If Canada were smart about vacuuming up US talent we'd look to bring people like Alex over. Awful he's been forced out like this.

The replies to this are extraordinary and reveal how odd many BlueSky users are

It may seem hopeless at this point, when any kind of just peace is unlikely and distant, but now more than ever these projects are important.

The Guardian published its list of “100 Best Novels.” If you polled one thousand random members of the reading public, they might come up with a 1000 different “100 Best Books” lists, and every single list would be equally valid, to the reader themselves. My latest: medium.com/p/342ed16138...

There is absolutely no reason for prediction markets to exist. None.

yes of course we expect authors to check every citation what the fuck are you talking about

“.. 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...

the academic bargain has been this: you sacrifice $100k+ of lost income & savings to go to grad school to get a TT job making less than an avg. middle manager, if you're VERY lucky, but to counterbalance that you get job security forever. w\o that last part the ROI on academic labor makes no sense.

You may remember during DOGE chainsawing USAID early on they said they wouldn't kill PEPFAR. Not true. Massive cuts in funding and implementation details, and we're holding HIV meds hostage to African countries signing away mineral rights to the U.S.

Months into the ceasefire, Israeli officials barred thirty-seven international N.G.O.s. A Doctors Without Borders clinic is carrying on without antibiotics, or even chairs for patients.

A point that the great @donmoyn.bsky.social often makes is that the handing out of governing spoils is a signpost on the road to authoritarianism. I think this quote captures this very well, and it's an exclamation point on this madness. 6/6 newrepublic.com/article/2105...

Today is Nakba Day, when we commemorate the roughly 750,000 Palestinians who were forcibly displaced by Zionist militias during the 1948 Palestine War. Acknowledging the Nakba and making restitution is the precursor to building a better future for everyone living in the region.

This seems alarmingly in excess of the risk or offence

Good thread, and especially relevant to the question of why US scholars aren't rapidly exiting.

In May's Show & Tell, @craigsilverman.bsky.social and I are joined by Amnesty International's Barbara Marcolini. Barbara spoke about her role as a journalist in a human rights org. and walked us through how she documented the Israeli military's destruction of civilian infrastructure in Lebanon.

“In Israel and in Iran, replace the tyrant” Gaza Street, Jerusalem, facing the home of the Israeli tyrant. Credit: Orna Kuperman

What's gutting about this is that Juniper seems to have had a family who supported and loved her, she was in a community that has been explicitly welcoming to trans people, and a man still murdered her. She was living the life so many trans people can only dream of, and it simply didn't matter.

By, erm, me

NEW: A class action lawsuit is accusing OpenAI of sharing ChatGPT chat queries (!) + other personal data with Meta and Google. Reminder: no matter how friendly your chatbot is, it's probably surveilling you. futurism.com/artificial-i...

Peer review is not equipped to fix this, or any other form of research fraud. We rely, collectively, on researchers' own sense of integrity. However, I fully endorse strong sanctions when fraud is detected. Any submission with a fraudulent citation should be rejected, or if published, retracted.

I wrote about AI notetakers, the erosion of consent, and the hidden cost of the permanent record. Have you changed the way you speak in meetings since the bots arrived? blog.yaelwrites.com/you-are-bein...

I calculated the Pentagon's "black budget".... Using Claude, the LLM banned from the Pentagon by Hegseth, I went through the military’s initial budget submissions. I found $126 billion in programs either explicitly marked as classified, or described only through a code word. (1/2)

Scoop from me and Gabriel Stargardter in Paris: French authorities are investigating whether BlackCore - alleged to be an Israeli disinfo firm - interfered in the March municipal elections in Marseille, Toulouse, and Roubaix. www.reuters.com/business/med...

A classic thought-terminating cliché: whenever you encounter it, ask the people making these idiotic claims to present one example, piece of data, or any basis for what they’re whining about. They will twist in the wind.

Also just your periodic reminder that indiscriminate scraping to train AI violates nearly every fair information practice. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

The definitive, complete report on Hamas' sexual crimes has finally come out– and the Israeli government has nothing to do with it. Zero. @ntarnopolsky.bsky.social interviewed here, who adds insightful and vital analysis you won’t find elsewhere Listen in: theworld.org/segments/202...

