"We need to be in the room"

After federal agents shot Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, a New Yorker sent ICE's director an email in January comparing him to a Nazi. This week, DHS agents stalked him across New York. His home. A hotel. They gave his wife a letter warning of criminal prosecution. www.syracuse.com/news/2026/06...

Slaughter is an earthquake: SCOTUS has overturned a 90-year-old precedent that facilitated much of modern governance by granting many agencies meaningful independence from the president. Now SCOTUS crushes that independence ... for seemingly every agency except the Federal Reserve.

It's rare that a newspaper says this out loud.

Legend.

It’s not hyperbole that part of what kept the queer liberation movement going in the Reagan era was the partying part of the “bury your friends in the morning, protest in the afternoon, and dance at night” schedule. Without joy there is no air left to fight

this thread answers the question "what if the SpaceX IPO roadshow were honest?"

Authoritarian governments “make membership in the political community conditional on the favor of those who … hold power. Once membership is conditional, the holders … adjust the conditions, and the people they exclude have no standing to object because they’ve been redefined out of the polity”

If anyone is headed to #CLSA #ACDS from Halifax to Wolfville tonight, please send me a message—Halifax -> Wolfville plans and backup plans and BACKUP backup plans have fallen through, I get in at 7 pm!

Eight vaccines linked to a lower risk of dementia www.gavi.org/vaccineswork...

Super interesting study of ventilation & air filtration and their relation to infection progression/severity. Innovation for good, technology for the people.

The best kinds of contemporary socks, the kind anyone can afford, are actually made out of cotton yarn that's spun super fine and blended with elastics, you actually can't darn that with thread that's available nowadays. Saith I, a contemporary knitter, who knits real wool socks and darns them.

This is absolutely nuts: hackers are hijacking high-profile Instagram accounts by simply asking Meta's AI chatbot to change the email on the account. Meta's AI does it, hacker gets password reset code, they're in. A staggering security issue www.404media.co/hackers-simp...

I am very glad the internet has discovered JLM's analysis of Busytown

This, from Lorna Finlayson, expresses my view on universities better than I ever have myself. The process is farther along in Britain than elsewhere, but something of this trend is visible in too many places. newleftreview.org/sidecar/post...

NEW — I wrote about my visit to Delaney Hall, the ICE facility in Newark, NJ where detainees are on a hunger and labor strike in protest of rotten food, unpaid work, and unjust detainment, and where protesters outside have spent the last week drawing ICE's ire while keeping strikers' demands alive.

The call for “viewpoint diversity” is a nakedly political demand to overwrite the principles of academic freedom and academic excellence in order to create a “balance” of political and ideological allegiances – but only in fields and sectors that are deemed to be too liberal.

Faculty: libraries and librarians need your advocacy BEFORE our collections are shuttered and our workers are fired. Whether you think your library is in trouble, and it almost definitely is, write to your provost and tell them how essential the library and library staff are to your work. Right now.

“Flávio Bolsonaro and his younger brother Eduardo, who is in self-imposed exile in the US, have denied any of the money went to Eduardo.” Self-imposed exile … so he just … lives in the US? www.ft.com/content/35ab...

one of the reasons i am always on about elite persuasion is that i have seen elite persuasion operate in real time. as toby documents here, the radical anti-trans push in the uk didn't come from some "bottom-up backlash," but was orchestrated and organized primarily at the most elite levels

Anyway here’s the passage of Judith Butler that the Guardian censored years ago

The reflex to treat strikes as a public policy ‘problem’ instead of a democratic tool to rebalance power shows how Carney sees unions: disruptions to contain, not organizations workers rely on for fair wages, safety, and a voice. www.thestar.com/politics/fed... #canlab #cdnpoli

From Harvard to Gaza, the right wing understands the social and political importance of our educational institutions very clearly. Their tactics for ensuring such institutions serve their ends include: controlling who attends them; controlling who teaches at them; and, failing that, destroying them.

The next James Bond should be Gary Oldman in his Jackson Lamb persona.

