Saltzman and McSweeneys stay winning, and devastatingly accurate.

Call me crazy, but I think having a Nazi tattoo is a red flag! My latest on @mcsweeneys.net www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/if-...

The Complicated Reality about Learning (and Wanting) to Read: Why Holistic Approaches Matter open.substack.com/pub/paulthom...

Reading Crisis as a Distraction from Addressing Poverty Directly open.substack.com/pub/paulthom...

Not all heroes wear capes

BBR gonna print and frame this and hang it in my English classroom

My upcoming book is absolutely packed to the brim with em dashes—more em dashes than any well-adjusted human being could possibly need or want—and if any of you tries to claim they are the result of some soulless LLM rather than my own unhinged compulsion I will fight you.

🔊 Sound On

new single “Moths” 🩶 open.spotify.com/track/0Obuns...

Paraguay!!!!!

Ha.

Spending a day playing with the new and improved AP English Lang syllabus for my class #APLang #iteachEnglish 📖📖 Some thoughts in a thread for my fellow teachers and beyond… Things are no longer embryonic, but they’re also not not-embryonic, if you catch me. Lots to fill in.

Friends and strangers and strange friends, I am sharing our neighbor’s dog vet needs. The pupper ate a foreign object and needs veterinary surgery. Every bit helps our friends! gofund.me/999971c90

And yet public education loves teaching, testing, and planning based on screen-reading, and would vastly prefer digital reading.

Sometimes you just need to put Dire Straits' Brothers in Arms on the record player, turn up the volume, and sit in the sweet spot between the speakers and feel like the Maxell guy.

The American Library Association is auctioning off a bunch of the classic celebrity “READ” posters along with a bunch of other full sized literacy posters. This is going to fix so many of my problems, I just know it. movieposters.ha.com/c/search/res...

Hmmm how much money do I want to spend on this? 📚 #PubLibs

warning: this video has gone triple platinum in my house. play with caution

Today it is 43 years since Sally Ride became the first woman and lesbian astronaut to visit space! She's without a doubt my favorite astronaut, and truly an icon

Once I made this point explicit to students they brought a fundamentally different orientation to the work of peer response. I reminded them how useful it was to see the work in progress of another human trying to solve a similar problem as you. They get it.

"To get people adopting the product, they explain, it was necessary to first create a crisis narrative, then [cast surveillance] as an act of pre-emptive safety. ... AI-driven panopticon surveillance is portrayed as both natural and inevitable. All the while, the surveillance provider cashes in."

When my post gets under 10 likes:

high school english teachers ought to be able to choose the books they assign

Thinking of how the staff development teacher left all the LLM artifacts and errors in the slideshow for our final faculty meeting. Says a lot about the relationship between admin and staff, and what admin thinks its job is.

It’s gonna be this all over the map for The next few years as states continue to fail at supporting public ed in meaningful ways. Lip service about a liberatory pedagogy, the money’s gonna go to reinforcing capitalist structures

One of the things I research is the cooperation of cultural institutions like museums in pitching tech products--specifically AI--to the public. This is advertising for the capacity of AI to educate and thus to reshape education itself as a project better left to private tech companies. 1/n

i assume banning kids from social media will be accompanied by a huge investment in teen-friendly communtiy spaces (like youth clubs) and social activities? No? Huh.

There's a corollary to this about writing your own tests.

Rough Trade exclusive of the new @kristinhersh.bsky.social album! Also: NEW KRISTIN HERSH ALBUM

Also, dafuq is up with that picture? “Claude will hallucinate an adventurous, fit, gear-toting life! “

Yesssssssss

Dave Eggers, on NPR's Wildcard with Rachel Martin: www.npr.org/2026/06/11/n...

Wanna chime in that in a lotta ways, this is high school as well. The “why” is often “it’s the next page of the textbook.” I’ve seen plemty of lessons and curriculum guides that have no pedagogy beyond that.

ngl every time I see a post about sports betting I am judging

Nov. 2020, my large suburban district got hit with a ransomware attack. We were virtual at the time so we lost 2 more days of instruction, plus I’m like 80% sure that the county ultimately paid. I think another school district elsewhere also paid up the ransom.

Tool working as intended

A court in Munich declared that Google is liable for their "AI summaries" and all its hallucinations. This brings "AI" slop in line with all other products: "AI" is basically the only product where a provider can deliver unchecked garbage and put all liability on the consumer.

No Star Wars, No Star Trek, name a favorite Sci-Fi franchise. (Any expanse gif should include Avasarala cussing).

Oooh. @atheists.org has filed a FOIA request to learn how Pete Hegseth decided to cull the list of religious labels in the military. atheists.org/news/federal...

Factcheck: True.

One thing I don't think anyone in or out of education talks about enough is the effect of electronic gradebooks on grade inflation and how it turned schooling into a series of negotiated transactions btw teachers, administrators, parents, and students divorced from teaching and learning.

“A jar of bright fruit is an innocuous and joyful thing. The reflex to correct and regulate the people enjoying is the very opposite. The joke may point at a white person, but its punchline is still Blackness.” Whoever wrote this for Newsweek deserves some credit.

I did not feel I was a part of the world. I felt separated from my body and sense of self. But when I saw the Citi Bank icon on my phone turn rainbow, I knew it was time to be the real me. And thanks to Gay Checking, I can spent without worry

Going in my “let’s talk to students about their AI choices” file

every minority knows this trick well we live with it daily

An AI tool we can all get behind

Soccer fans on r/WorldCup2026Tickets are using Claude to build DIY ticketing software, exchanging on back channels, and leaving scalpers scrambling. www.wired.com/story/reddit...