"I increasingly believe there is an urgent, strategic, and moral case for children’s advocates to embrace ballot measures not just as a possibility but as an increasingly central part of our policy playbook. The stakes are too high to leave this powerful tool on the table."

Today's Word I Hate: task

A pamphlet-length argument packaged as a book that had a greater impact on me than most other books? (And I could get my HS students to read it.)

Q of the Day: How much profit have U.S. corporations made by outsourcing labor to its customers? (e.g. having us do the check-in and baggage tagging of airline counter staff; the work of checkout staff at supermarkets and drug stores; the info-collecting work of office and hotel receptionists)

I wish we, like, regulated shit nowadays. Between car bloat, blinding headlines, and neighbourhoods packed with rental suites but no on-property parking, driving is an absolute nightmare now.

The amount of effed up this is: incalculable.

This, like so many red state actions in public schools that clearly violate First Amendment rights, is meant to go up to Trump's Supreme Court. But that doesn't mean we can't celebrate the wins along the painful way.

"To offset the cost of historic levels of military spending, social programs were cut, leaving most Americans worse off. This is not a sign of a country on the ascent. Rather, it suggests a state in decline and addicted to war, two traits that often go together." @costsofwar.bsky.social

Trump to a journalist a few weeks ago about his extrajudicial bombings in the Caribbean: "We are just going to kill people..."

"If Trump’s first term was marked by a level of graft and self-dealing that would have embarrassed a Tammany stalwart, then his second term seems to be an explicit effort to outpace his previous record and set a new high-water mark for political corruption in the [US]." #GiftLink #GiftArticle

The number of extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean keeps going up.

Listen, doc, I want to look like I've been deformed by power. Can you do that for me?

A comment on the utterings of the techbros that applies equally as well to their products. They put the onus on the consumer to do the work to understand them and make their half-formed products useable. All while seeking to suck up all of our resources.

This is really interesting. In Carjacked, we wrote about how the car is often seen (and marketed-e.g. Subaru ads) as a vehicle of care and way to express love as a parent. This research shows both inertia and that notion help mean car ownership persists as and after children grow up.

Will is generally great but he makes a classic geography mistake here, one that has infected many experts on national issues: Housing is a national problem, but its pricing is not national. While it's true that, nationally, most Americans are spending 30% of income on rent/mortgage ...

Ten or twenty years ago, if an executive came out and said "actually our products can't be trusted" the stock would take a nosedive rather than go up.

why do people not understand they have to do the work for our 'doing the work for you' tool

thanks to @thenation.com for publishing this excerpt of my book; grateful to be edited by the wonderful @apockros.bsky.social www.thenation.com/article/arch...

You know what media is NOT bending the knee in the Trump era? College journalists! The Harvard Crimson's brutal takedown of the lecherous ex-prez Larry Summers is just the latest example of students showing a failing 'grown-up' media how it's done My new column www.inquirer.com/columnists/a...

Trump administration to announce dismantling of much of Education Dept. wapo.st/4i6ZRr5 gift link

WE WANT TRAINS! The public is sending a message: Amtrak is setting ridership records, carrying 34.5 million passengers in fiscal year 2024-25, while ticket revenue is $2.764 billion. www.trains.com/pro/passenge...

Charlotte-Mecklebburg Schools, according to reports, saw 15% of its students absent today amid Border Patrol operations in Charlotte. If that percentage of 15% happens Tuesday in Wake County due to the Border Patrol coming to Raleigh, 24.000 students could be absent from school. #nced #ncpol #wcpss

🧵

"Don't blindly assume brakes will work," says CEO of world's biggest motorcycle company.

"‘In fact, what’s really surprising is that higher AI literacy brings more overconfidence...We would expect people who are AI literate to not only be a bit better at interacting with AI systems, but also at judging their performance with those systems – but this was not the case.’"

"Or will we keep erasing forms of understanding through the hierarchies we’ve built, and find ourselves scrambling to colonise Mars because we never learned to listen to those who knew how to live sustainably on Earth?"

Unfortunately seems to be a pattern across the CEO suite in Big Tech. My new Techtonic episode focuses on their products & outcomes - asking "How low can the tech oligarchs go?" techtonic.fm/episodes/202...

Epstein built an empire of abuse and a whole lot of people just sat in silence and didn’t say anything. The epidemic of violence against women is constructed on a foundation of enabling and turning a blind eye. This post is about the reporters who said nothing when their peer was called ‘Piggy’

Harvard making clear they see this is a PR problem and not an ethics issue.

WOWSER! The White House Intervened on Behalf of Accused Sex Trafficker Andrew Tate During a Federal Investigation “I’ve never heard of anything like that in my 30 years working,” said a retired assistant director for Homeland Security Investigations.

It's the HR equivalent of students writing papers with AI and teachers using AI to police them and grade them.

...the fact that FL and TX are adopting such standards (and they are abysmal) but not able to impose them upon CA or MA is why I'm no longer an education nationalist. Look at who is in power and ask if you want them to control every state's education system.

The casual way this techbro talks about the "error-prone" products they are throwing out into the world, the necessity for the consumer to accept, train for, and correct for these, and the impending economic chaos wrought by the frenzy they are creating as though it's normal and natural: holy hell.

As a former public school teacher & current public school parent, I want our schools to be able to do more with more. That's why I'm fighting back with Iowa CCI's Public School Strong campaign and working between now and Dec. 5th to raise $500 to support this important work headed into 2026. 👇

every teacher in america is a replaceable widget except for larry summers

Research-based strategies are exactly what we should be focusing on, but let's not pretend, as this piece does, that teachers colleges and unions are to blame for Common Core Math, which was spread nationwide by (yup!) the Common Core, developed and pushed by politicians and industry.

this new Real Housewives of Georgetown series is going to be terrible isn’t it

Everybody is talking about the new reporting on DOJ corruption today. Please note this as well: The Trump Murder Memo was also produced by DOJ. It's another window into how badly DOJ has been corrupted. This is arguably worse than the Bush torture memo. Liberal commentators should talk about it.

What about the schools tho

Something that gets lost in the mania to apply genAI in K-12 schools at the exact same time as companies are experimenting with it: It took from the 1980s to the 2010s for computers to go from the top of every office worker's desk to the top of every student's desk.

Children are being used as guinea pigs as adults test AI products on them. “'We’re sharing some examples from educators about how they’re using AI in interesting ways, some of which might prove sturdy and some of which might prove faulty. And we won’t know which is which for a long time.'”

Amon white people, the correlation between racial resentment and their vote is much, much stronger than between educational attainment and political alignment. In fact, if you control for racial resentment, education polarization basically disappears.

Trump does not represent the “will of the people” – a stable majority of Americans, including about two thirds of those who call themselves independents, reject core tenets of Trumpism. It is the Republican Party that is moving away from the center of American society.

Very good news.

Two birds, one stone.

The car system is terrible for all but the very rich.

The debate over whether this is 'fascism' is a silly semantic one in which a small minority mean 'completed fascist authoritarianism' and the vast majority mean 'the people in power say and do things that demonstrate completed fascist authoritarianism is what they want to achieve.'

A new report finds that students in juvenile detention often don’t get the special education support they need and struggle to reconnect with school after they’re released.

“While the AI industry claims its models can “think,” “reason,” and “learn,” their supposed achievements rest on marketing hype and stolen intellectual labor. In reality, AI erodes academic freedom, weakens critical reading, and subordinates the pursuit of knowledge to corporate interests.”