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.

Brilliant essay by Cory Doctorow - I'd never understood the key role of trying to be a growth stock in how these companies behave. www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

Non-protesting dad just trying to hustle his kids, as young as 6mo, out of the neighborhood. ICE threw a flash-bang INTO HIS car, all 6 kids in the hospital now. If anyone wondered how things turn against occupying armies there's a case study playing out in front of you.

This helps make sense of what’s going on. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

The dissertation is a nice find! I'm a longtime fan of the papers that followed (Olazaran 1993, 1996). I cite them here (and in my Language paper): websites.umass.edu/comphon/2017...

Wow. Good things can still happen in this country!

Yeah, famously superpowers go around bragging how strong they are, making colonies, establishing regional spheres of influences, blustering at shifting coalitions of allies, undermining stability with squabbles over barely-populated islands, oh wait I’m describing declining 19th century great powers

As the great Suketu Mehta wrote in the accompanying essay, "By 1643, only nineteen years after the first Walloon settlers founded New Amsterdam, 18 languages were already being spoken in the city—among a population of a mere 500." To hell with fictions of a homogenous past, linguistic & otherwise.

Over the holidays, I did a quick and dirty genealogy by copying and pasting information from genealogy sites into a spreadsheet. Here's what I got, a lot more than I ever thought I'd find (e.g. I'm maybe descended from Brian Boru, and Charlemagne and Hildegard?!) websites.umass.edu/pater/2025/1...

It is unclear to me how much traction Glossa: a journal of general linguistics is getting on BlueSky. I am thinking of switching communication about new papers to LinkedIn, which gives better insight into the # of views garnered. Give us a like if you want Glossa to stay on the Blue side of things.

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.