Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance required 9,852 theatrical pyrotechnics, nearly 400 costumed extras, and a lot of ingenuity. And yes, that was a real couple featured in the wedding. www.wired.com/story/bad-bu...

I don't care one whit about football, and I deeply hate the Patriots.

Sir Ian McKellen performing a monologue from Shakespeare’s Sir Thomas More on the Stephen Colbert show. Never have I heard this monologue performed with such a keen sense of prescience. Nor have I ever been in this exact historical moment.TY Sir Ian, for reaching us once again. #Pinks #ProudBlue

NEWS: Judge Biery has ordered the release of 5-year-old Liam Ramos. A thunderous rebuke against ICE’s violent campaign in Minnesota. Read the order below. Link: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

I think it is OUTRAGEOUS that people are LEAPING to the conclusion that some our post prominent Americans are child rapists when it is EQUALLY PLAUSIBLE that they are simply indifferent to whether other people are child rapists so long as those other people can offer them access to power.

It's near-white out conditions in Chicago as the snow comes down, and tonight's anti-ICE/CBP rally is wrapping up in front of city hall. But not before the crowd bounces and chants, "I believe that we will win!"

Wes: Murder and Adultery: The French and Russian Novel (Meyer) Hughes, Hurston, Morrison, Wideman (Pemberton) Harvard: The Normal and the Abnormal (Kleinman and Rosenberg) Punishment, Politics, and Culture (Sarat) Medical Sociology (Good)

Exactly this. But instead of providing families with resources, healthcare, or well-funded schools--all things that might address those feelings of anger and desperation--RFK has instead reverted back to the "refrigerator mother" theory of autism.

Anyway, you can give $5 tax deductible to PBS for their app and get Ken Burns Revolutionary War doc along with Lupita and Sandra Oh in Twelfth Night and not pollute all of Memphis while you’re watching it.

Today, Luke Farrell (@lukef.bsky.social) explains how complex eligibility requirements have turned America’s safety net into a lucrative revenue stream for monopolistic private contractors.

Weather is something that happens in other places, to other people. They call me and tell me about it. I go, wow the sky is wet? And the air hurts? That's crazy.

Emmalon Davis (Philosophy, U-M) and I are thrilled to be welcoming Margaret Price (English and Disability Studies, OSU) to Michigan next Friday, February 6 from 3-5pm. Dr. Price will be giving a lecture entitled "Exploring the Politics of Disability, Accompaniment, and Collective Accountability."

This is a beautiful testament to food, memory, and adaptation. Reminds me a bit of Sara Hendren's What Can a Body Do (gift link)

CNN is reporting that federal authorities may have been collecting information and "documenting details" about Alex Pretti before killing him on Saturday, and that officers tackled him a week earlier. www.cnn.com/2026/01/27/u...

In which the author argues that the *real* problem with ICE isn't its rapid expansion, its weaponized deployment, or its role in facilitating and committing state terror, but agents' insufficient preparation for the job. Clearly the answer here is higher education. Got it.

Greg Bovino sadly filling one steamer trunk after another with elaborate fashy overcoats, the teargas canisters he always has bouncing around on him like labubus, and dozens of "chest-belts." They will be shipped ahead of him as he prepares to return to his home, which is a men's size 10 boot.

Vigils were held around Minneapolis and beyond Saturday night in the wake of the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti by federal agents. Photo and video: Jeff Wheeler, Anthony Souffle, Simon Peter Groebner/The Minnesota Star Tribune.

Tomorrow's front page of the Minnesota Star Tribune: Jan. 24, 2026

I am not being snarky. I need my colleagues who wrote on covid school lockdowns to engage with this. To be as loud as they have been about prior "learning loss." Hell, you can cite Tom & Mark's AERJ paper so you feel better that there's some econ somewhere in your argument.

"Oh my gosh, it was so nice to see you! Have a lovely day, fuck ICE!" "Oh you too hon! Stay safe in that traffic, fuck ICE!' - two older Minnesota ladies, bidding farewell after the protest

POLIO vaccines should be optional?! POLIO?! Almost nothing about the vileness of this regime surprises me any more, but 'freedom of choice' is one hell of a justification for not mandating a vaccine for a disease that killed and disabled tens of thousands of people between 1900 and 1960.

