What if Bluesky doesn't have to be Important. What if social media doesn't have to be Important. Remember less than 20 years ago when social media didn't exist and we just hung out on forums and anyone who suggested the forum was Important would have been referred for a wellness check.

Feeling overwhelmed with all of this. LISTEN. Another Louisiana resident (Marshawn is the only name we have) testifies against the state’s racial gerrymander, speaking truth to power up and down the hearing room and predicts how this story will end. Speak your truth, fight and believe.

Frustrated with the election pundits talking as if votes only 'swing' from one party to another. I did some analysis of the results, and my modelling (based on votes only, not polls) suggests that the largest movement since 2024 local elections (by a long way) is from 'Did Not Vote' -> Reform

First two groups mentioned weren't formed in 1979 but in 1982 & 1988 respectively, and in places that Israel was at the time (and still is) consistently occupying, bombing, and displacing people within. It for whatever reason is still controversial to say but: occupation begets militancy in response

I’d hypothesise this happened here too: hospitals, magistrates courts, police stations etc concentrated in bigger centres, so solid jobs go, local services then fold, shops close - a downward spiral 1/2

This is maybe my meanest take about academia as a whole: a lot of what gets published is being written solely because it's important for academics to write. Is it knowledge, or just a kind of currency created in the desperate hope that it will help you advance?

for, uh, world-historical reasons I am putting this back out there

Weekend reading: I wrote about why Reconstruction is such a key historical reference - and about the lessons from the way America’s first attempt at biracial democracy was drowned in ostensibly “race-neutral” laws and white supremacist violence. This week’s piece:

turns out when you legitimate a taste for bigotry people gravitate to the parties that serve it as an entree rather than as a garnish

insanely smug English majors are the only ones who haven’t rotted their brains too much to do investment banking. our time

Let's face it many people in the UK are disillusioned. But that's when they are more likely to fall for fantasy arguments, misinformation, and bullshit. Just ask @jagolinzer.bsky.social, @profsanderlinden.bsky.social, or Prof Karen Douglas, Prof of Social Psychology at Kent University.

Deliverism, cost of living, growth... but there's just too much evidence that for a large part of the electorate it is just a general probably heavily social media influenced view that "everything is rubbish and we'll vote for whoever says that" bsky.app/profile/anth...

Anyway if this picture continues, very much the tale of two Englands (and probably Wales), graduate / younger versus not, where one party is dominating the not, setting the political agenda. A problem that politics in many countries can't come to terms with.

Anyway, such is the political moment, which we will all now be instructed to ignore as we're told that there must be more immigration crackdowns to make people happy because that has worked so well for the last ten years

Photo by @nicolehester.bsky.social for The Tennesseean www.tennessean.com/picture-gall...

A state that redraws its legislative maps before every election to maximize advantage for the incumbent party is not a democracy or a republic and in any case obviously violates the guarantee clause, among many others. No country does this. No country ever thought of doing this. It is a total farce.

NEW from me: many of our universities are now in a dying fall. A new global-national-regional-local split is opening up, which could choke off progress on almost all the Government's plans. Do they have a plan? Nope, nothing, not a clue. 👇 isrf.org/blog/whats-t...

I just repeated the analysis for grants in fiscal year 2026. I found 98 grants with title changes upon administrative (non-competitive) renewal. Here is the removed word cloud for fiscal year 2026. 4/5

...of the British working class even despite the suffering of their own country, India, at the hands of the British empire. Modern Britain is to an extent a continuation of that history, but also reflects a culture that celebrates and enjoys diversity like few other places in the world.

There were always two Britains. That's a reason why external observers, such as Indian intellectuals who visited and lived here in the 19th and early to mid 20th century, Dadabhai Naoroji, the first Indian MP in the British parliament, and Mahatma Gandhi, both empathised with the extreme plight...

it is considered impolite for me to be honest about how honest they are being about their desire to return to pre-1865 american democratic norms

while these days their dippy antics underscore they were always incurious blowhards the thing to remember about the New Atheist luminaries is they did their actual job: legitimating chauvinism and Islamophobia and helping make possible a series of wars that killed millions

The United States now has the most government restrictions on academic freedom of any high-income country. www.chemistryworld.com/news/academi... Raw data from @vdeminstitute.bsky.social —> academic-freedom-index.net/research/Aca...

As I was saying...

Anyway. I’m glad nobody was hurt and I’m sure the journalists who attended the WHCD will not center themselves and their personal experiences and instead remain focused on holding the powerful accountable and informing the people about their government.

