i think powell's response here is a demonstration of the folly of the idea that democratic accountability requires presidential control. what if the president is not acting in the public interest? you want independent agencies to be able to push back and pursue their *congressional mandate*

This is the sort of statement that was expected from every university president and law firm partner over the last year. That those statements weren’t made played a huge part in where we are now and people will remember.

I can’t believe the potential end of Fed independence is only causing a 0.5% slide in Dow futures. www.cnbc.com/2026/01/11/s...

Bears fans preparing to riot but the stadium puts Serengeti's "Dennehy" on the PA and they all calm down instantly and begin milling about harmlessly. "Keep the juice in your chops," they mutter to each other, absently if still somewhat warmly. "Keep the juice in your brats."

Wild that Indiana is going to finally win a national football championship in the year that IU’s leaders & the state’s government decided it was no longer a serious research university.

New: we've obtained material explaining how an ICE surveillance system, called Webloc, works. Draw shape on a map, see all phones available there, follow them home. All without warrant “This is a very dangerous tool in the hands of an out-of-control agency.” www.404media.co/inside-ices-...

This is what an actual politicized campus look like, where activists gin up social media outrage that targets professors, political appointees strip faculty of professional autonomy, and students are not allowed to learn about what it is to live in America now.

??? Apparently Venezuela oil revenues will go into “offshore accounts” outside of the US Treasury, PBS reports.

Some reflections from me on January 6 in comparative and historical perspective (first time on substack) open.substack.com/pub/ziblatt4...

“Web 4.0” will be the strip-mining of the collaborative spaces of the web, enclosure and privatization, followed by the managed decline of those commercial platforms once there’s no fresh feedstock to extract. bsky.app/profile/anne...

you cannot blockade a country and bomb its capital cities and capture its leader without being at war with it, is the thing

this is a war of aggression. it is illegal under international law, and he has no right to launch it. you might fairly argue that it none of that has constrained him, but laws matter when powerful actors insist they do, and there are powerful actors who could start insisting they do.

Among the many reasons you don’t kidnap a foreign head of state at gunpoint even if you have the capability, is that it sparks consequences you can neither control nor anticipate.

Prof Eliot Jacobson: And it's a wrap. The year 2025 came in at 1.47°C above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial baseline, making it the 3rd warmest year on record behind 2023 (1.48°C) and 2024 (1.60°C), and likely the 3rd warmest in the last 120,000 years.

Mind bogglingly low.

THIS THIS THIS. ALL OF THIS THIS is why faculty resist technological strategies for teaching. There is no engaging with Edtech without this context

“Thwaites holds back the vast icy plateau that scientists call the West Antarctic ice sheet. The greater peril would be if Thwaites collapsed and caused the broader ice sheet to melt away, adding another 10 to 15 feet to sea-level rise.” www.nytimes.com/2025/12/27/c...

Wait until the New York Times learns about the Electoral College.

Kavanaugh in a footnote in today's opinion says "the officers must not make interior immigration stops or arrests based on race or ethnicity."

bari weiss saw this and decided that she had to hide it from the american public

SCOOP: Flock left at least 60 of its AI-powered, people-tracking surveillance cameras exposed and livestreaming to the open internet. We tracked ourselves. The exposure highlights the power of these cameras and types of things they're tracking. Not just cars. www.404media.co/flock-expose...

In a world of Sundown Towns where Black people weren’t allowed after nightfall, Green Book businesses were tiny spots of light. Traveling while Black was about survival. The Green Book Project documents that history: greenbookproject.org.ohio-state.edu #GreenBookProject #CommunityMap #EconSky

This and the discussion about how academics can now just read AI summaries of things really drives home how much these guys always confuse the product for the goal. You don't do a coloring sheet because you want to have a colored sheet at the end!!! The coloring is the point!!!

Highly recommended! "The Incidence of Tariffs: Rates and Reality" by Gita Gopinath and Brent Neiman. "...tariff pass-through to U.S. import prices is almost 100 percent, so the United States is bearing a large share of the costs." bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/u...

Arizona, the model for voucher programs across the country, spent so much money paying private schoolers’ tuition that it faced hundreds of millions in budget cuts to critical state programs and projects last year. (Published July 2024)

Very much reads like they are significantly reducing the influence of peer review on scientific funding, which under the current regime opens the way for more politicized funding instead.

Grading and googling hallucinated citations, as one does nowadays, and now that LLMs have been around for a while, I've discovered new horrors: hallucinated journals are now appearing in Google Scholar with dozens of citations bc so many people are citing these fake things

Nothing will make you an education AI skeptic faster than grading some college take home assignments. Admins who haven’t been in a classroom in years push it as a learning tool. Students are laughing at them as they use it as a cheating tool. It’s all instructors are texting about with each other.

Gen AI tools are not good sources for information during rapidly unfolding, novel events. Words associations aren't helpful for discovering ground truth. These tools are more likely to echo and contribute to the inherent uncertainty and ambiguity of crisis events.

The destruction of the enterprise of US academic science has been one of the most confounding aspects of a hugely confounding year. My @statnews.com colleagues are writing about the consequences for individuals & the country. You want to read this series. www.statnews.com/american-sci...

I guess it's fitting that it's a reimagined, worse version of someone else's artwork

In my 25yrs in the academy I 👀 the proliferation of expensive enterprise software that shifted the burden of sooo many basic administrative functions — reconciling receipts, paying honoraria, booking travel — from competent, efficient staff to faculty + students. I’d spend entire days on this crap.

Europa Universalis 5 has a lot of problems but it also is clear someone actually read the literature on state development and capacity this time. Very promising.

An underappreciated method for survey research.

Fluffy toys spouting CCP talking points in response to questions is decisive evidence in favor of my "Philip K. Dick as greatest prophet of our era" shtick. www.bostonreview.net/articles/hen...

my university literally turning the heat down to minimum for most of the winter break. Research? What research?

I have seriously contemplated reorganizing my entire campaigns and elections class around "ok so why *don't* we see convergence to identical platforms?"

They're using the confinement box, one of the most horrific methods of CIA torture in the post-9/11 black sites, against migrants now. This is the direct result of the lack of consequences for the architects of the torture program. Either there will be criminal penalties for this or it will expand.

Absolutely buzzing over this new video of a rarely seen giant squid

bad actors like wurman are why i think it is important to place the birthright clause in the full context of section 1 and section 1 in the context of both dred scott and the two decades of antislavery and abolitionist agitation and political thinking that proceeded it

NEW: www.theatlantic.com/national-sec...

I am once again thankful my mother no longer works for the university. Cutting budgets in all the wrong places.

Cloudflare outage is the adult snow day

Under new Trump administration rules, students won't be able to borrow as much for medical or nursing school or some other health professions.

If you actually have to do work, AI often just makes more work because you have to spend so much time making sure it didn't lie to you again.