On October 3rd, I’m asking you to register to vote. zohranfornyc.com/register

Amazing!

So, this is happening now.

Why is everything terrible? www.cnn.com/2025/09/29/e...

Excited to see this small piece I wrote on horror, possession, and opera come out in Calibano, the magazine of the Rome Opera! www.operaroma.it/en/calibano/...

"From the dawn of civilization onwards, crowds have always undergone the influence of illusions ... The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them." -- Gustave Le Bon, _The Crowd_.

This looks great!

This, but the entire summer.

I hope he's okay, but we need more of this.

A nice refutation of Sam Altman's asinine comment that GPT-5 has "PhD level intelligence:" www.reddit.com/r/Artificial...

What are your favorite podcasts, YouTube channels, or other mass media platforms that engage in critical theory, cultural studies, media studies, etc.?

Proofreading has some real highs and lows. Sometimes you are reminded why your argument is actually pretty good and the next moment you see that you've misspelled "the" for the 15th time.

A perfect, concise reading of Trump's idiotic press briefing. No notes.

A more complete report on the DOGE fiasco. I say we, the people, sue to get our money back.

I don’t think we know enough just yet to understand how this will affect NPR and PBS but both received a very small percentage of their budgets from the CPB. This will however have an immediate effect on local public radio and TV affiliates, esp in rural & Indigenous areas More info here (gift 🔗)

Let that sink in. What DOGE burned through in six months, through sheer stupidity, carelessness, and cruelty, could have funded the NEH for more than a century. This was never an attempt to save money, it was a mugging.

It's really weird to demand accountability from a NYC mayoral candidate for a deadly NYC shooting rather than the current NYC mayor, an ex-cop who campaigned on a "tough on crime" platform and promptly got indicted for crimes

I acknowledge that the new system is better, but sometimes I miss "ibid."

Preparing a final manuscript means going down some very weird rabbit holes to clarify some very minor points.

I love that this is the summer that my car's air conditioning has decided to die.

Faculty who wrote to defend their president and object to a DOJ investigation of their university...are now being investigated by the DOJ. The most banal defense of free speech and academic freedom will trigger the full wrath of the US government now. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/u...

It's not fair to be existentially exhausted on a Saturday.

What fresh hell is this? www.tesla.com/tesla-diner

The bootlicking continues. www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

Difficult to overstate what ICE will become. As a civil rights lawyer, I’m already struggling to find friends & journalists and activists picked up needlessly by ICE & essentially disappeared within the immigration system. It will get worse. We have to get in formation & I need funders to help.

Really good analysis by Meredith Whittaker of agentic AI and the privacy concerns that come with it.

Genuinely thrilling that New York comes through tonight.

A little good news to end the evening! www.nytimes.com/live/2025/06...

Gods damn it.

Watching this feud unfold brings me a lot of joy.

I suppose it was inevitable that I'd end up mucking around in Lacan's writings on math and set theory.

This is my favorite post about Sam Neill, which seems even more charming after listening to @blankcheck.bsky.social on Jurassic Park a few weeks ago.

It's time. And by that I mean that it's time to undertake a major re-watch of The X-Files over the summer. The show was tremendously influential on me as a kid and I've always feared it wouldn't stand up to watching it again, but I think I need to take the dive back in. #thexfiles

FYI to media outlets, you're misleading your readers if you repeat this at face value. There's no lawful way for him to redirect these grants elsewhere. It's a lie to distract from how the GOP budget guts educational funding, including Pell Grants at trade schools.

Everything is normal and cool. arstechnica.com/health/2025/...

OMG. www.nytimes.com/2025/04/18/b...

flashback to how americans acted the last time federal agents started kidnapping their neighbors

It's a start. www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/u...

This is such a smart take.

No matter how you look at it universities in America were systematically & unilaterally outsmarted by anti-intellectualists. Which should be embarrassing. 20 years ago I woulda lost my shirt on this bet.

I have never seen anything like this in NYC. 5th Ave covered from 42nd St well to the 20s. Nobody prepared for this volume. Volunteers are holding the traffic on all the side streets. No police in sight. #handsoff

So sick of everyone’s pathetic lack of courage. STAND UP NERDS

It's amazing to me how much the Right depends on banning words and foreclosing certain kinds of language and discourse. I think this is because there is simply no compelling argument for the anti-environmental political positions that they routinely adopt. newrepublic.com/post/193395/...

Sorry to be missing SCMS this year! Good luck to all the friends and colleagues presenting in Chicago.

Musk is not popular, and arresting him for vote-buying isn’t going to make him more popular, it forces the issue into the public eye in a way that makes him look bad

merit is back baby

More of this, please.

Columbia University has failed to defend academic freedom & freedom of speech & allowed a great institution to be bullied & extorted into submission by an administration hellbent on contorting higher education to their will. The AAUP condemns this capitulation. We can & must fight back.

Casar: You can quickly explain Doge with just two numbers. First: $8 million a day. That’s how much Elon Musk collects in federal government contracts. Second: $65 a day. That’s how much the average senior—someone who has worked their entire life—gets from Social Security.…