In her latest column, @bakerdphd.bsky.social looks at the history of AAU regarding campus free speech. If they took a stance on many key issues today, some status-obsessed public universities would face very difficult membership decisions.

Whale Evolution: Flamingo-Legged Watermelon Mouse Mutant Sewer Rat King Gator Wolf Steel-Jawed PollyWorg Titan MerSausage

This is a cool opportunity for people in Alabama with K-8 kids! The "Spot the Truth Challenge" invites students to create short videos showing how they spot truth vs. misinformation online. There are prizes! Enter here: www.mediamastersrock.com/spot-the-tru...

Heads up #SPSP2026 - no excuses!

NEW: An immigration court has terminated removal proceedings against Tufts doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk, finding that DHS did not meet its burden of establishing that she was removable, her lawyers tell the Second Circuit. live-awp-vermont.pantheonsite.io/app/uploads/...

Reminder: the nat'l minimum wage today is *HALF* what it was in the 1960s. A number of states have kept up, but most Republican-led states and most purple states haven't. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum...

Nice writeup of our now-finished JITSUVAX project: cordis.europa.eu/art... The main output of the project is the empathetic refutational interview... 1/7

Can you imagine you get hired as part of the SuperBowl halftime and they're like "so you're going to be grass number 74..." 😂 "you just walk out and DO. NOT. MOVE" The dancingest music that ever danced is playing and you must NOT MOVE A MUSCLE.

If you liked the Bad Bunny show and visual representations in Puerto Rican art, my newly tenured friend Nico Ramos Flores has a forthcoming book: "Archipelagoes of Longing: Puerto Ricans, Resistance, and Memory." It examines PR visual/literary culture as it relates to oppression, migration, & trauma

Next time somebody tries to get me to justify the existence of the humanities, I’ll just point out how for the past two Super Bowls we’ve all jumped online and engaged in collective semiotics and hermeneutics of the half-time show as text.

There are a lot of people who are going to complain about being unfairly vilified by that halftime show and it's because they know in their hearts they're on Team Hate.

Oooh, that's a baaaaad bunny! #SuperBowls

Officials in authoritarian regimes frequently make absurd false statements in public to signal their loyalty

This sounds like the same error populists make when they argue politicians should follow, rather than shape, public opinion. Newspapers should find news, and showing their readers what matters. If readers already knew what mattered they wouldn’t need to read the paper.

I've been singing this to myself all day

This a word cloud from the titles of ~1100 terminated NSF grants. It is hard not to see these grant terminations as an attack on the training of the future United States scientific workforce.

The Winter Olympics are a lot more about almost dying than the summer ones, tbh

Afternoon

"This was not the first time Ms. Britt had been disturbed by something she heard about the second Trump administration." "disturbed" is the new Susan Collins "disappointed" You can, you know, do something. There's this part of the Constitution called Article I.

AI has no sense of humor, though its failures can generate a good laugh. For example: On Halloween, I posted a picture of my kid sorting her candy, captioned, "We have progressed from data collection to data analysis." Now I regularly get bots in my mentions trying to sell me data analytics tools.

Times article has an incredible illustration

Reading The Chronicle as a professor is really hard today.

What should my students read about OPEN SCIENCE? I'm teaching the second methods class in our MA sequence, and I want them to understand current best practices in open science and why they matter. What readings would you assign?

Good lord. Sir. An undergraduate student inviting you to address a group of undergraduate students on an academic topic does not constitute an "advance."

the Epstein files are really devastating because they remind me of how many girls and women miss out on professional opportunities, mentorship and careers because of how many powerful, rich and influential men only view girls and women — and interactions with them — through the lens of sex

Open public resources and records are a key way for journalists, factcheckers to hold people in power accountable when they lie - now they're openly being destroyed

😂😂😂😂

Lessons from other eroded democracies show there’re multiple ways to destroy the free press.Yes, you can arrest/intimidate journalists like last week.You can also buy news organizations, destroy their credibility and gut their newsrooms. You can sue frivolously until newsrooms can’t afford to fight.

