As the son of a 10-yr NFL defensive tackle/end who earned four Super Bowl rings and was both an NFL and a D1 defensive line coach for 12 years before he died at 49 (my age now), I can most assuredly, indubitably tell you that CTE is very real.

I’ll tell all of you a fun story about this in a few months

looking at the work ahead of us probably the single most impactful fix you could put in place would be to legally turbo-charge and also destigmatize unionization nationally (card count, revitalized NLRB, make "right to work" illegal, etc). number 2 is rabidly aggressive antitrust enforcement

This is a very strange moment, in how obvious it is that a major crisis is approaching, and how calmly and clearly people are observing it come. www.ft.com/content/3647...

Bolsonaro is in the hospital again for those keeping track.

good advice, and as an important corollary: stop laundering conservative opinions! They actually believe what they say!

Only took a cross country flight, a two hour drive, and hanging out with @banditelli.org for the first time in 10 years to get this.

Alright it's officially over. I sat on the toilet looking at my phone too long this morning and I've had a day long neck pain

I keep circling back to that line from the Mishnah Sanhedrin, "whoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world" and wondering what it means to live at the mercy of men who are equally indifferent to any individual life, to millions of lives, and to the world itself

David Berman, I’ve never needed you more

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Oh, yeah? Would a dying empire do THIS?!

It seems absurd to lock in, as growing number of commentators seem to be doing (NYT clip below), on Trump’s failure to articulate a casus belli in Iran. Asking “why?”, presuming a satisfactory explanation is out there, ignores the sense of unreality that perpetuates endless war in the first place.

ASSANTE1.BMF

I went Luigi Mode yesterday (ate alone at a McDonalds in a distressed former industrial town in Pennsylvania)

Very cool 👍

Tom Noonan in “The Pledge” may be the most unsettling second-for-second performance in history. R.I.P. to a king

Criminal who stole 20 million dollars supports Garrity for PA Governor keystonenewsroom.com/2026/02/17/s...

straight fire from Melinda Cooper as usual

I teach at a mid-sized public university in Pennsylvania. Every day, I see students who aren't Humanities majors benefit from the critical thinking, collaboration, communication, and creativity that is fostered in my classrooms. And I see Humanities majors with their eyes on the future.

The ending of this book is one of the most absolutely bleak things I've ever read.

It’s so funny to think about the fact that there’s people out there deferring every life decision to this

the absolute minimum required for my vote, in 2026 and 2028, is a firm commitment to putting these people in prison. I don’t care how good you are on other issues. I don’t care if it’s a purity test. if I don’t see a hard commit to imprisoning these people, you don’t get my vote, plain and simple

you can think this without typing it

Dear universities, big tech and neo-liberalism would like to inform you that your faculty are too invested in students, your curricula are fluff, your culture wars are outdated, and you aren’t spending enough on AI. www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

I really want people to think about this. After all the insane lawsuits, all the threats, all the bullshit weve seen from this admin and the targets who kneeled in fear, an average Joe called the president a Pedophile protector to his face and didn't get touched. That's the Power of a union.

I have zero bandwidth to develop the idea, but the last decade has given rise to a gulliblity style, where a source’s statement is treated as the story regardless of whether it’s true or plausible. It creates stories that are technically true but functionally misinformation. You see it everywhere.

I've never been a conspiracy theory guy, but you're never gonna convince me that there hasn't been a specific cabal of ultra-rich dullards trying to buy, strangle, and bring to heel all of the most important reality-shaping machines since the uptick in power labor had during COVID

🚨 2026 DISINFORMATION WATCH 🚨

the epstein stuff is disturbing not just morally but epistemically. how much of the random stuff that is happening now that seems kind bad is, in fact, the work of one rich pervert I'm going to find out about in 30 years?

among everything else this week dunno if you heard but coding is over. huge opp for humanities folks. should be megaphoning 'learning to think never goes out of style'

“Who faces arbitrary death for not behaving perfectly submissively at all times” has obviously never been an empty category in the US but the expansion to include “anyone, from any armed and unidentifiable agent of the state” is incredibly bad

We make the money people. We make the billionaires, we make every god damn thing. The sooner we realize that the sooner we can reign these lying billionaires and their hype men in.

I wrote this yesterday about the hero city of Minneapolis www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKOW...

Labor organizing uses a 1-5 scale to asses people; 1s are organizers, 5s should be treated as stoolies for management. As a general rule, the focus is getting 3s to 2 and 2s to 1. 4s are often only a consideration either when there are no 3s left or you can tell one of them is about to become a 5.

law enforcement just murdered someone and is attempting to cover it up, and the person you ask for insight is fucking *Rahm Emanuel*? the moral degeneracy of our media is truly bottomless

The fact that this isn’t the position of every educational institution and teachers union in the country is baffling and terrifying to me.

two weeks ago

This oil painting shows the Anchor pub in Cambridge on Silver Street. Dated 2016 it sold probably in a Cambridge Drawing Society exhibition #Cambridge #TheAnchor #oilpainting

Was talking to a union member about conditions for general strikes recently why we weren't there yet in places like PA -- this week we got to have a follow up about why Minnesota hits broad conditions, how, risks, and opportunities. I still worry about next steps, but today is a big first step.

The law protects me and binds others, this can't be right!!

Hung a guy at Nuremburg for doing this, FYI. Not "a thing like this" but literally this, exactly.

the abyss is staring back at me

this is beautiful in so so many ways.

oh it's going to be a Recession recession

ten minutes ago: wow exciting game, OT, cool! now: fuck this stupid game, refs are evil incarnate

trash

A real Thomas Friedman moment