Cornell paid millions to get illegally frozen grants unfrozen, and effectively agreed to help the Trump regime's assault on academic freedom to get bad faith investigations dropped, while also agreeing the govt can launch new investigations! Full text here: statements.cornell.edu/2025/documen...

Cornell University has agreed to pay (the Extortion amount of) $60 million and accept the Trump administration’s interpretation of civil rights laws there, fixed your headline for you

Sometimes I'll happen upon the cv of someone whose work I admire, + I note that they've done fancy 💰💰💰 "creative direction" or event planning work for little nonprofits or research labs I also admire. And I'm like, I'm glad you guys know each other, but *how do you have a budget for these things*?!?

Holy shit. THIS IS HOW AN ANTI-BOOK BAN LAW WORKS, Y'ALL. Maryland's school board overturned a Harford County Schools ban on FLAMER. www.thebanner.com/education/k-...

You realize this is what they WANT you to do...because it's not about the books. It's about dismantling the entire public institution.

I don't understand why this isn't absolutely blowing up. A whole public library system shutting down branches to remove books because the Tennessee Secretary of State believes that Executive Orders are above the Constitution.

The Tennessee Secretary of State handed public library boards that are eager to ban LGBTQ+ books–and particularly trans books–from their collections the biggest permission slip last week. Rutherford County is *closing* libraries to remove books. bookriot.com/rutherford-c...

In light of that 404 article about librarians fighting against AI:

“And then you have librarians who are experiencing a real existential crisis because they are getting asked by their jobs to promote [AI] tools that produce more misinformation. It's the most, like, emperor-has-no-clothes-type situation that I have ever witnessed.” - Alison Macrina

"Once you have created a culture in which all expertise is denigrated and removed from the equation and considered nonessential, you create the circumstances in which AI can flourish.” Librarians are at the front lines of the war on knowledge. They speak out here.

Beautiful pre-sunrise over Queens

Tomorrow is the big day - Check out Printing Indigenous Community @filsonhistorical.bsky.social where my colleague Megan Sekulich & I will be talking about Indigenous aesthetics, printmaking, & revitalization!

Divide and concur — this radical plan from 1920, for "lasting peace" after WW1, proposed uniting central Europe into 24 wedge-shaped cantons which would radiate out from Vienna’s St. Stephen’s Cathedral: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/unionization-of-central-europe/

me at the end of class: here's a little speculative exercises; imagine you wake up from cryosleep in 2085. what's the kind of tech-society r/ship you'd like to see around you? students: no AI I honestly think students' views are missing from the 'should AI be integrated in classrooms' discussion

The US government's decision to stop supporting a telescope facility that would have given us unprecedented insight into the early universe is calamitous, says Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

“And then you have librarians who are experiencing a real existential crisis because they are getting asked by their jobs to promote [AI] tools that produce more misinformation. It's the most, like, emperor-has-no-clothes-type situation that I have ever witnessed.” - Alison Macrina

i say thank you to the bus driver when i get on and yell thank you when i get off every day i ride the bus, and i take two buses to and from work, being nice and friendly costs you nothing and should be your default expectation for yourself because it improves your day and everyone else’s day

getting to say thank you to the bus driver is perk of taking the bus

“The current proliferation of AI that we see particularly in the library and education spaces would not be possible at the speed and scale that is happening without the precedent of book bans leading into it.” — @maggietokudahall.bsky.social www.404media.co/ai-is-superc...

placesjournal.org/article/extr... fantastic article by @shannonmattern.bsky.social part love letter to libraries and all they represent, and part dream of the future libraries are building.

And Jesus said, thou shall not feed the poor and the hungry from your bounty because you must build ballrooms with lots of gold to honor the Lord while remaining liquid in case Argentina needs another bailout. - Book of Trump, 11:06. bsky.app/profile/atru...

Hero jury saves hoagie hurler from legal grinder www.nytimes.com/2025/08/27/u...

This week we talk about containment (Wardian cases, card catalogs, archival boxes, storage architectures, 📦-based pubs like Aspen, kiribako, etc), and materials + ideas that defy it — and we take part in a box-making workshop @ the Ctr for Book Arts! crossreference.wordsinspace.net/fall2025/por...

This is not surprising, but so appalling. About 180 FEMA staff members knew they would be risking their jobs to communicate the degradation of emergency response under Trump tells you how bad things are. We can't say we were not warned, but the people who warned us are being punished for doing so.