ICE at the polls! Bannon is basically yelling “fire” in a crowded theater here. His objective is to cause chaos (and suppress votes on the left). And it’s already working. This threat works on multiple levels and doesn’t have to be “real” to serve its purpose. Let me explain & offer some advice.

I taught a class on “hope” last year and the few theorists who’ve written on it all point out that hope is the harder choice - that despair is easy and too often fashionable

This pup found a stick shaped like an old timey pipe earlier today and has already solved three mysteries. 13/10

The thing I keep circling back to is that, when Bezos originally bought the Post, it legit seemed like the least-bad option. The expectation was that billionaires would treat media outlets like they do sports franchises — something to boast about owning, as a form of expensive status.

Here’s the quote I just sent to Dee Spiegel when asked for a reaction to news of the WaPo cuts. Hope the Germans like it❤️

Working theory: If one had a chance to improve society by injecting just one piece of knowledge into every human — so that they truly UNDERSTOOD it, not just knew it on a surface level — "the difference between a million and a billion" would be pretty high in terms of return on investment

These are the last words in the last column I wrote for The Washington Post, titled "When institutions crumble, strongmen step in". www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

Oh friends, it’s like this right now. This week alone, I have had SIX of the most brilliant people I know separately botch meetings/emails/other work stuff. For almost all of them, it’s the first major mistake I’ve ever seen them make? I hope we can give ourselves grace in things large & small.

If you're feeling helpless and don't know what to do: Look for people out there who are already helping. I promise they're out there. And then ask how you can help and do it. You're not alone. Community is out there and it's the way forward. ❤️👊

I was looking back on my old research on platform behavior. The biggest social media co's have implemented NONE of the expert recs that I & others have urgently pushed. In fact, platform accountability is largely a thing of the past, as tech bros align w/ Trump. www.freepress.net/big-tech-bac...

Oh my goodness so the igloo was completed and someone decided to go one better and build a church in the snow. It's incredible.

Now out in @nataging.nature.com: Exposure to low-credibility online health content is limited and is concentrated among older adults www.nature.com/articles/s43... Linking discernment data with exposure from web and YouTube, comparing health vs politics exposure, etc. Lots of good stuff.

I needed to read this thread today. For anyone who ever doubts that small positive steps can have big effects down the road -- some of which you might never even live long enough to see.

I’ll be teaching Social Psych and Personality Psych for UGs (small classes) in the Fall! Tips, tricks, assignments, exercises, syllabi, etc. are invited and welcomed!!

I keep saying to people in my life that the problem with writing in these days is that you sound absolutely off your nut for simply saying what is happening.

Really excited to see my pal @samwang.bsky.social running for Congress in NJ, and happily donated. :-)

I truly do not understand why members of the press continue this charade of doing pressers with him. And how every member of the press doesn't walk out after that. Like - the government needs the news to govern. There's power - you can withhold attention

Just out—a piece I wrote a piece for the APS Observer (@psychscience.bsky.social) in which I share recommendations and resources for running a research lab at a small, liberal arts college. I hope it helps others in the same boat! www.psychologicalscience.org/publications...

This is really what I want people to appreciate. I get that it feels good to be like "well that person's a pedophile too!" But in many cases they weren't. They were just people who didn't think it was a big deal. That's terrible in its own particular way.

Trust does matter. Unfortunately HHS/NIH leadership is actively working to undermine trust in public health institutions and it's beginning to have an impact: joshuasweitz.substack.com/p/confrontin...

This set of essays, led by @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social and @adambonica.bsky.social, is really important. Folks should spend time with them. And their response to the responses reads like two scholars tired of bringing loads of evidence to a fight where some folks are just bringing vibes.

Yes, the Harvard news swung from “they’re dropping the request for $200M to get a deal done” to “now they’re demanding $1B in ‘damages’” within six hours. Universities CANNOT cave to this www.insidehighered.com/news/governm...