It’s the most wonderful time of the year

and they say books are dead

some of the things I’m proud of from this year: 1. this essay about the Trump admin‘s sketchy relationship to data and information

Sunday NYT devoted the entire style section to supposedly postfeminist rightwing women (who appear totally unfamiliar w feminist thought but whatevs) AND is eliminating the magazine recipe column?! a huge 🖕🏻 to those of us who need pleasure reading along with our vast helpings of displeasure.

Me: Oma, did you read this? Oma, very moved: yes, it was SO TRUE. Everyone should read it. I was thinking I should write a letter to the editor, but I’m sure they’ll get so many. Me: oh really? how many 100 year olds do you think read the New Yorker??? Oma, thoughtfully: I guess that’s true.

when you’ve written 20,000 words and she just …tweets it out

some news: today is my last day as the Microsoft Visiting Professor at Princeton‘s Center for Information Technology Policy. I’m so grateful to @randomwalker.bsky.social and the rest of the crew for a terrific, generative semester. and I’m thrilled to be visiting at Brooklyn Law School in spring!

I’m not a narcissist but I would believe you if you told me that this entire thing has been engineered specifically to drive me, a professor at a public university in Texas who teaches First Amendment and writes about AI, out of my mind

thought I was gonna have a great writing day but instead I’m doing my hammiest rendition of Bananaphone to entertain a sick toddler

is liking the sticky bun at Flour basic or nah

if i were developing an alternative law school ranking one important factor would be natural light in the library reading rooms

boarding passes used to look like this

Overslept, left my coffee at home, missed my train, made the next one, bought more coffee, sloshed coffee on my shirt, realized shirt is inside out. doing really great

1/ A few thoughts about @williambaude.bsky.social’s comment in yesterday’s NYT chat that, “It’s amazing how many of our problems today could be solved by a Congress that was willing and able to legislate in response to national problems.” www.nytimes.com/2025/12/09/o...

cancel culture is when you publish a bestselling book that gets excerpted in major newspapers and magazines and reviewed in others. many people do not like the book, but don’t be fooled: this is not evidence of diversity of opinion. true expressive freedom means never having to say you’re sorry

I’m eager to see what the order says. Early leak suggested it was going to direct DoJ to seek to enjoin any state AI legislation on dormant commerce clause grounds. OTOH this seems like a great admission that the imperial First Amendment wouldn’t go far enough to undo all AI regulation… so, yay?

this baby is TWO 🥹

“Librarian’s dividend” is a great phrase. we talk a lot about how LLMs eviscerate expertise and knowledge, perhaps not enough about how they may reinvigorate demand for experts who actually know wtf they’re talking about. 1/2

I believe we call this “wishcasting”?

present me has questions about why past me felt it necessary to cite so many hearings. too hard to bluebook!

the LPE conference schedule just dropped and it’s 🔥🔥🔥🔥

Excited to read this. I think legal scholars who work on press freedom and the First Amendment are going to need to really grapple with the tension between the ideals of a free press and the doctrinal impediments to reforms that would help realize those ideals

someone is wrong on the internet about something I care about and know a lot about and I’m not wading into it. please clap

I have a piece in the current issue of the New York Review of Books on the anti-trans agenda and the dangers it poses for the rights of cis women. www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

And that movement’s most influential social victory, the decoupling of ideas about biology from ideas about how women ought to be, is precisely the achievement under threat today

looking at the jumble of papers that faculty leave to university archives makes me feel much better about the mess that is my office.

seriously considering driving to Philly to stock up on Gold Rush apples

The instructor determines that, not me! it’s not my class. It’s not my assignment. It’s not my discipline. It’s not my university. I have no idea what the rubric for the assignment is. If someone were Monday morning quarterbacking my syllabus like this I’d be outraged.

I guess my hottest take today is that you cannot just avoid the culture wars if you simply ensure that you have airtight pedagogy

you could lawyer your way to a passing grade for that OU essay i guess (and i would be sympathetic if the prof had done that just to move on) but it's very clearly not a good-faith interpretation of the assignment and academics is dependent on that

sometimes I ask my First Amendment students whether requiring them to complete the final exam in order to pass ”compels speech“ in violation of the Constitution. the answer is no, but the lesson here 👇 is that you can get a lot of mileage out of complaining even if your complaints lack any merit.

It finally happened—my mom and I are walking our dogs in mismatched blundstones

salted maple pie

6’1” punks in the beerlight thunder road see no evil pretty pimpin’

me when my mother (my OWN MOTHER!!) casually admits she used ChatGPT to draw up a lease

bring back graphs like this

one of my favorite things about NJ Transit is that the conductors are always wishing each other happy birthday over the PA system

everyone knows that the government has a compelling interest in preventing corruption or the appearance of corruption. what this *gestures wildly* presupposes is, maybe it doesn’t?

the more I write down why I think I’d be good at this job the more I think I’d actually be really good at this job

great opportunity to work on public sector AI

taught an information scientist how to find court documents on courtlistener today!

This will send faculty fleeing in droves. It is a recipe for harassment and censorship. I would quit academia before working under these conditions. I mean that.

“We will simply go from being scammed by the primes to being scammed by defense VC land, checkmate lib”

Here is the statement on the initial TAMU system proposal. The adopted rule apparently prohibits "advocacy" of "race and gender ideology" without approval.

can’t wait to tell my students in the middle of class, “hold on—gotta email the chancellor before I can answer your question“

judging by my texts this story has now fully broken containment

my sister got me a Lloyd‘s for my birthday 😍🎂

people keep asking me if I want to work for Mamdani and like, definitely yes! put me in, coach! but also, maybe no?👇

i am the parent of a child in pre-K and it is literally impossible for me to imagine speaking to my kid like this OR being so checked out as a parent that you don’t care about your kid‘s social skills

on the free shelf at the coffee shop