"aggressively marketing Cambrian sea life to girls" - YES! Thinking where I would be if I had had Gould's *Wonderful Life* as a kid, instead of a stuffed rabbit.

do not let frontier labs capture the question of measuring the impact of AI on the economy

Thanks, Keanu. I keep hoping the book will lose its relevance, but it seems everyone has forgotten the lessons of 2003.

"The way we’ve organized housing for the last century has given us not only pervasive unaffordability, but also too few versions of the American dream." @mbolotnikova.bsky.social on the last hundred years — and next fifty — of housing in America 🎁 www.vox.com/the-highligh...

Gov. Jared Polis passed over other deserving inmates to give clemency to Tina Peters, according to two members of his clemency board who revealed Polis overruled the unanimous recommendation of his experts. Polis has now fired both of them.

Any recs for recent articles/books that you found insightful re: Enlightenment thinking vis-a-vis scientific and technical interventions? I'm interested in work people are doing broadly around receptions of rationality esp in terms of technology + digitality.... #STS #CriticalAI #TeamRhetoric

In addition to producing hazardous air pollution and endangering pets and wildlife, fireworks make the 4th of July the most common day for human-started wildfires in the US. The West is a tinderbox - maybe it’s time to consider alternatives without catastrophic consequences.

a fun fact about SSPX is that the main founder was a Vichy regime sympathizer and one of his founding bishops was an outright Holocaust denier. both excommunicated in the 80s I’m no JPII stan, but you KNOW that was one thing former Polish Resistance member Karol Wojtyla was NOT going to stand for

Vatican response! the gist is “they excommunicated themselves by doing this” and they quote a lot of the nastiest little jabs interesting to see where they call them “the Lefebvrists” and not the Society of St. Pius X, positioning them as a cult of personality rather than a legit-sounding order

Submit your recently published work on philosophy of science & race or nominate a colleague's work ‼️TODAY‼️(deadline July 1st Anywhere on Earth). Prize is $500. It is super easy to nominate a work here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F... #HPS

Trump has Opinions about statistical techniques for privacy preservation now New(ish) EO says #Census can't use statistical noise, just blunt-force coarsening and suppression There are many reasons *not* to do this—I think gerrymandering is the only reason to do it? 🧵 www.npr.org/2026/06/12/n...

NEW from me: Americans are set to lose nearly $250B gambling this year—a record high, up more than 60% since 2019—and that's before counting unofficial betting via prediction markets or crypto Can anything stop America's gambling boom? 🧵

Here’s Why Weather Forecasts Have Seemed So Inaccurate Lately. Meteorologists simply aren't able to gather as much data as they used to, and you're suffering for it. gizmodo.com/heres-why-we...

here's my scotustake: you need a plan to both break this court specifically, and also a plan to arrive at a new and functional court system, *and also* to recognize that political contestation never ends but that's no excuse for doing nothing

but there's also the need to do more than kick the can down the road--to arrive at a new settlement that redefines the court's power relative to the other branches here i think briley's "jury of circuit court judges" proposal is pretty good www.liberalcurrents.com/break-up-the...

This is normatively correct, but of course many involved don't see it this way. Parents treating HS (and earlier!) sports as arbiters of their kids' merit, as gateways to college and fame and fortune, has 100% helped make things so toxic for trans kids who just wanna play with their friends

i did a triple take at this line. the university of michigan apparently jeopardized a grad student's status and got him detained by ICE for almost a month on this basis, which i can only convey to non-academic folks as "absolute horse shit"

you know, when someone says something like "these are the things that need to be done to avert disaster" and your response is "you think democrats will do that?!?" all you're telling me is that you think politics is a spectator sport

man it’s really scummy to see paid circulators passing around petitions at denver pride to “stop gerrymandering”. it’s to stop the democratic counter gerrymandering! people gotta read what they’re signing… also if they’re a paid circulator not a volunteer it’s almost certainly a Bad petition.

