drives me nuts that wealthy blue states are not moving to expand their own public university systems in response

I wrote something about my friend Asad Haider for the new issue of @nybooks.com www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

By its stated goals, DOGE failed. By its actual goals (shrinking parts of the state the Trump-Musk coalition opposed) it worked pretty much as planned. The deficit talk was just the sales pitch.

Never mind the jobs you had, tell me five classes you took in college: 1. Inflatable Public Sculpture 2. Century of the Gene 3. Drugs in History 4. Food, Farms, and Famine 5. Science Fictions We may not have had a lot of humanities at RPI, but we had a great STS dept and a great Arts dept

3-4:30 today at the monument fyi

BREAKING: Immigration officers are asserting sweeping power to enter homes without a judge’s warrant, a memo obtained by AP says.

"SEIU has continued to steadily organize Starbucks stores at essentially the same pace for the last three years. The NLRB election data for 2025 shows that SEIU won 125 union elections at Starbucks and had an election win rate of 82 percent." www.nlrbedge.com/p/the-starbu...

Debates continue to circulate—as they should—about the utility of neoliberalism as a category of analysis and political practice. Myself + three other historians wrote a brief overview of how it works in our field for the Royal Historical Society @royalhistsoc.org www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Great question! It’s not just about whether or not the gyre is widening – its that the falcon cannot hear the Falconer. In today’s blood-dimmed world, it’s a game-changer that many don’t consider. The kicker? A beast that is rough, slouching, and born.

ICE just indiscriminately stopped a citizen at a bus stop in front of the co-op. If this is how they treat the President of the Minneapolis City Council who is legally observing, just think of what they’re doing to everyone else in our City.

If officials can’t bring themselves to arrest someone who is captured on camera from multiple angles killing someone in cold blood, they should just step aside so someone with a backbone can lead

There are many complex social problems that feel impossible to solve, but I truly believe we can end the use of MATLAB by 2030. Let’s save the next generation from the trauma of 1-indexed programming languages. We can do this!

The New School for Social Research is nuking all of its PhD programs for some reason! Yikes

This isn't a photo of lake Superior, this an album cover for a black metal band called like Wintergrave or Frostveil

when the AI bubble bursts and we have hundreds of extra GWs of capacity on the grid, power will then be too cheap to meter and the hall–héroult process will be essentially free. i propose spinning up the aluminum industry and providing a weekly ration of aluminum billets to all americans

🚨We analyzed 138 million geocoded property tax records to quantify how municipal boundaries spatially overlap onto economic segregation in every US metro area—creating disparities in localities’ ability to fund public goods. And we made an interactive map of our results! [1/16]

Ken Burns Revolution documentary drinking game where you take a shot every time you recognize the author of a primary source before the narrator tells you.

“Sooner or later, one has to take sides, if one is to remain human.” —Graham Greene, The Quiet American

worth noting that the $30.2 million deficit the school is facing can be traced to ballooning admin salaries, real estate, and admin benefits, according to the economics department's analysis. the salaries for the actual professors is in line with or *below* the school's revenue growth

I've done a decent amount of historical research on documents turned over in litigation and it never ceases to amaze me how many people are willing to write out "hey would you like to commit a felony with me"

BREAKING: We won! Today the 3rd Circuit Court ordered the @post-gazette.com to restore our contract it illegally tore up 5 years ago. That’s our health care, PTO, right to a 40-hr. work week, short-term disability and so much more we’ve struck for 3+ years. pghguild.com/2025/11/10/p...

I do really appreciate that the ASA grant application form takes direct aim at Ohio State's weird affectation 🦡🦡🦡

Academics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching

SV spent a decade chasing the organic adoption high of smartphones and social media, only to fake it with astroturfed garbage: crypto, NFTs, metaverse, and now AI-Slop. Hard to see them getting real hype ever again.

A stat we don't talk about enough: Newspapers have lost 77% of their jobs over the last 20 year, more than any of the 532 other industries tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

beating my higher ed drum: this includes Higher ed reform which must decentralize power from trustees/admin to faculty, students, staff & alumni governance. Start with collaborationist universities and move outwards from there. Institutions that cave to pressure should face real consequences.

I found this bizarre study yesterday while looking through some Philip Morris documents and I can't stop thinking about it...

Everyone wants to streamline bureaucracy, but maybe we'd get better results by making it *harder* for university admins to chase fads. Imagine the money we'd save with a mandatory cooling-off period before launching a "Center for Blockchain Studies" or dumping millions into the latest edtech toy.

"when people say that it is the job of college professors to keep students engaged but that we can also not ban devices, I want to sigh performatively—how, exactly, am I supposed to keep them hooked when Hollywood can’t keep them hooked?" musgrave.substack.com/p/a-post-lit...

Probably best to chase it indefinitely

This may just be the best CS paper I’ve read this year. Just read the abstract and first para of the intro! The rest of the intro is really wild too, but very very good: dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

NEW - Inflation and Incumbent Support: Experimental Evidence from the 2024 US Presidential Election - https://cup.org/3JaiZYj "priming Americans to think about inflation reduced support for the incumbent party" - Selim Erdem Aytaç, @danielmcdowell.bsky.social & David A. Steinberg #OpenAccess

Does a new generation of social scientists have to publish more to achieve less? (from 2019) blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsoci... Intuition says "yes", and so says data for sociology.

Again, it is worth keeping in mind when comparing the rate of discoveries that public funding for medicine and the sciences is orders of magnitude larger than for the humanities. We work slow in part because we work on a shoestring.

damn. hoping it at least signifies something

one of the minor frustrations of the 2020s internet is how many sites now don't respect boolean commands in search, like they'd rather give you a bunch of unrelated content to sift through than turn up only a handful of results

I have a piece out today comparing the current ARG bailout to MX 1994 (quite different); ECB behavior in 2010s (closer as it targets voters); current BZ tariffs (ding-ding-ding--it's a market intervention that's also an intervention in domestic politics). www.barrons.com/articles/arg...

if I had a nickel for every time a "factory [that] went overseas" actually went to the South, I'd probably be able to self-fund my dissertation.

Since the omerta on criticizing LLM infra investment appears to be breaking can we go back and maybe, acknowledge that there were some indicators that these guys have long been pretty cavalier about throwing money into the void? Money that could have been better spent on actual infrastructure?

so assuming 1. the floodgates break on tariff passthroughs 2. a future administration repeals most or all of them, has there been any modelling on which prices are likely to be stickier than others? my intuition is that some industries will probably try to hold the line on higher prices for a bit

Came upon some predictions from a southern studies edited volume from 1985 and man, what a swing and a miss there

I thought they were getting milder over time but jesus no, I wish I had budgeted a full day for recovery. You should still get yours though, especially if you teach on a college campus!

Going through the archives you run into plenty of articles about apartheid that sound eerily familiar (and, unlike today, have no compunction about analogizing I-P to South African apartheid). Here's some selections from October 1977.

I guess I should be grateful that there was *any* corporate archive at all for the main case in my dissertation but aaaah, it's a bit galling that the only correspondence was for two random years from a handful of random executives. What I would give to have been able to pick two different years...

I have half a draft about this, I don't think this is a new dynamic at all (constitutional sheriffs/Claremont-y sheriffs have been around for a while), in a post 2020/2024 world priority #1 for Dem execs should be making sure the police are *actually* under civilian control esp in crisis situations

Cornell University Library is hiring two Processing Archivists! Come work with us! jobs.hr.cornell.edu/us/en/job/WD...

oh man this looks fascinating!

You know what couldn't have been made today? Andor.