I mean yeah it’s an authoritarian takeover but can we take some comfort in the fact that the people doing it are INSANELY stupid?

🧵: I really cannot exaggerate how dangerous the Trump regime manipulating official economic data is for not only the American economy but the global economy more broadly. Much of our position as a safe haven for investment came from the perception of strong and consistent economic transparency. 1/4

Wow - this is fantastic work by our rep.! Bonus: Markey’s accent.

A major downside of publication without peer review for the new Omnilingual ASR paper (ai.meta.com/research/pub...) is that no one could force them to cite Keoni Maheloni, esp. this blog post. blog.papareo.nz/whisper-is-a... (Thanks to Olga Kriukova for sharing both of these with me).

“Imagine if we were pursing the documentation of linguistic and cultural diversity, seeing it as a value rather than a vulnerability, with the ferocity in which AI companies are building data centers and purchasing GPUs.” ethanzuckerman.com/2025/12/05/g...

JUST ANNOUNCED: Schmidt Sciences has awarded $11M to 23 teams globally for our Humanities and AI Virtual Institute (HAVI). These projects bring AI to history, archaeology, literature, and film, unlocking new understandings of human culture. Learn more: buff.ly/tvTUYwY

Our country. How can we make this stop?

Both NWAV and LabPhon are in Montreal in 2026!

Just logged into X for the first time in ages to give Sabrina Carpenter one more like.

ILL absolutely rocks! Your library doesn’t subscribe to some overpriced online publisher? Just ask your ILL for it and you’ll have it likely in hours.

It’s looking to be a snow day for the kids and not for me. Thankfully one of the kids is a teenager…

Great culture can save lives. Literally. Amazing letter in today’s @thetimes.com about Tom Stoppard

The DC shooting story is really getting to me because we literally trained this man as a child soldier for a death squad in a forever war and Stephen Miller et al want to blame it on other cultures? It's our culture, American culture, that killed that woman.

Does anyone have experience using Apertus in teaching, or just testing out its capabilities? It would be so great to be able to offer our students an alternative, more ethical platform. www.swiss.tech/news/switzer...

Great connections between our linguistics department and the CICS NLP program (including Katrin Erk now in a joint appointment). Also happy to communicate with prospective applicants.

Struck this morning by how the win wasn’t from the UC system itself pushing back—it was its worker power through *unions* and aligned groups like @aaup.org defending UC interests, even though admin itself wasn’t. There’s some kind of lesson here

Makes a great case that the filibuster is “actively destroying our system of government” by shifting power to the executive and judicial branches.

pre-writing a devastating obituary for your enemy is god-tier hating of a kind you don’t often see anymore. renaissance haterism. beautiful stuff.

Like others last night, I initially jumped to the conclusion that SCOTUS was once again merely siding with the Trump administration and allowing them to stop food AID. But this interevenyion is more complicated. Justice Jackson took the lead, in order to prevent worse outcomes.

Can I just say how impressive Paul Kiparsky is? Had the great pleasure of hearing him give a great talk at AMP, and just came across this cool new paper on Stratal OT and vowel harmony that I'm looking forward to digging into with my grad phonology class. web.stanford.edu/~kiparsky/Pa...

For the fellas playing along at home, unofficial election results will be updated live here:

The Python Software Foundation won a $1.5m grant from the US government National Science Foundation. Turned it down because required to affirm that we "will not... operate any programs that advance or promote DEI" simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/27/...

I’m not sure whether coffee before class resulted in it being more confusing or more exciting. Probably a combination of both.

This deep dive into Bowie's Blackstar is so, so good. Over 45 minutes, just for one song. I'm only 20 minutes in, but have learned a lot already, and have been throughly entertained. @bowiesongs.bsky.social @davidbowienews.bsky.social www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zGY...

