Hello friends and also enemies, Behind the Bastards has been nominated for a Webby! This is the first award I've ever been nominated for, so if you'd like to vote for my show I'd appreciate it: vote.webbyawards.com/PublicVoting...

So at 6:00 a.m. Oracle sent out a massive termination email list. 30k people. They're claiming it's because AI made them redundant. However, it appears it may actually be because, front office intelligence may have been spending money like a drunken sailor.

Our daily news show, It Could Happen Here, has also been nominated for a Webby! And we're currently just a little ahead of some Trump-ass news podcast, so please help! vote.webbyawards.com/PublicVoting...

Updated 3/31/26: "College Board may use artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other computational methods (collectively, 'AI'), including in the development and scoring of tests and for test security purposes." Got it.

“…the researchers argue that AI systems have given rise to a categorically different form of “cognitive surrender” in which users provide “minimal internal engagement” and accept an AI’s reasoning wholesale without oversight or verification.”

U of Minnesota has named a new School of Nursing scholarship after Alex Pretti.

"At an internal all-hands meeting on Friday, NSF leaders announced that they would dissolve the agency’s Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences directorate based on the budget request, according to two NSF staff members who shared information anonymously in order to speak freely"

BREAKING: In response to huge cuts in Trump's budget request, NSF is shuttering its SBE directorate. Staff will be transferred to other parts of the agency and "grants that align with Administration priorities" will be maintained. That & more w/ @maxkozlov.bsky.social & @edwrdchen.bsky.social

As an antitrust lawyer, I get the sentiment. But it’s not down to a lack of laws. Trust me, we have all the tools we need to dismantle the monopolies and oligopolies. What’s long been lacking is the political and regulatory will.

Some say the New York Times wouldn't reflexively both-sides a manifestly bonkers claim that flies in the face of everything we know about physics and Waffle Houses. Experts are dubious.

The horse op-ed is an instant classic. I can't tell you how much joy this piece gives me. It should be taught in every introductory writing class in no small part because the horse arguments are so compelling. "I have noticed that human children get to eat cake. But I am bigger than the children."

Two guys talking about fertility rates on a podcast together? Oh yeah of course. Oh and they determined the problem is that women have too much access to education and professional opportunities? Wow who could have seen that coming

"Republicans just voted to uphold an abortion ban for 462,000 women veterans—even in cases of rape, incest or if their health is endangered."

In 2023, the FDA deemed 19 peptides too unsafe to be dispensed by compounding pharmacies. Now, under RFK Jr., the agency is poised to reverse itself — despite the fact that few clinical studies support claims of the peptides’ effectiveness or safety. www.propublica.org/article/pept...

OK folks this reads to me like a stacked pile of nothing put in a box labeled 'wow, so interesting!' and if there is something anyone thinks I am missing (I'm talking to you, bluesky-doesn't-get-AI guys) I would like to know what it is. Here's how I read it: 1/n www.anthropic.com/research/emo...

tTo be clear, educators at every level have been fighting this same goddamn battle. I’m the child of a family of public educators and I spent my formative years watching my mother and her colleagues fight this very fight. Many of them still fight, even in retirement.

This is why I say that higher-ed serving all members of the public is a hot take IN HIGHER EDUCATION. This is also why your response is both dangerously naive: it misrepresents what the fuck is happening to higher-ed over the past half century.

At my own institution, I have access to a whole fucking dashboard where I can compare the departments across campus in terms of enrollment and enrollment targets. The reason I have this data is because FUNDING is tied to enrollment which is part of the business model.

The past forty years have seen a shift in the framing of the institutions themselves as BUSINESSES. More specifically, businesses whose “products” were students who were also its primary customers. This customer oriented mindset is what partially spawned the field of “student affairs.”

This “education as a privilege” also coincided with the reframing of all but “flagship” public institutions as hob production sites. Put simply, education was a privilege and if you wanted more than job training you needed to pay more for it. This led to the second prong of the attack.

Doing so allowed them to smuggle elitist ideologies into public higher-ed by justifying the increased cost as paying for the right to have a quality education, despite resistance from many faculty (and staff) that such increases were antithetical to the very mission of higher-ed.

As a result student demographics and education began to shift to resemble the new composition of the college going population. Now the folks running institutions, legislating their funding, saw this as an issue so they stated to reframe public higher-ed as a privilege, not a public good.

Interesting how society has always associated cooking with women and yet, 94% of Michelin star restaurants have run by male chefs. I guess what it's really "a woman's job" is the unpaid part of it.

