California State University's $17 million contract with OpenAI has been met with criticism, but canceling it would create fragmentation and inequity. Instead, the focus should be on finding a constructive path forward for AI in higher education.

It’s the year 2026 and not only are we still serving milk to every student but milk has somehow taken the stage in the culture wars. She probably hiding but the one person who can save us is @emelaniedupuis.bsky.social 😉

Nik Janos and Zach Justus in @insidehighered.com arguing nostalgia detracts from honest conversations about AI in higher education. www.insidehighered.com/opinion/view...

Opinion | No, the Pre-AI Era Was Not That Great Misplaced nostalgia doesn’t get us anywhere. https://bit.ly/4pk3uwa #EDUSky #HigherEd #AcademicSky

Me and Zach Justus in @insidehighered.com popping the nostalgia bubble about pre-AI higher ed. www.insidehighered.com/opinion/view...

Fantastic thread on nationalism as a social thing and historical process but also on the dubious ways that social scientists and the rest often practice a “methodological nationalism” to interpret social forms of all variation (networks, scales, places etc).

Probably dumb as hell to publish this on a Friday afternoon, but the clock is ticking to get @gavinnewsom.bsky.social to sign SB 79. Please share — and, if you're a Californian, please call the governor's office at (916) 445-2841 to ask for his signature. publiccomment.blog/p/newsom-s-f...

An assassin writes Bella Ciao in the same breath as a Notices Your Bulge meme on his bullets. One of the government responses is a practicing Hindu asserting that the fundamentalist Christian victim will join him in a Norse pagan afterlife. Welcome to the epistemic collapse.

Bingo! What a post.

Joins a long list of ways people treat “the environment” as a means to an end. Ex: I don’t like thing. Environment environment! Thing bad.

To underscore its importance, my new article w/ @fredstaffordcs.bsky.social came out on the day of the huge Iberian blackout. We argue the left/liberal's fixation on increasing renewables often downplays (or rejects) how grid reliability must be central to any winning electricity politics.

people wanted a luxury belief presidency that would give them the means to live out the indulgences they craved while making them richer. They got a bunch of meth tweakers ripping everything out of the walls

Let’s go #Cascadia! Unite British Columbia-Washington-Oregon-California.

So deglobalize textiles but globalize American prisons. They’re gonna offshore human rights abuses of Americans if they can.

Paging Max Weber and Wendy Brown: we need a new ethic of responsibility.

The message from the Left should be: tariffs bad, industrial policy good. Sure, there are niche cases where tariffs might be useful as part of industrial policy, but it really weakens the message to add qualifiers. Fight unreservedly against the thing destroying the economy.

This NYTimes story exemplifies one of the stupidest aspects of DOGE's crusade to "cut government spending." DOGE fired a NOAA employee who supervises a dozen NW salmon hatcheries to ensure they comply with the Endangered Species Act and other laws and it may screw up salmon harvests for years. 1/14

imagine the Downfall meltdown scene as an online all hands Teams meeting

We're tracking student visa revocations at Inside Higher Ed. If you know of any that aren't on our map--or want to report numbers from your own institution--email me ([email protected]) or @amowreader.com ([email protected]) www.insidehighered.com/news/global/...

I want to tear my hair out when I see people cheering charts like in this skeet. From a climate change mitigation perspective the ONLY thing that matters is ABSOLUTE carbon emissions — not the ratio of renewable to hydrocarbons, not the energy intensivity per unit of output, or anything else.

We're gonna do a covid supply shock to ourselves, I really think this needs to be the message, because we all lived through that and nothing makes the complete disruption of global supply chains more visceral

In brighter news CPE is going to keep fighting for public policy action until the bitter end. A new initiative we’re launching: publicenterprise.org/report/enhan...

Those trying to understand the tariffs as economic policy are dangerously naive. No, the tariffs are a tool to collapse our democracy. A means to compel loyalty from every business that will need to petition Trump for relief. 1/ A 🧵 to explain his plan and how we fight back.

What did we all think four decades of a right wing anti-government crusade meant? Vibes? Essays?

Wrapping up my weekend trilogy on education. Please share with any educators you know. open.substack.com/pub/contrapt...

