Book Advent #11: "The Rock Eaters" by @brendapeynado.bsky.social is a delightful collection of mostly speculative stories. I have a new addition to my list of favorite short stories ever in "Kite Maker" but there are so many other weird and wonderful gems here to savor.

Book Advent #10: "Some of My Best Friends" by @tajjaisen.bsky.social is a sharp essay collection exploring law, art, and more while navigating racism and nationalism.

Book Advent #9: "Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea" by @rchetypes.bsky.social is about the real life pirate Shek Yeung with speculative/weird elements. Featuring gorgeous writing, this novel meditates on the effects of power and the efforts to cling to it. And another cover from @yukoart.bsky.social!

Book Advent #8: Bog Queen by @annanorth.bsky.social is a lovely story told in parallel about two women who live akimbo to the norms placed on them. There's also a third POV which scratches my itch for the mysterious and profound.

Book Advent #7: "Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning" by @cathyparkhong.bsky.social is a captivating blend of lyrical prose and sharp social insights.

Historian of eugenics here. I don't normally like to retweet bad arguments, but this is such a fundamental misunderstanding of eugenics, I think it's important to point out. I don't have time to debunk all of the ways this is inaccurate, but I'll highlight a few things and then recommend some books🧵

Book Advent #5: "Exhibit" by @rokwon.bsky.social is one of those books that just burrows its way into your skin through the power of its language. I loved just letting it take me over.

Book Advent #5: "Lone Women" by @victorlavalle.bsky.social is a wonderful exploration of the monstrous among women in the Old West of Montana. It builds tension so skillfully and seamlessly that you don't realize it's happening until the end. This edition has a lovely cover by @yukoart.bsky.social.

Book Advent #4. "The World and All That It Holds" by @sashahemon.bsky.social is a wonderful story of survival and longing across boundaries of all kinds. Books like this fill me with grief and hope.

Book Advent Day 3: Brown Girls by Daphne Palasi Andreades is expansive, beautiful, and haunting. It has one of my favorite uses of the first person plural point of view. What a wonderful way to explore complexities and commonalities.

Book Advent #2: Mexican Gothic by @silviamg.bsky.social. This is a wonderful addition to gothic horror. A very explicit version of the "empire writing back" via transplanting the traditional gothic manor to Mexico and confronting colonialism head on via a quick-witted protagonist.

I grew up with advent calendars. Every day a new door to open and a hidden world inside. Books are like those advent calendar doors, so I want to celebrate books that have been a joy for me. Maybe they will be a joy for you or your loved ones. 📚💙

Book Advent #1: "We Lived on the Horizon" by @erikaswyler.bsky.social Come for the dystopia, stay for the class commentary. This is a really lovely book about power, hierarchies, and the stories we tell (ourselves). I loved the elegant, elegiac prose. 📚💙

Interesting results in this new paper: Canadian physics counts: an exploration of the diverse identities of physics students and professionals in Canada. 🧪 🇨🇦 ⚛️ 👩‍🔬🎢

Rix Road, the season finale of Andor Season 1, was released three years ago today. F the Empire. All of them.

"While other universities report that the humanities are shrinking, at Berkeley, the opposite is true. The music major is the fastest-growing major on campus. We are finding bigger classrooms because film is exploding. English is back to the numbers we saw 15 years ago. We are hiring" bit.ly/4ohKuOe

Fall of Freedom starts today. Here’s NPR on the initiative www.npr.org/2025/11/21/n...

Overall I enjoyed The American Revolution. It is definitely a nice introduction for people who haven't revisited the topic since high school (or earlier). www.pbs.org/kenburns/the...

Things like this will become increasingly common as billionaires increasingly treat low earth orbit like their personal playground and garbage dump

From the very first census in 1790, the U.S. has measured race – but never in the same way and rarely without controversy. In this new data essay, we look at how the census has approached racial and ethnic measurement over time.

how did i go so long not knowing we were literally teaching people to read wrong. i knew something wasn't right but jesus christ www.apmreports.org/episode/2019...

Reminder: If you use generative AI for *any of your writing tasks* you are a Slopper not a writer and should be ashamed of yourself. The end.

Having recently finished Annihilation recently, I was excited to see that @jeffvandermeer.bsky.social was going to speaking at the Malta Book Festival. Definitely not disappointed with the wide-ranging talk about craft and his inspirations.

Oh yes I will be writing an essay about how the SNW episode “Four and a Half Vulcans” is wildly offensive and normalizing race science that was mainstream and popular in United States in the 1850s Like Disco called this shit terrorism What the fuck is this regressive bullshit

there is no question in my mind that rfk jr is the most dangerous person in this administration and that his eugenicist ideology threatens the lives of millions of people www.advocate.com/politics/dem...