Really extraordinary reporting by @natashabertrand.bsky.social et al. A few observations. 1. You don't appoint a former CIA Ground Branch bigwig ambassador to Mexico without serious escalatory intent. Likely functioning as on-the-ground covert operations general. www.cnn.com/2026/05/12/p...

This was a deeply upsetting thing to read but it is good to see the report released. www.civilc.org/silenced-no-...

A report published Tuesday by an Israeli civil investigation committee found that sexual and gender-based violence committed by Hamas & its collaborators during the October 7 attack was "systematic, widespread and integral" to both the assault itself & its aftermath. www.haaretz.com/israel-news/...

An interesting lesson here about the advance & limits of battlefield transparency. In 1991 the US failed to hit a single Iraqi Scud missile, despite huge air/ground efforts. This time it hit a lot—but still only a fraction of the total. Sensing *over large areas* remains hard. From NYT report:

Holy shit, the CIA is doing targeted assassinations in Mexico now, like, semi-officially:

this is very clearly and directly genocidal: "Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group" is explicitly listed as a genocidal act in the 1948 convention, and Russia's intent to destroy Ukrainians as a people has been made clear over and over again

the key element of the crime is not the mass killing of people, but the intent to destroy a people in whole or in part. this is both a harder legal threshold to cross, bc you have to demonstrate intent, & an "easier" empirical threshold, bc no one has to die, than conversational use of the term

The Gallup Poll survived its very messy breakup with CNN in 2006, but I don’t think it will survive this. No one has figured out how to remove systematic errors or increase reliability or validity of simulated aggregate results. It’s killing its most visible brand for very bad reasons; what a shame.

It appears that Instructure (makers of Canvas) just straight up paid off the criminal gang www.instructure.com/incident_upd...

Today Deborah Lipstadt— who built a career on defending the memory of the Shoah & demanding historical justice for its victims— is amplifying a call for New York Times editors to face Nuremberg-style public hanging

New article in @isq-jrnl.bsky.social: what encourages states to embrace the climate security agenda, and approach it in particular ways? Based on interviews conducted in 2022-3, the story is messy & diverse but makes a case for problem-driven research in IR. academic.oup.com/isq/article/...

“in wrenching interviews, Palestinians have recounted to me a pattern of widespread Israeli sexual violence against men, women and even children — by soldiers, settlers, interrogators in the Shin Bet internal security agency and, above all, prison guards.” www.nytimes.com/2026/05/11/o...

👀 Toronto and Montreal are duking it out to host a new NATO-backed defence bank. The bank is "intended to improve access to financing for companies operating in defence and security sectors often considered too risky by traditional lenders." How montrealgazette.com/news/montrea...

I look forward to seeing how PM Carney puts this into action, taking it beyond me rhetoric.

The fact that Nigel Farage, who has credibly been accused of antisemitic harassment of Jewish students as a young person, was invited to this rally against antisemitism, but Zack Polanski, the sole Jewish leader of a UK party, was not, shows what a joke this is. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

Oh my. This is spectacular. sinceyouarrived.world/taken

I don’t know whether Ukraine will try to attack the Moscow parade today. But that after more than 4 years of the Russian war against Ukraine the Russian president is afraid of attacks against Moscow is a victory for Ukraine.

There's a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.

In my recent conversation with Politico on my new coauthored book, Auditing AI, I discuss why AI audits matter, why accountability can’t be left only to computer scientists, and how we can evaluate systems for real-world harms. www.politico.com/newsletters/...

You do not hate the DOGE people enough. Boys with toys breaking things they were too arrogant and lazy to understand.

Very good to see. While Canada has recognized Palestine as a state, it has some way to go to actually treating it as a state. This is a good & important development in that regard. PM Carney speaks w President of the State of Palestine Mahmoud Abbas: www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/read...

Reposting given fresh reports that the U.S. is again bombing Iran.

They hacked Canvas during finals week. This is why the faculty need a secure ballroom.