Aquesta setmana / this week!

Many thanks to Núria Silleras-Fernández for including me in this special issue of eHumanista on pleasure and pain in the medieval and early modern Iberian world -- and in such good company! www.ehumanista.ucsb.edu/volumes/66

Another university getting rid of things you could only ever do at a university and replacing them with stuff a 13-year-old can do on a phone

The way Altman talks about parenting is really revealing I think. Whether it's sales pitch or deep rooted philosophy, the ordinary tasks of living and working are just too unfathomably hard to imagine trying to do. They want you to conceive of the labor that makes you a person as impossible.

Concerned about ICE's $45 billion plan to convert warehouses into immigration detention centers? This is what they'll look like inside. From ICE's plan for the Social Circle, GA facility. Each little dot: a person. www.socialcirclega.gov/home/showpub...

I'm very grateful to Emily C. Francomano, Sol Miguel-Prendes, and @albertlloret.bsky.social for their thoughtful responses to _Alone Together_ in the latest issue of La corónica. It's hard to express the feeling of being read with such sensitivity and critical acumen. I learned a lot about my book!

i’ll end this little brainstorm by just asking what it is, exactly, that the MAGA right likes about the United States, since it explicitly rejects those things that make this nation distinctive — its pluralism, its revolutionary heritage and egalitarian aspirations, and its republican institutions

The stories weren’t played together on A1, but they probably should’ve been. We’ve come a long way as a planet from the Arab spring days when tech bros touted themselves as harbingers of freedom.

Yesterday morning kids were sent running from their bus stop in panic because ICE showed up. This guy at today’s ICE Out of Lindenwold protest is a must watch 😭. @maddow.bsky.social

At this point, we should treat almost all the media coverage about AI consciousness, ethical consequence, personhood etc as downstream from AI corporate marketing and comms efforts. It’s all they have since the gloss wore off the initial excessive claims.

give me the ferments and free my soul I’m only eatin yogurt at the super bowl I’m RFK

A desperate plea sent to me by a Minneapolis resident who's been on the front lines since the beginning of the ICE occupation:

Instead of just outright banning killer robots in the classroom, we should be having discussions about the *ethical use* of killer robots

Unmarked car, no lights or police insignia. Masked armed men leap out. Victim not in the act of committing any crime. This is not how a serious federal law enforcement agency acts in a free society. How is this not supposed to be a “right wing paramilitary force loyal to the regime”?

An entire community of thousands, here legally, having been demonized with deranged lies about eating pets, is about to be arbitrarily DECLARED illegal so they can be forcibly ethnically cleansed. I don’t want to hear one more fucking word about comparisons to Nazi Germany being overwrought.

Alex Pretti’s last words were “are you ok?” said the woman next to him who ICE also pepper sprayed in the face.

Minnesota: "School officials say the [5-year-old] child was used as bait. They say [ICE] agents made little Liam knock on the door to ask to be let in in order to see if anyone else was home."

You can say Merry Protein again

Fuck Bari Weiss, fuck bootlicking regime propaganda

The more we say to young people "everything that needs to be known is already available to you via this convenient chatbot" the more we signal to them that their brains are vestigial...no need to work on your reading, thinking, or writing skills, machines can do that better. Go scroll.

LLM's provide a simulacrum of what it looks like to "know" something. ChatGPT can not "know," only humans can "know." And "knowing" is a mysterious, precious, unfolding thing...and it used to be the reason why many people went to college, because they wanted to experience "knowing" new things.

This is a thread of major media outlets falsely anthropomorphising the "Grok" chatbot program and in doing so, actively and directly removing responsibility and accountability from individual people working at X who created a child pornography generator (Elon Musk, Nikita Bier etc) #1: Reuters

I learned a lot from this reflection on investigative journalism and Bari Weiss's spiking of the "60 Minutes" CECOT story.

From Amnesty International:

I don't understand how anyone can watch how blatantly Grok is manipulated to answer the way ownership desires it to and then act like the other LLM chatbots couldn't possibly be similarly but less obviously compromised to produce responses in whatever way corporate interests and priorities dictate.

I’ve come to believe that we need to gather considerable forces and a campaign to demand the removal of face masks by ICE, Border Patrol, FBI and police. It is a practice in conflict with the principles of transparency & accountability that are central to the concept of democracy.

I miss translating literature so much. last week I read a chapter from henry berlin’s “alone together” for @albertlloret.bsky.social’s class and couldn’t resist trying to translate the ausiàs march excerpts into portuguese. here’s one example (lines 9-12) from poem XIII.

I'm shaking almost too hard to type. I entered SLC airport and heard screams and cries for help. I could see people gathered around, watching. I sped over to discover this woman face down on the floor, four grown men pushing her down, while she cried "HELP ME" and pled for her child.

The real generational divide is people who refuse to watch a video if it could be an article versus people who refuse to read an article if it could be a video

On the National Day of Catalonia, explore Catalonia’s literature, history & identity with a free issue of Catalan Review, published for the North American Catalan Society. Available online at: bit.ly/CATR-36-1 #Catalan @wviestenz.bsky.social @berlihe.bsky.social

IMO the biggest differences between universities are: - does the library have books (not only digital subscriptions) and a budget - are there staff for support/admin work or is it someone’s second job - do students have time to study and faculty time to teach No big names or tech matter as much.

US Park Police now doing traffic stops in DC, and charged at me with a baton for filming closer than they liked

I often make this point but while we've all known for a while that this is what they wanted in the end, I think it is notable that high-level officials now across different branches of government are explicitly saying, straight up, that they want a military occupation of the United States

GROW UP - dashare.zone ADMIN

CFP - Survival, Resistance, Rebirth - 20th International Colloquium of the North American Catalan Society, The State University of New York at Buffalo, April 16-18, 2026. Paper and panel proposals due by 10/15/2025 @berlihe.bsky.social

the urge to be an authoritative interpreter of tech to your fellow benighted humanists is an essentially middle-management instinct

What infuriates me so much about this new operation is that it is literally punishing people for following the rules and showing up to their court hearings. It is so toxic to the basic concept of following the rules. It is an operation designed by people who hate the concept of the rule of law.

Grok where are the snows of yesteryear

A report from the scene of a horrifying kidnapping on the streets of Worcester, MA today by @billshaner.bsky.social www.welcometohellworld.com/they-dont-ne...

Imagine if projector salespeople told you projectors were great in the classroom not because they let everybody see an image better but rather because now every course could be about projectors, because projectors are the future and the time to opt out of talking about projectors all day has passed.

SHIT GPT - dashare.zone ADMIN

Van Hollen details why he thinks the government of El Salvador is making a huge mistake in turning itself into a concentration camp for Trump

Sometimes you don't need a family office. You need a FAMILY office ... www.wsj.com/politics/elo...

you want to "prove" that birthright citizenship isn't what it has obviously meant for 157 years? go ahead. but don't pretend you aren't interested in this because daddy trump needs someone to give his prejudices a thin veneer of academic plausibility