Mans said the racists have NOTHING on the nerds

Duke University, which has recently increased class sizes, has raised cost of attendance to an incredible $96,597 per year. Congratulations to the investors in this exceptionally profitable hedge fund. www.dukechronicle.com/article/duke...

Instead of celebrating the Fourth of July, @zachstafford.bsky.social and I decided to have a conversation with none other than Kiese Laymon.

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.

AI native is such a weird term for technology that’s still relatively new for most people regardless of age.

I understand the general thrust of these claims, but I think they assign too much agency to "AI" and not enough to the hypesters and the institutions that bought into the hype while also being complicit in the poisoning of the information ecosystem that will be necessary for a post-"AI" world.

'Slaughter of the Innocents (They Might be Guilty of Something)' Kara Walker, 2017

The reason there’s no controversy section is that white people don’t count cowardly appeasing racists in your community as a scandal.

I would like to have a conversation with this season's writers because they are doing the absolute most

And because of the nearly infinite complexity of the past, and because of the complex nesting of its nearly infinite temporalities, you (yes, you) will "see" things that no one else has ever seen before. If you do the reading. And if you don't surrender this gift of perception to a machine.

The reason why it is essential to read IN BULK when studying history is not simply to amass empirical knowledge—though that is important, too, of course—but because *interpretation* requires thick contextual awareness, and there is NO SHORTCUT for building that up that awareness.

I really hate that AI has turned the internet into a pit of suspicion. It used to be a place where you could go to marvel at the weirdness of the world and now we have to evaluate every single thing that seems wondrous.

I feel I’ve somehow accidentally stumbled upon the final boss battle music for the sequel to Gay Pride Month better known as Gay Wrath Decade.

These concepts only map onto a very particular set of “traditions” and vision of masculinity and femininity.

Black women have never had to fight to enter the workplace because in the US their place was always to work, Black men could only be patriarchs inasmuch as they could carve out independence from white domination.

The entire concept of “traditional” men and women hinges on an erasure of the ways Black people had to survive when these concepts were being reified.

Just here to post this again like I do every year, not only because Douglass was one of the founding philosophers of American liberty but because I am so moved by the kids Frederick Douglass’ descendants deliver “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July”

For America's 250th, I read Frederick Douglass’ speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” on the House floor—for the first time in history. His speech endures as a mirror & mandate for us all—to confront our inequities while fighting for an America as good as its promise.

went to guitar center today to try out playing a fender bass VI. there was a young girl there playing seven nation army on bass with her mom, dad, and grandma just beaming at her. they ended up getting the bass for her and she seemed over the moon. gonna carry that sweet moment with me for a while.

I just learned that the creator of Widow’s Bay is the person who was dressed as the Babadook at the adults drinking Halloween party

Justice Brown Jackson's argument for birthright citizenship is very moving. I recommend reading it in full. An excerpt with alt-text below. “The Reconstruction Amendments were an anticaste, antisubordination reset for the Nation, not a mere spot treatment for the dark stain of slavery.” — KBJ

Justice Jackson’s opinion in the birthright citizenship case is absolutely stellar.

Obviously this is a dipshit opinion. But since I sometimes see people on the left rolling their eyes about those signs, I just want you all to know that the other night some lost Black teens came to our house after taking the wrong bus and we were able to get them home. Why’d they pick us? Signs.

Picking the right door as a young Black person can be a matter of life or death. A lower-stakes example: I tell people who are nervous about canvassing their neighborhood to start with the people who have signs indicating similar values. Gestures matter if they help us find each other.

Independent agencies set standards that keep us safe across a wide range of areas. Imagine Trump’s friends want to market an unsafe product - for children, for elders, in construction. And the Consumer Products Safety Commn is run by Trump cronies who will approve whatever he wants.

I do not think there is sufficient appreciation for how catastrophic yesterday’s decision in Slaughter is for this country. As Justice Sotomayor said in her dissent and she intoned from the bench yesterday, “today the majority reshapes our Govt.”

guys, George RR Martin just emailed me personally to let me know how much he liked my new Regency romance! He even makes a point of saying "I am not writing to pitch anything or ask for anything in return"! Which I appreciate because obv I thought GRRM was going to propose a newsletter swap.

I hate it so much.

hasn’t harlem suffered enough

Okay. Ai can go bankrupt then. This is not our problem, this sounds like a rich tech billionaire problem.

Deal with yourself as a individual worthy of respect, and make everyone else deal with you the same way. -Nikki Giovanni

Hey, I got a new starter pack for ya! Big Nope to "A.i.," Data Centers, & Big Tech A work in progress chock full of people & groups providing info about and organizing against the pernicious effects of "A.i." and its pushers. go.bsky.app/3w9a45V

✨What Juneteenth Means to Me as a Physician Juneteenth reminds me that freedom has always been tied to health. At the time, freedom was declared, but not delivered and that gap between promise and reality still shows up today. Thread. 1/

by request i'm going to share a quick thread of collections where people have pulled together articles / resources / arguments about ai harms and how to resist them this is by alphabetical order in my bookmarks, it's not comprehensive, feel free to add to the list of lists

Break them

At Scarleteen, trans pride is part of everything we do, every month of the year. It’s not a slogan for June, it is the baseline that shapes who we center, who we listen to, and what we choose to publish and amplify. Here are some more of our staff favorites, by and for our community: 🧵

I'm attending a digital humanities event in Montreal. There was a keynote on AI and something about the talk made me wonder if it had been written by Claude. I said as much in the Q&A. As I posed the question, the speaker shifted, looking slightly uncomfortable. What he said next shocked the room +

it’s a good day to watch Ponyo (2008) 🌊

Just watch Thierry Henry once Lalas is done

"The FDA's definition of a medical device is broad enough to encompass many of them, but a decade of regulatory shifts has produced a landscape where the same tool might face rigorous premarket scrutiny if sold by a commercial device manufacturer, and none at all if bundled into an EHR system."

Remember this scene the next time a corporate reporter tries to insist that a rural diner full of white men in their 60s is somehow a more authentically "American" place, somehow more representative of who we are as a nation.

I can’t believe it has been one year since Melissa and her husband, Mark, were taken from us. Melissa was not only my dear friend, but she was also a remarkable woman whose strength and compassion left an unforgettable mark on everyone fortunate enough to know her.

Mamdani on the viral "my mayor's Muslim" Knicks fan: "Thanks to him, there are a lot of people who have just been running up to me over the last few weeks just shouting, 'My Mayor's Muslim!' I said, 'It's true. I am.'"

I'm so serious, there's no way you're standing in solidarity with the mad thinking bad things & people are mentally ill. So you need to sharpen your praxis, because standing with mad people is actually important, we need liberation, & that advances our collective liberation. @161bklyn.bsky.social

Last image from tonight (short film in the morning): this brother out here with his Singer sewing machine, gifting people a custom embroidery on their jerseys and hats with the name and the date, was more artistic than anything at Burning Man and ad gorgeous as a Caravaggio. Magic! Goodnight.

Tom Holland Umbrella Video rule also applies to Cop Slide

Was just talking this morning about a class where the professor used AI to 'design' the class assignments and the students subsequently had to de-bug the code before they could even complete the assignment... only for the professor to use AI to grade the assignments.

When I had students ask me why they should take US history in college when they took it in high school—“I got a 5 on the AP!”—I would tell them it was because now I could teach them things that they wouldn’t have been allowed to learn in high school because someone’s parents would’ve been mad.