Kind of surprised that this hasn't been bigger news. It's finals week for a whole lot of universities, and yet, Canvas (a learning/grading platform used by ~9,000 schools globally) is currently inaccessible because of a pay-or-have-your-data-leaked hack. www.insidehighered.com/news/tech-in...

Drink up! I'm a 2026 James Beard journalism finalist — for a story I wrote about Little Rock's annual eggnog contest. Read it in The New Territory (newterritorymag.com), a spiffy mag about middle America.

How did I miss the Habermas obit? Here's to a line of genius thinking that I can use in just about any class with just about any students for great understanding & critique!

“There’s no country on earth with more righteous and noble principles, and there’s never been a country where those principles have been abused as horribly.” — Elvis Costello, on America, back in ‘86

This 💯

One of my primary to-do’s remaining in life is accomplish something so odd & arcane that Sandi Toksvig will summon the story and tell it on @qi.com

We talk & talk about the digital stuff in a #hologram experience, but this piece is a nice reminder of how important, challenging, and time-consuming the construction of the physical space is to their presentation. #ABBA

We so rarely discuss ethics in the context of #holograms but, per usual, it tends to show up in the research: www.sciencedirect.com/org/science/... Good data here!

@tcmtv.bsky.social programmed ‘Gaslight’ last night during the blather. #wink

Someone has sure already made this observation but the fact they can convert all those empty warehouses into prison camps means they could have converted them into housing, community centers, job training centers or, hell, libraries or schools all along. It’s always a matter of will not resources.

Any former protest-music students still follow me? Ever timely …

"... users of LLM-powered systems are highly susceptible to becoming interactionally entrenched in culturally essentialized narratives" (i.e., echo chambers)

Read the speech. "You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration, when integration becomes the source of your subordination." What I wouldn't give for someone in Congress to talk like this (with their snarling mouths, not their timid thumbs). #MarkCarney #Resist

Permanent alibi

Unconscionable clickbait from the NYTimes, holding Anita's hand to help stir the shitpot of speculation without *any* serious reporting to support the claims. Golly, pretty scrolling pix tho. #hst #huntersthompson #gonzo

"The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little." — FDR, today in 1937

"... it is becoming apparent that scientific endeavor for the betterment of humankind and preservation of life is unattainable under the current system."

One of the more profound and inspiring comm/media/cultural studies lectures/sermons/rants I’ve heard in a while: youtu.be/EMWPs75q2_Q?... Students, get ready, this is a preface for next week! #keepitweird @hankgreen.bsky.social

"Giving AI a face is not just a marketing ploy but a biological inevitability."

@kanopy.com OMG, ***trailers*** please

Incisive analysis of parallels between Epstein case and R. Kelly, from the guy who gets it, @jimderogatis.bsky.social

Intriguing additional context for #hologram usage: www.police1.com/swat/how-hol...

💯👏🏼🎬

Always a good writing day when I snatch the Heraclitus off the shelf

A smart manifesto about AI & education from unionized minds: www.aaup.org/reports-publ... "It is essential that higher education workers are in control of technological advancements affecting their employment."

Scurrying to drafting board to craft a syllabus called The Ideologies of Fonts. The conservatism of serifs! The liberalism of sans serifs! The ranting progressivism of italics! #Calibri

Great read about the power of close reading (adaptable to a surprising variety of contexts!): www.bostonreview.net/articles/the...

Nobody puts Piggy in the corner

Started 'Katabasis,' laughing thru the tears, feels like the most thorough parody of academia since 'Moo'! "Good jobs were vanishingly rare in academia. Alice very much wanted one. She wouldn’t know what to do with herself otherwise. She had trained her entire life to do this one thing ...” #preach

Pondering the state of expertise and credentials vs. social impact and change through the lens of ‘The Lowdown’ and whatever the hell a “truthstorian” is: thepickup.com/whats-a-trut...

Such fun presenting today at the @hauntedfutures.bsky.social conference, hosted by the film & screen folks at U College Cork. Our panel explored liminal spaces, fictional architecture, and my own work on digital apparitions — oh my! Best to the whole haunted bunch!

Important that this analysis connects student news orgs to media literacy overall.

I feel like baking them all a very gay cake

The New York Times quickly sending out Douthat to argue that Mamdani’s victory doesn’t really matter is so predictable it borders on self-parody. Remember, folks: Every time the Right wins an election, it’s an undeniable expression of the will of the people. If a lefty wins, it’s just a blip.

ChatGPT's co-opting of my beloved em dash is really bothering me. "The dash is a time-honored and exceedingly normal tool for constructing sentences! ... we think and speak in thoughts, which interrupt and introduce and complicate one another in a neat little dance ..."

"But #GenXers face a long future of precarity, debt, and climate catastrophe, as millennials do; some of us just lived, for a while, in a mental atmosphere not yet shaped by this knowledge. This, perhaps, was a privilege, if only in the way that a fool’s paradise is better than none at all."

As October dawns, I'm quite excited to be booked for the Haunted Futures (@hauntedfutures.bsky.social) conference next month. Digital ghosts & media specters & archival wraiths, oh my!

In the Midwest? Like this lovely new midtempo #TaylorSwift album (particularly "Opalite")? You'd probably really dig Lissie ...

Nice to see #ZachBryan tap into some of his Okie protest-folk roots. Where's everybody else?

“A key finding is that 52% of all autocratization episodes become U-Turns, which increases to 73% when focusing on the last 30 years. The vast majority of U-Turns (90%) lead to restored or even improved levels of democracy.” #turnthebeataround

Wow! #WoodyGuthrie and especially Marjorie are dancing a jig today!

When I was a boy, it was candy cigarettes

Make it make sense.

Clerk at the drugstore today, out of the blue: “Are you a professor?” Yup, why? “You just have that energy. I bet you’re good.” Thanks, tell a search committee! #academicchatter

If someone had only told me at a much younger age that #buddhism is basically nothing but numbered to-do lists, I’d be levitating by now

"Well, there are certain sections of [Chicago], Major, that I wouldn't advise you to try to invade ..." #Casablanca

'It's so cool that cities are like "pweeease only turn your AC on if you're actively dying and don't go below 79" while the Al nobody asked for is slurping up the power grid to make 1 image of a girl with 5 tits' – @LaurenKayes

"I've never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure." -Clarence Darrow