The white supremacist conceit that everyone in antiquity was living under some kind of global jim crow segregation is just complete bullshit news.harvard.edu/gazette/stor...

The cover for my book, The Future That Was, is now live! It features the MacArthur genius artist Shahzia Sikander's Infinite Woman (2021), where earth is surrounded by an infinite series of women marching around the globe who, from afar, become rays of the sun ☀️ press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...

Yes, “the worst of the worst.” Drug traffickers. Predators. 73 year old Sikh grandmas who sew saris and pay taxes www.bbc.com/news/article...

Chicago Tribune publishes essay by President Sosulski on value of the humanities www.lakeforest.edu/news-and-eve...

Judith Butler: "It is important to refuse the notion that this is just how things are right now, invoking a feckless realpolitik that justifies complicity with a brutal and rising authoritarianism."

I spoke to the Irish Times for this very good and rounded piece on the real-world effects of C***GPT in the humanities classroom: www.irishtimes.com/ireland/educ...

If *your department head and your dean* can be removed for supporting your colleague in teaching in their area of expertise, then you have no academic freedom. In a functional sense, you don't work at a university at all.

Muhammad Hanif on American love for Pakistani military men who love America.

When you stand up and fight; sometimes you lose and sometimes you win. But do you know what happens if you don't fight at all? Nothing.

These are incredibly useful tips for all teachers and professors starting a new academic year...

AI-assisted design hits another one out of the park

My op-ed in the @chicagomaroon.bsky.social on the University of Chicago’s appalling plans to gut the humanities and possibly eliminate the South Asian studies department chicagomaroon.com/48353/viewpo...

Your occasional reminder -- as arrivals on student visas decrease 28% -- that tuition from foreign students counts as an export, which means that every rejected student visa is going to contribute to the US trade deficit. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

The only thing I can say about this paragraph is read it. Sit with it. Read it again. @michaelharriot.bsky.social

i'll say it again, my loud and vigorous support for any democrat who calls for televised hearings and criminal charges for everyone involved in DOGE. this guy should never be able to live in peace again.

Since 2023, translators and interpreters have seen work dry up, rates plummet and their jobs reduced to editing AI-generated output. Some are leaving the field, others are considering bankruptcy. All despite any major upgrade in translation quality. This is how AI is killing translation work:

James Dobson dedicated his life to evil and the world is worse because he made it so on purpose. defector.com/james-dobson...

Every year the consequences of climate crisis become more deadly for Pakistan.

"You do not need the strongest powers of observation to see that crime is a pretext — and not the main reason — for the military occupation of Washington by federal agents and soldiers from the National Guard."

This attack on one of the most important social science research group by BJP is (once again) a harbinger of whats to come here in US.

My best tweet ever was “Let’s put the cialis in socialism” and I’m still mad it didn’t go wildly viral

"Since the Health Ministry only counts recovered bodies, every single unrecovered body is also uncounted." "The minimum scientifically plausible number of deaths attributable to the genocide overall is more than 460,000." #Gaza #Palestine #Israel #USA #Genocide

This story is wild

It is mind blowing to hear Democratic politicians talking about the president sending the military into American cities as a “distraction.” Actually you are all now one degree away from being violently removed from power. The fact that this may not happen does not erase the fact that it may happen.

The Monkey Prince Angada delivers Rama’s message to Ravana, by Manaku, 1725, 📸 by @StephChambers76

about two months ago, i reached out to @boringstein.bsky.social to ask if they'd be open to talking about the incredible videos they were making for Zohran Mamdani's election campaign it turned into a much bigger story than i expected

lol

Can relate

I have lost all patience with the apparently unshakeable conviction that striking a reasonable, moderate pose means assuming the sincerity of transparently pretextual horseshit. Donald Trump does not care about reducing crime in DC. He is testing and normalizing paramilitary deployments in cities.

A great read on UChicago, arguing we’re seeing the result of decades of mismanagement: “The university’s trustees and leaders view it preeminently as a tax-free technology incubator, and its debt load is so great that it is abandoning ideals it once held dear in order to sustain that goal.”

Wow Sally Rooney. Fair play. ‘I feel obliged to state once more that… I too support Palestine Action. … If the British state considers this "terrorism", then perhaps it should investigate the shady organisations that continue to promote my work and fund my activities, such as WH Smith and the BBC.’

The purpose of academic freedom is not to allow faculty to live cushy lives free from criticism or constraint. Its purpose is to allow them to investigate widely and report (or criticize) the results openly, instead of allowing politicians to decide what is true and what is not.

The adamant elite refusal to call bullshit is a big part of How We Got Here. The prevailing cultural attitude for years is you must not, under any circumstances, treat anything as bad faith. You are obligated to find some reasonable idea and engage with that, even if you distort to get there.

to get a sense of scale, Manan Ahmed Alex Gil & Roopika Risam mapped secret ICE facilities in 2018, now expanding. see also the profoundly moving documentary “Borderland: The Line Within” on their project and the cruelty of ICE www.nytimes.com/2024/09/13/m... xpmethod.columbia.edu/torn-apart/v...

"Cox described a climate of confusion and frustration among faculty"

i am surprised that Manan @sepoy.bsky.social doesn’t publicize this piece saying I told you so but please read his eerily prophetic article on the link between the end of humanistic area studies & language learning w/ the rise of military funded LLMs and now AI spheres-journal.org/contribution...

27 years ago, two years after the introduction of effective HIV treatment, the Bay Area Reporter, San Francisco’s lesbian and gay community newspaper, ran ‘No Obits’ as its headline. It was the first edition not to report an AIDS death in almost 15 years.

For all of the educators trying to deal with AI, I did a deep dive in early June and these are the four articles I decided to assign to my students. 1. This is the longest of the bunch, but so wonderfully comprehensive. www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1...

deep dive into alarming proposed restructuring of UChicago's Arts & Humanities Division. Tl;dr—but do read: (1) humanistic fields pay for themselves; (2) Hum depts are not the source of catastrophic financial pressures (3) doing this destroys Arts & Hum, saves no $$ chicagomaroon.com/48231/viewpo...

They’re not saying it because msm has refused to report on the truth about racism & white supremacy in this country in any sustained manner. They will say “Democratic cities” over and over. But what of Portland, Seattle, Nashville, Jacksonville, Miami?

As a University of Chicago graduate who benefited tremendously from its international studies, this is beyond shocking. These are top programs.

This is so insane.

After one too many conversations about the ways GenAI + peer review = shitshow for all involved, I dashed off this slightly polemic commentary on how I think we should talk about GenAI as an epistemic carcinogen. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

you can't say (correctly) "Vote Blue no matter who" and then desert the idea when a left-winger wins, and party leaders even encouraging or winking at opposition to Mamdani at this point are fools

Reached the “let’s see if we can do martial law” stage of all of this a bit earlier than I expected, tbh, but I guess the Epstein thing 🤷🏽‍♂️

BBC International Editor Jeremy Bowen has confirmed that the entire Al Jazeera team in Gaza City has been killed.

An entire news crew working for Al Jazeera was killed by Israel as they sought to bring the world firsthand reporting from #Gaza. Among them was prominent journalist Anas Al-Sharif, who had been previously smeared and threatened by the IDF. #NotATarget Full statement: cpj.org/2025/08/isra...