1/ A longtime Wired editor just wrote a mush-brained essay about how he totally missed the political rot of Silicon Valley (& still doesn't get it). But in the late 1990s, a Wired journalist warned of a toxic ideology bubbling up from tech. Paulina Borsook has largely been erased. Let's change that

Is more of your University's budget going to consultants to...balance the budget? That's a business model: "The increasing involvement of accountancy firms in nonauditing work, including anti-corruption services, illustrates how corruption narratives operate as market-making strategies..."

"Corruption narratives, like witchcraft accusations, offer a lens for analyzing social relations, economic interests, and hidden structures of power."

Repost with the politically most awful thing you've ever been asked to review: Mine was a journal submission in which the author argued that because he used to employ a gardener from Gaza this made him a good Zionist and Dubois would have been a Zionist actually.

Reminds me of a European Research Council grant I was asked to review once that wanted to study how far right politics could be countered by better understanding how immigrant communities "self-ostracize." I said it was the dumbest idea I'd ever heard and they haven't asked to review anything since.

The even more unbelievable crime fact (which I learned relatively recently) is that burglary has fallen by more than 90% since the 1990s. Did anyone notice? Nope. Does anyone believe it? Nope. But is is true? It is!

Obviously I agree, but I'd argue it's far worse: the more university leaders have internalised the idea that their only function is jobs training, the more hostile they've become to the very sorts of learning that later command a wage premium on the job market...

Book launch for “Methods in the Philosophy of Science: a user’s guide”. Ftf in Exeter and online on the 29th of Sept feat Sophie Veigl, Kerry McKenzie, Hasok Chang, and me. It should be fun! (the book will be open access in July, contact me in the meantime) www.exeter.ac.uk/events/detai... #philsci

Youth pastor, pulling up a chair and turning it backwards as he sits down at your table: "hey kids! Do you know who ELSE overcame cancel culture?"

For all its problems, I think Graeber was really onto something in /Bullshit Jobs/ when he suggested that politics would come to be increasingly defined by the resentments of the unproductive segments of the economy towards the productive ones...

Every politician in this country just fundamentally hates people lol

"It took me an hour and change to drill down my bio to be that good... I had to edit it, edit it, edit it down. I had to keep talking to it." What if the thing propping up the stock market is a bunch of affluent professionals who can't deal with their big feelings about staring at a blank page?

Mark Zuckerberg demonstrates that his AI smart glasses suck and don't work: defector.com/mark-zuckerb...

How did "free speech" become a cudgel to silence dissent? My latest in @bostonreview.bsky.social www.bostonreview.net/forum/the-ri...

US comedians would be advised to retool their craft by learning about what Soviet called "stiob." Here's a serious-minded place to stop: anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Student protests at Yale in 1974 motivated the creation of the Federalist Society, which gave us six current Supreme Court justices. After the university administration punished protesting students, William Shockley returned to Yale in 1975 to deliver his message. www.thecrimson.com/article/1975...

It was mirroring and projection because these solutions to "cancel culture" were more of what was supposed to be the problem: discipline, repression, silencing, and punishment.

One of the main issues here is that the speech of mostly marginalized private individuals like students and minorities has been transmogrified into the violation of free speech rights. "Maybe we shouldn't invite this person to speak" is not a violation of free speech. It is speech...

This essay, by an Egyptian-American former New Yorker staff fact-checker, is an incredible read And incredibly damning Huge recommendation

This is a great point. I’ve also got $10 that says at least one of the people from this ‘Institute’ will clip BlueSky posts and share them as vindication and evidence that they’re ’making the right people mad.’

Rather than seeing this as a political project, I would suggest it's better to see this as a reflection of an economy increasingly centered around the extremely niche emotional needs of people with billions of dollars to spare...

The Paranoid Style is an organic, homegrown American style of politics. Even if Russia were minding its own business, we would still have conspiracy theories blossoming here.

5/ These practices left behind an immense charnel ground: a bone accumulation covering more than an hectare, over a meter thick in some places. The product of tens of thousands of years of large mammals (maily horses and reindeer) butchery.

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...

Nepal's govt reversed the social media ban & have imposed a curfew but protesters still out on the streets against the gov't corruption & against the state violence that killed 19 people & injured hundreds.

Thanks to @brandonshimoda.bsky.social for pointing to Nour on twitter who's foregrounding innumerable ways to help Gazas directly—with water, food, medical care, rent. DM her there at @TF7_AAWLA if you want to help out. Honored to share this water truck delivery with @lalehkhalili.bsky.social

They just think jargon like "high salience" makes them into strategic wizards!

I think it's the opposite. I see Dawn of Everything as making the central point that human civilization was capable of anything, and it independently experimented with many different forms of organization before choosing hierarchy and capitalism. It implies agency where the ET theory does not.

Now available for advance ordering and/or free download… Anarchy in Alifuru: The History of Stateless Societies in the Maluku Islands by Bima Satria Putra www.minorcompositions.info?p=1596

"I was lying before but now you can trust me" is an absolutely wild argument to make, but many people are doing it...

*We regret to inform you that the only stuff we're allowed to build is the torment nexus

I'm reading Omar El Akkad's One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. This quote at the start of Chaoter 6 is astonishing: it flies straight out the other side of passive voice. Seemingly, the bullet got lost and killed a 'young lady', or *a child*, as a decent person would call her.

I absolutely agree with this, and I've always been slightly uncomfortable with how Rayner is 'framed' (which is only partly down to her). Enemies and supporters see her as 'working class', but much of this boils down to the cultural politics of having a northern accent (as I do)... /1

The thing that makes it hard for me to feel too bad about Rayner is that New Labour and New-New Labour politics is largely based around doing exactly this sort of stuff to people on benefits who don't even have the time or money to get the right legal advice...

A devastating review of "Abundance" (the book) in @nybooks.com. I mean, whew!

Will the absence of sausage rolls in America mark the moment its citizens notice how far their continent has fallen behind?

Pairs well with the story about the American high school where parents start queueing in their cars at ten o'clock in the morning to pick them up...

The irony of the photo above this headline. The look on my face was of anger + sadness. Placards of every journalist killed by Israel were handed out. But the number of dead journalists outnumbered those willing to show up in support our Palestinian colleagues. Shame novaramedia.com/2025/09/04/b...

Every dunk on a post published by The Argument is a data point they’ll use when they sell the publication to some ultra billionaire and move on to their next equity scam.

My new book has a cover! Out July 2026 from @uchicagopress.bsky.social

This absolute banger

‘One veteran shaman, returning from his first experience performing at a top-dollar eco-lodge, asked the ayahuasca researcher Stephan Beyer why these people had come halfway round the world to see him when they weren’t sick.’ @mikejay.bsky.social on shamanism: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Hello, I'm Head CBS News Person Bari Weiss. My top story tonight is that I have been silenced by cancel culture. Your TVs have been jammed and you can't change the channel. That's to prevent the Woke Left from silencing me. Our top story tomorrow will be that I am being silenced by cancel culture.

I often think of William Morris' thoughts on the "education of desire". What are the patterns and practices that can help our students feel their appetite for longer/calmer forms of thinking over the incessant cacophony of short form videos leeching out of every surface of their lives.

In Memoriam: BRINKLEY MESSICK 1946 - 2025

cc: U.S.A.