This is an absolute travesty. @durba.bsky.social is an absolutely brilliant scholar, writer, teacher, academic. