"a state full of ordinary people — real estate agents, high school students, solar energy consultants — who’ve decided that watching their neighbors being dragged away is an intolerable sin."

Excellent piece "As a longtime foreign correspondent, I have covered civil wars in countries across the globe. Not so long ago, I would have rolled my eyes at the notion that one could erupt anywhere in America, much less in my once placid home state of Minnesota."

Memoing is a superpower.

Dr. Gladys West, the pioneering mathematician whose work laid the foundation for modern GPS technology, has died. She was 95.

it's always so strange that Ben Affleck is a well-spoken, erudite person because every other aspect of his personality seems like the only words out of his mouth should be slurs muttered through broken teeth

King's has several funded PhD projects in Safe, Trusted and Responsible AI. If you're a UK/home student, please check them out! www.findaphd.com/phds/program... I'm involved in 3 of the projects, links below.

Let's gooooooooo With alt

"Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world." Susan Sontag, who would have been 93 today, on storytelling, her advice to writers, and what it means to be a decent human being www.themarginalian.org/2015/03/30/s...

Well, I was going to have a chill productive afternoon, but an emotional, but very positive student meeting derailed that plan.

Scott Alexander on Dilbert guy is p good. "Adams followed up on God’s Debris’ total lack of success with a sequel, The Religion War. In the introduction, he manages to be literally more annoying than any person on Earth has ever been before in the entire two million year history of the human race."

It's nice when folks are bad at their jobs sometimes

Librarians, how many times have you heard the "This library has so many books, it's sinking" lore? As much as I love to hear that people are cancelling bloated subscriptions, I have to laugh at the AI-powered "learning experience" shift Microsoft thinks it can seamlessly perform. They'll be back.

Repeating my mantra that the average person out there has *no idea* how much of a fiasco the student loan program is right now and that 90% of it has to do with politicking (going back decades) and nothing to do with the borrower.

If you're into higher ed policy, want to learn more about jobs outside of academia, and will be in Chicago in March

The Italian Woman by Henri Matisse, 1916 https://botfrens.com/collections/212/contents/137825

I really feel like in the last 4 years, there has been a slow but steady degradation in metadata based systems, and its going to come back and bite us in the butt after we turn LLMs loose on the world's repositories of human meaning.

I never thought I would walk away from Star Trek. I’ve written about it for a decade and I’ve eagerly shared it my entire life. But given who owns it now and who stands to profit from Trekkies’ loyalty, I can’t keep promoting it. The Trekkie in me won’t allow it. Here’s why I’m beaming out.

Me at age 13: hahaha the internet is so funny i wish the entire world worked like this Me at age 31:

At one point today, there were 283 Minnesota attorneys doing a training on how to file emergency habeas petitions to keep our neighbors from being shipped out of state and held indefinitely. That would be the second largest law firm in the state. And that training was just put together this week.

Is anyone dealing with poor quality worldcat records when doing research?

Personalized pricing can sound nifty when you first hear about it. Why shouldn't people who can pay more, pay more, and people who can pay less, pay less? After all, from each according to their ability, to each according to their need.

If ICE and genocide and grift and tyranny weren’t enough, this alone should have fire running down every street in America. This isn’t the way to live. We do not have to live this way.

16-Part Epoxy xkcd.com/3194/

So we can use Grok to generate images of Elon in a bikini. Good to know.

When you find out how the Siege of Constantinople in 626 AD ended.

More evidence for the “POTUS is actually Stephen Miller in a skin suit” theory

Perennial reminder of this excellent paper about how secret police forces are swamped with underachievers “We don’t want clever people. We want mediocrities.” (Ungated summary here ajps.org/2019/10/08/w...)

/6 ICE is a monument to totalitarianism, lawlessness, and bigotry. It should be ripped out and woodchippered root and branch and replaced with something focused on the concept that you can’t defend the rule of law by burning it down.

I want to go to there

This. I am done returning to the status quo of what got us here. I want universal healthcare. I want a maximum wage tied to the minimum wage. I want omnipresent, cheap public transit and walkable neighborhoods. I want Supreme Court and police reform, and I want the rich to pay their fair share.

Going after the Hmong, that's really, really low. Like, "Oh yeah, the ethnic group that had to flee Vietnam and Cambodia, because they were such staunch allies of the United States.", low Shameful.

There’s a big story everyone is missing—but this article hits on it. We aren’t just seeing public health dismantled bc we’ve been taken over by conspiracy theorists and lunatics. What we’re really seeing is the giant, predatory, underegulated wellness industry come to Washington.

📢 PhD Scholarship at QUT to join my DECRA project "Democratic Resilience Online: Strengthening Public Opinion Formation Amid Digital Threats" @qutdmrc.bsky.social 📅 Applications close: 13/03/2026 More info here: www.qut.edu.au/study/fees-a... Please share and reach out if you have questions!

2016 vs 2026

SPEAKING OF THE COLD!!! Activists have given @lefttheprairie.bsky.social another list of things they desperately need to stay warm & safe in the streets in the coming days! All of this is going to the twin cities! www.amazon.com/hz/wishlist/... If you hate the 'zon our GFM does direct help.

Seeing kids, not much younger than the students I teach, get terrorized and abused by federal officers is a real rage stoker. I've watch the video of the Target kid in the Walmart parking lot wail, "I'm not Ok" probably more times than I should have. It is going to be with me for a long time.

Have we tried actually turning it off and turning it back on again? You know sometimes you just have to wait for the capacitors to get completely empty for a hard restart to work.

Sometimes they just tell us they are weaponizing the criminal justice system to push their political agenda.

One of the best people.

Sailing Rigs xkcd.com/3193/

A problem with “papers please” societies is that when the masked, armed man asks for your papers he can just say they are faked. Or he can walk off with them and then a different armed, masked man asks you for your papers. If they want to get you, they will get you

I’m seeing lots of people on here misunderstand the purpose of ICE watch. It’s de-escalation. And it’s grounded in the social science of violence. 🧵

Can you use Grok to create images of Elon Musk in a bikini? Asking for a friend. 🧐

So my life has been shaped by my experience as a debate nerd. What we are seeing now is a disadvantage argument we ran when we debated the founding of DHS in 2002-2003.

“The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

semi-regular reminder that ICE was only created in 2003 when you are asked to imagine a world without ICE, you're basically being asked to remember where you were when Lilo & Stitch came out

Wild how this is going to hurt seniors and people with relatives in other countries, but won't affect Bessent and his ilk who's government subsidies aren't classified as public assistance.

I must soldier on. If I want to keep this perfectly fine, well-paying job in administration, I must confront my worst enemy, my prophesized foe—the greatest of all evils. I must write the department newsletter.