Global mean temperature 2025: 1.44 ± 0.13 °C above the 1850-1900 average, based on a synthesis of eight international datasets. 2025 was the second or third warmest year on record. 2024 remains the warmest. That makes the past 3 years are the 3 warmest years on record. wmo.int/news/media-c...

We've removed the paywall from this guide so everyone can access it. 👇 Stay safe.

Some thoughts about the murder by ICE in Minnesota. This is the time for all of us to demand much better and to show what’s right.

When you see comments on Social Media defending the violence of ICE, it is worth keeping this quote in mind.

"Because the U.S. entered the UNFCCC with advice and consent of the Senate in 1992, it’s our legal view that it also must be exited using the same process in reciprocation... Letting this lawless move stand could shut the U.S. out of climate diplomacy forever" www.reuters.com/sustainabili...

"This is rather dramatic but lost in the general media turmoil over everything else - 🇺🇸 is withdrawing from 66 international organizations and treaties, most notably everything connected with climate change, democracy and rule of law." www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/...

We cannot be more clear. Leave us the fuck alone.

Ever relevant, this poem by Mary Oliver, especially today.

“Remove justice and what are states but gangs of bandits on a large scale?” Augustine of Hippo, The City of God (Book IV, Chapter 4)

From Trump's perspective, Venezuelans' rights, interests, and agency are absolutely irrelevant. We--the US--"need to be surrounded by safe countries" and we--the US--"also need the energy out of the ground." This is "when you're a star, they let you do it" but as foreign policy.

"@mattseybold.bsky.social's provocation that print functions as a kind of rent strike, and Cory Doctorow’s sustained critique of platform enshittification, both frame form as a site of contestation—an object of refusal and redesign rather than a refuge from mediation."

As a big, big fan of @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social, this is obviously a great piece. But for me, it's telling that it begins with a historic comparison, since history's language is no longer useful. We're in a new era where past language—shame in particular, but civility, etc.—doesn't win the day.

RSVP here!: luma.com/inauguration

Seems like there’s a LOT of people who despise Gavin Newsom….and also a handful of weird MAGA-brained Democrats who think it’s unfair to criticize a presidential candidate *checks notes* three years before the election.

“Just one more thing, Ms Bondi… … If The Epstein Files are a hoax, why the redactions?”

The utter perversion of the #BrokenTimes' both-sidesing compulsion: Here it equates the right-wing ruin of New College with (checks notes) liberal (in any sense of the word) education, which it dismisses as just another "ideological bubble." Just fuck off.

"Academics literally cannot make genAI go away" we also can't make underage drinking go away and we're not advocating for installing bar carts in every classroom.

This how normal countries operate...

🚨🔥 Warmest Christmas on record for the Contiguous U.S.! The average high of 57.9F and the average low of 36.6F each broke the Christmas record by a full 3F. 🔥🚨

it’s hard to think of a bigger grift than the claim that predictive text aka gAI is ‘conscious’ and thus “deserve rights” like the ability to vote

i can't figure out if the cabal of rich tech bro incels who put the stupid liars in charge are mad at them for being so bad at everything, if they're in total denial, or if they're just fully mentally checked out

READ: Palestine's Gaza Strip is renowned for its bright red and delicious strawberries. Israel's genocide has decimated the fields of "red gold" that once served as a major agricultural export. mondoweiss.net/2025/12/isra...

I’m sorry, but it is disgraceful to be an academic who uses this technology to conduct research. It should be prohibited in all of our scholarly institutions, including universities and journals.

"The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary" (Ursula K. Le Guin). We need a radical new form of cultural and political imagination more than ever!

Computer scientists: "So with machine learning we can extract subtle patterns from massive datasets. What shall we do with it?" Business school professors, every single time: "You know, I think phrenology got a raw deal in the late 1800s."

"[Workers at major companies] are asking, why do I have to use something that doesn't work? Well it's because capitalism demands eternal growth. Milton Friedman's ghost haunts every trader, Ronald Reagan pops out of the toilet every so often, this is what we do here." Love the mental imagery.

