Why I’m not watching the State of the Union – and you shouldn’t either | Robert Reich

The point of the AI project is to provoke despair in creative people. They haven’t produced profits or anything anyone wants, just a steady stream of articles about how us artistic types can’t do the thing we’re already doing, making art. Jokes on them, we’re even better at despair than they are.

My top ten Westerns (in no particular order) Rio Bravo McCabe and Mrs Miller The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid Shane Little Big Man Red River The Searchers Lone Star High Noon

Here’s looking at you, Pittsburgh.

Anyway congrats to our Free Speech Champions(tm) who helped usher in the most censorious American government since the Palmer Raids

The World of Leonard Cohen at the CUP Bookstore in Cambridge.

From climate change, to Chinese politics, to Leonard Cohen, we've got a very wide range of new titles this week! 🙌 📖 'Still No Miracles Needed' by @mzjacobson.bsky.social 📖 'The Communist Party of China' by Ben Hillman and Fengyuan Ji 📖 'The World of Leonard Cohen' by @nearleft.bsky.social

Yes.

Also, may I say that I don’t agree with people saying ICE and CBP need “more training.” They’re doing exactly what this administration has trained them to—impose a reign of fear in blue cities. They don’t need more training. They need to be ripped up root and branch.

Trump’s “Board of Peace” is a Board of Dictators — ICE terror at home, cash for autocrats abroad, and Trump deciding who’s protected. That’s not peace. It’s a protection racket. READ & SHARE NEW SUBSTACK🙏⬇️

This is the most astonishing graph of what the Trump regime has done to US science. They have destroyed the federal science workforce across the board. The negative impacts on Americans will be felt for generations, and the US might never be the same again. www.nature.com/immersive/d4...

Hey beautiful losers, this week the books series has ed David Shumway @nearleft.bsky.social talking new collection THE WORLD OF LEONARD COHEN w/ contribs @touchofallright.bsky.social, @eweisbard.bsky.social & Sarah Hill. Wed 5:30 pm ET, achieve satori here: iaspm-us.wildapricot.org/Popular-Musi...

Bond drive for ICE Watch moneyontheleft.org/2025/05/09/b...

It is hard for me not to regard the failure to recognize that the AI boom is inextricable from totalitarian creep as willful ignorance, as either the delusions of those who believe they are immune or an endorsement that doesn’t require a vulgar red cap. But AI boosterism is Trumpism now. Full stop.

This was published in the dead week between Christmas and New Year’s. If you work in education & were, reasonably, taking a break, maybe you missed it. Don’t miss it.

Trump must be impeached immediately. This is not how a democracy functions.

A college sophomore at an Occupy rally could not have generated such a grotesque outsized caricature of US imperialism

The utter perversion of the #BrokenTimes' both-sidesing compulsion: Here it equates the right-wing ruin of New College with (checks notes) liberal (in any sense of the word) education, which it dismisses as just another "ideological bubble." Just fuck off.

Can the Times reinvent itself as Fox News?

Commentary: Because the assaults on academic freedom are well underway within state capitals and inside university administrations — in Ohio and across the nation — few institutions will be spared. But alumni have to speak up now ohiocapitaljournal.com/2025/12/09/i...

"The rapid, largely unregulated rise of datacenters to fuel the AI and crypto frenzy is disrupting communities across the country and threatening Americans’ economic, environmental, climate and water security." www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

the idea that a handful of conservative legal scholars have an understanding that should supersede a settlement affirmed my generations of american is astoundingly arrogant, and the idea that trump — or any president — can unilaterally overturn that settlement is just despotism

Presumably Alabama will be suspending fraternities and sororities too. U. of Alabama Suspends Black and Female Student Magazines, Citing D.E.I. Guidance www.nytimes.com/2025/12/02/u...

“But if the Rabbit novels are obviously realist in most of their aspects, their representation of the social may be less apparent.” David Shumway @nearleft.bsky.social on the work of John Updike. pghrev.com/updikes-real...

The dripping contempt the right wing SCOTUS majority holds for district judges is truly a sight to behold every time. When they deign to give actual reasons for their shadow docket holdings, it’s “look at the absolute idiots who keep getting everything wrong!”

"AI has become the high-fructose corn syrup of the digital realm: It’s now in everything, even if you don’t want it there." www.sfgate.com/tech/article...

Good work, @pghreviewofbooks.bsky.social, now I gotta get @nearleft.bsky.social’s book.

Boycott complicit institutions.

How many Supreme Court justices have been redacted from the Epstein files, anyway?

How did the @nytimes.com editors let this sentence appear? "Critics have likened Mr. Trump’s approach to extortion, while others have chalked it up as a cost of doing business with this administration." www.nytimes.com/2025/11/26/u...

AI generated content of any kind undermines the credibility of whatever is being communicated

one of the coolest things about ChatGPT is how you can actually just never use it. you can fill your whole entire life with simply not once using it. it's incredible.

Before the midterms of 1866, President Andrew Johnson called his congressional opponents traitors and said they should be hanged. Voters were so profoundly moved by his words... that they gave his opponents a supermajority in Congress, and the nation got the Fourteenth Amendment.

🥰♥️♥️♥️♥️

The Kremlin disguised a nearly $100 mn payment to Trump in the form of a brokered real estate deal... and both Jeffrey Epstein and William Pulte were involved in the deal. That's very interesting.

all six D's who voted for this god awful thing including the corrupt give away to senators need to be primaried

This isn't "internal recriminations." It's voters expressing overwhelming opposition to what the people they elected to represent them are doing, and anyone--either in journalism or politics--who characterizes it as infighting is either not seeing and hearing what's right in front of them or lying.

Time for change in some high places in the Democratic Party if we are to meet the greater challenges of the moment in this country. My latest. www.thedailybeast.com/why-these-vi...

Chuck Schumer Helps Pull Democrats Back From Brink Of Courage

American politics makes a lot more sense when you realize that the GOP is afraid of pissing off the GOP base, and the Dems are afraid of pissing off the GOP base, but neither party is afraid of pissing off the Dem base.

Democrats trounce GOP, but it’s Schumer who concedes.

I fully believe in the corporate death penalty and believe we would be a better world if OpenAI lost its corporate charter and was forcibly dissolved. www.cnn.com/2025/11/06/u...

I’m just a small-town political scientist, & it’s still relatively early, but it appears that The Actual Democrats did not Need To Do any of the Things or Learn any of the Obvious Lessons that Ezra Douthglesias said they Must Do & Learn.

Eagerly awaiting tomorrow's New York Times headlines explaining why this wave of victories is actually bad for the Democrats

Politicians should probably get on Bluesky to get better in touch with the American electorate.

Despite your best efforts.

Looks like the Dems will pick up 12 seats in the VA House of Delegates, which will go from 51-49 to 63-37 D-R. That's an honestly shocking result.