Harbor Seal, Brown Pelican, Great Egret spotting.

still no phone so i'm just out here looking at nature.

Black Phoebe! first bird with the lens that @markthornton.bsky.social got me for extreme birding adventures 🦅

My phone fell out of my pocket on a United flight and now they have to take the plane apart to get it out because turns out there was just A HOLE THERE for lithium batteries to fall straight into.

some highlights from the most recent phase of my long term research on cold brew naranja variation and change in Santiago cafés.

A group of elementary school-aged children, running toward me with an urgent question: “COMO SE DICE SEIS SIETE EN INGLÉS!?!?!”

The democratic process in Estación Mapocho Santiago, Chile.

Kudos to the Brown University students who are posting continuous live updates, spaced just minutes apart, on the campus shooting. A lot of grace and professionalism under immense pressure. www.browndailyherald.com/article/2025...

I love a play within a play! I’m in Santiago doing research on student political participation related to Chile’s upcoming election and two students stopped me in the street to ask me questions about the election.

They're always partnering with Anthropic to launch AI at an institutional scale and never with the Anthro Department to launch hanging out and talking to each other at an institutional scale smh.

IMPORTANT: a friend who is a high school teacher has informed me that the youth are doing a trend where they censor the word “job”

"As one senior researcher told me, decades of painstaking work vanished overnight in an attack by an inexperienced and ideologically driven staff intent on dismantling the bureaucracy without understanding its purpose."

I don’t think it’s normal that we have a camera inside of the chickens’ coop and we’re evaluating and worrying about their behaviors.

An experience in the garden ❄️🌻🐥

"Because there is no legitimate war between the two sides, killing any of the men in the boats “amounts to murder,” said Todd Huntley, a former military lawyer who advised Special Operations forces for seven years at the height of the U.S. counterterrorism campaign."

I don’t know if anyone else notices or cares, but when I see a presentation in which the speaker uses obviously generated-AI images to illustrate their slides, it makes me immediately less confident in whatever other content they’re presenting.

The NSF Bio Anthro Program DDRIG, Cultural Anthrpology DDRIG, and Archaeology DDRIG have all been archived (as of yesterday afternoon). Please speak with your grad students and plan accordingly. To say I am angry and depressed about this is an understatement.

I just became shocked upon realizing that the youth are barely even sampling The Hush Sound in their TikToks

Regret to report that there has been another good linkedin post

Sunrise and slides on the way to New Orleans for AAA!

PBS NEWS WEEKEND has been cancelled and 34 jobs will be cut at WETA in Washington D.C. The NEWS HOUR West Coast bureau will also close and the updated daily West Coast broadcast will end. “We cannot fully compensate for the scope of the federal funding loss.” current.org/2025/11/weta... #PBS

they’re calling it the Big Beautiful Bill in the TikTok comments 💀

Mamdani going so hard for trans right and winning is some juicy proof that every dem that abandoned us didn’t do it for politically advantageous reasons. They did it because they’re transphobes and they will lose for it

Normal people are just sick to fucking death of the cruelty and meanness

Teen Vogue eliminated all their Black and trans staff today. It's resegregation in real time.

Teen Vogue took young people seriously. It's impossible to overstate how important, how rare, and how profoundly needed that is.

hollering into the void: OCD is not shorthand for your fun lil quirks or hangups around organization, it's an irrational and sometimes dehabilitating condition that destroys your quality of life from the inside out

"[Chicago mom] Andrea Soria... overheard her 6-year-old whisper to her dolls: 'We have to be good or ICE will get us.'" apnews.com/article/chic...

Together, we’re critical to the comprehension and production of meaning! 🧠 @markthornton.bsky.social

This is a piece of the Mamdani campaign that I think is really underdiscussed—that in a moment of terror and despair, his premise is that standing up against fascism can be joyous.

worth applying to politics as well. when you're criticizing an action people take "taking the better action next time" is only one of the alternatives people will consider, and worth remembering that "not bothering at all" is another.

Purdue to the rescue of IU student newspaper, whose institution was attempting censorship. Details in alt!

Don't forget @tyanna.bsky.social's linguistic anthropology starter pack! bsky.app/starter-pack...

🚨🚨🚨 And THREE stood up! Penn has joined MIT & Brown in rejecting Trump’s loyalty oath compact. When we join together and fight back, WE WIN! No amount of federal bribery is worth surrendering the freedom to question, explore, and dissent. LET’S GO! #DefendHigherEd @aaup-penn.bsky.social

Gentrification font in the middle of the forest. Relentless!

E-bike autumn

IGALA is on Bluesky & Instagram (IGALA_insta) now! Help us grow online and off by following AND nominating yourself or a colleague for an executive board position 🙃

My first academic article was on the dictatorship of Uzbekistan inventing a group called "Akromiya" that did not really exist but which they used to arrest anyone with whom they disagreed under the pretext of "terrorism". Just bringing this up for no reason whatsoever!

“Debate Me” culture is not organic, endemic, or apolitical. This mode of high jacking discourse is and has been central to a 30-year conservative training program that has produced untold numbers of people to do this for every reason but “civil discourse”

the Dems have invested nothing in understanding this political moment

Why is it that when people talk about “waves” of things there only ever seem to be three waves that doesn’t make any sense.

We’ve seen this going viral on other social media platforms and people aren’t citing @markthornton.bsky.social for his methods/labor/data viz skills 🙄. But actually it’s interesting how people will just share things and not care where it came from & if it’s legit. This is, unfortunately, legit 😭

I'm scared of what AI is going to do to youth (and adult) sociality but I'm more scared of the homeschooling movement.

As a scholar of youth & language and (social) media & stuff for a very long time I thought it was like good for youth to have phones and social media and at some point in the past few years I switched to I don’t think children should be around screens at all. Does this mean I’m ready for parenthood?

In two years, we went from having the first Black woman president of Harvard to having affinity groups defunded and support for minority students eliminated on campus. History will condemn the cowards in charge who capitulated to white supremacy and the pedophile rapist president.

Meet Rhubarb (Barb), Kiwi, Squash, and Echinacea (Eki)! They’re named after things in their future home in the garden 🐣

Just got back to New Hampshire (on the 🚌Dartmouth Coach🚌) and the leaves are already changing colors 😭😭😭😭

FYI www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

Thoughts for a new school year: I’ve been interviewing people about pro-democracy movements during Chile’s dictatorship & former student activists have brought up that they made sure to have great grades so that admins wouldn’t be able to use ‘bad student’ as cover for expelling political dissidents