Through two Trump administrations we have watched these simpering fools give pass after pass to this trashbag of a president, trading access and a spot on Air Force One for every shred of integrity they had left I've heard about the DC bubble but my god, how insane

While we simultaneously plan our next reporting trip to a protest, or a detention center to meet with detained immigrants, or a fucked-up wildfire, or to speak to a family living in their car because this economy turned their lives into a nightmare the gall, the audacity to scold us from on high

So it took my breath away to walk into a hospital recently and see men clearly dying of AIDS. While Zambia has managed to keep its core H.I.V. program running despite drastically reduced support, the cracks are widening and the human toll is becoming painfully visible www.nytimes.com/2026/04/25/h...

I first reported on H.I.V. in Zambia in 2002, when no one had treatment in sub-Saharan Africa. I saw hospitals where gaunt, dying patients packed the corridors. But Zambia — bolstered by international donors and the U.S. PEPFAR program — turned the tide www.nytimes.com/2026/04/25/h...

This makes me so angry. A friend of mine started out as the editor of a Zambian magazine that combined pop culture with serious and extensive sex education, partly financed through these sorts of fundings. All gone, because of one white supremacist and his ego.

On view at the Frick Collection until May 25, “Gainsborough: The Fashion of Portraiture” features paintings by Sir Thomas Gainsborough. Featured is Gainsborough’s only Black sitter, Afro-Anglo abolitionist, musician, and writer Ignatius Sancho. #art #nyc #nycart #music

Still feel like "Musk and his crew of incels destroyed a bunch of stuff they didn't understand and thereby hastened the deaths of millions of children" did not get the public attention it warranted.

Here’s something I wrote about how ICE flights are getting longer and the shackling crueler: www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

Call me Cassandra, but if you make thousands of HEI staff either compulsorily or 'voluntarily' redundant and create conditions in which senior staff take early retirement in an attempt to save more junior colleagues' careers without significant new hiring, a critical loss is exactly what happens.

Burchett is right: the most DC thing ever *is* a member of Congress blaming the city for something he and his colleagues did themselves.

When major donors like the US and Germany condoned Israel's killing of hundreds of @unrwa.org's humanitarians in Gaza.

These are a really good set of reforms - and carries on the Govts outstanding record on clean power - and will get virtual no coversge because of everything else. Ffs

Apparently the Pope has read Baudrillard.

A four-hour documentary from 1969 about life in Nazi-occupied France chronicles the way that many ordinary citizens simply lived their lives as if nothing had changed, @dgraham.bsky.social writes. "The Sorrow and the Pity" is more relevant than ever:

Sparing you a click, LLMs always make everything up, based on statistical correlations not of knowledge but of amount, order and proximity of words in stolen text they ingest for training. It’s literally what they are designed to do. It just sometimes happens to be correct.

Our push back is helping. Someone in the Administration is looking at the fact that most Americans support funding of science and strong public health measures and those folks might vote. The restoration of NSF Fellowships may be a similar trend 🧪 Call Congress!

Pope Leo XIV in Cameroon: “The world is being ravaged by a handful of tyrants.”

I’m sorry but the use of “doubles down” in this headline is pretty funny, very “I’m going to lovd and tolerate the shit out of you”

also: for those who insist annually that Yom HaShoah disrespects other victims - do you think other memorial days are disrespectful erasure? or were you ignorant of their existence & only care about people murdered by Nazis when you try to cynically use their memories to justify yelling at Jews?

Thirty percent of all hospitals in Oregon now refuse to provide lifesaving medical treatment to trans people. Not just gender affirming care to minors. They discriminate against ALL Trans people.

Magyar won with an emphasis on corruption and the rule of law. Good lessons. It wasn't just "we will improve the economy". It was "these people are stealing from you and we will put them in jail."

something that wrinkles my brain every time I remember it is the fact that total eclipses are only possible on earth because the moon and sun appear to be the same size in our sky, due to the insanely, astronomically unlikely fluke that the moon is 400x smaller than the sun but 400x closer to us.

Once again, the national average pay for adjunct professors with PhDs is a flat fee of $3900 per course.

Absolutely devastating article on one little, beautiful, remarkable piece of what we lost to DOGE

The horror of sitting across from a Trump voter is the realization that they do not believe in universal human rights. Simple as. They believe in a tiered, racist and patriarchical system of humanity, and they're voting to ensure they remain at the top of it.