philosophy & literature heads tune in - this is very exciting

Habemus cover

My husband was detained by ICE today Juan Muñoz, an American citizen, father of 2, and local government official, was peacefully protesting w. other elected officials. He was assaulted and taken away I have had zero contact or updates since #SOS @duckworth.senate.gov @durbin.senate.gov

Pretty clear illustration of "you may as well stand up for what you believe in, they're coming for you anyway."

you will not be surprised to hear there is a debate on this - see @zumhagenyekple.bsky.social's challenging and super smart book: press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

F train

say it again: 4 million people work in higher ed, the largest employer in 10 states, second largest employer in 10 more, and in 60 of the 100 biggest cities ROI for NIH and NSF for local economies is conservatively 4x, often close to 10x demolishing higher education is economic sabotage

Reading/viewing/listening suggestions from @benwurgaft.bsky.social to make this beautiful May weekend even better. 😎

I am lucky to have time, right now, to read, listen, and view a lot. Here is a quick list of recommendations on a nice Spring morning: 1) @zumhagenyekple.bsky.social's wonderful poem "Salthill" published in the Galway Review: thegalwayreview.com/2025/04/09/k...

Half of Big Ten university senates have now voted in favor of forming a mutual defense alliance to combat federal overreach. #AcademicSky www.forbes.com/sites/michae...

If you don't see your college, university or professional org on here please write to them and encourage them to sign. If you know other alum put a letter together with as many signatures as possible. If you are faculty or staff bring a resolution through your senate. #academicsky

A plantation museum focused on the truths of slavery had two grants for Black history and culture terminated in ‘furtherance of president’s agenda’

So happy to see this letter--now signed by 260 university presidents. Not at all happy to see that Tulane's president, Michael Fitts, is not one of them. Where are you, @tulaneu.bsky.social ??? #academicsky

We’ve known what this man & co are capable of for a very long time. Biden & Garland should’ve prosecuted them and did not. The main-stream media largely let it drop out of rotation in the cycle. I think about these kids every day. Every day that someone on TV asks if it’s really that bad yet

Coinciding with it's "No" letter Harvard has refashioned its university homepage into essentially an advertisement for the social benefits of university research. This is the current front page.

“So this is my radical proposal for universities: Act like universities, not like businesses. Spend your endowments. Accept more, not fewer students. Open up your campuses and expand your reach not by buying real estate but by bringing education to communities. Create a base. Become a movement.”

Important for Dems to not only pull out all the stops to bring Garcia home but keep his story front and center. This is much more than abt immigration now - this is abt the basic foundations of our Constitution. Our country's founding fathers fought a revolution & declared independence over this.

Columbia University has failed to defend academic freedom & freedom of speech & allowed a great institution to be bullied & extorted into submission by an administration hellbent on contorting higher education to their will. The AAUP condemns this capitulation. We can & must fight back.

One reason this government can so easily frame protesters as terrorists is that others—including some at universities—have already laid the groundwork. When we treat students engaged in constitutionally protected speech like criminals, we make it easier for authoritarian governments to do the same.

Yesterday members of @aaup-penn.bsky.social, GETUP, @afscme590.bsky.social, CIR, @rapup-uaw.bsky.social & @phillycwu.bsky.social showed Penn what a petition signed by 1,100+ coworkers looks like. (Turn sound on!) Solidarity with higher ed workers at Columbia and everywhere. Let’s fight like hell!

I don’t love a bunch of work emails on a Sunday. Hi, don’t do that.

1/7 It is with deep sadness that we mourn the passing of Linda Williams, a pioneering scholar whose fearless work transformed film and media studies. Over her remarkable career, Williams challenged scholars to take seriously popular and often marginalized genres,

congrats to Columbia, your reward for allowing a violent NYPD crackdown on your own students is being crushed by the federal government

This scrum of pot-bellied, sunken-chested betas trying to bully an all-black clad badass Eastern European wasteland survivor while dressed like Men’s Wearhouse mannequins is peak cinema.

Happy last week of Carnival!!!

A Karen

The narcissism and self-absorption of the DC political and press circle cannot be exaggerated. A rogue billionaire tearing apart the government, entire agencies collapsing, our neighbors turning on us, but inside the DC bubble it's the same old game of press releases and carefully neutral headlines.

The DEI caused the plane crash narrative is a distraction. The tariffs are a distraction. Whatever insane nonsense Trump spews that the media will chase like cats chasing a laser light is a distraction. The only story that counts right now is the wholesale hijacking of control of the US government.

Every single Democratic governor in the United States should be issuing statements like this, and huge credit to Pritzker for being the one who has. Trump is declaring himself a dictator by fiat. His words should not be treated as though they were law.

No point mincing words: this will kill a lot of people.

FINALLY we are seeing some pushback from SOMEBODY! Lawyer up, Donnie

Three weird years without this gorgeous force of life

Este domingo, en El País Semanal, el mundo de Trump. Viene con dos firmas gigantes: dibujo de Edel Rodríguez y un texto exclusivo de Marilynne Robinson, la gran escritora americana, ganadora del Pulitzer, que lleva medio siglo indagando en la historia de su país para entender sus males

Understood our nation is at war against (Happy MLK Day)

Just a reminder of some of the context around the TikTok ban: In 2020, Trump tried to ban it via executive order a couple months after K-pop fans used it to organize fake signups to Trump’s Tulsa rally, which led him to publicly overestimate how large the crowd size would be.

A teary shitty new year. Honest fullest love to all.

The usual. Jan 4. Bowery Ballroom NYC. Maybe the snow will be falling in manhattan. I hope so.

Luna Park, Coney. From the F train. Abracadabra

Absolutely upside down stuff: a Peabody award winning professor who teaches media non-fiction storytelling about *checks notes* police, inequality, and power is “persona non grata” on the campus where he is employed for that expertise? for documenting the thing he is known for covering?

Fuck every single one of these ventures I am so serious. Hire real humans as teachers

"Women full professors are 19% more likely than men at the same career stage to leave academia, as compared with 6% for women assistant professors and 10% for associates."

Not to mention what phosphorus has done to its once-arable soil Thank u for this reminder @owenjones.bsky.social

So nice to see A Different Order of Difficulty: Literature after Wittgenstein @uchicagopress.bsky.social on @vjoshuaadams.bsky.social Adams's very cool list of recommendations in Annulet's Year in Reading list for 2024. "A landmark in philosophy and literature" is now my favorite blurb ever. 🙏 VJA

Our 12/5 issue is now online, with Fintan O'Toole on the return of Trump, Patricia Williams on the horrors of family separation, Tim Judah on Ukraine, Zadie Smith on propaganda nightmares, Anne Enright on Alice and Andrea Munro, and much more.

It’s #WorldPhilosophyDay today, so why not listen to a few episodes of the Philosophy Bites podcast - over 300 to choose from on Spotify, Apple Podcasts etc podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/p...

Every first-grader