none of the occupations are over

This looks like an amazing resource, created by people who definitely know what they are about

Harvard's faculty spending its time and limited power on this kind of flakey nonsense during a time when colleges are beset by reckless AI integration and attacks from the federal gov't should be a reason for journalists to STOP acting as if Harvard is some kind of shining exemplar of higher ed.

Which is to say, they fail even to rise to the level of Cool Runnings, remain stuck at the level of Awkawfina's "blaccent" or Lena Dunham's "cornrows."

Something I flagged in AI-assisted essays on Caribbean lit last year that also shows up in this story: probably bc of training data bias, it can't even start to produce a faux-Trinidadian (or Jamaican, or Bajan) idiom, and so drifts toward still implausible but Black-US-sounding phrasing instead.

Every meeting, admin failing the "don't open the meeting by telling faculty how much easier they have it than admin" challenge.

TIL!

NEW on the podcast: REI workers are calling for a national consumer boycott of the popular outdoor sports co-op during it’s annual anniversary sale from May 15-25. I sat down with Ashley, a worker in Greensboro, NC to talk about what’s been happening at the table, boycotts as a tactic, and more.

This seems likely to be pretty effective? Thinking specifically about 17-author papers and the thing that happens to your career/networks if you're the person who drafts the section that gets your 16 co-authors banned.

The current energy crisis is all about artificial scarcity manipulated for short-term geopolitical and economic gain. In an age of transition to continuous and renewable energy, it's infuriating and absurd that we are still expected to consider this as some kind of inevitable or realistic situation.

Academic departments deserve to be saved, supported, resourced, allowed to grow even if they're not "best in the country," "first in the REF," "top-ranked," "at a Russell Group uni," or whatever other austerity-brained nonsense senior managers have been using to flimflam you out of solidarity

If the answer is more surveillance and more punishment and incarceration of already disadvantaged youth then we are asking the wrong questions and considering an insufficient range of options. www.thestranger.com/news/how-fea...

The difficult part of any technological infrastructure that has been incorporated into an institution is that generally the institution has hollowed out whatever services and roles that technological was brought in to modify or replace, so uncoupling is an expensive and messy prospect.

So sick of this anti-intellectual bullshit from Democrats and it’s WILDLY irresponsible in the middle of a full-on GOP war against colleges and universities But also so typical for Democrats to actually help the GOP with their stupid ass wars

I’ve been thinking about this more and more. Even *if* there were a perfect detection tool teachers could use, the very act of shifting our dynamic w our students to one always involving surveillance and distrust is absolutely toxic to the trust necessary for effective learning environments.

Does your institution has a "kindness initiative"? That's all the same project as this coercive-tech-forward version for service workers.

Who is the "they" who are coming for PK Subban? I will fight them.

Their goal is to trap women in motherhood. To raise the birthrate, yes, but more importantly, to leave women in the kind of precarious position where they have no choice but to settle for less-than-ideal husbands and/or less-than-ideal jobs.

A critical supplement to this 🌟 list are those folks who help us imagine other political economies: Christina Dunbar Hester on community radio, Nathan Schneider on co-ops, Joy Lisi Rankin on the public history of computing, @hellobrittparis.bsky.social on other Internets... (plus me, too?)

Over 50% of American adults can't read above a 6th grade reading level, and this is an absolutely catastrophic civil rights crisis with implications for every facet of individual and collective life, including processing political statements by politicians, doctors, and so on

"We are not custodians of a past we did not choose." --Alyssa A.L. James' (@colibriphd.bsky.social) brilliant 2025 piece from the Small Axe section on Heritage and "Tending to the Future."

Get in loser, we’re going to throw down some money for Independent Bookstore Day 🎉

The "death" of English departments and other liberal arts fields is not about their obsolescence but about the fact that they're being actively *killed* by institutions that don't value them on principle, not because of any evidence. Glad ppl are catching up. www.nybooks.com/online/2023/...

New MSA contingent / independent scholar essay award h/t @nissaren.bsky.social and @cupress.bsky.social ! libraries.clemson.edu/press/2026/0...

These same boards are the same ones pushing “AI literacy” into every corner of our institutions, so the convergence-effect Ted describes in this thread—increasingly powerful boards filled w/ rich ppl whose anti-intellectual, airport-book obsessions drive research & teaching—is also the story of “AI”

Sometimes you really do have to put on your “I know you fucking lying” eyes.

Finally got to Data Borders after three people recommended it to me basically unprompted in the same week. It's a brilliant (and sobering) book, but for #surveillancestudies in particular, can't recommend Ch4 "The Good Citizen: Citizen Milieu" strongly enough. www.ucpress.edu/books/data-b...

