An early version of the first US News college rankings awarded points for diversity & didn't put the usual suspects on top. So the magazine got rid of the statistician responsible & changed the algorithm to affirm the "conventional wisdom of the meritocracy." washingtonmonthly.com/2000/09/01/p...

Free speech is often fraught on university campuses, but particularly in the wake of Charlie Kirk's death, we need to ask more of our universities in respecting contentious speech (And, some for all of our CO universities)

I spent the week at the police surveillance convention and let me tell you my biggest observation: The name of the game now is consolidating as much information as humanely possible from surveillance devices, the internet, other governmental data, and literally a million other places. 🧵

Only an administration intent on committing war crimes in the present and future would stoop to calling Wounded Knee a "battle" rather than what it truly was: a massacre of over 250 Lakotas, mainly women, children, and the elderly. 1/

Really perfect description of "PC" debates prior to the trump era

Longshot but it any of my bsky folk are Nebraskans, I'm be performing this weekend at the Omaha Comedy with Subtext, Minor Adjustments, and Bad Bubblegum!

“This policy operates as a prior restraint on publication which is considered the most serious of First Amendment violations,” we told @kenbensinger.bsky.social “The government cannot prohibit journalists from public information merely by claiming it’s a secret or even a national security threat.”

If you are currently abroad and on a valid H-1b visa, starting Sunday you'll be barred from re-entering the U.S. - unless you or your employer pay $100,000 to the U.S. government. This de facto travel ban will cause chaos throughout tech and the entire economy. www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...

I was reliably told celebrating political violence was cause for government reprisal and private sector termination.

That's literally false. The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that praising someone's death is protected speech, including in Snyder v Phelps (2011), where protesters at a soldier's funeral held signs that said "Thank God for Dead Soldiers" & "Thank God for 9/11" rollcall.com/2025/09/19/s...

The findings “suggest that medical AI tools powered by LLMs have a tendency to not reflect the severity of symptoms among female patients, while also displaying less ‘empathy’ towards Black and Asian ones.”

From Feb 4th 1939

Holy shit, It's not a bit @criticalrole.bsky.social is doing a fundraiser for @ncwit.org!

How to delete your account without agreeing to the new TOS: In the dialogue box asking you to agree, DO NOT click agree. Instead, click on the TOS link which will open another tab. In the top right of that tab you can go to your account settings and delete your account.

This is precisely the kind of government coercion that the First Amendment was designed to prevent — and media companies need to start standing up rather than capitulating to it.

After years of complaining about cancel culture, the current administration has taken it to a new and dangerous level by routinely threatening regulatory action against media companies unless they muzzle or fire reporters and commentators it doesn’t like.

coates is genuinely a generational writer

The first reviews (Advance Praise) for Degrees of Freedom are out! Huge thanks to Ericka Johnson (Linköping) and Nicki Washington (Duke) for the very kind words about my forthcoming book. tomwilliamsphd.beehiiv.com/p/degrees-of...

When I was placed on the Professor Watchlist in 2021, people sent death threats about my children. I had security officers monitor my 8yo at school. Where is all the outrage for those of us who have been targeted for years? Where is the outrage for our families? My own colleagues are silent.

idk if you've seen this south korean editorial that ran a few days ago. google translate version scorched my eyebrows www.hani.co.kr/arti/opinion...

This man will not be fired for calling for the murder of American citizens, yet multiple journalists/reporters/teachers lost their job for accurately reporting things Charlie Kirk actually said and stood for. But it’s the “violent left” that’s the problem

Why isn’t every local news broadcast opening with, “What are the ‘Groypers’, and how do you know the signs of your son is part of the deadly gang?”

Groyper culture is ultra right. The mainstream media is pretty clueless.

"Kirk was a poster child for our emergent Christian Fascism. ... He advocated televised public executions which he insisted should be mandatory viewing for children. The idea that he championed free speech and liberty is absurd. He was an enemy of both." chrishedges.substack.com/p/the-martyr...

How much did he make to help implement American fascism? Which is kidnapping and killing people at hyperspeed? People talk about him like they merely disagreed with his style, or like difference of opinion are strictly aesthetic. He profited off making the hate machine more deadly.

It is quite simply dishonest to describe TPUSA as a “free speech” organization and not even mention the “Professor Watchlist,” as NPR just did. Reporting on a crime does not entail adopting the victim’s views.

Thinking about the phrase "political violence" and the number of people who've died on Rikers Island in just the last month.

Someone shot up my kid's school today, and our governor is paying tribute to a guy who thought that is an acceptable price to pay for having the Second Amendment. Jared Polis has failed Colorado.

We’ll see more of these farcical “inciting violence” accusations. The right always adopts the language of the left to claw back civil rights. After years of hearing about how hate speech leads to violence, they’re starting to say that pointing out their racism is incitement.