Great to hear Marty Meehan on the radio this morning saying UMass would not sign the compact (probably easier to say when you haven't been asked to, but still). H/t to @gregggonsalves.bsky.social for this link. www.insidehighered.com/opinion/view...

News coverage of the Trump administration's proposed "compact" with universities has been, so far, shockingly bad. I hate to pick on NPR reporter Elissa Nadworny, who's usually a solid reporter, but almost every important thing I heard her say this morning about the proposed "compact" was false.

We just presented our work on automated IPA transcription at AMP 2025 in Berkeley. We fine-tuned Wav2Vec on the Buckeye corpus. Slides and links, including to a web-based interface with text grid support, can be found here: websites.umass.edu/pater/handou... Phone alignment output coming soon!

Cornell is cancelling a distinguished professor's classes on Gaza and suspending him because of the complaints of a student who previously served in Israel's military surveillance agency and was literally recording the comments of other students in class and deliberately derailing discussion.

So much gratitude to the @aaup.org for their work on this (and for sharing the ruling - so great to read). The NY Times reporting doesn't even cite the AAUP by name - this Guradian article is much better. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Bad Bunny will headline the Super Bowl halftime show next year.

It’s wild to me how much people are into sports! Been spending time in airport bars on my long way back home (about to do a red eye from Vegas to Baltimore…)

I am in Berkeley for the Annual Meeting on Phonology and I have discovered that "Fieldwork IPA" is delicious.

This is as huge a scandal & blunder as this chaotic Administration has seen. The person who should be called to answer for it is Secy Kristi Noem. When a woman who loves the camera as much as Noem is nowhere to be seen for 10 days it’s b/c she’s hiding out. Media should be all over this.

Moving past umlaut - a band with nasalization diacritics in their name! And they rock, of course. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sn%C3%B...

Posted this before I learned that Massachusetts is next up…

Love this - so inspiring

RFK Jr. rolled out that old chestnut again about how healthy Americans were in the 60’s, so here’s a fact check. In 1965: -42% of American adults smoked; it’s 11% now. -The infant morality rate was 24.7/1000; it’s 5.6/1000 now. -Overall life expectancy was 70 years; it's about 77 years now.

The schedule for the AMP 2025 special session on "Deep Phonology" is now up. We'll be kicking it off with "AI-assisted analysis of phonological variation in English" (we've fine-tuned a wav2vec model on the Buckeye corpus and are evaluating it and other models on the TIMIT corpus).

Here's a public-facing description of the linguistics work I do, that I think is really well done as these things go. www.umass.edu/gateway/rese...

Love the airflow in v2!

"Democrats need to avoid Blueskyism" says guy on Elon Musk's website.

How am I just seeing this for the first time? So good - highly recommended to anyone teaching a general intro class or intro phonetics or phonology. Also looks great for curious non-linguists. Can't wait to check out the other episodes.

There is no questioning in the NPR piece, let alone analysis, of *why* this is being done. It's not just because Trump has a bizarre hatred of wind power. Another move to consolidate wealth in the hands of the few, and rob us of public goods (see HCR 9/30). Everyone should be furious about this.

This is good. medium.com/@carmitage/i...

“the focus on mitochondrial dysfunction is a mirage; given RFK Jr’s decades-long crusade against vaccines, his obsession is not with the mitochondrion but with one of public health’s resounding successes.” This is excellent. @gavinyamey.bsky.social you would like this www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/...

#NIH is hanging by a thread. The #CDC has been decimated. #RFK Jr. and Russell #Vought are psychopaths--I don't say this frivolously--they are cold, calculating, inflicting violence on millions through public policy. It is where we are right now. These men are not normal. 1/

Besides being what seems to be the right response to the ‘AI problem’, this emphasizes what colleges are good for, and what kept them solvent through MOOCS and Covid: interaction with an in person community of peers.

This sounds so great - getting my copy now...

The only thing I can say about this paragraph is read it. Sit with it. Read it again. @michaelharriot.bsky.social