As the boy who cries wolf shows us, pathological liars eventually stop being believed even when the wolf is actually coming to eat them

Absolute banger of an essay.

Obama: The Dems don’t know how to sound normal which is why we keep losing elections. The GOP:

Obama recently urged Democrats to “talk like normal people” instead of sounding like they’re in a “college seminar.” I explore the language ideologies that undergird his advice and how they align with the rightwing assault on higher education. educationallinguist.substack.com/p/obama-norm...

I'll just note that critical race theory predicts quite a lot about the current racial retrenchment and for being *correct* it was pilloried in the press and by some academics.

Am I wrong though?

Many of us raised alarms that this was exactly how so-called institutional neutrality policies were going to be weaponized by universities when FIRE (the “experts” cited here) was advocating for them.

Educational linguists: Students of color must master academic language to be successful Dem establishment: Stop talking as if you are in a college seminar to be successful Me: Language ideologies are never just about language

On this day in 1933, Nazis raided the Magnus Hirschfeld library in Berlin. The world’s greatest collection of LGBTQ books and scientific papers were looted and later burned, erasing decades of research into sexuality and gender identity. ‘Where they burn books, in the end they will burn humans too’.

Gotta love Trump’s focus on kitchen table issues affecting American youth today such as *checks notes* the lack of flavored vapes

White grievance and entitlement is never going to end, even when they get what they think they want, they will complain, because at heart they want to live in a world that only contains and reflects them.

Half of all Americans die in hospice care. Easy money and a lack of regulation transformed a crusade to provide death with dignity into an industry rife with fraud and exploitation. (Published 2022 with @newyorker.com)

Pushy reminder from one school librarian to another: if you can alter your challenge policy, put a clause in there that prevents people not in your immediate school community (parents, students, staff, board) from placing challenges and limits each request to 1 book at a time. 1/2

Looking for some reading to celebrate #internationalworkersday #MayDay? The Journal of #Sociolinguistics has a brilliant back catalogue of research on #language, #labour and #workers 💪 Take your pick from the suggestions below, or visit our website for more!

Keep in my mind that what has Dawkins transfixed with “Claudia’s” “humanity” — moreso than any real human he’s ever met — is that “she” is very impressed with him and always available. It’s honestly so pathetic how much these dudes tell on themselves, that all they’ve ever wanted is a sex slave.

Odd that Yale seems to think that the first step at rebuilding societal trust is to remove any desire to contribute to the public good from its mission statement www.forbes.com/sites/michae...

Multiracial democracy in the American South has briefly existed twice in American history, both times enforced from outside, and both times has lapsed the instant the rest of the country lost interest.

Term limits seem like such a no-brainer

The Dem establishment hates its base so much that they literally attack it with their last dying breaths www.politico.com/news/2026/04...

Now that The Devil Wears Prada 2 is out I have to once again read insufferable takes that suggest the “real” villains of the original were Andy’s friends because apparently being worried that somebody you love is being treated like garbage by their boss is a problem if their boss is Meryl Streep.

In the 1990s, campus debates focused on whether to limit hate speech. Today, Texas Tech is banning discussions of gender and sexuality. Different politics, same assumption: that language has fixed meanings that can be regulated. Why that matters—and what to do open.substack.com/pub/educatio...

paper out, hope it's useful doi.org/10.1017/S009... #linguistics

“Demand letters to universities, a compact which is nothing more than a loyalty oath, ideologically driven state houses that are ending tenure and collective-bargaining rights, ending academic freedom — and you’re going to tell me I should be neutral?” Dr. Wolfson said.

Texas Tech is where my parents met. Now its faculty and students are not to be allowed to research, discuss, or write about people like me, their lesbian daughter, or any of my writing, or any other LGBTQ people, our lives and work. It’s brutal — one of so many brutalities — and it can’t stand.

The attack-the-academy movement was never, ever about freedom and diversity of thought in the academy. It was always going to play out this way. It’s never been “nobody should dictate thought,” it’s always been “WE should dictate thought.” www.erininthemorning.com/p/texas-tech...

“Siobhan Somerville’s interdisciplinary approach to a wide-ranging archive, including federal law, photographs, letters, memoirs, and more, shows how naturalization has long functioned as both a powerful metaphor and a contradictory material practice at the core of the US settler colonial state.”

The universe was listening! @dukepress.bsky.social posted the intro to *Cisgender.* You get to read vignettes about my grandmother & Leslie Feinberg & Audre Lorde... & wrestle with what they do to the cis category. You also get a peak at why disorientation is my framework of choice. bit.ly/4vKd53u

The media is so unserious

And anybody who thinks that any academic field lacks “viewpoint diversity” has clearly never attended any academic conference where scholars are constantly disagreeing with one another on a range of different debates in our respective fields

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

I will never understand how American elites managed to convince themselves that uncivil debate — not fascism, not impunity and not widespread indifference to facts — is the defining problem of our time. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/o...

Tbh I am not sure if he is condemning Trump or the Catholic Church here 🤔

"These findings demonstrated that LLMs not only differ linguistically from human experts but also appear to compress and simplify the rhetorical space through which scientific uncertainty is conventionally expressed." www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Dr. Tseng, Professor of Spanish and Linguistics at American University, will discuss the history of Latin American immigration to the DC Metro Area and how its shaped a unique regional language. RSVP to attend: alexlibraryva.org/event/15710620

60% of American Jewish college students are concerned about right-wing antisemitism, compared to 45% who are concerned about left-wing antisemitism. This is not what you would expect from media coverage of the issue. forward.com/news/818719/...

I worry that the focus on the mistakes or hallucinations of AI will end up backfiring as this technology inevitably gets more accurate. The issue for me is less one of accuracy and more of not wanting to cede human decision making to a disembodied algorithm with no moral compass.

It was always a weapon

Antisemitism is structurally necessary for Elon Musk's politics, because he wants to brand himself as the insurgent populist fighting the elite, but as the world's wealthiest person, he needs a definition of "elite" that is not strictly rooted in wealth or corporate ownership.

This presidential admin has tried to convince us that it actually cares about the supposed discrimination against Asians via affirmative action and presence of antisemitism at universities while also trying to convince us that efforts to combat anti-Muslim and anti-Black sentiment are illegal DEI

This administration relies on a scared media to handle his PR stunts as if they were news and then relies on a mostly uninformed public no longer paying attention when their PR stunts are exposed as lies.

Whenever people claim something offensive was just a joke the only legitimate follow up question is to ask what the person thought made it funny

We are know the famous “first they came for poem” but this fascist regime went from trans people to the pope really fast

LAX is such an awful airport that it is literally taking me longer to get a taxi out of the airport than my flight from Philadelphia took 😠

One of the reasons Dems have been so ineffective at resisting Trump is that when push comes to shove they actually agree with his imperial worldview though they would like US imperialism to be led by a slightly more diverse group of elites

Oh, this is good. Idaho passed a bill banning local cities from flying the Pride flag. So the cities decided to wrap the poles themselves in pride colors. This is amazing.

White critical scholars: Neoliberalism is about social class, not race. White people in the actual world: Will destroying an entire civilization be good or bad for the market?

This is essentially the passive voice on steroids

Iran is an oppressive regime whose worldview is antithetical to the progressive world I am fighting to create. At the same time, them refusing to back down from Trump’s bullying reveals him as the fraud he always was. The emperor has no clothes and it is about time we loudly name that reality.

I am not from San Francisco so have not been following this campaign closely but the establishment supported white man questioning whether his primary opponent who is the son of Indian immigrants is “really from here” feels like a dangerous message in these political times apple.news/AqMD0-90dQOq...