"a coalition of more than 230 environmental groups has demanded a ntl moratorium on new datacenters in the US, the latest salvo in a growing backlash to a booming AI industry that has been blamed for escalating electricity bills and worsening the climate crisis" www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

"The newspaper industry served as a feeder for our entire news media ecosystem. So when we lose those newspapers, we've lost that journalism. In the early 2000s, we had 40 journalists per 100,000 people. We're now down to 8 journalists per 100,000 people," says @victorpickard.bsky.social.

"universities are being infiltrated by a commercial industry that exploits students+faculty as data mines frenzy w/o consulting their faculty, collecting empirical data on whether gen AI is pedagogically useful, or pausing to inquire about the long-term impact" www.publicbooks.org/four-frictio...

Shortly before I finished edits on MORE EVERYTHING FOREVER, an economist warned me against proposing a wealth tax with a cap on maximum net worth. He told me it was too unpopular and people would say I was out of touch with reality. I seriously considered listening to him. I'm really glad I didn't.

Netanyahu literally hours after the attack on Sunday denouncing Australia’s call for a Palestinian state. There is not a single Jewish catastrophe this war criminal would not weaponize to seize even more land and win ever greater impunity for Israel.

No, Anthropic and OpenAI are not like Uber - they burn way more money and have no path to profitability, nor is AI "like Amazon Web Services," which cost less than $70bn over 9 years and had a proven worth and path to profitability almost immediately. www.wheresyoured.at/ai-mythbuste...

Premium newsletter: my 18k word AI Mythbusters: There’s no insatiable demand for AI compute, AI is not “getting exponentially better” or “tricking humans,” we haven't “lost control of AI,” AI doomerism is a grift, and there is no “GenAI arms race with China.” www.wheresyoured.at/ai-mythbuste...

NYT op-ed reminds billionaires to heed the French Revolution, mentions Network State cultists Peter Thiel and Balaji Srinivasan. "It’s as if the sheer scale of this wealth, which beggars even the riches of the Gilded Age, has induced a kind of class sociopathy." 🎁 www.nytimes.com/2025/12/14/o...

This is fucking grim. Somebody invented a white guy, an "IT professional" named Edward Crabtree, who stopped the Bondi shooting and spread it all over the internet, which was picked up by AI agents and slop aggregation sites. The real hero is a fruit stand owner named Ahmed el Ahmed.

Any university, law firm, corporation or other powerful entity that now bends the knee for Trump deserves to be scorned and boycotted. He is deeply unpopular and will only grow more unpopular. Moreover his power is waning and his own coalition smells it and is fracturing.

"We live in hell, and the rapacious need for growth in every industry, unrelenting, forever and ever, is decimating all of our institutions and our way of life." Amanda Dobbins, on fire

Tech fascists believe they are going to merge with AI, live forever and colonize the universe as a species of self-replicating machines that eat the energy of the stars. We can think big, too. Anything is possible. Don't let billionaires monopolize the power of radical imagination.

AI dialogues shifted political support by 2 to 3 points in trials, eclipsing standard ads. Roughly one-third of this effect persisted for a month. However, models optimized for persuasion proved more factually error-prone. #MLSky

This is the conclusion, which I'm pulling out from behind the paywall because it'll probably be a free newsletter or podcast one day. I think the AI era is a reckoning for the tech industry, one where consumers finally realize they're being abused.

This is what government censorship actually looks like: defunding entire fields, deporting researchers, and quite effectively chilling speech that helps people understand how our information systems are being exploited and calls out powerful people and platforms for their bullshit.

Weird situation. AI adoption in the work world is stagnating, while higher-ed institutions are rushing to embrace it so that students will be prepared for…the work world?

He’s gesturing to a sleeping man as he says “He’s the only leader in the world who can help end [the war in Ukraine].”

Look around. The case for more, not less, liberal arts education - actual, real education in reading, writing, thinking, arguing, analyzing, & synthesizing by doing the actual hard work for which there is no substitute - is stronger than it’s ever been at any point in human history.

Oh my god the absolute depravity of this.