I had the pleasure of speaking with @tega.bsky.social + @lav.io about their new exhibition — which engages with surveillance, data infrastructures, and climate — at @pioneerwork.bsky.social!

Yet again, machine learning — even gussied up via the transformer architecture — encodes and reinforces societal biases. This study reveals that LLM-based peer review relies heavily on author institution in its decisions. arxiv.org/abs/2509.15122

“Syracuse University paused admission to 20 majors in the College of Arts and Sciences without faculty input” dailyorange.com/2025/09/coll...

No but seriously where are the hundreds people that disappeared from the monstrosity of the so called “Alligator Alcatraz”? Why aren’t people talking about it? I can find very little and it’s from weeks ago! Are we at the disappearing phase of this horror?! www.miamiherald.com/news/local/i...

A few years ago I would not have predicted @wired.com would be a journalistic beacon, but with this forthcoming “politics issue” they are doubling down on real, anti-authoritarian reporting Not regretting my new subscription

Seems like people now broadly understand that data centers use a ton of energy but pols are happy to trade that for "high tech jobs." But just bc it's big computer doesn't means it's big jobs! It's a big storage facility. The jobs are mostly in construction, with a tiny maintenance crew thereafter.

Finished spread! The lives of different types of stars, the various ways they give back all they had taken in changed, and the new forms they give rise to! This took me some time to say the least! It's a lively place out there! On to the next spread (finale of this chapter!!) #Nostos #Unflattening 2

“The thought that we’re ‘responding to only a small sliver of what is going on—and other animals will respond to a different sliver and process it differently—is not an easy idea to take on board.’ And yet it’s one of the most important things we can know abt the natural world and our place in it.”

“In humans, curiosity usually begins as a mental stirring, but in octopuses,… it’s a function of bodily design. In a sense, curiosity + intention are dispersed throughout an octopus’s tissues—right out to the tips of its tentacles. Inquisitiveness… ‘is built into the octopuses’ anatomy.’”

this is bad for all the data privacy and freedom of information reasons many have already noted but it's going to be fun to watch it fail!

The Charlie Kirk memorial is a combined Evangelical mega-church service and Trump rally. Never has Christian nationalism had such a defining and legitimizing stage. This event amplifies evangelic beliefs as an American value like I've never seen before.

Just 2 gun rights advocates sitting behind a wall of bulletproof glass while enjoying a memorial for a gun rights advocate who got murdered by a gun.

When the histories of this period are written, I want there to be an emphasis on the fact that he **really thought** that asylum was about mentally ill people and not people migrating under threat of violence.

I wish the rapture would happen but just to people who believe in the rapture

I feel like part of the problem is that in the modern era, especially in the United States, people think that in order to count, they have to post about their activism or what they're doing. But here's the thing: you don't. 99% of what I do is stuff I never mention on social media.

I wouldn't advocate a return to an Adbusters style 90s politics but a default skepticism of corporations and their products is a good thing

You’ll be shocked to hear that their recommendation is not limiting the circumstances in which AI is deployed, but rather accepting the inevitability it will occasionally have catastrophic effects.

lol www.rollingstone.com/politics/pol...

I think they bought this full-page, full-color page 7 Times ad purely out of spite

It strikes me that quite a lot of people knew for the last year that the guy running our horrific deportation squads took a bag with $50k in cash from undercover FBI agents investigating corruption, and it didn’t get out until now.

this charlie kirk deification is some of the weirdest shit i have ever seen

It’s really all we should be talking about today.

oh my god, what the fuck. here's the full votes: www.govtrack.us/congress/vot... i will be calling Rep McCollum's office (my rep) tomorrow and expressing my INTENSE dissatisfaction that she would vote in favor of this bullshit.

Here's what chronic under-funding/neglect has done: my dept is down 8 TT faculty as peeps quit & lines are not replaced. Fin aid, academic advising, fiscal and business + other units all under-staffed, making it harder for students, remaining taff to operate. Infrastructure crumbling. ⬇️ morale.

The older I get the harder it is to escape the conclusion that the typical American reads approximately 0 books or even articles a year.

My militantly de-woked alma mater, which Charlie Kirk did not attend, might erect a statue to him, for the same reasons that Sinclair media will be airing a memorial for him tonight on local stations nationwide: Because fuck you, that's why.