3 actual quotes from this piece: “Can I afford the tax? Yes. Is it going to deter me? No. But I think it’s shameful. I provide a lot of money to people who are blue-collar workers who work for me, servers in restaurants." giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

We would do well, I think, to learn a little from the ancient world. Hatred of injustice can be a form of virtue. Much as Aquinas wrote of hatred for God, in the face of unjust structures of power, it is at the very least superior to either indifference or disbelief. davidgraeber.org/articles/hat...

Generating content is not a self-evident good.

Yeah I gotta say if it turns out *this* is the thing that bothers us, rather than, say, what is done to the image of Christ found in the poor and dispossessed themselves, then all those Calvinist warnings about idolatry basically seem correct to me.

The discourse ab older professors not retiring is exactly the kind of resentment austerity capitalism is after.

🧵 The arguments behind landmark Supreme Court rulings have never been freely available… until now. More than 125,000 #SCOTUS records & briefs (1830–2019) are now open on the Internet Archive. Full announcement ⤵️ blog.archive.org/2026/04/20/u... @wolflawlibrary.bsky.social

I'm not joking when I say mRNA technology is more important than "AI" and it's a tragedy we're throwing billions into one while our government is aggressively defunding the other.

But an honest accounting of what the tech is actually doing in the world and how it is being used, including who is doing what to who with it and how (because people *are* using it) would seem to be essential for any critical account rooted in materiality and social praxis.

My whole point is that it’s not about trust or individuals and their relationships. It’s about a kind of political debate that is non-toxic and can reach people (the comms battle) while we build real power on the ground for massive change (organizing!)

I'm quoted in this for signing & sharing a testimonial about an incident in which Vancouver Police edited their press release after I'd published an article about it to make it look like I had lied. Anyway, long live the Wayback Machine! www.niemanlab.org/2026/04/jour...

if i have to choose between shoes and ai, i pick shoes

Real wild to see NPR do a serious article version of a twitter thread of mine from five years ago (part of which i reposted here). (Seriously tho, i talk about this with every group of Philosophy in SFF students I get.)

Regret to inform everyone that Peter Magyar beat the world’s smartest illiberal populist in large measure by working incredibly hard for 2 straight years, meaning the rest of us are just going to have to get off our asses and do shit rather than just complaining.

Communist party recruitment video bsky.app/profile/bran...

There’s a basic messaging problem when the value proposition of your technology is human obsolescence.

Weeks: “To tell us that we should reconstitute ourselves seems a hard road to follow. What’s kinder is to say: We are who we are. What we want to do is to change the rules of the game so that we can become otherwise over time. It’s about embracing the politics that would destroy you as a subject.”

TODAY: Iranians are forming human chains around civilian infrastructure (bridges, power plants) as Trump threatens to kill them all

London (England) comrades! I’ll be in town giving a talk hosted by @lawsocialchange.bsky.social on Wedn, April 15, 4-6pm. S. Wolfson Lecture Theatre, Paul Webley Wing, SOAS & online. Register: www.ticketsource.com/centre-for-l...

every time i write about wage theft i do a double take because it's so crazy corporations steal more than $50 bn from workers' paychecks each year, illegally paying workers less than they earned for their labor that significantly exceeds the combined losses from larceny, burglary, & vehicle theft

Sarah Jaffe interviewing Kathleen Weeks in Dissent last week: dissentmagazine.org/online_artic...

The horse op-ed is an instant classic. I can't tell you how much joy this piece gives me. It should be taught in every introductory writing class in no small part because the horse arguments are so compelling. "I have noticed that human children get to eat cake. But I am bigger than the children."

Georgia's GOP Hatched a New Plan to Win Elections in Metro Atlanta: Don't Let Voters Know Their Candidates Are Republicans. | The Republican-majority Georgia House on Friday gave final passage to a bill that would require nonpartisan elections in the five most populous counties in metro Atlanta.

One of the countries that relies on Cuban doctors, and which is therefore indirectly affected by the current US attack on Cuba, is Italy; specifically the southern region of Calabria, where my maternal grandfather is from. Non-paywalled link in comments. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Ok, the OP is glib, but there is a dissertation to be written about how the "impact" criterion on research takes the potential world of uses, practices, artifacts, dynamics or values that knowledge might catalyse, and demands that researchers give a poorly motivated account of only the "good" ones