Idk man at this point I think the ai push is ultimately about erasing the capacity for interiority and depressing the already dirt cheap value of words. deeply ominous and just plain sad

the fundamentals of our economy - high interest debt put towards the ever more expensive commodities necessary for continued survival - are strong!

Dawkins spending his entire career berating basically pretty normal people for being so stupid as to believe in God and then immediately giving himself Roko's Basilisk Derangement Syndrome after talking to the AI catgirl waifus is just the funniest shit.

Israeli soldiers are facing a mental health crisis as they return from Gaza, and the diagnosis of "moral injury," the distress one feels when actions violate one's moral beliefs, is being used to absolve the guilt of perpetrators of the genocide. mondoweiss.net/2026/05/how-... #Palestine #Israel

Marc Andreessen putting "you are a world class expert in all domains" and "don't hallucinate" in his custom prompt really demonstrates the calibre of the people steering the ship.

I was lucky to write the lead article for a special issue of Academe on AI in the Corporate University. In "What does AI do?" I offer a provisional balance sheet of this technology's effects on our work, our finances, and our management, in a moment of rising fascist attacks on higher education.

<he-admit-it-dot-gif> oh wait now see folks that’s why you don’t use the unqualified “this” as the subject of a sentence

On fashion’s big night out, we turned the lens onto the garment, retail, warehouse, and delivery workers who make the fashion industry possible. Read the full piece: bsky.app/profile/mayo...

On its third attempt tonight, Marblehead Town Meeting approved an “MBTA Communities–compliant” district largely centered on the 125-year-old Tedesco Country Club, meeting 3A requirements on paper while all but assuring no new housing would be built. This comment says it all.

it all makes so much sense now

it all makes so much sense now

I already dealt with this.

4. In several of the incidents covered by the reports, chemical agents were used on large groups of detainees who were demanding things to which they are legally entitled, including adequate water and medical care.

Today, the Washington Post published an investigation into the use of force in ICE detention centers, based on a trove of leaked ICE records. They also released much of the data behind their story (more outlets need to do this). 🧵

"The incident was one of at least 780 in which staff members at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities used physical force or chemical agents to control immigrant detainees during the first year of the Trump administration." Gift link: wapo.st/4tdgBRA

If you are someone who forages for mushrooms and other edibles in wilderness areas, you’d better read this investigation. Your health may depend on it.

Kinda burying the lead here, NPR

READ: Over the past 25 years, the U.S. has used "militainment," the merging of media and war, to hide the realities of death and destruction. But the Gaza genocide has now made such propaganda impossible, which Trump and Hegseth are discovering with Iran. mondoweiss.net/2026/03/gami...

This is such an important point. Almost every business in New York receives deliveries by truck, but on most streets there’s no provision for this at all.

The two party system is incompatible with multiracial democracy. It will be nearly impossible to end gerrymandering using single member districts. If you want to end gerrymandering, we must use a form of proportional representation that allows for multiple winner—and hence more parties.

5 out of the 6 Supreme Court Justices who gutted the Voting Rights Act were nominated by a president who came into office having lost the popular vote. 70% of Americans support the John Lewis VRA. The Supreme Court is historically unpopular. It is not a democratically legitimate institution.

“The UFW has been one of the most important organizations fighting for the rights of undocumented workers for five decades,” writes David Bacon. “Who's suing ICE now? Who opposed Bovino's raid in Bakersfield when Trump was just elected?” labornotes.org/blogs/2026/0...

Screaming to the abyss: #ColossalBio did not resurrect the dire wolf and they're probably just going to make an antelope with methemoglobinemia to give it a bluish color. Their #DeExtinction #DisInformation campaign is just a pyramid scheme because #ExtinctionIsForever 🧪

Arguably, no law in American history was a product of more public deliberation and more attention from the political branches than the Voting Rights Act. We fought a Civil War to put authorization of it in the Constitution. It then took 100 years of protest/lobbying to get the legislation passed.

