Looks like JD Vance is going to need to change religions again.

Amazing.

feels relevant today

As all this disgusting Epstein shit starts surfacing more and more, I hope we don't lose sight of the fact that apparently every major media outlet knew everything and instead spent their time money and energy attacking the trans community.

This isn’t even the stuff they’re trying to actually stop from getting out.

Check it out! Here's a photo of the aurora sent to me by my sister near Somerset, Wisconsin. Photo is only five minutes old, so this is more or less a current view.

This is essentially the same story told by the Panama Papers of 2016, the Paradise Papers of 2017 & the Pandora Papers of 2020. Nearly 7TB of data on released on wealthy people, mostly men, doing terrible things at scale & facing no consequences:barely any prosecutions, miniscule # of convictions.

every woman acutely understands this face.

Catholic bishops nationwide recently announced “You Are Not Alone,” a program that lays out ways for Catholics across the country to provide direct aid and solidarity to immigrants in the U.S.

More here on the link between AI data centers and rising electricity costs:

Michael, you’re describing a disturbingly large portion of the ruling class here.

My takeaway from every new Epstein revelation is that some powerful people victimized many powerless young women, many more knew, some actively enabled it--and we're still being told that MeToo and accountability for sexual violence have gone too far

I spoke to CNN about how demoralizing it was to watch Stanford leadership stay silent while contrarians on campus launched unscientific attacks to stifle Stanford researchers. Now, those attacks have gone nationwide and much of MAHA leadership have ties to Stanford. www.cnn.com/2025/11/08/p...

Here is my argument that the pundits are wrong. You absolutely can run a socialist in middle America and win. www.patreon.com/posts/143343...

Extreme weather can happen everywhere. And many extremes (not all!) are demonstrably getting worse with climate change. This is not just a problem for a few places!

"Trump seems committed to turning the U.S. into a petrostate, solidifying its position as the world’s largest oil and gas producer and exporter. ... China is becoming an electro-state, the world’s largest manufacturer, exporter and overseas investor in clean energy technologies." By Lyuba Zarsky.

The far right is obsessed with Lord of the Rings and Musk keeps posting about "hobbits" because modern scientific racism owes more to fantasy worlds and gaming systems than genetic science, and they see both as effective mediums for right-wing propaganda www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

Too many treat loss of public education as unfortunate collateral damage. But there is no greater democratic institution than the one responsible for renewing faith in and principles of democracy for each generation.

The best way to show that MAGA is not part of some dark authoritarian movement is to remove professors who suggest that it is

Indiana University removed a Lecturer from her "Diversity, Human Rights, and Social Justice" course after a student filed a complaint about a graphic the instructor showed in class, which included "Make America Great Again" as an example of "Covert White Supremacy." www.wfyi.org/news/article...

The key conservative impulse is to protect oneself from accusations of agency

In the century leading up to 1975, nearly 6000 freighters went down in the Great Lakes. The Edmund Fitzgerald was the last. The last. In 50 years, not a single commercial freighter has been lost in the Great Lakes. Why? It's NOAA. Of course it's NOAA.

"In an internal memo from September, CEO Sam Altman said that OpenAI’s “audacious long-term goal is to build 250 gigawatts of capacity by 2033.” If Altman achieves this goal, OpenAI will need almost exactly as much electricity as India’s 1.5 billion people" Great @truthdig.com piece on chips ->

Democrats have a lot of old leaders. But there are plenty of old populists, and plenty of young corporate Dems. The wisdom lies in knowing the difference, as Bob Kuttner writes. prospect.org/2025/11/11/m...

OK, #socsky, I'm looking for songs about intergenerational mobility (up or down) or class reproduction. E.g., Whiskeytown's Jacksonville Skyline ("I was born in an abundance of inherited sadness"). Or, in a lighter vein, Musgraves' "Merry Go-Round." Examples notwithstanding, the genre is open.

Fascinating stuff

"We’re done waiting for Dems to find their spine. We can’t afford a weak & cowardly Democratic Party while the authoritarians invade our cities, terrorize our communities, & threaten our democracy. We get the party we demand, & we intend to demand a Democratic Party that fights.” — @indivisible.org

Texas A&M reinventing "prior restraints" www.texastribune.org/2025/11/10/t...

Good read by @jilldlawrence.bsky.social about Elise Stefanik, who started as a smart conservative, went all in on MAGA, got her nomination to UN Ambassador yanked, and is now attempting to run for governor of New York.

The President pardoned members of his private militia after they failed to overturn an election; they, in turn, pledge their support to him and urge him to use them to police civil society.

BREAKING: The Supreme Court rejects a call to overturn its decision legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide.

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.

America’s chickenshit elites problem continues to be the biggest obstacle to fighting Trump www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

Resign.

How about we shut down the government for this very popular and specific goal and then, hear me out, we hold out for like a month and a half and then, ok this part is important, after a watershed election where we ran the table, ONLY THEN, fold and don't get the one thing we said we wanted.

Great job, @schumer.senate.gov. You've changed the story from "GOP hurting millions of Americans to please unpopular, failing, delusional despot who's destroying his party" to "Dems are too weak and divided in the face of Trump's strength to take a stand and protect Americans"

The dominant narrative is that the world is rolling back climate policy. But what does the data say? The latest Oxford Climate Policy Monitor Annual Review from the Oxford Climate Policy Hub tells three key stories. bsg.ox.ac.uk/news/climate...

Harm to SNAP recipients, federal workers, and others is real. In a normal democracy it’d make sense to prioritize reducing that harm in the short term. In a rapidly backsliding democracy, harm is happening no matter what. Preventing authoritarian consolidation is the most harm-reducing move.

Re-upping this: www.noemamag.com/we-need-to-t...

Almost completely, every single problem with higher education that folks think is mainly about something else is <primarily> about the massive decline in state public funding since the 1980s. Yes, including everyone's obsession with getting their kid into the "right" college:

The ACA wasn't even the compromise. The public option was the Republican alternative/compromise to single payer. The ACA was already a far right plan

I don't know what the Senate is going to do. But if they do in fact fold in exchange for nothing, they will be living up to past performance. To expect the Senate to carry out the will of the American people is to misunderstand why it was created in the first place.

The Biden administration was fully complicit in genocide, and anyone who served in it should be held accountable.

Dems: Wow, we did really well in off year election during shutdown. Dems: We better stop that.

“I want you to understand what it is like to live in Chicago during this time.” aphyr.com/posts/397-i-...

LAST CALL! #Sociology Professorships in Copenhagen, Denmark! We're hiring 2+ open-rank profs (Asst/Assoc/Full). Any area. Deadline: this Saturday, Nov 15! Join a leading European sociology department. Please repost! jobportal.ku.dk/videnskabeli...

“The elites are ecstatic about imagining a vast, uneducated, and unproductive population forced to pay companies like OpenAI to access the written word and to approximate thought.” Must read piece by Noah McCormack with too many quotaboe lines to select one! thebaffler.com/salvos/we-us...

bluesky branding refresh unveiled

great idea! but like what if we do this except we hold the money in some central place until people need it and then providers are paid directly from that special account, and everyone in society would help watch that account and make sure it’s safe, so we could call it social eyes healthcare

What an amazing essay from the former chair of Africana Studies at Bowdoin. I'll share a few sections in the reply but seriously, read the whole thing. It's all insightful and beautifully written. lithub.com/maybe-dont-t...