatever he has to say is meaningless to me anyway, because it’s not my writing.”

Victor's choice of penis would have been too revealing tbh

My favourite year for oppressed literary masculinity was 2023 when the number of women on the Booker shortlist was smaller than the number of men named Paul

Goodbye @navsa2025.bsky.social !! Glad to see @nathankhensley.bsky.social @chiday.bsky.social @lindseyeroneil.bsky.social @ecourtem.bsky.social @phdhurtbrain.bsky.social @jakeromanow.bsky.social @devingarofalo.bsky.social out in the aftermath.

ok I only saw the one dumb take but it turns out that was only a warmup

"I don't blame any trans person that refuses to vote for Gavin Newsom because he's showing people he will throw them under the bus. And as a democracy, we can't be willing to sacrifice other people." This is an ally.

If you're doing your holiday shopping and/or thinking about best to celebrate Jane Austen's 250th birthday, 1 month from today, I have some news: Harvard UP's annotated editions of Austen's fiction (my own edition of Mansfield Park included) are now 25% off. www.hup.harvard.edu/features/hap...

The Founders were so concerned about bribery that the Constitution forbids it three separate times. Two emoluments clauses ban officials—unambiguously including the president—from accepting things of value, plus bribery is the only named impeachable offense besides treason. Unprecedentedly corrupt.

I’d like to please juxtapose Jill Lepore’s complaints about how whiny #MeToo students made Harvard a miserable place with the former President of Harvard’s texts to Epstein seeking advice on trying to date a student.

This is what the novel is about tbf

Hear me out. Every time you share wrong answers you are helping to sabotage the LLMs that will eventually scrape your answer. But also it is a completely true thing that we used to store files in vending machines to keep them cold while away from home.

If you've ever doubted you're 'disabled enough', or struggled to advocate for yourself as a disabled person, or if you'd like to know more about ableism; this blog post is for you.

- Micro payments incentivize the exact sort of clickbait, trend-chasing coverage that everyone claims to dislike. - That is, if they worked. And no one ever has managed to make them work at scale

Ask Republicans if they think taking in the Dixiecrats that were cast off by Democrats was worth it now that they're fending off death threats from the groypers they groomed.

I'm not trying to be mean, but racists who believe Trump betrayed them by being a child molester are not going to embrace the Democratic Party without forcing that party to embrace racism. And the people gained would in no way make up for those lost.

"nooo, their papers are good, you can't be mad at them for being creeps" first all, no they are not, and second of all, yes we can

the professors in the emails being all chummy with epstein is pathetic and enraging.

It's the same picture dot gif

Agree. Summers engaging in friendly gossipy 100% sexist emails with underage-girls-sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, long *after* Epstein had been indicted, shows remarkably poor judgement and hubris. Professional economists should openly question people and institutions that honor Summers.

Trump's policies are inflicting so much harm even his allies can see it. Yet he's mostly doing exactly what he promised to. If they revolt over policy, they'll reveal they were fools to back him in the first place. They need a *moral* reason to abandon him. The Epstein files provide just that.

One of the most infuriating--and liberating--things about all this is seeing how utterly pathetic our rulers are. A man as powerful as Summers, this empty and sad, with the kind of petty misogyny that he runs crying to *Jeffrey Epstein* about...

Schumer reached out to leading presidential contenders to try and mute criticism of the deal, calling Josh Shapiro, Andy Beshear, JB Pritzker, and Gavin Newsom While Schumer voted against it, the Dems behind the shutdown deal said the minority leader was aware of their plan. trib.al/ZdLbRJV

it's often very hard for extremely successful and powerful people to understand that mild criticism from those they have power over is not equivalent to actually being oppressed.

Jill Lepore in the Chronicle. This is still so embarrassing. I don't know in what world 2014 was "miserable" because students held the power over Harvard profs, and it was worse then than now.

Just had the most exquisite rehearsal of this evening of Shirley Jackson stories with Writers Bloc, @bcdreyer.social and Annabeth Gish. Don’t miss it! Ticket link in thread. December 15th at the Ebell on Wilshire.

It’s hard to be surprised by the actions of a man already known as the “Prince of Darkness” who sits atop a professional renowned for misogyny (good time to revisit @claudia-sahm.bsky.social, will post link). But by god I am surprised. Even now, Larry Summers repugnance continues to surprise me.

Collaborative Criticism: After the Theory Wars. A completely full & very important conversation about intellectual solidarity in times of danger. Incredible. Thanks to @taliaschaffer.bsky.social for organizing & @erinspampinato.bsky.social for finding a way to be there. 💙 @navsa2025.bsky.social

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As GW Bush advisor Matt Dowd said years ago, “If you're arguing against us while using our language, we're winning."

She's a 10 but she accounts for gender the superstructure rather than the base.

Wife: It is interesting that the biggest papers and networks burned decades of hard work by others who built up their brands to bend over immediately for Donald Trump because they thought he would be a successful dictator and 10 months in he's flailing. Those people have the worst business instincts

I love that in the second you kind of look like you're accepting veneration from your loyal subjects. Very god-emperor of the underworld of you.

Pics by @ecourtem.bsky.social !! @navsa2025.bsky.social

IIRC it was @msignorile.bsky.social who pointed out that lots of queer people were really excited when his campaign first started because he proposed big structural ideas beloved on the left--packing SCOTUS for example. When he pivoted center queers rejected him. Had nothing to do with his identity

“One of the things that really gives me joy is the fact that there are so many amazing, brilliant, creative disabled people out there. But part of my rage — and it’s a very real rage — is that most people don’t really know about them.” Obit:

Protect Norman Rockwell from the hashtag retvrn creeps. His legacy is so much better than that.

Buttigieg polled an impressive 0% with Black voters. Zero. Percent. Do you know how kind and friendly Black voters are? Everyone gets like 3%, just for showing up! You have to work to go down from there! It's 2025, And I still run into people that don't know why Black voters don't like Buttigieg.

fully 50% of the most recent People Magazine's Sexiest Men Alive (TM) were humanities majors (and the others didn't go to college). Which points to an ongoing crisis in higher education: why are STEM programs taking our tax dollars yet failing to give our young men critical Sexiness skills?!

Alice Wong, Presente. Thank you for everything.

this is a huge [citation needed]

This is very easy to notice especially in discourse around college admissions - a lot of conflict over whether we want to make sure the absolute "most talented" kids get sorted into elite schools vs prioritizing fairness and making sure kids who work hard have equal opportunity.

As an academic, I am acutely aware that all deadlines are fictional, and that's how I run my classroom.

Some inspiring words on cinema in the streaming era from the Pope. Yes, THAT Pope.