The US doesn't even pretend to understand what soft power is anymore

I am thrilled to receive special recognition by @apsamena.bsky.social Best Article committee for my work on gender "edutainment" in authoritarian regimes. My pastry chef past makes it personal. But I'm also on a quest to audio-visualize the political science toolkit. This means a tremendous amount.

Rana Khoury's book Civilizing Contention is outstanding: deeply thoughtful, intellectually rigorous, supremely important work. Huge congrats on your @apsamena.bsky.social Best Book award @rbkhoury.bsky.social!

We need ~30 years of data from the AMOC to be able to finally determine if it's actually collapsing. We're at 20 years of data. Removing this now means we can't definitively determine a potential AMOC collapse that could result in substantial climate disruptions. www.livescience.com/planet-earth...

L'administration Trump continue sa destruction des infrastructures métrologiques et scientifiques qui autorisent à factualiser des problèmes dont elle ne veut pas avoir à s'occuper et qu'elle souhaite activement ignorer afin de pouvoir poursuivre l'extraction agressive des ressources de la terre 🛢️⛏️🏗️

> Wikipedia editors now find themselves doing double duty: feeding AI systems with credible knowledge while also guarding their languages against AI-generated misinformation and low-quality content. *sigh*

Issue 3 of our @interpretivemm.bsky.social Research Digest is out! It's a repository of recent articles applying interpretive methods and ethnographic sensibilities that we compile quarterly. I hope it's of use in your reading and teaching! Enjoy, and please share! mailchi.mp/d4d246f8e792...

I just went 76-6, think you can go 82-0? I probably was one player away from 82-0 www.82-0.com/share?id=e6C...

L’artiste franco-iranienne Marjane Satrapi, autrice de la bande dessinée « Persepolis », est morte à l’âge de 56 ans Satrapi, author of the blockbuster graphic novel Persepolis, about growing up in the early yea... https://arabist.net/2026/06/04/lartiste-francoiranienne-marjane-satrapi-autrice.html

The problem with AI plagiarism and predatory journals is further accentuated in autocracies where there is hostile government takeover of universities: pro-government administrators can pretend that their cronie appointees are as qualified as legit academics whose stance annoy the regime

Edgar Morin, un siècle de sagesse en trois leçons theconversation.com/edgar-morin-...

On Agnès Varda's birthday, we're celebrating the restlessly curious visionary whose work was at once personal and passionately committed to the world around her. 💘 🎞️ 📹 🌻

Even if one thought that putting Trump's face on everything was legitimate and not sacrilegious, I don't understand why the picture they keep coming back to is "neighborhood creep whose yard kids are too afraid to fetch errant balls from"

On devrait pouvoir critiquer l'IA sans recourir à des catégories religieuses, comme cette fameuse "âme" qui n'a de sens que dans un cadre théologique surnaturel où une entité personnelle éthérée survit à la mort corporelle, mais peut-être qu'il est présomptueux d'en demander tant aux Américains 🥹

The world is no longer headed for the most catastrophic futures climate scenarios once warned about: but not because the science was wrong. It’s because people listened, and acted. Read on in this week's edition of Talking Climate.

I was interviewed for this piece in Burokrat about Turkey’s global comm initiatives www.burokrat.fr/la-turquie-e...

Les entrepreneurs détestent au moins autant payer des salariés que payer des impôts : l’Intelligence Artificielle n’est pas moins coûteuse mais elle permet aux entrepreneurs de signer moins de chèques à moins de subordonnés - le gain n’est que psychologique et idéologique, pas économique 🙃

He wrote a book about truth and AI and got caught sharing information hallucinated by ChatGPT that he had write for him and then didn’t bother to check and now he says he feels “Seduced and betrayed” by it? I mean the truth is obvious: It’s a scam, and he’s part of it

It’s what the headline says: “Using the tech is more expensive than paying human employees”. Go figure. But to be perfectly clear, **even if AI was more economical**, it would still be dehumanizing and immoral

The Canal + Backlash against the zapper Bolloré signatories should definitely get more coverage in the English-speaking world. It is another example of how there is a struggle over culture fueled by the far right resentment that most art worth watching has been progressive.

