intrusive surveillance as a service

I have apparently reached the point of my kpop fandom where I can no longer take the colorism, antiBlackness, and compulsory anorexia and have started watching New Edition videos instead

This is an exceptionally accurate description 😅

Whoever decided to put this cover art on this book is brilliant. It is perfect.

It's been interesting, as I endure this period of guilt and grief, to see what music works as a balm. So far Metric and Brownstone are working best with Céline Dion showing up as a surprise mainstay

It is not clear from the article whether conference organizers (the ADA) directed security to do this or whether the conference center did or if the hired security guards decided this on their own.

How many times can I reply “a fan only covers the area of its airflow, bubbles cover the entire area the bubbles float in” to everyone smug-actuallying me about goddamn fans

so has -maxxing left behind its chan origins sufficiently for general use? or are people using it "ironically"? this may be a question for GrammarGirl

There is something truly obscene about a British-German project to use Namibian wind/solar resources to produce hydrogen/ammonia for export to make Germany energy independent, dredging up the site of the Herero and Nama genocide. Also illustrative of why colonialism always matters as analysis.

The push to ostensibly "destigmatize" mental illness – and illness in general – by insisting on biological causes cut off from history, subjectivity, and difficult questions of collective or individual responsibility strikes me as one of the most pernicious arms of biomedical social engineering.

Europeans are so much more enlightened than Americans, I’m sure their deportation camps will have fresher food

Yes, it's true, the median household net worth is around $193k. But it's not a normal slope below that, there's yet more skew, just like at the top. You'd think the 33rd percentile would be around $125k. They're not, it's more like $67k. 10th percentile is around $0. Below that, it's negative.

my confidence that these people are going to lose is rising and my estimate of the amount of damage they are going to do on the way out, especially as they realize they're losing, is also rising

New: Regretful cities are literally covering their Flock cameras with black trash bags because they cannot figure out how to immediately exit their surveillance contracts or get the cameras taken down: www.404media.co/cities-are-c...

More and more Discourse on here feels, functionally, like an op, and this disillusionment has caused me to seek refuge in the Marxist analysis of my undergrad days: what are the material realities that feed the cultural dynamics? Here's the answer on the updated kid book debacle:

I do kind of wonder sometimes if this was all signaled years ago by the relatively recent trend of hiring non-librarians to head academic libraries (relatively recent as of the past ~15 years, at least that's my perception)

.... I would so love to know how they would modernize Ivanhoe, just out of morbid curiosity

when do we stop calling them data centers and start calling them mass surveillance centers?

imagine trying to do historical research constrained by youtube's monetization policy

On the other hand, if you’re suing a billionaire, start demanding their AI logs in discovery

Recently, FamilySearch digitized and uploaded tons of microfilmed records, including many from 18th-century Massachsuetts. They're using some sort of AI to transcribe/summarize the handwritten documents. I've noticed that the AI strips out references to race and enslavement in 18thc documents.

Two publication updates: 1) We have codified our open-to-submission periods as January and August of each year. Our next open window will be August 2026. 2) We have increased our word cap to 7,000 words and encourage authors to aim for the range of 4,000-7,000 words (excluding references).

I can always tell when I am having an anxiety spike by how I will keep going back to the bookstore faster than I can keep up with what I'm buying. This is all from the past week or so *stress laugh emoji*

This pattern of response explains why I've seen that one APA sample citation in so many published articles over the years (I don't remember the details, but given APA + my areas of interest it's been cited a ton in Psych-adjacent areas, not STEM)

I'm sorry, what? In writing my first monograph, I spent six weeks trying to track down a citation in TWO languages I didn't know. And good thing too, because the citation was wrong. That's scholarship. That's research. You know, the thing we're trained to do?!?

