I mean this is the modern tradition of the World Cup. FIFA are authoritarian hangers-on.

My Viet ABG wife keeps buying an Irish brand of tortilla chips (we are living in England) called 'Blanco Niño,' which I take as an act of aggression.

Per the findings here, you have to wonder if the J6 insurrectionists and ICE agents understand they're being targeted for opportunities expressly because the 1.5 intelligent people in MAGA leadership ID them as manipulable pathetic losers w/ no other options. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/18/w...

I'm so old I can remember when Donald Trump (and the media) spread hysterical lies about the Ebola outbreak in 2014, which Obama handled quite well www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m...

I mean, what a terrible person.

lol of course this isn’t a real cattle ranch but a super elite feeder junior college for Ivy League schools that takes 26 students a year

The other day on the train to Cambridge from Ipswich I just glared at this guy for a full minute before he realized I was reacting to his listening to music on his phone w/ no headphones and turned it down but not off.

I think this article by @tedunderwood.com is essential reading, especially for those who feel nostalgic for pre-AI search technology www.ideals.illinois.edu/items/48937/...

Gift article: how oppressive regimes offer “loyal losers” (who probably hate HATE meritocracies, blame DEI for their failures, etc.) their only possible route to success www.nytimes.com/2026/05/18/w...

Obviously there are a lot of reasons why antisemitism has become such a big force in US politics, but I think the fact that "socialist" ideas are so often transmitted through parasocial, online-mediated agitprop instead of mass organization makes the socialism of fools all but inevitable.

Eg Hasan Piker isn't really a "socialist" in any practical or robustly ideological sense, he's a solo capitalist entrepreneur with an aesthetic affinity for Communist dictatorships. Guess what the socialism of resentful small-time capitalists tends to look like?

Just a reminder to everyone: The idea that the Biden admin was engaged in "weaponization" of government was a myth dreamed up by Russ Vought. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/a-weaponiz...

We’ll see that’s where you’re wrong, Julia. My opinion is *not* invaluable. It’s actually pretty valuable. You can value it at higher than an outside chance at $10 or $250 (implied odds @ ~ $0) or not, but don’t lie to me *and* ask me to complete your survey for free!

My standalone outdoor sink with piping everywhere but its faucet and drain is actually about to play several organ fugues by JS Bach. Look over yonder, the congregation cometh.

This is exactly the kind of person Republicans have elected to office since 2010.

The normal citation practices in my field are bad though.

we had like, 50 years of theory about how the text requires interpretation, how readers construct their own meaning, celebrating aleatory composition, etc., but once a text gets spit out by a machine, all of a sudden we're back to demanding the structuring presence of an author's intent

Steven Rattner: For three years, there were more job openings than unemployed workers — at peak, 2 jobs per job-seeker.

That has now flipped under Trump, and unemployed workers outnumber available jobs for the first time since the pandemic.

What's your highest and most recent athletic achievement?

You have to think that by doing all of this brazen corruption out in the open, as part of an effort to normalize personalist autocracy, they are just delaying and fueling the inevitable, which is accountability before the law. Most people in this country will not rest until justice is served.

I don’t think this kind of thing gets enough attention as a partial explanation for what ails the US. The conditions for killing the experience of society and anything good that comes with it. www.axios.com/2026/05/19/e...

but there's something extremely bizarre about the outcome "the president cannot wrong the state in a legally actionable way, but the state can wrong the president in a legally actionable way." 9/

The big story is about the unappropriated, misappropriated funds being dumped into an account for the enrichment of (in some to-be-determined combination) Trump personally, his personal lawyers and political lieutenants, and his insurrectionist rioting henchmen. 1/

Few things aggravate me more than a US American expat adopting a pseudo-English accent in England.

I remember from the first Trump term that the raw force of stupidity and cruelty of the Trump universe made academics and PMC miserable, reactive, and stupid in turn. Just noting that it’s happened again.

I say without hyperbole that this is the most brazenly corrupt action in US Presidential history. That it does not immediately lead to impeachment is a dangerous sign of how far the rule of law has declined.

"Would-be authoritarians don’t need to staff their regimes with ideological true believers, offer extreme enticements or impose draconian punishments in order to make successful power grabs. They just need to figure out how to target their ideal labor pool: the frustrated and mediocre."

We’re gonna see more of the literary-Modernist appraisal loop playing out in awarding prizes to stochascript generated by models trained on instrumental literary Modernism and more respected writers using LLM tools, as these are obvious developments.

At the "writing on paper" stage that's easy, and I think in-class exams &c work fine for the first year or two of college. But at some point students have to do experiments and long projects. And I suspect the bridge that gets them there is learning a lot about the limits & capabilities of AI. +

“Roughly three-quarters of those children… are likely U.S. citizens”

First, they taxed the private jets And I did not speak out. fortune.com/2026/05/16/n...

They're stealing billions of your money to pay off violent right-wing psychos while doing everything in their power to spike gas up to $5 a gallon, make groceries into a luxury and hand the country over to the oligarchs who want to permanently replace you.

I’ve been saying for months now: if I were running for office today, my signature issue would be accountability before the law. Every single ICE agent unmasked and scrutinized for civil rights violations. Every lying DoJ attorney disbarred. Every corruption and murder prosecuted.

All of these people are anti-American.

“.. We spotted nine Polymarket accounts .. who made collectively $2.4 million betting almost exclusively on U.S. Military operations. .. “.. Now, here is the crazy part. 98% win rates.” @mediaite.com www.mediaite.com/media/news/6...

Always complicated to explain, but it's as logical to describe people of the ancient world as "white" or "black" as it is to describe them as liberal or conservative.

As an avid pedestrian and pedestrian rights and safety advocate in my community I feel a lot of pressure to ally with cyclists, but what every pedestrian knows is that cyclists have car driver energy. They will take undue right of way bc move fast on vehicle and demand you duck and cover.

More here, including sources for these claims. www.chalkbeat.org/2026/03/24/c... I agree that there remain many big open questions about the future of higher education. But any predictions about the future need to start with a basic understanding of the present.

These idiots are gonna make me become anti- anti-postmodernism again for the sake of pedantry.

Corruption.

Nope. It’s true we’re in a period of credibility collapse, but it’s not about generational behavior (unless maybe boomers). It’s about science and tech being big business and big government for long enough that people can rationally if incorrectly suspect ulterior motives.

Leaked image of new Apple EV.

No, this argument is ahistorical. Read Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. Read Shapin and Schaffer on ‘virtual witnessing’ at the dawn of the historical Enlightenment. It’s true there’s nothing new about this understanding of truth. It’s how truth has worked for as long as we know.

This is really the heart of my argument, and I hope it resonates widely. With shoutouts to Althusser, Machiavelli, @profmsinha.bsky.social, and @jvl.bsky.social

Computational research is certainly a new set of habits. Usually the first thing I do in the morning when I get out of bed is brush my teeth, not ‘oh shit I better start running this ML classifier now, it’s going to take a while…’

Face / Off sequel but it’s just Nic Cage’s facial hair clippings glued on

Just one 18th c novel on the list, Tristram Shandy, referred to as an ‘anti-novel.’ www.theguardian.com/books/ng-int...

"Writing is thinking." This phrase went viral recently (from lnkd.in/gYj2c9uE), often quoted in the context of objections to use of AI in drafting academic prose. In Nature Reviews Bioengineering we respond: "Thinking is not only writing." Preview below. Shareable full access link: rdcu.be/fiuYi

Palpate the Casbah