If a Minnesotan says to you, "I don't plan to let you do that," run.

Fascinating story about how genome-based theories of disease clouded our understanding of exposome-based explanations of disease and how those errors are now slowly being corrected. “Your exposome is the sum of your own personal environmental exposures, from the womb to the casket.”

I am back in Ann Arbor, nursing my annual start-of-winter-term cold (all hail Theraflu), but here is the finished syllabus for Disability: A Democratic Dilemma. Not entirely satisfied, but I need to stop fussing and get on with prepping my other class. Thank you all for your wonderful suggestions!

Mamdani: For too long, those fluent in the good grammar of civility have deployed decorum to mask agendas of cruelty

Moonlighting as filial tech support for my parents has made compiling my third-year review materials seem positively joy-filled by comparison. (I may have brought this upon myself--I went with my mother to purchase the new computer that I am now in charge of setting up. I have regrets)

Friends, if you or someone you know has published awesome work in disability studies (defined *broadly*), please let me know! I'm updating my "Disability: A Democratic Dilemma" course and would love to include some newer work (both academic and otherwise).

Same energy

It is time:

A small (personal) example of this book’s intellectual dishonesty: My father-in-law is reading In Covid’s Wake, and excitedly told me he found a passage where I’m quoted. The quote in question is me saying the FBI worked to censor speech on social media. Huh? When did I say that?!

The largest provider of "mental health services" in the US is the injustice system, and many "mental health facilties" ostensibly focused on patient care are actually carceral.

They won't ever let it go, the Crows. This has gone on for 1000s of years. Just because a Heron once said something rude about them looking like Goth pigeons.

the power went out in SF yesterday due to a fire at one of the PG&E substations. No one at Waymo thought to program their cars for a power outage. It went about as well as you’d expect. (And they want to bring these things to Detroit)

I am home in SF, so my Christmas present to myself is a ticket to the 10th anniversary screening of Carol feat. a discussion with Todd Haynes and Christine Vachon. It is being held in partnership with 4 queer bars (Rikki's, Jolene's, El Rio, and Mother), The Barb Shop, and Peaches Christ. I 💗 SF.

I just introduced my parents (both Montrealers, now living in SF) to this classic (my grandmother lived on Sherbrooke, so they of course could identify the exact location)

i don't think this is even a real statistical anomaly anymore. it seems like there's someone in the crowd at every mass shooting who has been through it before. this doesn't have to be our shared cultural experience.

Brown’s student newspaper is posting updates about the shooting at its campus. www.browndailyherald.com/article/2025...

Respectfully, Alan, now feels like NOT THE TIME to be posting this article. What a stunning false equivalence.

Relatable Corvid

Michigan student have made a “snow squirrel” on the Diag (there will be no maligning the Rubenesque squirrels, thank you). They have also started a Reddit thread entitled “Mason Hall roach glamour shots.” Welcome to the end of the semester, folks.

I have had 6 MRIs. All took extensive documentation to get ok'ed by insurance and were for clear reasons (a back issue that turned out to be a broken femur and a pituitary adenoma). They do do preventive MRIs if you're at high risk for breast cancer, but full-body preventive MRIs are mostly a scam

The *tiny afghan*.

YES. Also: there are so many awesome mocktail brands and recipes (there are even dedicated NA stores, like The New Bar in SF). I've also become a huge fan of shrubs and this blackberry, lime, and star anise syrup from instagram: www.instagram.com/reel/DNZFFsd...

My feelings about this are best summed up by the good Dame Emma Thompson (video below). In short: MAKE IT STAHP.

Perhaps no one I trust less for cooking advice.

new on @carceralhistory.bsky.social: distinguished historian @madameclair08.bsky.social pitches her new @beaconpress.bsky.social book, TELL HER STORY: Eleanor Bumpurs & the Police Killing That Galvanized New York City carceral-history.ghost.io/authors-pitc...

I'm sorry Ryan Lizza, Chris Clizza and Olivia Nuzzi thats too many z names for me to keep straight