USAID budget was $23b per year

yay six hour delayed flight announced right after returning the rental car

journalism is important, and it is accordingly important that the news is not controlled by billionaires.

Concerning!

Goes insanely hard

To be clear: the lower court said the map intentionally discriminates against black people in violation of the *constitution* (not just the VRA) and the MAGA Majority of SCOTUS is saying "that's ok now."

another day, another story about the administration's war on knowledge itself, all in service of allow its corporate patrons free rein to rob us blind and poison our world www.nytimes.com/2026/06/01/c...

My god, Octavia Butler, just miss ONCE

it's vice signaling all the way down

there's really only two kinds of near future: one in which guys like this are systematically broken on the wheel for the many crimes they have committed, and one where they walk free. only one of these is a viable future

i think the marketing freaks who made dark roast coffee popular to the exclusion of everything else should be hunted for sport

How about: "Trump's Justice Department launches a criminal investigation into E. Jean Carroll, a woman the president raped."

or what it can do is not need to turn a profit

google's ideal final product is grinding up every book in the world into pure, clean slop to serve in a trough for you to come slurp up while you watch ads there's no worry about waste or leftovers because it all goes into a big putrid barrel labeled "AI" at the end of the day

Trump doesn’t literally decide who gets the money. But everyone on the commission is appointed by the AG, and can be removed by Trump *at any time*. It’s a machine to reward his allies. I promise you, not one dollar will go to anyone he doesn’t deem worthy of getting rich at your expense.

And now they want to give him a big payout w your money!

It’s pickling Saturday!

I read Dirac’s original paper on the Dirac equation and I must say it is really beautiful. He comes from an experimental question (that the electron has spin-1/2) and derives the equation from a simple relativistic argument. The presentation is honestly better than any I’ve seen in modern textbooks

Does anyone have the issue when accessing APS webpages that every single time you are asked to verify you are a human and often the page fails to load without a refresh? Is this universal or just me?

The best parts of my experience in academia has been thinking very deeply about things for a long time and writing detailed papers explaining those things, polished as much as possible to present things that I have come to understand as clearly as I can.

together these create an arms race that we all lose, as incentives for producing academic output get further and further untethered from the upshots of producing knowledge

This is all a function of politicians and parties claiming to represent a mythical idea of the median voter, the regular Joe, who is socially liberal (but not too liberal) and economically conservative and so hates taxes and high prices and when the government spends money

The idea that the primary purpose of higher education is credentialing (rather than, you know, *education*) is one of the all-time greatest lies that economists tried to make us believe.

On this May Day, we remember the words of coMarx, the inventor of cohomology theory: “we have nothing to lose but our cochains”

We won! Hundreds of thousands of people who are currently detained and separated from their families in lower-level cases will be released from jail every year. An incredible victory for liberty and public safety. You can read the historic decision here: civilrightscorps.org/wp-content/u...

this line from alito’s opinion, that the question before the court was “whether compliance with the Voting Rights Act should be added to our very short list of compelling interests that can justify racial discrimination,” is truly orwellian

john roberts only ever cared about the court's reputation because he thought taking a slow and steady approach and protecting its reputation would make the conservative wins more durable than simply going for it all at once and nuking their credibility.

The court has simply recreated the pre-Brown world in allowing racial discrimination across a broad number fields as long as it is “facially neutral,” gutting the Reconstruction Amendments in the process.

My god it sounds like it was written by an LLM trained exclusively on Trump’s Truth Social posts

Legitimately funny photo

Forget about the substance, the reveal that “most of” the justices talked to Mollie Hemingway for her book is bananas. Hemingway is a right-wing freak who runs a conspiracy theory blog. If literally any of the justices are taking this person seriously, the Supreme Court is GONE gone.

I swear this really happened: In his UT Law speech the other day, Clarence Thomas (at about 36:00 in this clip) bemoaned the leaders in this country who "gain positions of authority" and then become "enticed by access to things that were previously unavailable to them"

How is “viewpoint diversity” not just affirmative action for people with bad ideas

There are definitely words for people who make money off of producing content about powerful people that the powerful people like and want to participate in. “Journalist” isn’t one of them. But there are others, for sure.

Honestly crazy in a country of 350 million people the amount of representation of the worst people you’ll ever meet among the roughly 500 people who run our government.

The US isn’t as as bad as Hungary of course but it’s very very obvious that the media environment shapes how people think about political issues! It would be weird to deny it in Hungary and it’s weird when people do it here about trans rights or vaccine hesitancy or anything else.

Not dunking on Zack or this post, I’m just always struck by how easily American journalists will admit that the media shapes public polling and political outcomes when they’re not talking about America.

rather fitting way for trumpism to unravel we have (a) mind-numbingly stupid, illegal, and cruel decisions leading to (b) entirely foreseeable consequences of them, which (c) they cannot resolve because they operate under delusions like (d) a delusion of victory after clear defeat all the classics

this is in no sense how it should have happened. but it is precisely because we find ourselves in a situation that requires war, death, and destruction to get well positioned political actors behind accelerating energy transition that we should demolish fossil capital as decisively as we can

days like today i get incandescent with rage all over again that he wasn't in cuffs and an orange jumpsuit and perp walked on jan 21st, 2021

I'm a bit of a broken record on this, but usurping the power of the purse isn't just one constitutional violation among all the many others. It is, uniquely and singularly, the death of constitutional government altogether. Game over, end of story, you now live in an autocracy.

I dreamt of the beach (1/4)

Teach the controversy, even if the controversy is fringe lunacy

Good morning Houston!

we gotta see some convictions for this stuff, we just have to

NSF Update through March 13, 2026 1/2

maybe we shouldn't have made everything shit

"Every vice-signal, whether it’s Trump or Farage or Jenrick or Herbert Kickl, is telling you the rules are over. If you can’t believe them the first time, at least believe them the 100th." @zoesqwilliams.bsky.social The Anti-Vice Popular Front is expanding www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...