They don’t need to work effectively. They just need to have the drone program running long enough to pivot to surveillance.

Being friends with creative writers is great; sometimes you read about a historic pangolin and try to figure out if you can get e.g. @angermonsoon.bsky.social to write a whole thing about it.

this is what i meant weeks ago when i said so much of the aggressive surge in migrant policing felt like a boundary test, where a period of highly visible violence would eventually recede in favor of less visible and more "professionalized" migrant policing at a level beyond its baseline pre-trump.

🚨: My new monograph ARRESTING ECOLOGIES: GLOBAL LITERATURE ACROSS AIR, LAND, and SEA, 1926-2014 is available for preorder from OXFORD UP, with 30 percent discount.

Blah blah blah gender stratification but also if you ever say the words, “make girly jobs more manly” to me, I will laugh in your face. Just a full on guffaw. What is wrong with you?

📣 New opportunity for early-career scholars! We’ve partnered with the Women’s History Association of Ireland (@whaireland.bsky.social) to award £500 for the best first monograph in women’s/gender history ❗Deadline: 31 July 2026 Find out more & apply: womenshistorynetwork.org/womens-histo...

Coming up: Hit Repeat Until I Hate Music Tucson book launch event w/ @marchxness.bsky.social. 4/19 6pm 600 S. Meyer feat karaoke, books, readings by @stephjayb.bsky.social, @raquefella.bsky.social, Drew Krewer, @suburbanprairie.bsky.social, John Melillo, @angermonsoon.bsky.social, & Laura CJ Owen

The photographer David Taylor came to talk to my grad class this week. This image, from his project COMPLEX, which documents the network of private ICE prisons across the US, has just been staying with me since. www.dtaylorphoto.com/projects/com...

The TikTok girlies (gender neutral) are hatching a plan to all buy copies of communion by hooks on Vance's release date. I will be participating.

Someone with actual medical expertise once told me that you don't do this sort of thing unless you're prepared to handle the clinical responses meditation can induce in people with PTSD. You definitely don't do it in a work setting where people didn't consent and can't opt out!

"criticizing AI use in journalism or other creative industries is classist" NO IT IS NOT there is a class that benefits enormously from cognitive surrender, epistemic warfare, and the enclosure of all hitherto produced culture and it is NOT THE WORKING CLASS

I don't need a summary of what's available online, in biographies, or even in my own notes. I need to comb through and find the great details, decide what interests ME. No, it's not efficient. It's slow and painstaking. But I don't believe in efficiency as an ultimate good, especially in writing. /

Hit Repeat until I Hate Music is out! If you've been reading essays about sadness for the @marchxness.bsky.social tournament, my Sugarhill Gang chapter here is doing...something entirely different. (No one has ever turned away sorrowing from Rapper's Delight. It's right there in the title.)

It’s actually not okay to pay someone with a PhD $2500 to teach a college course

Let’s also kick edtech out of schools because I promise you Palantir has that data too

It's been a bit worrying the extent to which a lot of people seem to assume doing a task at all is doing it well.

New story up today in @tucsonessayclub.bsky.social's Significant Objects 2026, it's "White Paper" by @meganc.bsky.social: www.ebay.com/itm/26762190... #significantobjects #significantobjects2026

There’s little weirder to me about this moment than seeing wired, the publication that for decades paved the road to US technofascism with their ridiculous propaganda of “tech optimism” & technolibertarianism, running articles like this. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad they are—it’s just ironic as hell

The news has moved on, but ICE is still in Minneapolis. My neighbors are still patrolling streets, driving strangers to work, and providing aid. As a photojournalist at @propublica.org, I wanted to know: What do they look like in their daily lives? So I picked up my camera 👇

I’m organizing a panel on "Interrogating State Surveillance in Authoritarian Times” at the next 4S [@4sweb.bsky.social] conference in Toronto. Please consider submitting an abstract! #surveillance #authoritarianism Submission deadline: April 30, 2026 Website: www.4sonline.org/accepted_ope...

The point of putting ice in airports isn’t just to put ice in airports. It’s to normalize putting them anywhere as “extra security.” This will include polling places w/ long lines in minority communities, polling places in blue/purple districts, & anywhere else it “helps” the people deploying them.

Please don’t be taken in by ICE agents not wearing masks at airports. It’s all PR to get mostly middle class air travelers to accept ICE, while on the streets masked ICE agents are still terrorizing immigrant communities and those defending them.