As I get older I'm coming to increasingly radical views like "you have to do things to get good at them" and "you have to think about problems to solve them"

My latest video on Ford's "basket weaving" OSAP comment has reached the "Study whatever you want but don't expect the gov to pay you for it" crowd, and I don't think they grasp how desolate their lives would be if there was no art, no culture, no history. We can't have a society of only STEM majors.

Reminded that there are few more corrosive trends in higher education in recent years than the divide and conquer approach to undermining faculty solidarity by focusing on numbers of majors. Each degree pathway at an institution is strengthened by each other form of expertise available to students.

I'm convinced AI is our generation's radium - a discovery with genuinely useful applications in specific, controlled circumstances that we stupidly put in everything from kid's toys to toothpaste until we realised the harm far too late where future generations will ask if we were out of our minds.

TikTok is now under US ownership and their new ToS reads like a guide to giving fascists everything they need to put you on a list. They’re collecting information about immigration status, citizenship, sexual orientation, whether you’re trans or non binary and physical or mental disabilities.

If I were a PM who believed we were at a global rupture moment, upending decades of international order, and requiring totally new relations with the world, I probably wouldn’t cut my foreign affairs staffing and budget by 15%

people who are new to academia tend to find its obsession with sources and citations a brake on their "i'm just trying to be CREATIVE, man" mindset. but it turns out the relentless obsession with accuracy, citation, and *provenance* is a load-bearing pillar of the whole enterprise

This is specifically about AI use in humanities disciplines within academia, which is clear from context- this crap is extremely harmful in that setting. Inevitably, people show up to be like "AI finds cancer cells tho". NOT THE SUBJECT, and that conflation has been inflicted upon us intentionally.

Merriam-Webster’s human editors have chosen ‘slop’ as the 2025 Word of the Year.

I guess it's fitting that it's a reimagined, worse version of someone else's artwork

I will believe in the end of identity politics when steel and lumber (28,000 jobs and 105,000 jobs respectively) stop getting bailouts, while higher education (310,000 jobs) collapses in front of our eyes because it's full of ivory tower elites

It's weird to not only have lived through an information revolution but also now living through its undoing, all within less than a generation.

🤓 Toronto-Ottawa new multimodal transportation level unlocked today: walk-streetcar-train-LRT-taxi 🚶🚞 🚊 🚉 🚕

On the upside, we can watch AI videos of wooly mammoths wrestling sabre toothed tigers on them long after they’re gone. 🦣 🐅

Amazon is helping fund a $300 million build of a ballroom for the White House. Independent bookstores are donating to food banks and organizations that help with food insecurity. They are not the same.

It’s just FRIENDS. The voices are easily identifiable as the FRIENDS cast, “smelly cat” is a FRIENDS joke, the set is nearly the FRIENDS set, the music stings are FRIENDS music stings. This is all just a lot of flea-circus flimflam.

An awesome telling of the story of last night: “managerial machinations that involved emptying both bullpens.. telling tomorrow's grand plans to piss off because tomorrow is for suckers..it gave us, and we'll give you a moment here to lie to yourselves and imagine you knew who this was, Will Klein”

⚾️♾️

I cannot tell you how many tech journalists at prominent media organizations do not understand this

Did a new one

they are so close to understanding the entire point of trade

I bang on about this a lot: I think the combination of a global pandemic, underregulated internet/SM, collapse/corruption of trustworthy media, plus now unregulated genAI, is a wildly toxic environment for radicalisation & mental health. We see the results of that in our politics & lives every day

Dr. Jane Goodall filmed an interview with Netflix in March 2025 that she understood would only be released after her death.

We have allowed the lazy, grifting Silicon Valley charlatans into the front door, & in doing so, we have learned just how many of our own colleagues & administrators simply are not interested in the actual business of education. It's incredibly demoralizing. bsky.app/profile/mcop...

Canada Post “lost” 1 billion dollars last year? How about, “it cost Canadians 1 billion dollars to have a national postal service” which works out to costing about $25 a year per person (population of Canada in 2024 = 40 million). Seems like a pretty reasonable cost to me.

RIP Kaleb Horton kalebhorton.ghost.io/2025-so-far/

Currently listening to economists and social psychologists discover sociology from 75 years ago (with all its faults). This is the indignity every sociologist lives every day.

Personnellement, je pense que quand on a été accueilli à bras ouvert par le Québec il y a 46 ans, on a le droit de demander que ceux qui nous suivent soient accueillis de la même manière sans être traitée d’ingrate ou d’être invitée à déménager.

"The fundamental issue with “debate me bro” culture isn’t just that it’s obnoxious, it’s that it creates a false equivalence between good-faith expertise and bad-faith trolling."

internet culture desks aren't just for cute meme trend stories. ever since gamergate, understanding how and why info moves online is critical to seeing how we got *here*

Watching the cable news commentary on the bullet engravings is wild because none of these people seem to realize that the content of the engravings are indicative of extremely online meme brain rot

the world will have to learn what “groypers” are and i don’t think the average boomer is ready for that

TONIGHT: Join Toronto Metropolitan University on September 10 at 7PM ET for a conversation about Trump’s widening assault on U.S. universities – why and what can be done?

The people whipping up panics about "academic freedom" rarely speak up when academic freedom is actually imperiled. This is absolutely chilling.

It turns out that protecting hate speech did not create the conditions to protect other kinds of speech; instead, it protected hate and allowed hate movements to take over all the institutions of that might have defended the rest of us.

*taps sign*

I know I'm not the first person or even the millionth person to point this out; it's not even the first time *I* have said it, but this is what actual First Amendment violations look like and the fact that none of the supposed free speech warriors are saying anything about it tells us everything.

Al Gore quoting Adorno and name checking Habermas—never thought I’d see the day…

Le @conseildepresse.bsky.social lance une campagne, à laquelle j'ai modestement contribué, afin d'inciter les jeunes à être aussi critiques quand ils consomment des produits que lorsqu'il s'agit d'information. Pour éviter de partager n'importe quoi et devenir plus wise que les algorithmes! Partagez!

Can we get more of this? “The Japanese American National Museum will ‘scrub nothing,’ Fujioka said, and instead will highlight the importance of DEI. “Our community is based on diversity, equity is guaranteed to us in the Constitution, and inclusion is what we believe in,” Fujioka said.

This is so sickening. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Eulogy for US science

Trump says his tariffs will raise $6 trillion. Assuming that's over 10 years, that's $600 billion per year. There are 134 million households, so this is nearly $5,000 per household per year. And it's like a sales tax, so it's a flat tax. A huge hit to the budgets of working folks.

This is so economically illiterate. It’s like building a space program on the premise that the earth is flat.

Capital Economics: if today's announcements are implemented, the effective US tariff rate will shoot straight past the Smoot-Hawley levels of the 1930s. "The effective tariff rate on all imports will rise from 2.3% last year to around 26%, leaving it at a 131-year high"

There's no question that today's tariff announcement will give the United States the highest tariff rates of any industrialized country. And it's not even close.

We have had nearly two decades of panic about Free Speech on Campus and not a single case, not even the ones they made up, were as bad as what's happening now

L'IA, c'est pas juste du plagiat sans rétribution de Miyazaki. «C’est ce site qui a fourni les chiffres trompeurs sur les fortunes personnelles des chefs de partis.»

Absolutely. Grok as liability insurance