"They are amazing historic documents, and certainly we’ll want to take good care of them and preserve them, even if they’re no longer the official binding government document. Balancing care for the physical maps with efficiency of unifying them and digitizing them is going to be... important."

Federal Judge Sara Ellis declares that Homeland Security is not telling the truth about its attacks on the people of Chicago. "I don't find defendants' version of events credible." she says.

I was one of the four people who got canned. In the interim, you can subscribe to my newsletter, Straight From The Hut. No paywall, but feel free to choose the pay to support model. I'm not going anywhere — the show goes on, and I'll be back on MSNBC Saturday night. straightfromthehut.substack.com

New: Conde Nast fired four employees who were among a group that confronted the company's head of human resources on Wednesday over the decision to fold Teen Vogue into Vogue/recent cuts. Employees who were fired included journalists from the New Yorker, Wired, and Bon Appétit.

"'It's time to use it or get left behind,' he said." Okay, leave me the fuck behind. www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/...

Harvard's right-wing student magazine defends itself from charges that it invoked lines from Hitler by insisting that it did not intentionally use Nazi language, but came upon this "blood and soil" thinking organically. In other words, it's how young conservatives see things now. Take that in.

Page One. @theguardian.com #ICE

A nice Brooklyn Rail conversation about Alex's installation!

The Autumn 2025 issue of The Recipes Project is live! This issue, GLOBALIZING EARLY MODERN RECIPES, was co-edited by Lavinia Gambini, Lucy Havard, & Amanda Herbert. recipes.hypotheses.org

End of The Line: how Saudi Arabia’s Neom dream unravelled on.ft.com/47FBigb

I don’t know how many times I’ve watched this video. I don’t know how we’ve gotten to the point where men in full balaclavas can abduct daycare teachers while they’re watching children. But I do know that this isn’t sustainable. Abolish ICE. There is no way to reform this.

Hoping this helps our colleagues across the industry

This week we talk about containment (Wardian cases, card catalogs, archival boxes, storage architectures, 📦-based pubs like Aspen, kiribako, etc), and materials + ideas that defy it — and we take part in a box-making workshop @ the Ctr for Book Arts! crossreference.wordsinspace.net/fall2025/por...

Increasingly the Venn diagram of my intellectual interests & commitments—digital humanities, book history/bibliography, book arts, critical making—perhaps meet in the region "Luddite Humanities" Not technological rejection—but slower, deliberate, critical, historicized engagement with technology

“The Tennessee Eastman (as in: Kodak) Corp came to operate the Y-12 uranium separation plant, not because the company knew anything about separating uranium, but because it was very good at mass chemical production… It was uranium separated at Y-12 that was used in the bomb dropped in Hiroshima.”

First commute into the city since our move back upstate, a gorgeous sunset over the Hudson, and a moving conversation w/ a mom who’s come to the city to be with her daughter as she initiates a divorce. I shared some of my own experience. Sometimes I feel like I’m right where I’m supposed to be 🙏

The women justices (all of them) are working over the Solicitor General in this tariff argument like nobody’s business.

This is a nice story about how libraries change lives.

Yass is also the guy with a huge stake in TikTok and was reportedly on the phone with Trump just before he pulled a 180 on banning the app.

Yes, yes, yes!!! I always say libraries are *tech organizations.* They have the potential to model the antithesis of the Silicon Valley tech organization, which is NOT the only way to be! Digital doesn't have to be extractive, exploitative, *worse.*

libraries are closer to what the early internet was all about than what it is today. unsurprising, given the web's academic origins. they are data centers built for and around people instead of severs. a physical network offering so much more than books.

I wrote about public libraries as spaces of civic solidarity, common knowledge, and public infrastructure — all endangered by commercial and federal saboteurs

Re: last two RT’s about civic spaces:

I’m going to basically spend all morning laughing like a maniac. I have BEEN saying! Rebuilding civic infrastructure is EVERYTHING.

ah, perhaps instead of pumping millions into endless factional infighting Dem donors could invest in making local Dem organizations genuine civic spaces that can reach people during and between elections

I’m just a small-town political scientist, & it’s still relatively early, but it appears that The Actual Democrats did not Need To Do any of the Things or Learn any of the Obvious Lessons that Ezra Douthglesias said they Must Do & Learn.