We've been really privileged to transcribe Jess Schomberg @schomj.bsky.social's brilliant co-produced series of DisLis (Disability in Library & Information Studies) interviews. Here's a recent episode with the fantastic Dr Sami Schalk @drsamischalk.bsky.social on Black Disability Politics:

Please do not try to clock “balanced list of threes” as an AI tell because that’s been classic rhetorical structure for going on three millennia and it’s baked into all our writing now, I‘m begging people to read more old things

How do we write about this?: Reflections on scholarship about immigrants, data literacy, surveillance, and academic freedom in 2025 by Hayley Park and Negeen Aghassibake www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2026/reflect...

I'm not sure how much the rest of America knows or understands about the MOVE bombing in Philly, but it was probably the single worst instance of police brutality in American history. I think of it every 5/13 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_MO...

Now's a great time to support LaVonnia Moore, a rural Georgia librarian who was fired because she approved a library display (set up by community members) that included a book featuring a transgender character. Her legal case enters the mediation process this week. 📚 www.gofundme.com/f/help-lavon...

I've been thinking about this lately in terms of novels I've been re-reading lately. Now that I'm no longer subscribed to Kindle Unlimited I'm reading books that have gone through a publication process that involves basic copy editing, and when I try to re-read old KU favorites... they're so bad

Historian of abolition here, history tells us how we got here, to put it succinctly “John Brown was hanged for treason and Robert E. Lee was not.”

Re-engaging with the literature I was assigned in high school has been interesting. Faulker did not hold up. Brilliant writer. But so excessively racist it made me realize how racist the environment I grew up in was, in the same way that secondhand smoke was ubiquitous. Now on to Richard Wright

92% of children with significant school attendance difficulties are neurodivergent. 83% are autistic. These aren't children who don't want to learn. They're children for whom the school environment itself has become unsafe. "School refusal" is the wrong frame. stimpunks.org/access/educa...

Would love to see RFK Jr have to deal with the healthcare system for decades while managing diabetes before he tells me that antidepressants aren’t necessary.

In a generally bleak and coal-heavy year for energy production, Minnesota produced more of its own power —mostly from carbon-free sources — and kept its emissions steady even as the rest of the country's rose. minnesotareformer.com/2026/05/04/d...

I do reviews and sometimes edit for academic journals and same. I especially notice this in the lit review section in part because of reasons unrelated to gAI, but the use of chatGPT to "help with copy editing" somehow ends up stripping out intellectual coherence and replacing it with bloat

my very favorite Richard Dawkins headline of all time remains “British scientists don't like Richard Dawkins, finds study that didn't even ask questions about Richard Dawkins”

You tell Alexa what to do. Claude tells you what to do.

The closest I've come to learning about this period was reading Nell Irvin Painter's excellent Standing at Armageddon and that is more focused on the decades that followed

3-year contract, academic reference + instruction #LISjobs minnstate.wd115.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Minnes...

Charlottesville used bookstore’s got game

www.theroot.com/white-suprem...?

My libraries hot take for this Friday: "digital first" is not a sustainable strategy for libraries.

The sad thing is, machine translation had actually gotten really good earlier this decade, but now if I go to watch a Russian crocheter with the auto-generated subtitles turned on, youtube continually translates crochet as "knit" ... and it's downhill from there

honestly the AI rot in crochet and knitting has been getting worse and worse, from the images to patterns that are just slop. there was a point where you could make sense of a clumsy or bad translation, but these days, no, they AI it, and make it incomprehensible

I think it's kind of funny that the hardest part of walking my bike to the repair shop is going to be: crossing the street without being hit by a car

Our research team estimates that Covid caused 23 million deaths I’m sorry that Dr Bhattacharya felt stressed during the time he pushed for mass infection instead of mass vaccination; a physician friend of mine in Kenya lost 28 patients to Covid IN ONE NIGHT & still has PTSD

If you’re like, “Wait, everyone is shackled on ICE flights?! Wait, there are 50 ICE flights a day?! Wait, they’re sending people to countries they’ve never been to?!” I am begging you to please read my ICE Air FAQ. 🙏 gillianbrockell.com/what-is-ice-...

with zero sarcasm this is good government and we should do this immediately