Periodic reminder that Teapot Dome, the worst scandal in American history prior to Watergate, involved $9 million changing hands. That’s adjusted for inflation. This story by itself is 55500% bigger than Teapot Dome. That’s not a typo.

"What makes universities particularly valuable as a ‘space for exceptions’ is the same thing that makes people hate them." newleftreview.org/sidecar/post...

🔊 Coming soon! 🔊 ✨ In the Loop: Revolutionizing Public Finance ✨ A new podcast series from the Money on the Left Collective, hosted by @publicporpoise.bsky.social, @greenbackbetter.bsky.social & @videotroph.bsky.social. Watch this space 👀

UC Berkeley Law creates new AI policy that bans AI for "conceptualizing, outlining, drafting, revising, translating, or editing any work submitted for credit" or exams because "thinking remains the sine qua non of good lawyering (and of a quality legal education)." That's what I'm talking about.

“In 🇱🇧 , we start our days with a deluge of stories and images: buildings targeted, cars struck on highways, families wiped out.. Israel seems to be following the same logic it deployed in Gaza: emptying out entire areas through what amounts to ethnic cleansing.” www.bostonreview.net/articles/mil...

This friend speaks my mind. "It is true that one particular form of the university—the post-WWII research university—is dead, its death rattles readily apparent. It is too early to say, however, exactly what will wear its skin. Let us hope that it is not this preview of an undead university..."

None of this is good news

Residents in Fayette County, Georgia noticed their water pressure was unusually low. Turns out that a data center 20 miles away had been drawing 30 million gallons of water in secret through connections the county didn't know existed. Is it any wonder why so many are opposed to data centers?

who indeed

The "Yale report" argues that "improving the world today," and fostering "an ethical, interdependent and diverse community” should not be part of Yale's mission. It couldn't be more wrong. Gift link to a NYT op-ed by Wesleyan president Michael Roth, a righteous dude. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/22/o...

‘The surviving population of Gaza has been reduced to a condition of bare existence, subject to unrelenting hunger and thirst under the ever present hum of killer drones and bomber jets.’ Eyal Weizman on the demolition of Gaza. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

🇧🇷 URGENTE: Brasil proíbe empresas de mercado de previsão, como Kalshi e Polymarket, de operar no país. Resolução do Conselho Monetário Nacional, assinada pelo presidente do Banco Central, Gabriel Galípolo, entra em vigor no dia 4 de maio e proíbe apostas sobre política, esportes e entretenimento.

“The humanities are dead. Long live the humanities.” utotherescue.blogspot.com/2026/04/line...

The executive director of World Press Photo said this image shows the inconsolable grief of children losing their father in a place built for justice. It is a stark and necessary record of family separation following the U.S. reform policies. n.pr/4d0E5EA

Here’s our Guardian article (published April 2025) that set us on the path to this book.

As Brian J. Chen and Jai Vipra observe, trusting tech companies to protect us from our leaders only benefits the growing oligopoly.

“This continuous-improvement cycle transforms real-world disappointment into automated course updates, freeing faculty time for research (about AI), service (related to AI), and existential despair (you can guess the topic).”

A group of new accounts on the prediction market Polymarket made highly specific, well-timed bets on whether the U.S. and Iran would reach a ceasefire on April 7, resulting in hundreds of thousands of dollars in profits for these new customers.

We are seven months away from the most consequential midterm election in US history. Meanwhile, we are fighting a war. These are the structural conditions for a coup attempt in which a president tries to nullify elections and take permanent power as a dictator. snyder.substack.com/p/the-next-c...

being able to sit patiently with other people's thoughts, sit patiently with your own, and make both of those processes legible to someone who is not you is very valuable. if you can find a new way to do this that is fantastic news but I suspect it will at least resemble the model we've inherited

more seriously: both an adult life spent teaching and an adult life spent on message boards and sites like this one have underscored to me that reading and communicating about reading is very much not a trivial skill. the recent tech developments further underscore this for me

New at Media Nation: The @bostonglobe.com ends its use of the AI tool Nota after @poynterinstitute.bsky.social reports that it plagiarizes, although the Globe says it wasn't using *that* part of Nota. #journalism dankennedy.net/2026/04/03/t...