The environmental impact of AI is entirely overblown. There are a lot of reasons to decry AI. AI’s energy use isn’t one of them. All computation (across every type of computer) uses less energy than aluminum refining.

I am enjoying writing my current book, perhaps the most fun I’ve had in my career, but a day doesn’t go by that I ponder “what the hell am I doing and why am I doing it?”

What are good examples of the “just transition thesis” working, where environmental justice accompanies decarbonization (a win-win)? At what scale? How fast?

AP Exclusive: Trump administration workforce cuts at the federal agencies that oversee the nation's dams are jeopardizing their ability to provide reliable electricity, provide water for irrigation and control flooding, workers and dam-safety experts warn. apnews.com/article/dams...

Scholarly research is about to experience an unprecedented vortex, as two huge air masses clash: the cold air mass of radical federal defunding of academia, OTOH, and the hot air mass of AI-enabled research, OTO. The tornadoes spinning out of this confluence will remake the intellectual landscape.

Dude was visiting his fiancé, who lives in Vegas. His English isn’t good so he misunderstood the border goons when they asked where he lives, he said Vegas, they took him away for questioning without a translator and now he’s been in a jail for two weeks.

It’s very possible that within a few years Artificial General Intelligence will replace climate change as the defining political crisis of our time. Big implications for those concerned about climate.

Trump moves to take total control of FERC. You can say goodbye to any substantial transmission-planning or distributed-energy reforms.

I wish it wasn't Yergin who's saying it, but, it needs to be said. "In other words, what has been unfolding is not so much an “energy transition” as an “energy addition.” Rather than replacing conventional energy sources, the growth of renewables is coming on top of that of conventional sources."🔌💡

Me and Zach Justus in IHE on the MAGA coding of AI and what it means for higher education.

coming to really hate how social media has made writing itself worse because you cannot write anything without a million caveats

News headlines about publishing usually focus on problems! Not the everyday successes that happen outside the spotlight. So I appreciate @derekkrissoff.bsky.social reminding folks in the @chronicle.com: university presses are thriving & making extraordinary books. www.chronicle.com/article/this...

Next month, OU Press will publish "The Opposite of Cheating: Teaching for Integrity in the Age of AI" by @tbertramgallant.bsky.social and David A. Rettinger. For a sneak peek, here is an insightful author interview with the @edsurge.com podcast. www.edsurge.com/news/2025-01...

holy hell someone in an SUV did a hit and run on sociologist Michael Burawoy and killed him!!!! www.mercurynews.com/2025/02/04/o...

An “self-coup” (enabling a President to rule by decree) entails two steps: (1) the President sidelines the legislative branch by issuing orders rather than relying on legislation; (2) the President sidelines the judicial branch by ignoring court orders declaring the former step illegal. Here we go:

First post of the new war, on a subject that I really wish I didn't have to revisit again: Trump adamelkus.com/posts/newtr @adamgurri.liberalcurrents.com

Even rockier times ahead for academia. I hope that any scholar serving as a peer reviewer will recognize the headwinds facing writers of serious books right now & feel the urgency to use peer review as an opportunity for solidarity in building things up, not tearing them down.

To survive the coming assault from MAGA, universities need to focus on (a) training students in technical competencies; (b) promoting the discovery of new facts about & conceptions of the world; and (c) preserving & transmitting the knowledge that already exists. open.substack.com/pub/nilsgilm...

One of the reasons I’ve been kind of meh on the ecological footprint arguments against “AI” is that 1) there’s no particular technical reasons things can’t get vastly more efficient and 2) “just add scale” has diminishing returns. It turns out tech… investors… didn’t… know this?

The challenge of writing a book is that I’m actually writing like 1.5 books. The more I write , the more there is to write, the more words and pages accumulate. Future me is going to be cursing the editing.

Fire at Moss Landing in Monterey, Calif. www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/e... (Yes, this site has Tesla big backup batteries. No, I don't know what's caused the fire or burning now. More to come...)

This is very bad.

Fascinating thread about something I knew next to nothing about.

I have been struggling to think of an historical example where an existing hegemon opted intentionally to destabilize and promote chaos in a system that they dominate, basically because of domestic political discord. I can’t think of another case in history. 🧵

👀 www.goodtimes.sc/the-wharfs-c...