These podcasts are super engaging and informative. Great for observers of Turkey, the US and other dem backsliding cases. I really enjoyed the one I joined on vilification of protesters. Great work @ekoshy.bsky.social and @baykurt.bsky.social! itallhappenedbefore.substack.com/p/episode-8-...

Finally finished this thread for those interested

Clearly my cat Destry does not know how to read or else he wouldn't find a book on The Rise of Organized Brutality by @sinisamalesevic.bsky.social this comforting (a great read evidently evidently also pillow)

It's fashionable in academia to brag by situating your contribution and cite many sources. Call me old fashioned, but if someone is citing a source, shouldn't the assumption be that at the very least they've skimmed through it or have read about it in at least 2-3 other places on its importance?

I don't want to read any more opinions about "how instructors should respond to AI" that don't engage at all with our working conditions: heavy teaching loads, large class sizes, adjunctification, etc.

Mon Capitaine ! 🇫🇷 👏 www.lemonde.fr/sport/articl...

Save Black Studies at Birmingham City University c.org/WHPJzGKR

We see this in other areas of higher ed as well. My piece in the Jacobin discusses our reliance on these systems. Banner, SAP, CRM platforms, assessment software, etc. jacobin.com/2025/09/... 3/4

None of this is normal. Great thread by @helenbranswell.bsky.social.

Great read on one of the most interesting phenomenons in recent cinephile culture

Hackers have the potential to do something very funny and leak millions of AI generated assignments, not to mention syllabi www.cnn.com/2026/05/07/u...

"The reporter should have checked the accuracy of the A.I. tool returned" Or, and I do mean it: do not use this nonsense. Why check everything twice for no reason? Why ever look at the nonsense output of a fascist technology?

I know I have some mutuals and others here who have encyclopedic knowledge of music. If you were to travel to Fukuoka or Tokyo what are some record stores you would absolutely go to and what are some stuff you would absolutely bring back (post-punk, alt pop, moog rock, new wave, classic punk etc..)?

With all the Star Wars jive, I always forget to note that May 4 is also a very notable date because it's when Bruce Springsteen played the Harvard Square Theatre in 1974 (h/t Barry Schneier here) and Jon Landau wrote his "future of rock and roll" Real Paper review

Absolutely fascinating how nearly every teacher and professor I know is now overhauling their pedagogy to put everything on old-fashioned paper, while (and in large part because) massive investments in AI like this roll in. I have no idea what will come of this. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/05/u...

The band Dry Cleaning were amazing to watch at the Basilica in Hudson yesterday. Distill the essence of a fun to listen to rock band and marry them to a charismatic deadpan lead. youtu.be/GVMJIZMOc1M?...

Mind boggling that the Turkish state and Turkish nationalists based their entire campaign to change the official English name to Türkiye on their misguided belief that others had named the country after the bird as a slight (when they merely were naming the bird after its mistaken provenance)

This is not something I would have predicted about MIA 15 years ago. I guess we all lose a few marbles as we get older consequence.net/2026/05/m-i-...

It was a pleasure to give an interview to the New Books Network on my new book ‘Nationalism as a Way of Life’ (04/05/2026): newbooksnetwork.com/nationalism-...

Chabrol, Goddard, Truffaut and Varda...and I would rename myself Jean-Pierre Melville instead of Splinter

TURKIYE: Labour movement keeps focus on social issues as authoritarianism rises globallabourcolumn.org/2026/04/30/t...

I guess this is my take: Wes Anderson is high brow with Owen Wilson and middle range by himself. Rushmore, Bottle Rocket and the Royal Tenenbaums they cowrote are perfect while the others very pretty and extremely entertaining

I have a friend who rehashed an interesting theory he saw somewhere about how Owen Wilson is the real film nerd and that anything co-written with him, Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, the Royal Tenenbaums is actually heartfelt and substantive, while it was style over substance once he left.

I’m legit pleasantly surprised when traveling is called in a NBA game

I was lucky enough to have a conversation with @reubensilverman.bsky.social about his new volume on the Menderes Era in Turkey (1950 - 1960), hosted by @paultlevin.bsky.social at SUITS You can watch it here. www.su.se/english/divi...