In the modern day, the person closest to going through what Spinoza went through isn't a comedian who couldn't get specials for 2 years for raping someone, it's Mahmoud Khalil

The three words every girl wants to hear (shun US goods)

interesting bit in a Lancet article re: Australia's teen social media ban: surprisingly the amount of socialising in person hasn't dropped significantly in the past 25 years, and certainly not by the average amount of social media use.

every day i wait for Horcynus Orca

Gelman on Barnard's about-face (he doesn't say what prior speech / flags / etc had been prohibited by Barnard, but you can guess, and if you follow the links, you'll see you're right) open.substack.com/pub/statmode...

so none of you were going to tell me that martin luther faked his own kidnapping to avoid a jail sentence. i had to just read that in a book.

McCarthywasm!!!!

You guys, so many Romance girlies are reading "On Tyranny" that they've broken the Goodreads recommendations algorithm. 10/10; no notes. #romancelandia

BREAKING NEWS: Canada, UK and Australia say they recognize a Palestinian state as part of efforts to pile pressure on Israel over Gaza. Follow live updates: https://cnn.it/3VtaMRI

unclear to me yet if the powers that be actually overplayed their hand on kimmel, but what i do know is that it's always correct to boycott the mouse

Sites like Know Your Meme are gonna be more important to future historians than like, actual newspapers.

Qacha's Nek, Lesotho 🇱🇸 📷 Philip Rawlins

Step 1: Cut funding for food stamps Step 2: Stop measuring hunger Step 3: There's no evidence cuts to food stamps led to a rise in hunger www.wsj.com/economy/trum...

Partial Retraction of "Misinformation on Marginal Revolution" from @pappubahry.com ; but o3 still indeed not reliable of course pappubahry.substack.com/p/partial-re...

This was such a fun little book. Thanks @economeager.bsky.social for the rec.

Being nice to trans people really did turn out to be a load bearing part of liberal democracy ey

i wonder if being literally shaken down for 100K in cash at the border for the privilege of remaining in the united states will create a sense of solidarity between H1B workers and less highly paid migrants who are informally treated like this and much worse at all times? guess we are about to see.

Guy who is way too assured of himself: oh, I think it’s time I assign you some homework after our intellectual dual

HARDEST PHOTO OF 2025 JUST DROPPED

I genuinely cannot believe that Ezra Klein said we should run pro-life candidates in Kansas, Ohio, and Missouri; three states that recently held abortion referendums where the pro-choice side won!

"More professors in the United States have been fired for controversial views in the past week than any other week in all of American history." www.insidehighered.com/opinion/colu...

If you pronounce Likert correctly (lick-urt) people will often think you don't know what you are talking about because the incorrect pronunciation (lie-kurt) is so common. Are there other good examples of this kind of thing?

i just want to convey the depth of my appreciation to our colleagues, in the broad sense, in the american and UK university systems, for continuing to teach the fact that trans people exist even though you are all going to be ceaselessly punished alongside us for it. thank you.

So, a university president fired a professor because they taught a course that discussed there being more than two genders, and now the university president is being fired for not having fired the professor quickly enough, is where we're at. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/18/u...

One of the inconsequential things that pisses me off the most is podcasts about Internet culture hosted by people whose qualification is being on their phone a lot, who have like 50% of the information about any given subject, no insights, and which release episods a week after events happen.

the more she does this the more im like okay i'm going to pretend i liked her books because she rules so hard

Sally Rooney: Normal People author says she cannot enter UK in case of arrest - BBC News www.bbc.com/news/article...

Guys you really can just spit in their faces. 99% of the time nothing will happen. They’re relying on you being too afraid to do so. Call their bluff. And sign up for the stupid email lists.

The palantir was basically a cellphone loaded with radicalizing social media apps

Haha. Academia.edu account duly cancelled.

turning and turning? in this economy?

I'm reading a lot about the Reformation (for the novel) and i'm sort of surprised I never heard of St Anne, Jesus's grandmother, before now. despite being raised catholic .... or perhaps it's BECAUSE i was raised catholic ....

think if you're broadly a centrist and were suuuuuper concerned about attacks on free speech from the left and so you decided to give the right a hearing then you need to realise you were taken for QUITE the ride (and don't really have anyone to blame but yourself)

"This is no time to reward killers and kidnappers. Instead, this is the time to reward genocidal war criminals", the Times argues. archive.ph/OtUG7

Today is a great day to read about the Levering Act en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leverin...

I think this is, perhaps, why despair is considered a deadly sin in a lot of Catholic traditions, and why hope is such an important virtue. You might well think that everything is awful and things are beyond saving, but actually acting that way? That leads to damnation

I think a lot about Saruman lately. He claims to join Sauron becuase it’s impossible to resist the might of Mordor, he’s simply powerless against him etc, but then it’s Saruman, not Sauron, who causes almost all the problems for the fellowship in the first two books.

Spring sky in Australia

If only Jimmy Kimmel had followed the spirit of the AAUP’s advice.

noting grimly that with the boating drone strikes we have definitively arrived at "how bad is extrajudicial killing, really?" but I continue to find it really strange that they did "children having cancer and communicable diseases is fine actually" first

I actually think there’s a chance we can pull Tucker. This is not the first wobble we’ve seen from him. Not sure we should try to court Karl Rove however, an orders of magnitude worse person

This is 100% what government censorship looks like.

Fully North Korea mandatory mourning in effect.

Perhaps the concentration of wealth and economic power plus the consolidation of major industries *was* a problem for society and an existential threat to democracy. Oops!

My longstanding refusal to give The Mouse any of my money is looking pretty good today

You want to be alive, but they want you dead. We’re a new, well, funded democratic group that thinks you can meet them halfway.

This essay, by an Egyptian-American former New Yorker staff fact-checker, is an incredible read And incredibly damning Huge recommendation

the UK's new anti-trans rules are indefensible & will make global fascism stronger my latest with @liberalcurrents.com www.liberalcurrents.com/britains-bat...