Teaching Baudrillard's "The Precession of Simulacra" today, now that we're reaching the end of my Paranoid Aesthetics class. Every time I teach this text, I am always amazed at how prescient it is.

It's about cruelty. It's only about cruelty and an enforcement of extreme poverty.

People need to understand that Chicago is a preview, not a culmination.

Starving the population rarely goes well for authoritarian regimes. Also, I would love to hear from the many so-called Christians in the Republican party about what their beliefs say about feeding the hungry. www.nytimes.com/live/2025/11...

A really harrowing visualization of just how rich Elon Musk is. Perhaps we should rethink the existence of billionaires? engaging-data.com/how-rich-is-...

Interesting. It would be fascinating to see MTG and others move away from the extreme Right, and showing them to be political opportunists and their Right-wing discourse as something rooted in bad-faith arguments.

I can't even begin to say how pleased I am to have been a part of electing Zohran Mamdani as mayor of NYC!

So proud of my fellow New Yorkers! Mamdani wins! www.nytimes.com/live/2025/11...

Get out and vote tomorrow, NYC!

I can’t stress this enough. They want to do inside the US the kind of extrajudicial murders they’ve been doing internationally. This has always been about normalizing the ability of Trump to smite his personal enemies without suffering legal consequences. Trump’s testing for compliance & resistance.

Remember when Paul Krugman’s columns were soooo wonky. “It sounds crazy to say that Republicans are making children go hungry to protect pedophiles, but it’s actually a reasonable interpretation of the situation.” - Paul Krugman

Amazing headline.

Teaching the first episode of The X-Files in class tomorrow as we consider the role of government and sovereign authority in the construction of conspiracy. We've been talking a lot about UFOs in class, and it will be interesting to hear their perspective on such an iconic TV show.

Damn. This is amazing. £325 per week, paid monthly, for 3 years - and the result was a profit for the Irish economy: www.citizensinformation.ie/en/employmen...

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/...