The pace at which US wealth concentration is rising is simply staggering The concentration of AI wealth into the hands of a few tech barons + plutocratic capture ==> unchartered territory

with agents trending, reflecting again on Gibson's disappointing 2020 novel on the topic. Maybe his always-sensitive cultural antenna was rightly tuned to Cringe.

"Sociology is a martial art" is such a resonant phrase, and when he says it in the film Bourdieu means exactly the opposite of what you'd assume he'd mean. Bien joué, Pierre.

This Thursday I'm in the hot seat at the NYU Sociology Department's Culture Workshop. Psyching myself up by rewatching "La sociologie est un sport de combat" https://andrewgoldstone.com/blog/nyu2026/

Lane wide open for unapologetically pro-immigration Democrats

hey, did anyone check how well Google Trends did at predicting the flu season this year?

Outstanding journalistic practice in every respect by @sarahjeong.bsky.social https://www.theverge.com/policy/872783/tear-gas-children-portland-ice-labor

Never mind the jobs you had, tell me what you consider valuable forms of cultural capital

zuck, muck, and altmuck are easy targets, but I think there hasn't been enough hating on captcha/duolingo guy. In terms of daily misery, he's right up there

Heard some youngs the other day complaining about getting blasted by too many substack newsletter emails. Asked if they'd heard of RSS. Nope. At least they still use e-mail, I guess.

This is why the Mahatma was proud to use Apple products

this short story could have been a social media post

More evidence, if any were needed, that "the humanities" does not even come close to covering everything that is being assaulted in universities now https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/20/universities-humanities-programs

"I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission—a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for 'the brotherhood of man.'" --somebody or other in 1967 https://www.crmvet.org/info/mlk_viet.pdf

This guy is yet another gift from Harvard to American politics

wikipedia turns 25 today! the last unenshittified major website! backbone of online info! triumph of humanity! powered by urge of unpaid randos to correct each other! somehow mostly reliable! "good thing wikipedia works in practice, because it sure doesn't work in theory" - old wiki adage

Every time I’m in Moynihan Train Hall I ask myself whether this forbidding shopping-mall/monument to inequality is ironic or fitting as a tribute to its midcentury liberal namesake

updating a syllabus from years past, deleting broken links to DH projects, thinking about all the pious disquisitions on what a contribution to knowledge those digital editions & tools & so on were

"Use plain language to automate tasks on your Mac desktop ($100/month)"—man, if only Apple hadn't killed HyperCard and let AppleScript wither on the vine

Michael Mann on "praetorian guards": "Despotic political rulers become very wary of military autonomy, for they bring the threat of military coups. Where they distrust the military, they tend to build up armed police and security battalions as their own praetorian guard, offering armed […]

learned about the at command, AMA and I'll answer at a specific time

provoking a flurry of futile activity LIKE A BOSS

blaming my failures on someone else LIKE A BOSS

overpromising and underdelivering LIKE A BOSS

On a related note, this remark by Dan Davies made me wonder if it generalizes to occupations, like mine, and cases, like mine, in which the worker receives $0 bonus https://backofmind.substack.com/p/how-much-exactly-is-my-jobworth

"for most knowledge workers, it [$100/mo subscription] pays off within the first week." I have two follow-up questions. 1) Pays off for whom? 2) Are managers "knowledge workers"?

Thrilled to share that I made $4.12 last quarter in royalties on Fictions of Autonomy (OUP, 2013). Makes me wonder: what is the maximum royalty I can receive and still consider myself autonomous?

what digitization process (or image compression algo?) yields documents resembling those undergrad papers where they inadvertently kept the off-white text bg color from the website they copied from?

I guess the guy has read at least the first sentence of Dialectic of Enlightenment

Until someone we like can be elected! https://coreyrobin.com/2026/01/03/grenada/

For no(?) reason, read the Marcuse/Adorno correspondence, 1969. I find myself moved and left very uneasy by the feeling that nobody won then and still hasn't won now. https://newleftreview.org/issues/i233/articles/theodor-adorno-herbert-marcuse-correspondence-on-the-german-student-movement

also, 21 years on from my last comp-lit course: I finally read Lord's Singer of Tales (in digital ed., h/t @dasmiq.bsky.social for the link on a syllabus of his). https://bookwyrm.social/user/agoldst/comment/9290902#anchor-9290902

@kjhealy you've done it! a grand unified theory of academic administration, at long last!

RE: https://mastodon.social/@kjhealy/115774921473852315 this functionalist theory of university websites is, however, in tension with the institutionalist principle that the people in charge have no clue & just want one that looks like everyone else's

an actually good critical genealogy of machine-generated articles: from Derek Price's bibliometry to PageRank to LLM-SEO, metricization is the institutional context for slop. https://artificialbureaucracy.substack.com/p/context-widows

postscript on "great books": you may not like it, but B Weiss is what a Columbia Core Curriculum education looks like

"Instead, what appears to have happened is a lot of empty talk, no real significant change, and backlash that is causing real harm. This is the worst of all possible worlds." https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2025/12/17/what-does-the-census-data-say-about-the-lost-generation/

The one problem that rules them all is taking away the wealth of oligarchs, whose personal holdings dwarf entire social problems for everyone else.

constative, meet performative

one of the great things about sticking with mutt as my mail reader is what it does to management holiday greetings, as if the boss had read Edwin Morgan's "The Computer's First Christmas Card"

it seems D. Hofstadter's Fluid Concepts & Creative Analogies was the 1st book ordered from amazon. Having been the kind of nerd who asked his mom for a copy, I feel…complicit https://neal.fun/internet-artifacts/amazon-order/

such political, very literary: award-winning novelist's muckraking story about exploited content moderators, published by Amazon in their "Out of Line collection." "Borrow" it "free" on Prime

since registration's over, I can safely advertise my spring courses. Tagline: "Fulfills your AHp & WCd Core requirements & my need to teach metrics for one week every year!" https://andrewgoldstone.com/blog/s26offerings/

Newfield on university-finance charades: ignore the sword of Damocles and it goes away, right? In 6 months our mgmt has gone from "PANIC AUSTERITY DOOM" to "la la la it's fine" https://utotherescue.blogspot.com/2025/12/liner-note-44-2025-crisis-in-university.html

Q: you’re really supporting another GOVERNMENT REGULATION? A: uh huh

mandatory ethics training: groundwork of the metaphysics of pastrami on rye

attempted to relieve stress by fiddling with zsh completions for a while. Maybe I'll propose replacing the entire zshcompwid and zshcompsys manpages with the text "GIT GUD"

RE: https://mastodon.social/@kjhealy/115703587197815919 Well, it matches MY age-8 experience of 8-bit gaming: baffling instructions, screaming frustration at getting through early levels, relying on perverse rituals in hopes of placating the machine-god

fantasy ethnography project: the people who make careers out of the disintegration of professions. Academic career coaches. Obstructionist professional-org staff careerists. Journalists on the beat…

Most enduring part of annual compliance training is the skit in which a woman mgr. sexually harasses an innocent pony-tailed male consultant ("it can be really hard lotioning yourself up properly")