We're thrilled to announce the launch of Semantics of Natural Languages, a new diamond open access journal - the scholar-owned and -led successor to Natural Language Semantics, published with OLH under the auspices of LingOA. snl-journal.org The Editors Amy Rose Deal, Clemens Mayr, Florian Schwarz

I'm telling you: if you like someone's book or article, straight up email them that. It'll make their day. There are not enough compliments in academia.

Note to media: police arresting peaceful protesters singing “give peace a chance” is not protesters “clashing” with police. It’s the state violating the First Amendment rights of people upset that human beings who did nothing illegal are being held without due process and being fed maggots.

Ed Markey tears into Seth Moulton: "Massachusetts deserves better than a senator who scapegoats trans kids." The crowd goes fucking wild.

What's this a plot of? Wrong answers only! If you want the right answer, check out the Lee et al. paper near the top of websites.umass.edu/pater/papers/.

Of all the harm this administration has done to US science, today's proposed changes to the way federal grants are awarded and administered is the most damaging yet. The text of the federal register document is impenetrably tedious by design, so here's an excellent summary of what it says.

Correlation is not causation, correlation is not causation... The people being interviewed mostly know this, but they of course had to use this grabby headline.

This was a nice surprise! The University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries has purchased this item in response to your recent Interlibrary Loan request:      Loan Title: The Emergence and Development of American English

The Emergence and Development of American English by William A. Kretzschmar, Jr. Based on data from the Linguistic Atlas Project, this book tells the story of American English from a linguistic standpoint. 📚 https://cup.org/41QndtU

Thanks for sharing this @asheeshks.org - it's the best Hampshire history/tribute I've read. Learning a lot - and I'm a local!

What a great meta-conversation we can now have about whether “Rock Music” is in fact rock music. As an old rocker, I say it is, and it’s f’ing brilliant. @bowiesongs.bsky.social, @ch-narayan.bsky.social, @erdanton.bsky.social www.theguardian.com/music/2026/m...

List of 9 websites where you can download unlimited books for free: 1. gutenberg .org 2. standardebooks .org 3. manybooks .net 4. openlibrary .org 5. bookboon .com 6. freecomputerbooks .com 7. internetarchive .org 8. digilibraries .com 9. librivox .org

This isn’t a scientific debate. This is government censorship. This is Lysenkoism, as @gregggonsalves.bsky.social pointed out last year. And this will not end well. www.washingtonpost.com/health/2026/...

You ever try to code switch at work and fail? 😂

The humans beat the machines on the speech recognition tasks in this paper. (Though the human part seems to have been an afterthought).

This is excellent. Hard to see how the US is doing anything but losing here. It had an ally that for all intents and purposes was already a 51st state - not in terms of control, but cooperation. And then Trump's bully instincts had to f*** that up.

Could this be fixed by more rigorous use of DOI/ISSN /ISBN? Authors must include them, and publishers must check them (presumably with an automated process).

Tracks.

This sucks.

Bad even for him. This is the absolute definition of racism. Can the press please report this plainly: “President Trump is a racist”?

HCR is part of my morning routine, and I get a lot out of her missives, but it’s good to get a historian’s perspective (a pretty clear misstep is detailed in the linked Slate article).

Bob Dylan has quietly launched a new Patreon project, Lectures from the Grave, featuring AI-generated monologues, fictional letters, and short stories attributed to historical figures—raising big questions about creativity, authenticity, and the role of artists in an AI-driven future.

#NoKings in Northampton MA @indivisible.org

The Great Barrington Declaration’s free speech movement in action. PS I have heard GB residents were pissed their town’s name got used for that declaration.

Has anyone seen “the AI doc”? @hagenblix.bsky.social maybe?

I just want to express my appreciation for @gavinyamey.bsky.social's righteously angry postings aout the current state of federal public health management (and the NIH, stuff), as well as his music tips, with this SNL bit. www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUBV...

"AI as a War Issue, War as a Workers' Issue" Couldn't be more clear than this headline. @tisjune.bsky.social, @shreyachowdhary.bsky.social, and @nathanckim.bsky.social share their reflections on Organizing Against the Machine 👇

This is important stuff. It’s not the LLMs, the problems are older and deeper. But yes, misuse of AI does play a role. artificialbureaucracy.substack.com/p/kill-chain...

50 years ago today Bowie played Springfield MA, and we have a decent recording of it! Thank you @bowiesongs.bsky.social for this, and the great ISOLAR 50 series in general - I look forward to it landing in my inbox each day! www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcSb...

This is the conservative pitch to most Americans: Sure, you might be suffering as a result of our policies, but other people -- people who are different from you, people you don't like -- they're suffering a lot more than you, so it all works out.

Paris friends! Amis parisiens ! This Thursday is the first of four public lectures I'm giving on AI and philology, broadly defined: "Philological Reasoning and Computational Models." The advertisement is in French, but the lectures are in English. I'd also love to meet while I'm here in March! 1/

So according to the WSJ a US Senator conspired with another country to manipulate the US into starting a war, am I getting this right

MAGA folks are doing all they can to erase trans kids & adults Kansas revoked trans people’s IDs overnight This report finds that “many alleged suicides of Black trans women are in fact modern-day lynchings”: www.advocate.com/news/crime/b... The Atlantic chooses to stoke a fake anti-trans panic 👀

This is essential viewing—thank you Dr Green for sharing it It’s a genuine tragedy to see the NIH Director embracing censorship so gleefully; his response to Dr Green (“it’s bad science!”) is one of the most repulsive things I’ve seen from Jay Bhattacharya, amidst a long list of vile utterances

!!

Hegseth just shot down a DHS drone with a laser because he thought it belonged to a Mexican cartel, but let’s let him preside over a radical shift to unrestrained AI on our most advanced weapons systems. What could go wrong?

Excellent and frightening for our future.

This should be great!

+1

Thank you to both @gregggonsalves.bsky.social and @joshuasweitz.bsky.social for these important words.

Thank you Joe!

Wow - could this maybe break through all the noise?

I can’t stop laughing about this!

This is a fascinating story. ICE tried to buy a warehouse in VA from a Canadian company, to turn into a detention center. One of the company’s advertising partners basically told them that if they sold, they could kiss their ads goodbye. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/01/u...

Omg this is wild. Hauser getting advice from Epstein about crisis management.

"P-Hacking with one prompt" by Shigeto Kawahara. TL/DR: Ask LLMs to find a significant effect, and they will oblige. www.researchgate.net/publication/...

The people of Minnesota have executed one of the most impressive civil resistance campaigns I can remember: - Organized a city wide general strike - Maintained nonviolent discipline amidst violence - Mobilized 10,000s in subzero temps to protest and watch ICE - Flipped public opinion against ICE

“in the absence of additional information, it appears Thao was taken half-naked in 10 degree weather simply because he’s Asian.”

Just for the record, and it’s insane that the mad king made me look this up, there is documentation of the US giving up all claim to Greenland to Denmark when we bought the Virgin Islands from them in 1916. history.state.gov/historicaldo...

And the stuff on copyright and how to fight back against the corporations is essential. The article is based on a lecture he gave for an upcoming book.