Folks who enjoyed K-pop Demon Hunters, which is an allegory built on biracial heritage experiences in Korean society but does not include any people of biracial heritage in it, should read about Insooni, a Black Korean whose career began with the Hee Sisters, and push for KPDH2 to do better!

🧵If people want to believe that white supremacist misogynists & those inclined to listen to them are driven to their hate & voting patterns by words that are A) accurate & B) claimed by entire classes of people, well. Those people are fools. Let's stop abandoning our values for imaginary votes, 'k?

It’s weird to me that people keep starting new Substacks and still don’t know that Substack is extremely bad news Please get off Substack 😭 www.anildash.com//2024/11/19/...

Hello, science has never been apolitical and I wrote a book about one of the ways that USians came to think that it was. Please read it and stop saying stupid shit. www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/...

Amid all the important national news coverage, I’m proud to collaborate with @veritenews.org’s @richardawebster.bsky.social, whose running investigation into Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry’s criminal justice policies dives into the new use of an algorithm that bars thousands of prisoners from parole.

This @brookings.edu piece is jam packed with lots of useful info on public university boards! I appreciated this figure using data Isabel collected that highlights how board members appointed by Republican governors are generally less representative of students and faculty at their institution.

For Alice Wade, a transgender woman, sharing who is she is part of the fight against the wave of anti-transgender legislation sweeping through New Hampshire and across the country. eu.seacoastonline.co... #transgender #trans #LGBTQ #LGBTQIA

A lot of people are describing this assertion of "race" as a biological reality as some Nazi shit. Obviously this is correct, but wildly incomplete, as the Nazis did not invent this. It's in Haeckel and Linnaeus, in Montesquieu, Thomas Jefferson, Hegel and Kant. www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...

I mean… Yeah. Yeah they do. For entirely known and warned-about reasons. Yes. www.science.org/content/arti...

wrote about how hayao miyazaki would hate you fucking losers slate.com/life/2025/03...

Tout this widely. The biggest danger right now is, as @dandrezner.bsky.social said yesterday, pluralistic ignorance, when “people who hold a majority opinion are unaware that it is a majority opinion”. We need to broadcast all the signs that the town halls etc are not a fluke.

What Vance is doing here is ENORMOUS disinformation. International students at the undergrad level typically pay full tuition, which subsidizes tuition for American students on financial aid by keeping tuition costs lower. At the grad level, domestic students are harder to recruit!

NEW: The Commerce Department is giving federal employees at the Census Bureau and most other parts of the department until April 17 to apply for a voluntary early retirement authority or voluntary separation incentive payments offer if they're offboarded by May 3, according to emails shared with NPR

They're called public records for a reason. Starting today, WIRED will *stop paywalling* articles that are primarily based on public records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, becoming the first publication to partner with @freedom.press to offer this for our new coverage.

Hey folks, it would mean a ton if you could chip in a few dollars to help us future-proof Assigned Media against potential government censorship. (Yes, I'm sorry, but this is where we are.)

I decided to start a #thread 🧵 of stories about legal residents and tourists being (illegally) arrested, detained and/or deported by the Trump regime. I'll only post stories from serious sources, as rumors and conspiracies are really not needed in this authoritarian moment.

Some of my Columbia Law School colleagues and I offer our thoughts on legal issues with the Administration's March 13, 2025 letter to our University's president, and its threat to academic freedom. balkin.blogspot.com/2025/03/a-ti...

*Jon Ossoff* just announced he's voting no. You think that happened out of nowhere? CALL YOUR SENATORS. 👇

Research from 2022 that every Democrat apologist should chew on: “We do not find any evidence that accommodative strategies reduce radical right support. If anything, our results suggest that they lead to more voters defecting to the radical right.“ www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

UPDATE—Mahmoud's attorney says they do NOT know where he is. They were first told he was sent to an ICE facility in Elizabeth, NJ. But when his 8-month-pregnant wife tried to visit him, she was told he's not there. They've received reports he may be sent as far away as Louisiana.

Vaccinate your kids. “COVID-19 vaccines cut the risk of long COVID by between 57–73 percent in kids and teens, according to a study published today in JAMA Network Open.” arstechnica.com/science/2025...

California’s connecting MPAs, and fish populations are rebounding Fish biomass has surged throughout California's 25-year-old marine protected area network, with the greatest gains in older reserves containing diverse habitats. https://buff.ly/4hMwBoR #ShareGoodNewsToo

Attorney General Bonta: California Remains Unwavering in Our Commitment to Protecting Gender-Affirming Care oag.ca.gov/news/press-r...

🔥 NEW PAPER 🔥 The dream collaboration with wonderful colleague & friend @dryasmiyn.bsky.social has come to fruition w/ our CEP paper: "Too quant to crit? Advancing QuantCrit methodologies in educational psychology" doi.org/10.1016/j.ce... *Yes, the title is based on MCHammer lyrics Fav quotes ⬇️