Hard agree on all of this! "For another, calling [duties like first-pass editing and fact-checking] 'grunt work' belies a fundamental misunderstanding—and frankly, disrespect—for the many steps of the writing process." That misunderstanding and disrespect is dismantling the world of letters.

This article marshals evidence and expert opinion to show something that educators already know: AI makes people think they can do things that they can't in fact do. AI is billionaires trying to profit off a society-wide Dunning Kruger effect.

I wrote about how the Hasan Piker drama serves as a proxy fight between centrists and the left, and how it exposes the real priorities of Democrats like Cory Booker.

Reading this conversation made me feel less alone

New reporting from @npr.org quantifies the fiscal toll of mass ICE enforcement on American cities—and the numbers are striking: www.npr.org/2026/03/24/n...

Rapid analysis from @wwattribution.bsky.social, published yesterday, shows this heat would have been “virtually impossible” without climate change: www.worldweatherattribution.org/record-shatt...

@pluralistic.net.web.brid.gy Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification, a book written by an extremely productive human trained among humans by humans, explains just this dynamic!

Statement from Dolores Huerta "The farmworker movement has always been bigger and far more important than any one individual... We must continue to engage and support our community, which needs advocacy and activism now more than ever." medium.com/@dolores_hue...

Oof

Peter Banko, who's laid off hundreds of employees as CEO of Bay State Health, has written a book on how to fire people. And, oh yeah, last year he was accused of plagiarism. www.bostonglobe.com/2026/03/09/b...

Brilliant reading of the money-ness of the Mamdani campaign’s Zcavenger hunt and Zetro card: “The question is not whether these practices are really fiscal governance in disguise…They make participation legible, and they can later help make other kinds of fiscal action feel actionable… 1/

Just re-upping the shoutout in this Daily Memo to the people of Chicago, L.A. and Minneapolis www.instagram.com/reel/DVh1I2y...

wrong

I know the world is ending but also: remember Michael Penn’s No Myth? Please say yes (what if I was Heathcliff?!?!) youtu.be/IxkJHX7ukKE?...

“Between Dr. Frankenstein’s antipathy toward academia and Harlander’s obsession with transferring his consciousness from his body in pursuit of immortality, it is difficult to imagine that del Toro did not have certain tech billionaires in mind.”

AOC: This is about actual crimes happening in front of us. This is about shredding the Constitution and plunging us into war. This is about taking crypto money and money laundering… So if you’re asking me if I’d support impeachment, I do

The Uni Currency Project

The U.S. Senate must be clear: no war with Iran.

Breaking: Former Harvard President Larry Summers will resign from his academic and faculty appointments at Harvard at the end of the academic year over his ties to Jeffrey Epstein He will also relinquish his University Professorship — Harvard's highest faculty distinction.

In the shell of an abandoned 99CENTS Only Store, L.A. artists stack hypnotic sculptures and portraits as a call to nostalgia. The full story: lataco.com/99-cents-sto... By Odessa Hairapetian

New Essay! ✍️ ✨ Reclaiming the Public Interest: Cities Should Sell Municipal Bonds to Their Own Public Banks ✨ Please read & share! 👩‍💻 🙌

"This is the future" = "You can't argue with this"

In contrast, Bezos’s ex-wife gave away $7.2b in 2025, the most given by anyone in a single year since Fortune began tracking this in 2012 - and more than Bezos has given in his whole lifetime.

CALL FOR PITCHES @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social and I are at work on a new version of Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century aimed at a more general audience. We’re looking for new contributions: your model close readings of texts, canonical and not, from literary studies and not. Details below!

We're at 55% of our $25,000 goal to help me launch @lataco.bsky.social investigative news desk. Thanks so much to everyone who has contributed or shared our fundraiser! We're already putting the money we've raised to use 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾 Donate here - givebutter.com/la-taco-inve...

Tony Gilroy, creator of Andor, wasn’t allowed to use the word “fascism” during press junkets in 2025. Interesting interview in The Hollywood Reporter. www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-featur...