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...

👀The federal judges in West Virginia, where ICE has been pulling over and detaining people on the freeway, are literally screaming about ICE's tactics. "It is an assault on the constitutional order," Judge Goodwin says. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

My general feeling is that every summary tool shortcuts the library shelf. In grad school there were few things I adored more than finding a book on the shelf bc I inevitably found six or seven other books on proximate shelves that I didn’t even know I needed! Process is the point!

It’s so funny to think about the fact that there’s people out there deferring every life decision to this

ICE has pulled out of Terminal Island, its base for the last eight months for escalated immigration raids across Los Angeles and Southern California. “ICE didn’t leave," Ron Gochez, a member of Unión del Barrio, told the L.A. Times. "The people kicked them out.” www.latimes.com/california/s...

I don't think it is only our job to teach students how to read long novels; it may also be our jobs to teach them how to live without an online surveillance state. To learn without intrusive apps. To swap notes. To write in a book's margins. To exist in their communities in slow, clunky, human ways.

This is so spot on

My friend named a mealworm in my honor at the Nature Center at Shaker Lakes. Please enjoy watching Buddy the resident American toad enjoying Michelle the mealworm as a special Valentine's Day treat. Yes, everyone here is a genius. youtu.be/BQ3dyzpAsMA?...

When he gave the Grammy to that young boy who made everyone think of Liam…even if that wasn’t actually Liam, it was just the perfect way of cutting through all the bullshit. Every kid impacted by this administration’s cruelty is another Liam.

🔥Bad Bunny halftime plus Contra ICE towels 🔥

On a similar note, as Mamdani continues to notch W after W you’re going to start seeing opinion pieces about how this could never work in any city other than New York, etc., etc. Do not engage! It’s just entrenched power bullshit and that’s all! Don’t let them make that a conversation!

Fabian Muniesa - 'Finance, technology, and fascism today' @ UC Berkeley 26/02/2026 besi.berkeley.edu/event/financ...

I liked reading this and will be thinking about it: www.nplusonemag.com/issue-52/rev...

Especially in dark times, reading for pleasure is important— spiritually, collectively — Check out the books a few writers and editors (including me) are looking forward to!! @latimes www.latimes.com/entertainmen...

Great piece on Los Angeles cutting down trees to reduce shade out of some misguided belief it will reduce crime and not just make the city more inhospitable. This place could be so amazing if city leadership weren't such a mess. lareported.substack.com/p/shade-remo...

according to the @latimes.com and @thisblue.bsky.social, if you want to make good decisions this spring, you should pre-order my book! (as well as @robinnelee.bsky.social's 'crash into me', for when you're ready to give into temptation) www.versobooks.com/en-gb/produc...

I've never seen a population more united. If people can hold onto that unity, if people can accept that different people will have different ways of confronting fascism, if we can remind NGOs and orgs that they can join but not control the resistance, then, well, people here will write history.

I have been actively involved in protest movements for 24 years. I have never seen anything approaching this scale. Minneapolis is not accepting what's happening here. ICE fucking murdered a woman for participating in this, and all that did is bring out more people, from more walks of life.

🧵

In 2026 I want all of the decent people to remember one thing. You aren’t meant to be this disciplined, this self-sacrificing to survive. The environment is supposed to support good living. We can have that. You are not a failure. That is politics. That is all.

what a shocking turn of events who could’ve seen this coming