If Democrats had the political instincts and media machine Republicans do, in 48 hours 95% of Americans would know Andrew Paul Johnson's name and be LIVID that the government is getting ready to give him some of your tax money

Yikes. Flagrant antisemitism from the Israeli ambassador to the United States.

It’s still one of the top stories at this hour at CNN, WaPo, AP, and NBC — as it should be. Why is NYT treating it like it’s no big deal?

it's not like the political media can't make a big issue of this stuff when it wants to. see the coverage they gave to Rev. Wright while Obama was running for President despite Wright being less close to Obama than Loomer is to Trump and Wright's comments being much less offensive than Loomer's.

In the Fall, my course on Beauvoir’s She Came to Stay will run in a screen-free classroom with LMS-free administration. I plan to use hard copy texts and give each student a composition book to write in. On my end, I’ll keep all-paper records. I want to see how it goes: whether time is gained …

We’re just normal men

A good puzzle game and a good technical textbook are structured exactly the same way. Introduce a concept. Explore the boundaries of the concept with the simplest elicitation. Explore its interaction with each previous concept. Every puzzle/exercise should have a small epiphany.

For folks who say that recent patterns of warming “prove” the climate models are broken, and other forces are “accelerating” the warming. Nope. Warming is as expected and within the range of estimates. Thanks to @michaelemann.bsky.social and team for this. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

you can really tell the people for whom the internet is a video game, designed to give them endless enemies to destroy in pleasurable combat

As I head in to teach this afternoon, my spirit is leaden. Sunday night, a trans student was stabbed to death in student housing. She was 19. As of yet, her identity is unknown pending notification of next-of-kin. I'll be discussing this with my class today--a very dark day for UW, certainly.

It's also worth noting that transphobia functions as a pipeline into antisemitism and vice versa, and that this dates back as far as the original Nazis, and that the pipeline functions even if there isn't anti-Zionism involved. See also: J.K. Rowling.

The rule appears to be that redistricting is always legal when it benefits Republicans and never legal when it benefits Democrats.

This is absolutely outrageous. SCOTUS reinstated Texas gerrymander 15 weeks before primary because they claimed it was too close to election to block it but now allowing Alabama to gerrymander one week before primary after trial court found map was intentionally discriminatory against Black voters

I'm reminded of the number of times in graduate school and during my early career where I heard supposedly rigorous scholars dismiss work on racism as too radical or unserious. “Things have changed” they assured me.

Pete Buttigieg took a brief leave when his son was in the ICU and Republicans still attack him for it to this day. But Duffy goes on an extended vacation to shoot a reality show while there are all sorts of pressing problems with air travel and Fox News thinks it's awesome. Beyond parody.

As a writer, I write with this belief at the core of how I understand who my writing is for and who should be welcomed into my intellectual worlding.

Incoming Hungarian PM Peter Magyar is setting a good rhetorical example for what to do with former regime insiders who benefited from Fidesz corruption:

So dark

What is not explained is why they don’t ever think women are intelligent even when they do the same.

In totally unsurprising news, Richard Dawkins is developing AI psychosis. Paywall bypass: archive.is/6RdK9

Amen: "The charge ... represents a betrayal of the professional and ethical obligations of every U.S. Department of Justice attorney involved, and reflects the complete collapse of the Department’s credibility and independence in favor of a cultish and cretinous devotion to Donald Trump."

ok it is extremely funny to see supposed communists claim to be fundamentally opposed to bureaucracy

NEW: Pope Leo XIV told the world’s press today that the Catholic Church’s moral imagination has long been too narrowed to sexual ethics — and that war, migration, and human dignity are the “much greater, more important issues” of our time.

it's not immediately visible in the US unless you are in DC, where practically everybody is—at maximum—one degree of separation away from someone who got DOGEd

He's claiming to know nothing about the videos the CDC has produced and he, himself has starred in.

Turning into a huge story and deservedly so as it cuts straight to the quick of what RFK & Co. claim to be doing at the CDC/HHS

The U.S. government altered its tally of American casualties — inexplicably scrubbing 15 wounded-in-action troops from the count.

This is the issue with theoretical work these days. Data isn't collected as means unto itself unless we've lost the point of experiment & observation. Without explicit theory to house data it's meaningless. Duhem-Quine, underdetermination of theory of by data is lost on people. olivia.science/theory

I wrote a whole book about AI but I agree with this completely — and also the implication that there are countless other areas of research more important than AI.

Tonight on Substack: some thoughts on always returning ad fontes in my life, and three fun translations of epigrams by Martial. open.substack.com/pub/avmarrac...

Learn whatever you want about "law," it doesn't matter because GOP Justices blew up the entire process of deciding cases based on chats with rich friends and stuff they watched on TV. That was the entire basis on which SCOTUS switched to the shadow docket.

Spanish PM Pedro Sánchez: “Here in Spain, we are approving and advancing a process to regularise half a million immigrants. “And I want to say to the Right and the Far Right who oppose this: Spain is the daughter of migration and will not become the mother of xenophobia.”

it is, among other things, incredibly striking to see that roberts was so solicitous of the burden the clean power plan might put on fossil fuel executives, when, a decade later, he is indifferent to the way trump’s moves have thrown hundreds of thousands of lives into turmoil.

The shot heard around the (US scientific research) world #GenesisAmendment000002

thousands of person-hours wasted across the country today with these four lines of text. I couldn't create better obstacles for scientists trying to do their jobs if I tried ⚛️🧪

This is fascinating! In 1977, Carl Woese overturned one of the major dogmas of biology. Because of his work, it is now widely agreed that there are three primary divisions of living systems – the Eukarya, Bacteria, and Archaea. 🧪

Got to love the chaos.

This alone is enough to disqualify Vinay Prasad from being taken seriously ever again. He’s irrelevant.

This country REALLY hates the homeless

An Iranian source familiar with the talks: The next step will be agreeing on a framework for negotiations, not a final agreement. Issues of uranium enrichment and the fate of the highly enriched uranium are to be decided in the talks, and haven’t been decided yet.-Al Jazeera

this morning, mamdani’s team got in touch with me to float a new tax proposal: if your net worth exceeds $5 million and you dress badly, you’ll be hit with a 10% annual levy for “visual pollution.” i would be in charge of deciding if the outfits are bad.

Rates of femicide—the murder of women or girls due to their gender—are rising worldwide while authoritarian men increasingly fabricate a “war against men.”

Exactly one year ago today:

mamdani being a cheerful normal guy that people project absolute insane things on is one of the things that make him very relatable to me, personally

generally it means whatever thing you’re trying to reach is, well, unreachable in this case the ‘blob’ in question is the actual file for the gif, that’s usually what we call the collection of bytes for a file like that, so if there was a failure uploading the bytes ‘blob error’ makes sense to me

Years ago, I compiled similar stories (victims prosecuted for false reporting but later having their claims proven true). Some involved minors. This happens more than people realize. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Here's Jeffrey Epstein and Peter Thiel (JD Vance's patron) discussing their plan to create chaos in the US as a way of grabbing more power and money for themselves. From the DOJ Epstein files.

NEW: We’ve identified the man who runs the far-right troll account on X “HowlingMutant,” whose jokes about rape and the Holocaust have earned him nearly 200,000 followers, which include Vice President JD Vance. His name is Alexander Norden, from Rockaway Park in New York City.