Tragedy and farce: Shock & awe … Shock & aw shucks

"Full AI Communism," a phrase from the Wall St Journal this morning on whether China's vision of AI as a public good or Wall Street's as a private product will win the AI race. Good title for a book!

Why do we as a society even tolerate private equity? Just an entire industry premised on the idea of making everything else worse

A really interesting piece on reducing AI cheating in the classroom from a Professor of English and former Dean of Humanities at University of Utah. The solutions? Smaller classes, lower teaching loads for faculty, and in-person classes.

Maybe if we stopped thinking of ourselves as so special and removed from broader labor dynamics, we'd actually have models for enacting the change we want to see.

Some responses to this post have been so defeatist, basically saying "admin will never change and there's no money so we're fucked." I wish faculty feeling this way had a little more humility. Union organizers in the past were beaten and killed, but they worked on. Let's take our lead from them.

TIL the CIA World Factbook was discontinued this past February. RIP. You got me through many games of Carmen Sandiego. It seems OpenFactBook may carry on its legacy, offering accessible geographical info with less imperialist ties openfactbook.org

You can, and almost certainly should, opt out of being part of Muse Image's new experiment in making the internet a worse and more invasive place.

Now, we need to stop private equity from buying hospitals. It's a disaster waiting to happen, if not already here.

Stephen Miller must be tried

Educating myself about campus culture at my new employer & really enjoying the excellent journalism in the student newspaper, The Mac Weekly. themacweekly.com

VR, AI, face computers … How many times is FB going to choke on poorly regurgitated old tech fantasies before people realize that maybe the rapey webpage guy doesn’t actually have any good ideas? finance.yahoo.com/technology/a...

Please let’s all start using this coinage and let this be his most lasting legacy in the public consciousness … that and the lesson learned to never make this kind of compromise again.

Friends & colleagues, I'm very pleased to announce that this fall I'll be starting a new job at Macalester College as Assistant Professor of Media & Cultural Studies. Events at my current institution haven't left much space for sharing good news, but I hope we can also celebrate light in dark times

Le Guin on the idea that there is a secret to getting good at writing.

Definitely one of the more interesting & intellectually dishonest figures in US politics. According to this review he manages to celebrate the US cause in WWII & endorse fascism. Elsewhere Trump's VP has the audacity to criticize Bill Clinton's "moral failings" www.nytimes.com/2026/07/07/o...

Are the many “Intellectual Freedom Centers” being placed on college campuses nationwide really just mandatory ideological indoctrination centers? 🤔 #AcademicSky

They’re talking about abundance but we’d rather have a Bund

How many Jews shouting ‘genocide’ will it take until everyone understands that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism?

can’t believe a narcissist is being so publicly humiliated by a reflecting pool

I mean without occupy there was no Bernie 2016 and without Bernie 2016 there was no dsa as it is today and without dsa as it is today there's no Mamdani. Highly unlikely an AOC, but also Bernie 2016 on that one.

The rise of larger vehicles like SUVs and pickup trucks, with their taller hoods and larger blind zones, has contributed to a 75% increase in pedestrian and cyclist deaths since 2009. Until we design better streets and ban these vehicles, people outside these vehicles will keep dying.

To the “AI is useful” crowd, it might certainly be in theory, but we can’t ignore that it is being shaped by right wing extractive logics mired in cultural hierarchal commitments, that have very little interest in a utility that serves a broader social good.

“The AAUP and AFT condemn the federal indictment of fifteen Minnesotans—including Erik Davis, former president of the Macalester College AAUP chapter—for defending their community during the violent ICE occupation of Minneapolis earlier this year.” www.aaup.org/news/indictm...

Absolutely legendary video. It’s incredible they got this whole rap crew to so many iconic Bay Area spots. Kids today will watch and assume it’s AI or at best green screen

Incredible. My students & I experiment with commands like these in my Radical Software class when we craft keystroke injection attacks, scripting that pretends to be a human user. Here this is using a CAPTCHA, supposedly the test of a real human at the keyboard, to mímic the scripted attack

American political discourse is written on an Etch-a-Sketch and the goal of every political campaign is to tickle the populace so hard they inadvertently shake it clean

The professor made it hard for the guy to be there

Feels like a lot of STEM guys believed coding was the hardest thing a human could do, and assumed that once somebody invented an AI that can code, it would follow naturally that the AI can do all of the lesser non-coding things that other dumber people were doing

This thread pretty well tracks what has been happening at @thenewschool.bsky.social so far with its “Center for American Experience”

MADPA Make Americans Drink Poop Again

Sure are a lot of ways to succeed in academia by making yourself…useful.

Here’s the story, and it’s not good: www.newschoolfreepress.com/2026/04/16/i...

My great colleague and former student, History professor Dr Emma Park, was summarily fired to make room for this bullshit.

As of this morning, @thenewschool.bsky.social is de facto replacing its History department with a “Center for the American Experience,” which is funded by private and undisclosed donors. The New School has been New Colleged, and there’s no GOP to blame here. Our anti-fascist identity is over.

“19 full-time faculty members, 10 of them tenured, were told… that they’d been laid off… Dozens more have taken early-retirement or buyout offers… Among those laid off Monday was Sanjay G. Reddy, a professor of economics + prominent critic of the university’s financial management.”

Goonies 3 is going to be a bunch of kids trying to find an uncle’s old USB key rumored to have a long lost bitcoin on it

Infuriating that we don’t know the criteria for firing FT faculty at #thenewschool.

NEW: People are being involuntarily committed to psychiatric care facilities — and even ending up arrested or jailed — after becoming fixated on ChatGPT and other chatbots and spiraling into psychosis. futurism.com/commitment-j...

Organize or perish. More than adapting to distracted students or AI, disabusing ourselves of the notion that tenure will save us is the most important change we can help each other make. Tenure won’t get you formal recognition or a seat at the table & is the ultimate enticement of inaction

Brutal.

The next time a director says bullshit like this, I want the interviewer to ask: "If AI was around when you made your other films, which artists would you have fired?" I mean it. Name real fucking names. Of all the brilliant people you worked with, who do you think doesn't deserve a job anymore?

One great thing about the Knicks winning is that all the guys driving around in backfiring cars with intentionally dangling license plates are a little bit less aggro www.nytimes.com/2026/05/29/n...

They renamed the Department of Defense and now renamed war itself. So now we have a Department of War waging conflicts.

"It's just a small fortune, Michael, what could it be worth, $40 million?" www.nytimes.com/2026/05/27/u...

"I don’t use AI to avoid writing—I use it the way filmmakers use cameras or architects use CAD. The ideas & judgment are still mine. AI just helps through the mechanical parts so I can spend more time on the thinking that actually matters" – Steven Rosenblum, maybe (I used AI to generate this quote)

It just begs the question: what poetry does Jeff Bezos read? I imagine him sitting down with "Casey at the Bat" and giving a hearty chortle at the way it masterfully combines wit & profundity with rhyming couplets

"Poetry without rhyming? Too easy"

Really. Well in that case let’s triple it!