A transcript is the only way to make video or audio content accessible to someone who is both deaf and blind. Transcripts can be converted into braille, to be read on a refreshable braille output device.

The President's fiscal year 2027 Budget was released today. Important---Important---Important The President's Budget is always fundamentally a political document that Congress may or may not (usually not) take very seriously. www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/u... 1/9

Red States: We're going to cut all the programs that don't support our theology Blue States: We're going to cut the same programs, but because they don't support the business school

Even in a world where LLM never existed this is solid mentoring

Another one of those what-if-it-happened-in-another-country moments: The president is suing the government for $100 million dollars for searching his home for the classified documents he stole, and the attorney who represented him on those charges is currently leading the Justice Department.

Climate policies work faster and more effectively than most people think. Analysis of 40 nations finds climate policies do reduce emissions. The strongest effects come from “packages” combining carbon pricing, subsidies and regulations, rather than single measures. buff.ly/miMIF8A #ShareGoodNewsToo

Hegseth seems to have spent the whole day trying to underscore my thesis that he doesn’t know anything about what makes a military effective — he’s a frustrated mid-level officer from the glory days of the GWOT lashing out at all those he thinks failed him: www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/the-mythol...

I mean, the Church really does, in fact, need to excommunicate Vance on the basis of his total fealty to the actual Antichrist alone

On a more positive note, and this is not an exhaustive list, but please do follow, read, and support our friends at places like @wearequeeraf.com, @attitudemag.bsky.social, @divamag.bsky.social and other UK queer media that provide good public interest journalism for our community.

We hope others will join us to do the same. This is based on how @pinknews.bsky.social have decided to act, and we will be happy to revisit it if they change course and provide public interest journalism for the LGBTQ+ community. Until then, we will boycott the publication.

We deserve better from our community’s news outlets, and others provide vital coverage while respecting queer journalists, operating ethically and speaking truth to power. We are removing @pinknews.bsky.social from our press lists and will no longer provide direct comment to them.

Pink News have now: - Made journalists redundant in search of a ‘reporter-free newsroom’. This includes one of the UK’s only trans reporters covering our community, and many other talented queer reporters. - Uncritically platformed Wes Streeting spinning taking healthcare away from trans kids.

The time has come for us, as an organisation, to boycott @pinknews.bsky.social. Despite reservations about the company, we have sometimes worked with queer and trans reporters there to tell stories we thought were important for our community - the same as other outlets. That ends today. Why?

"It is a pretty wild puzzle at the moment."

“They’re destroying more than fifty research facilities across thirty-one states, labs that house decades of irreplaceable long-term science…And they’re replacing all of it — the offices, the scientists, the institutional knowledge, the professional independence — with fifteen political appointees”

The fight we’ve been waiting for, the Battle of Brattle: Waymo vs. Cambridge turkey. @universalhub.com

When incognito mode... isn't arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...

The US has been proudly acting like the asshole at the party all night, then wonders why nobody wants to drive us home.

The New York Times rolling up its sleeves to do the hard work of normalizing the idea that women should not have the right to vote.

Thread. 🥰

"Wow, guys, this is deeply uncool. After all these years, I finally make it to a Passover Seder, only to find you had polished off the only cup of wine specifically intended for me. I mean, it had my name engraved all over it, in two different languages!" www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/hel...

In 2021 I was asked to do NFTs. 4 weeks of work for a projected $1 million. I got harassed for months by cryptobros for saying "no" publicly as a high profile artist. The project went ahead without me and the offer was legit. NFTs were and are a grift, peddled by the same techbros as AI

Feeling nostalgic for the good old days when an aggrieved reply guy could stick the flounce and then actually stay gone.

What is telling about this moment is that most people actually like “DEI” (also known as a workplace where bosses cannot berate you with racial or sexist slurs with impunity) a whole lot more than MAGA

Re: Journalism, but absolutely applies to academia. "I take umbrage with the idea that because we have fewer resources we’re forced to plagiarize and that more is always more. It undermines the respect for which so many of us have fought for—and continue to fight for— in this industry(.)"

Rest in Power, Marcus🥺🤍 Sonoma State CFA Members Honor Coaching, Organizing Powerhouse Marcus Ziemer www.calfac.org/sonoma-state-cfa-members-honor-coaching-organizing-powerhouse-marcus-ziemer/

When New Mexico launched universal daycare there was a story of the families making six figures that took advantage of it; iirc it was a few hundred families, & the framing was if they should be subsidized? Yes, to keep our very poor state offering a universal service, yes. Excluding would be worse.