NEW: We got access to Jeffrey Epstein’s personal Yahoo inbox — more than 18,000 emails. It shows Epstein’s world in his own words: an unfiltered look at how his operation worked, who enabled it, and how Ghislaine Maxwell stayed at the center of it all.

The bizarre liberal eulogies of Kirk by Klein, Newsom, & others overlook his relationship to violence & that of the white conservative movement more broadly. If we're serious abt not wanting to live in a society where ppl are subjected to this sort of thing, we absolutely can't normalize this stuff.

A professor at Texas A&M included content in her course about gender and sex, a student argued that it was illegal, and now the dean and department head have been fired, and the “case” has been referred to the DOJ. This is a five alarm fire. Video in replies. www.kbtx.com/2025/09/09/a...

"Harvard can't use race as a factor in admissions, but ICE can use race as a factor in detentions" is a retrenchment essentially to a pre-Civil War understanding of the Constitution. It's vanishingly few steps removed from "Latinos have no rights which the white man is bound to respect."

More evidence of how Trump's fundamentally dismantling US science. abcnews.go.com/Health/nih-g...

DOJ does damage control as staffer admits Republicans will be redacted from Epstein files www.rawstory.com/doj-epstein-...

A really great read overall on how Wikipedia has survived the Internet, and the challenges it still faces. Going straight on my students' reading lists!

Who portrays robots on stage, and does their race matter? Debates over this question have been raging as Filipino-American Darren Criss prepares to leave his leading role in the Broadway production of Korean musical hit Maybe Happy Ending, with a White actor stepping in to fill his role... 🧵

The precise moment when and where in recent weeks America crossed that invisible line from democracy into authoritarianism can and will be debated by future historians, but it’s clear that the line itself has been crossed. www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/america-ti...

Very excited for our lab's forthcoming #IROS2025 paper! Extremely cool work from @renazhu.bsky.social et al. "That’s Iconic! Designing Augmented Reality Iconic Gestures To Enhance Multi-modal Communication For Morphologically Limited Robots" mirrorlab.mines.edu/publications... 🧵

We now have a cover for my forthcoming book, *Degrees of Freedom: On Robotics and Social Justice*! (@mitpress.bsky.social, 2025) In this newsletter post, I talk about the cover, and explain its significance: tomwilliamsphd.beehiiv.com/p/degrees-of... Pre-order: mitpress.mit.edu/978026255402...

Go, a college student, has a dependent visa (her mother, an Episcopal minister, is here on a religious worker visa), which doesn't expire until Dec. But when she tried to renew it early, ICE nabbed her and sent her halfway across the US to a detention center. www.wthr.com/article/news...

WTF? I was quoted in this story but I have never spoken to the reporter nor would I have said those things. Is everything just generated by LLMs these days? cosmosmagazine.com/earth/oceans...

"Never in the history of our nation has an educational institution so thoroughly bent to the will of an autocrat" www.aaup.org/news/columbi...

Diolch y'n fawr iawn Christopher Wallbridge for hosting me for a seminar at @cardiffunilib.bsky.social to discuss Degrees of Freedom (@mitpress.bsky.social)! So much amazing work going on at Cardiff HCC right now --- looking forward to finding ways to collaborate!

I've received final proofs from @mitpress.bsky.social for Degrees of Freedom! To celebrate, I've published a newsletter post exploring the full timeline to write this book. Read the post: tomwilliamsphd.beehiiv.com/p/degrees-of... Pre-order: mitpress.mit.edu/978026255402...

New Newsletter Post: "The Where" of Degrees of Freedom, and Second Preorder Sale! tomwilliamsphd.beehiiv.com/p/degrees-of... I'm back in Bristol for four weeks! In this post I reflect on the history of Bristol, and how its efforts to correct for its legacy of slavery parallel themes in my book.

Again, you lied to your readers about your source. You falsely called him “an academic” and whitewashed the fact that he is a known proponent of racist eugenics — all while promoting his Substack with a hyperlink and striking a deal to obscure his publicly reported identity.

New, from me: The Times published a piece accusing a man born in Africa as claiming to be African-American in a failed college admission. They viewed this story to be newsworthy enough to grant anonymity to a eugenicist working with hacked personal data. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/whos-afrai...

it’s absurd that NYT forced him to delete these skeets, which … convey the factual information that Zohran Mamdani is, in fact, a man of South Asian descent who was born and raised in Africa, and that the pseudonymous source of the hacked material is a white supremacist eugenicist.

Why TF isn’t anyone talking about the $75 BILLION for ICE? Every city will look like Los Angeles - with masked kidnappers snatching our friends and neighbors. From current budget of $3.5 billion to $75 BILLION ❗️ $30b for hired thugs. $45b for concentration camps.