The woman in front of me at Costco just paid with a check. On the Saturday before thanksgiving. The depravity!

Astonishing to stop and realize that, at any given moment, bands of masked men armed to the teeth are storming churches and daycares, terrorizing entire communities—and that most of the country's political establishment barely blinks.

Poooooooor aggies

When I think about how exquisitely careful NEH staff were to be fair, impartial, and rigorous, and how much work people put into grants so small they’re pocket change…I just want to scream.

Jeff Tweedy is playing tonight in Dallas, where it's finally seasonally cool as of yesterday. The over/under for shackets in the audience is 411.5.

Paging @profloumoore.bsky.social

Today's shout into the void: asked my congressman to get me a chunk of the east wing before Trump starts selling them as souvenirs.

The silver lining is the Professor still has his faculty job, but this is explicitly viewpoint discrimination, a message that there is no such thing as faculty governance. All admin must be aligned with a political party. For all the talk of leftist indoctrination, this is no different from China.

🗃️

I gave a talk at Rice yesterday as part of a panel called “The Power of Oral Histories.” I could have just read this article.

She Studies the Russian ‘Red Man’ Whose Bloody War Evokes Soviet Tyranny www.nytimes.com/2025/10/11/w...

This was the girlfriend of the founder of antifa. 🗃️ www.nps.gov/people/margu...

"It wanted to signal strength. Instead, it’s revealing its weakness. The administration’s need to break the academy is forcing it to make a desperately risky gamble." www.nytimes.com/2025/10/08/o...

All across the country, as faculty rights and freedoms are under attack, @aaup.org is really stepping into the breach. If you teach in higher ed and aren't a member, please consider joining.

🗣️🗣️What is happening at Texas Tech is part of a national campaign to erase the existence of trans people. Faculty and academic leaders across the country must stand up now: this suppression of #FreeSpeech and #AcademicFreedom will not be confined to Texas! www.texastribune.org/2025/09/26/t...

POLICE AGAINST THE MOVEMENT retells the '60s civil rights struggle through its overlooked work against police violence and the surveillance, infiltration, and retaliatory prosecutions they faced from police in return. It's a pre-history of both the Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter movements.

The best negotiating tactics are the negotiating tactics you announce are negotiating tactics. That’s the art of the deal.

I’m so fortunate to have had Bill Leuchtenburg in my life, and I’m honored to help extend his legacy with a donation to the WEL Fund at UNC Press. Please join me in donating, and support the kind of public-facing scholarship he championed.

Texas AAUP-AFT’s open letter to administrators

News you can use

I’m in Krakow for a conference, and I can already tell that the score at the end of the week is going to be The Polish Language 962 Todd 0

It felt very meaningful to be doing it this week, for me at least. Here’s why:

5- alarm fire for academic freedom in Texas, should be of concern to all. The kinds of attacks on teachers and restrictions on content matter (esp. race and gender) we see in K-12 are invading universities. This week 2 faculty, a chair, and a dean were fired. /1 www.oah.org/2025/02/05/o...

I can think of some follow-up questions about the ways people used guns when he was a kid.

I encourage people to watch this video. The selected footage shows the professor doing nothing even slightly out of line, whereas the student misinterprets the law and hopes to impose her religious beliefs on the material. Administrators caving to this is terrifying.

Come to Fort Worth to see the Butt Collection. www.cartermuseum.org/exhibitions/...

I’ve been trying to decipher R.E.M. lyrics for more than half my life, and he just… skeeted it out.

This poor woman from the Modelo ad is getting ROASTED at work today.

MAHA!

"WGBH, the bellwether public TV station in Boston, has laid off the 13 people who worked on the history series “American Experience” and announced that no new documentaries will be produced for the show until further notice." 🗃️ www.nytimes.com/2025/08/27/a...

“Due to an indifference to running.” I never related so hard to a buffalo.

Possibly unpopular opinion: This is an excellent and completely appropriate use of her time and talents.

Nice semiconductor manufacturing company you got there. Be a shame if something happened to it.

I would pay almost any amount of money for this.

“I wish Ken Paxton would leave the AG’s office. No one could be worse than him.” The monkey paw curls.

Standing on a rock in Yachats, OR, just now, I saw three gray whales just cruising along offshore. This place is amazing.

Peth Hegseth has announced that the Arlington Confederate Monument - or, as I call it, the Monument to the Myth of the Loyal Slave - will be reinstalled after its 2023 removal. Here's why that's a huge insult to Black Americans, past and present.

AI can’t do this.

I used to try “Have some dignity!” on our goldendoodle. It didn’t work either.

Featured story: It was a police-led art heist. Their target were some of the most controversial, but best-studied and most-discussed works in U.S. contemporary art.

This morning, out of nowhere, I remembered that Billy Bush got fired because Trump said “grab ‘em by the pussy” in his presence. I wonder who’ll get fired as a result of this story.

From @gusbova.bsky.social, in our magazine: The majority of U.S. states enacted forced-sterilization laws that targeted the non-white and the disabled, leading to more than 60,000 coerced operations. But Texas, perhaps surprisingly, never passed such a law.

Citing scripture, Todd Moye is ordering his go-to Friday burrito from Salsa Limón.

Solution: Smoke tariffs.

what athlete’s expression will stay with you the rest of your life?

George wasn’t wrong.