Before COVID After COVID

“What fascisms old and new have in common is they tend to look to women to fill in the gaps that the state misses." And, I'd add, they get women to fill these gaps by making patriarchy's coattails the only way means by which women can achieve security or esteem. www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

"In a landmark study, OpenAI researchers reveal that large language models will always produce plausible but false outputs, even with perfect data, due to fundamental statistical and computational limits." www.computerworld.com/article/4059...

Crockett: "I'm gonna honor someone who decided they were going to proclaim I was involved in the 'great white replacement'? Yeah, I'm not honoring that ... it's unfortunate more of my colleagues even on my side couldn't see the amount of harm this man was attempting to inflict upon our communities"

There have been *so many* Academia[dot]edu warning signs over the past decade; I’m glad these new terms of service — claiming world rights to your work, your voice, your likeness, your signature, etc — are driving even more people away. May it advance the Ed Tech Luddite Revolution ✊

Trained lawyer: "we don't care" about alleged cash payments for government favors.

Breaking News: Britain, Canada and Australia formally recognized Palestinian statehood.

Absolutely wild. Israel targeted and massacred 31 journalists and media staff in Yemen. The second-deadliest attack on journalists ever recorded. The Israeli regime is built on war crimes.

NEW: Air Force jets are doing ICE flights to Africa with transponders turned off, making them nearly un-trackable. This includes the third-country removal to Ghana and another secret flight. We figured out where it landed. From me for @rollingstone.com: www.rollingstone.com/politics/pol...

I'm planning to talk a bit abt the history of disability and the Ugly Laws in my intro lesson for our Misfits class. In my prep, I learned that PBS's American Experience (now "paused" thx to Trump's cuts) recently released a documentary about the history of the Americans with Disabilities Act

One thing I have noticed is that people cannot fucking Read a Text, which is to say consume a piece of information and then meaningfully integrate what it says into their decision-making from that point onward. Unrelated to whether or not they remember or agree with it, new info gets no traction.

These memos are totally normal reactions to totally normal policymaking that's definitely and totally what non-autocratic governments do. www.theverge.com/news/782258/...

"What unites all this work is a focus on evidence-based approaches to identifying & addressing the myriad ways in which structural racism harms health by means of historically shaped pathways operating at multiple levels, from societal to institutional to interpersonal to individual."

Of course John Wilson instigated the restoration of Wm Whyte’s The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, showing at Anthology later this month! (Fwiw, I wrote about the history of the sidewalk: wordsinspace.net/2022/05/11/4...)

Oh no not no DV convictions!! Add DUI and no one could stay in office.

"It was 1955. Five hundred years had passed since Gutenberg had first done his thing and it was time for typographers to mark the occasion by designing a page or two or four from the Book of Genesis." - ft. Hermann Zapf, Jan Tschichold, Friedrich Neugebauer, et al :)

EXCLUSIVE: Tom Homan was investigated for accepting $50,000 from undercover FBI agents. Trump's DOJ shut it down.

I appreciate this letter to the editor in this week’s New Yorker — corroborating the importance of having a trusted, impartial source of statistics to counter those engineered by industry groups to serve their own purposes

“52% of all autocratization episodes become U-Turns, which increases to 73% when focusing on the last 30 years. The vast majority of U-Turns (90%) lead to restored or even improved levels of democracy” V-Dem data

entire press has gotten bullied into treating charlie kirk as if he was one of the most important americans alive and not a modestly popular podcaster

When I read stories like this, I think of the anecdotes I’ve heard abt abusive, negligent faculty getting huge payouts to leave their universities — after having consumed 🏔️ in institutional legal fees — while their burned-out good citizen colleagues get nothing (and lose a lot!) upon departure

Three major white collar criminals were convicted in fraud schemes and ordered to pay back over $800 million. Then, Trump pardoned their criminal offenses. Now the SEC is dropping enforcement and they won't have to pay the money back. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/19/u...

Israeli Culture Minister Miki Zohar has said he will pull state funding for the country’s national film honors, the Ophir Awards, after the Palestinian anti-war drama The Sea took top prize at the 2025 ceremony Tuesday night.

This is great. *And* I appreciate that Balls & Strikes has an official thematic tag for “Deranged Freaks” :)