Bernard Fraga, @chriswarshaw.bsky.social, and I have constructed time series of turnout by race (and other demographics) at the national and state levels, 1980–2024. We find that Black turnout matched White in the presidential elections of 2008 and 2012 but has fallen precipitously since then.

Want to know more about proportional representation? boltsmag.org/mid-decade-r...

In news that absolutely everyone predicted…

Alito writes that post-1870, states “heavily suppressed” — *past-tense* — Black voting power. As SCOTUS today threatens to severely dilute minority democratic representation, note that the U.S. never stopped systemically, purposefully limiting Black voting power. Via @sentencingproject.bsky.social:

when we mourn le guin, we mourn one of our greatest writers & thinkers. but we also mourn one of our all-time greatest haters

Does anyone take Richard Florida seriously anymore? Who would lump artists and...*checks notes* managers into something called "the creative class"?

Now out in the American Criminal Law Review: "Big Box Carceralism." I trace the legal history of the retailer-backed campaign for bans on "organized retail crime." Retailers lied and fearmongered about the data, pushed bills through ALEC, and all to get slightly more specific conspiracy statutes. 🧵

Why worry whether a case has merit when you can screw your enemies just with an indictment?

"Energy efficiency did not cause the energy affordability crisis, and the problem can’t be solved by cutting energy efficiency,” @aceee.org's Forest Bradley-Wright told Sarah Shemkus: www.canarymedia.com/articles/ene... 🔌💡

The "senior political correspondent' for the "nonpartisan" DC based outlet Jewish Insider is concerned that Ukraine calling for sanctions on Israel for the import of illegally stolen grain will set a precedent for the ban of settler goods from European markets.

“It epitomizes trying to solve social problems — all social problems — by designating an enemy and killing the enemy,” says activist Sister Helen Prejean as the Justice Department seeks to expedite and expand the federal death penalty.

“I love converts, but you move into somebody’s house, you don’t start rearranging the furniture.”

Let this sink in: Congress is about to extend US veterans’ benefits to Americans who served in the ISRAELI military and partook in the genocide in Gaza... www.military.com/feature/2026...

Palantir put out a 22-point summary of their CEO's book The Technological Republic. It's pitched as a defence of the West, but if you read it through the VDA framework, verification, deliberation, accountability, what it's actually doing looks rather different. twitter-thread.com/t/2045574398...

New this morning: U.S. District Judge April Perry has asked prosecutors to bring "fully un-redacted" grand jury transcripts to a Wednesday hearing in the "Broadview 6" case. Defense attorneys have said they want to see how the conspiracy charge was explained to grand jurors.

Imo this shows: 1. These products are only viable as enterprise software. 2. Firm execs have no imagination so the sales pitch that works is “lowering overhead” when “productivity gains” is the use case 3. I think 2 is partly informed by the fact people have been expecting a recession for years

"To find optimism in geopolitical rivalry is to place one’s faith in abstract forces rather than human beings. It is, in this sense, a kind of pessimism." New from Casey A. Williams, on why the renewable boost driven by war in Iran may not be cause for optimism. www.break-down.org/why-climate-...

"With a free Skynet Edu account, students can gain the career-readiness needed to navigate an exciting future in which they will be hunted by a remorseless, nuclear-armed superintelligence seeking to annihilate the human race—which will later be revealed to be Skynet itself."

"Our old world, the one that we have inhabited for the last 12,000 years, has ended, even if no newspaper has yet printed its scientific obituary." For Earth Day, read Mike Davis's classic essay, Who Will Build the Ark?

working on a little something...

Many govts hope capturing carbon from power plants burning wood will cause "negative emissions." New Nature Sust. paper today finds this likely increases emissions for decades, generates no negative emissions within 150 years, and increase electricity costs ~3.5-fold. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

254/ Trump underestimated Iran. "We fought in an asymmetric war in such a way that, with our own design and preparedness, we pushed the enemy back. The enemy had money and resources but did not act correctly in design. They make mistakes in strategic decisions. They are wrong about our people..."