NEW: At least four videos show what really happened when ICE shot a woman in Minneapolis on Wednesday. DHS has established itself as an agency that cannot be trusted to live in or present reality. Our latest:

"She said she felt as if the ICE agents were untrained, inexperienced and didn’t know what they were doing. Heller said the driver was being told to leave but also being instructed to stop at the same time, then the man "just fired" his gun."

Love and solidarity to everyone working for justice in Minneapolis.

I need people to wrap their minds around the fact that here in Minneapolis, ICE broke the window of a vehicle yesterday, pepper sprayed the occupants, and arrested them, and shot another observer in the face today, and OBSERVERS ARE STILL GOING OUT TO PROTECT THEIR NEIGHBORS AT MASSIVE PERSONAL RISK

Baybeeeee we love to see it. Pay this man

It's possible to just do things. To just begin. It takes some people [who usually won't get paid], some ideas and a way to raise a small amount of money.

Honestly, anyone currently considering applying for an academic job in Texas should be re-considering until things change. The GOP wants to make the UTexas and UFlorida system a model for their new UberUniversity system.

From an email to one of our faculty members.... Not even Plato can escape censorship at Texas A&M!

Utah commissioned it's department of health to do a systematic review of gender affirming care for trans youth. In a 1000 page plus report found it was beneficial and the evidence was substantial. The lawmakers rejected it anyways. www.deseret.com/politics/202...

“I’m sure you’re aware of our connections with the Trump Administration,” the North Carolina Republican Party's communications director wrote in an email response to us. “I would strongly suggest dropping this story.” We didn't. #ICYMI, read the story that he wanted dropped:

In 2026 I want all of the decent people to remember one thing. You aren’t meant to be this disciplined, this self-sacrificing to survive. The environment is supposed to support good living. We can have that. You are not a failure. That is politics. That is all.

Rolling into 2026 like

Apt, as this is how I am starting my new year 😂

I’ll do my best

A soft, small, hopeful thing.

it's completely bullshit that if I am paying open access fees, that the journals are not depositing the paper into NCBI.

2/ Our readers deserve clear labeling on AI content, and we deserve job security. Sign our petition for a fair contract and we’ll keep you updated on our campaign: actionnetwork.org/petitions/te...

1/ At bargaining yesterday, @propublica.org management said that they should have 100% discretion to replace workers with AI and would not commit to labeling future AI-generated content.

'"This is like a stick in the spokes of merit review,” says one staffer who requested anonymity because of fear of retaliation. “It devalues discussion of the merits of each proposal.”' h/t @jacquelyngill.bsky.social

“The changes permit as few as one outside review rather than the current minimum of three, end the routine use of expert panels to discuss those individual reviews, and give program managers greater authority to recommend which proposals should or should not be funded.”

News to me: “The National Science Foundation will be breaking up the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado," Russ Vought, … said in a statement to USA TODAY. "This facility is one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country.”

NCAR is foundational scientific infrastructure. This is escalating the assault on climate science, and there is a direct line between this step and the loss of many human lives.

Align. Your. Assessments. With. Your. Learning objectives.

GitHub pullin' a fast one on us, discounting their own Actions runners but slapping a fee on external ("self-hosted") runners. For a lot of folks, the net difference will be minimal, but the intent is clear: to use their own fee structure to incentivize staying within their ecosystem completely.

Just decline the peer review invitation. What are you people even doing?

'Tis the season of university administrators, who have failed to sufficiently support faculty over the past year, sending out holiday e-cards as if that's what's important for institutional community building and faculty morale.

The kind .. you find … in a second hand store

This was *entirely* preventable.

"AI" suffusing academia w/ a pervasive miasmatic atmosphere of mistrust by supplying an arms race btwn students (via systems which, yes, increasingly, I've been doing this for 20 fucking years, encourage them to not give a shit & just get a degree) & teachers (via surveillant copshit) sure does suck

1b. You cannot control other people.

The process of shrinking the gap between your values and actions is a lifetime journey.

So after months of this every time I list a new one, I wrote to Etsy support to explain and ask them to stop. And they actually responded and said, yes, we get it, that's a painting. But we can't do anything about it because the AI is in charge, not the people 😠

Stupid AI story OTD. For a year now, Etsy has been sending me messages that I shouldn't use a digital collage as my main listing image, because a collage image does worse in search. But it's not a f***ing collage, it's a grid painting

ICE detain U.S. citizen for looking Somali—use illegal chokehold to tackle him to ground. Man repeatedly begs agents to look at his digital passport ID—they refuse. Drove him 7 miles away before releasing him alone into Minnesota snow storm—told him to "walk home" in freezing weather advisory.

Eileen Higgins will be the next mayor of the city of Miami, breaking a nearly 30-year Republican streak, CNN projects

I'm all done with IRL #sciart events for the year, so I listed a few more itty-bitty paintings in my ko-fi shop ko-fi.com/1626SLXL3044...

"Decker said they’re now seeing cases where ICE agents violate constitutional protections on a daily basis. She and other immigration attorneys advise clients about the rights they should have but warn about the areas where ICE agents have been violating them."

"Sure Googlers [also faculty] had been willing to pull long hours, putting work before personal life and health, in order to realize the company's [university's] mission, but the quid pro quo those workers expected was for the company [university] to take that mission as seriously as they did."

Excellent piece by on the ebb and flow of creative work and the inevitability and importance of fallow periods. “What I failed to notice: that the fallow periods were doing something too. They were composting… The harvest seasons, when they returned, drew on seeds I hadn't remembered planting.”

My teen, who had dreamt of being an astrophysicist, just told me he wants to go to law school because, “Science isn’t going to be a priority in the US in the future…I don’t want a job where I’ll be constantly worried my funding will be taken away.” Gutting. How many future scientists have we lost?

Illinois becomes one of the few states to regulate employer use of AI. House Bill 3773 amends the Illinois Human Rights Act to make it a civil rights violation for employers to use AI tools that result in discrimination based on race, gender, age, or disability. www.mystateline.com/news/local-n...

WE WON!!! The US District Court for the Northern District of California has issued a preliminary injunction in AAUP et al v. Trump et al (the wall to wall union lawsuit challenging the administration’s unlawful use of Title VI to reshape the University of California system. Read the order here:

I’m really upset about this as a Guiding member for over 30 years. We’ve always welcomed trans girls and made a safe space for them. Not sure this will make any difference but if you can sign please do: c.org/SR6NcW46B7

An evergreen connection between poetry and activism: Big changes can start with *small* actions: that tiny choice to show up to a training, wear a button, post online, wear a whistle as a necklace, stuff that is too easy to cynically write off as performative. Every small action opens a door.

Latest painting (acrylic on canvas)

An experienced organizer I really respect once reminded folks "you can't always win, but you can always, always inflict a cost. Those add up."

incredible writing

Agents in Key Largo, Florida ripped this woman wearing medical scrubs out of her car as she screamed she is a US citizen. Agents cuffed her and put her in one of their cars. She was eventually let go, per David Goodhue of the Miami Herald, who also took this footage:

Please signal boost. Need a wheelchair tech who can help troubleshoot in Silver Spring, MD.

I am one of the lucky humans reading it RIGHT NOW and it's so, so good. It's full of wonder, poetry, black holes, musings on language, sci-fi, messiness, and science as a verb. It feels like one of those wide-ranging dinner party conversations with your best friend that you remember years later.