[Clickhole voice]: Heartwarming 🔫👮🌞

I am heartbroken by University of Exeter’s decision to endanger the majority of staff in philosophy and qualitative social science, including #Egenis @exeterspspa.bsky.social No warning, no consultations, just an email dropped into inboxes announcing redundancy. c.org/zKbPJFDwBq #philsci #sts #hps

PSA to people on Instagram: people who don’t have Instagram can’t see your posts! They see a login prompt. That information about your business or your event? Literally inaccessible

A SIDEWALK REPRESENTS PUBLIC SAFETY and don't you forget it

this is so fucking funny

Guess it's time for me to repost this dhicks.github.io/posts/2025-0...

pandering to the utilitarian vote by showing he will jump into a pool while wearing a nice suit (drowning child not required)

it's awesome that you can vote for who you want the next politicians to be. kind of a cool way to let fans be a part of it

Not the point of the study, and maybe this is my cultural christianity showing, but if you're given a choice between eating God or eating a baby, you have to eat God, right? defector.com/would-you-ea...

incredible blog defector.com/would-you-ea...

No joke I think being vegan has made this go down a lot easier for me

David Gantt supports Anthropic's red lines on surveillance and lethal autonomous weapons—but argues governing AI risks by contract produces "dangerously brittle" civil liberties protections that only public law can secure.

Chicago turning Greyhound bus station into a city-owned intercity bus terminal. Here's hoping it's done well! "For too long, the bus has been treated as a last resort rather than one of the most efficient, equitable and sustainable transportation options." www.chicagotribune.com/2026/06/25/o...

I‘m really sad for every French person who thinks they’re committing a huge environmental sin if they use air conditioning.

"In Inventing ELIZA, a group of eight scholars (“Team ELIZA”) lovingly and painstakingly reconstruct, explain, reanimate, and place into historical context the program itself, the many surviving transcripts of the program’s use in the 1960s, and the development of subsequent chatbots."

I wrote about the continued appeal of dirtbag politics, from the left to liberals, and how only a politics of grace and edification can save our liberal democracy Dirtbagism delenda est www.liberalcurrents.com/the-dirtbags...

Changing our cityscapes so that 44% of Americans lived in walkable areas would be the greatest sea change in American urbanism since the automotive revolution.

@drnikko.bsky.social and I are putting together a special issue proposal for Big Data and Society on "Trans Data"! If you're an #STS nerd, or a #transstudies nerd, or ideally both, do submit ideas if you have them - docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Comment from several ESSGN doctoral candidates now out in @nathumbehav.nature.com. What should be best practices in social science and behavioral genetics?

Just in: The breeder has agreed to transfer 1000 dogs (which does NOT seem to mean all of them? There are closer to 2k) to a rescue org. www.wkow.com/news/top-sto...

Finally standing up for us soyboys (i kid i kid this is actually awful and pathetic)

Still putting my thoughts together on this (very!) imperfect book, but I think dismissing it as mere "Calvinism" is mistaken. The various contradictions Harden struggles with are interesting precisely b/c she is a microcosm for our conflicting collective impulses lareviewofbooks.org/article/orig...

Polls show that people really underestimate meat's wide-ranging environmental impact. So here are some charts I've made over the years that show just had bad meat is for the planet. Let's start with efficiency:

"[such] brutal tactics hadn’t been used on animal rights activists before, and the action’s organizers didn’t adequately prepare. In that sense, the movement may have underestimated its own growing influence and power to elicit such a response from law enforcement" 🎁 www.vox.com/future-perfe...

This NOT FLYING TODAY? sign is in all sorts of stock images for flight delays/cancellations but if you actually read it (or, like I did, violate it) it's also just kinda a bleak statement about what our society imagines airports to be blog.bennettmcintosh.com/2026/04/25/O...

"America ought to have bigger aspirations for the future of walking ... Countries that have minimized pedestrian deaths have embraced walking as a wondrous, efficient transportation technology, wrongly sidelined by the automobile." ~ @mbolotnikova.bsky.social 🎁 www.vox.com/future-perfe...

I went to the Midwest Junto for the History of Science last week and the best bus route from Madison WI, to Lafayette, IN required some light trespassing at ORD. blog.bennettmcintosh.com/2026/04/25/O...

Many highly developed (& correct!) consequentialist arguments for how veg(itari)anism helps animals, workers, or environment through social, political, or economic mechanisms But what made me take the leap years ago was much simpler virtue ethics: "I don't like this & I don't need to be part of it"