The world is on fire but spring returns in spite of our stupidity. #FlowerReport

I think of this speech, so often, too often, in fact. It is one of the most pertinent you could hear, today.

May Colson Hall be a queer space forever and ever amen.

The world could be such a nice place if we allowed it. It's all so goddamn unnecessary. There's no need for any of it. It's so beautiful here. It should be so cool to be alive

The calls for trans people to be quieter as we're wiped out are only going to increase, and you owe it to your sisters and brothers to get louder and louder.

36 hours in Brooklyn to see the kid and his girlfriend. Leaving at the break of dawn to get back through the mountains before the blizzard.

I'm listening to a talk by expert in rhetoric Jennifer Sano-Franchini ( @jsanofranchini.bsky.social ) about refusing generative AI in writing studies. She shared a resource for refusing genAI that might be helpful for other folks in academia: #academia #genAI refusal.blog

Come, good boy, the next way home.

I am caught in a grading vortex where no matter how many papers I grade (and I have graded dozens, maybe hundreds, who even knows?), I’m perpetually six papers from being finished. This can’t literally be true, and yet here I am, with six more papers to grade.

Beautiful blue-green late winter water through the melting ice.

"Be positive, an old friend tells me. I'm screaming. Silently." An update to @liznangel3.bsky.social's appeal on behalf of my wife and me. As the appeal nears its end and as we push hard to transition from sea-dwelling to settlement ashore, we really need your help, if you can give it.

Yesterday morning kids were sent running from their bus stop in panic because ICE showed up. This guy at today’s ICE Out of Lindenwold protest is a must watch 😭. @maddow.bsky.social

The AI isn't smart like humans. LLMs do not deduce. LLMs do not infer. LLMs do not reason. LLMs do not do math. LLMs do not make graphs and tables from existing datasets. LLMs cannot write conclusions. LLMs CAN use a template and fill in the blanks with appropriate-sounding plausible words.

My employer, Univ. Colorado will pay OpenAI $2M/year under the banner of “equity”. That’s 54 full scholarships / year. Plus, our IT will be able to read our chatGPT logs, and our chats can be requested under public records law. No thanks. Surveillance is not equity www.axios.com/local/boulde...

Homemade gluten free Dubai chocolate hearts. I’m so pleased they worked! Found the heart mold at Goodwill last month. The pink platter is also from Goodwill, years ago. Thrifty valentines for K, who can’t have gluten. 💝

When I got the contract to write a history of concentration camps in 2014, I hoped to keep the US from ending up here. That didn't work out! But now it's critical to understand how much is already in process and the enormity of what's coming. The sooner we act to stop it, the more people we'll save.

Didn’t expect to weep through the halftime show, but here we are.

Truly he is the Best Bunny.

Trust me, the woman of academia are not at all surprised by the number of academic men orbiting Epstein.

Imagine if they just funded the arts instead of AI

The Monongahela

Nothing I love more than a scathing, borderline-petty academic book review. Truly the best tradition in the genre.

taps sign

Thinking about evil and how we defeat it. No great insights, unfortunately. Outrage and sorrow, but no wisdom. Here’s the redbelly on our feeder today. I’ll keep feeding them.

Minnesota is the best of us.

I'm not one for false optimism. But what I witnessed today in Minneapolis was tremendous, both in scale and exuberance. It was a stunning answer to the federal assault on Minnesota, a show of solidarity that gives us something to hold on to during times that are unforgiving.

They really think they'll beat us down. They believe we'll get so scared and tired we'll give in. They are wrong.

“This is a small enough city where we’re pretty tight-knit,” he said. “It’s not going to go well here for this type of enforcement: people are going to record, people are going to protest peacefully.” “We care about our community members here.” www.pressherald.com/2026/01/23/h...

On a downtown street in Minneapolis, as people stream out from the massive march, Mary Tyler Moore says “fuck ice.”

The ankle is swollen, bruised, and stiff today, but I’m ambulatory and am going to wrap it up and teach my classes. I suspect Monday will be a snow day, so I’ll have a few days to recover if I can push through today. It’s definitely not broken. I feel so lucky it wasn’t my knee.

I slipped on the ice and whacked my ankle. It’s going to be fine, just a bit swollen and bruised, but the adrenaline rush and subsequent crash has wrecked my morning and I want to hibernate until spring.

Whatever is in the Epstein Files is so explosive that the leaders of the Department of Justice are openly breaking the law every day to keep us from seeing it. (Just a reminder amongst all the other stuff flying around.)

No one can be watching this Davos speech and reach any conclusion but that the President of the United States is mentally disturbed and that something is deeply wrong with him. This is both embarrassing and extremely dangerous.

Severe S4 solar radiation storm happening now; G4 geomagnetic storm predicted once the incoming CME hits tonight. Could be a big night for auroras. Here’s a picture from October, 2024.

Córy Doctorow with another verbal bullseye: pluralistic.net/2026/01/13/n...

Nidhi Chanani has made this image available to download for free on her website. It’s terrific! The other side of my poster is a bit less polished, but gets the job done.

Someone should buy this beautiful print!

I don't know how to explain to Gen Z that presidential "scandals" used to be a tan suit and knowing what arugula is instead of being a child rapist who launched an insurrection and wants to drop nuclear bombs on Denmark.

We heard Debussy’s “La Mer” performed by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra at Heinz Hall one year ago tonight, and we’re trying to make hearing beautiful music live in a beautiful space an annual event, so we don’t forget how to be human. The new semester starts tomorrow.

We snuck into Cleveland for a few days and didn’t try to see friends. We needed a few days to ourselves to visit and remember. I had bratwurst and buttermilk at the West Side Market and remembered my dad. Heard Mozart and Shostakovich at Severance. It felt good to be human for a few days.

Unseasonably warm here, 55°F at dawn. Such strange, sad times.

The “prosecute the former regime at every level” candidate has my vote in 2028.

Nixon insisted the bombing of Cambodia was just targeting Viet Cong outposts there and not meant to undermine its government, but the bombings destabilized the Lon Nol government and paved the way for the Khmer Rouge’s killing fields and the massacre of more than a million people.

In spite of it all, things are blooming in my kitchen. #FlowerReport

What the fuck. Trump is claiming the U.S. military captured a sitting head of state in his own country, with no extradition process & no legal authority. No matter what you think of Maduro, that’s absolutely insane behavior—and a precedent that should alarm anyone who cares about international law.

K gave me a lava lamp and a bag of tiny yooperlites. He knows I love things that glow. We’ll put them with my mudlarked fragments of vaseline glass. Glowing bits of stone and glass scavenged along the shore.

The kids were very good to me. This and Dubai chocolate bars, plus bird seed for the feeder. I’m a lucky mom.

Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine People survive in each other's shelter. scáth also means shadow, adding another layer of meaning about living in each other's shared unconscious. www.gofundme.com/f/a-voyage-i...