Chicagohenge Classic. Captured on this day a decade ago, the Autumnal Equinox on Weekend Rewind.

I know we all hate to log into LinkedIn, but you might wanna do to opt out of this 😘

I genuinely cannot believe that Ezra Klein said we should run pro-life candidates in Kansas, Ohio, and Missouri; three states that recently held abortion referendums where the pro-choice side won!

moments ago, ice agents again came out of the broadview detention/“professing” facility to escort a silver suv out of the lot. one of the agents picked up and threw congressional candidate kat abughazaleh to the ground.

If you’re on academia dot edu, let me suggest that you strongly consider deleting your account.

LiveAI demo fails on the first prompt at Meta Connect 2025. #Meta #AI #LiveAI

lady WHAT are you on about. surely this will go over great with the students at the women’s college she runs…

Style lessons from Robert Redford, one of the most stylish men in the last century. 🧵

I wrote a thing. As someone who survived the 1970s and kept the receipts.

Would you like some good news? A new vaccine has just been approved for protecting koalas from chlamydia, which is one of their leading causes of death.

Lost in the Texas A&M news is that the entire crusade is the product of a former labradoodle breeder turned State Rep whose stunts and grandstanding are so insufferably transparent that even his Republican colleagues despise him. Meet Brian Harrison, winner of Texas Monthly’s 2025 Cockroach award:

Hello, I didn’t check the delivery address when I ordered some Chipotle delivery just now so if you are in Chicago and would like a chicken burrito go to: The Chicago Hotel Ambassador 1301 N State Pkwy Chicago, IL 60610 It’s at the front desk. Enjoy!

Vaccines are one of the greatest public health achievements in modern medicine. Protecting access is vital to the health and safety of Minnesotans. www.mprnews.org/story/2025/0...

An airplane flying around Soldier Field ahead of the Chicago Bears home opener, is dragging a banner that reads “HEY ICE MASKS ARE FOR CUCKS”

It's seeming likelier and likelier that AI really could eliminate a lot of jobs very soon. Just not in the way boosters have suggested. www.theatlantic.com/economy/arch...

If I see the salt truck video one more time I'm going to lose my fucking mind. They're not being used to block the city off from ICE. They're walling off the Taste of Chicago. The city uses salt trucks as temporary infrastructure.

Alright, so I've been afraid to say this out loud, but I think after today, I can say it: In the first Battle of Los Angeles, the good people of LA County have prevailed. We beat ICE back. 1/

Chicago forever

There is no military in the world prepared or powerful enough for the Dan Ryan during rush hour.

Just a reminder to check for your name in this list of books that OpenAI trained from. If your name is there, they probably owe you several thousand dollars. OpenAI cried that if everyone eligible author files, the company will go bankrupt, so I'm alerting every author I have ever spoken to.

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity. 1/n

gift link to dr. susan monarez’s piece in the wall street journal this morning.

My story on the front page of the Sun-Times today: www.everygoddamnday.com/2025/09/as-c...

WHAT

truly I need you guys to know that "North Chicago" is an extremely deceptive town name and that Great Lakes Naval Station is way way closer to WISCONSIN than Chicago. You can take a commuter train. But it's not even peak rush hour rn and it's a 90+ minute drive from Great Lakes to Michigan Avenue.

The thing that is irresponsible that these companies are doing is that they are selling a product they do not understand the functioning of fully, and that they are asserting that it is fit for purposes they have no non-motivated reason to believe it is safe or fit for

Man can't make any statement without mentioning 911

Pritzker: "No one in the administration -- the president or anybody under him -- has called anyone in my administration or me. It's clear that in secret they're are planning this invasion with US troops."

Those willing, by contrast, to trade away the rights and dignity of transgender people or the poor cannot be considered friends of democracy any more than those who were willing to countenance second-class status for blacks and Jews.

If you are okay with this, if you think this is justified, if you think people living on the street have brought this upon themselves, if you think this is good leadership, you may be able to fool yourself that you care about others but you don’t fool me

we should make up more random proverbs though, "a wet sheep is twice the price," that kind of thing.

mood (global)

Great Lakes conveniently has a Metra station for all your protesting needs

Some scientists haven't yet internalized the "why" behind science writing for the public - not just as a service, but for themselves. (I didn't always get it). In this piece for @natrevneuro.nature.com, I draw on the neuroscience of curiosity & decision making to unpack its value. rdcu.be/eCGr7

Conservatives now control federal research funding. The next step: actually manipulating research. A conservative law firm is demanding Brown retract research showing connections between anti-wind groups and the fossil fuel industry. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/25/c...

to get ready for the Minnesota State Fair, here is my Youtube playlist of 13 song that mention the Tilt-a-Whirl (a Minnesota invention) m.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

"Interesting digital humanities data sources": I blogged about 18 datasets for DHy teaching, research, & tool-learning I've bookmarked, & why they might be useful—plus some relevant tools, events, & resources re:data at risk:

www.nytimes.com/2025/08/25/u... As a fight over the future of elite higher education consumes university leaders and politicians, most college students live in a very different world with very different challenges.

People are shouting "LOOK HE'S THE BEST WE CAN DO" about the Governor of California, meanwhile the Governor of Illinois is out here talking like John Wick while *also* standing up for trans people.

The ghoulish fixation on preexisting conditions and starving children in Gaza is bizarre. In all modern conflicts the death toll is measured in excess deaths. This is something I wrote about Congo's civil war almost 20 years ago:

all of this a longwinded way of saying: while I don't pretend to know what the intentions of Third Way or Nichols are, what they're saying is *functionally* reliant on overt right wing propaganda in a straightforward way. Best, imo, to read it as an active extension of said right wing propaganda

One of the things I’ve learned a lot about this past year is how in many smaller towns, the sheriff, judge, real estate developer and construction company are either the same person, same family or just as good as. It’s all landlords all the way down.

ChatGPT and other LLMs aren't about to produce superintelligence, but if this is it, it's still changed the world. Not necessarily for the better. I did a big picture look at AI, comparing it to search and social media, On business, politics, education, misinfo, ability to grasp reality, and more.

Trump proposes to rescind AIDS funds. Congress rejects the proposal. So Trump and his henchman Russ Vought just refuse to spend the money and try to hide that decision from Congress and the public. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/21/h...

On the left: Nate Cavanagh, a 28-year-old DOGE staffer and college dropout. On the right: Mohammad Halimi, a 53-year-old exiled Afghan scholar. This is the story of how DOGE targeted Halimi on social media. Then the Taliban took his family. 🧵

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

Illinois is launching a first-of-its-kind legal hotline for LGBTQ+ individuals — Illinois Pride Connect. As the only state in the nation that will provide free legal advice to protect the LGBTQ+ community, we'll help fight ignorance with information and cruelty with compassion.

45 years ago this month—before a half dozen books and thousands of articles on the band—a shortlived magazine called Trax published the first written words on the Replacements. As Bob Mehr notes in his Replacements book "Trouble Boys," it was barely three weeks since the Mats' first proper club show

Norman Rockwell’s best painting. In addition to the crushing of Hitler’s Mein Kampf (scandalously cropped from many reprints) we have a new symbol of resistance: the sandwich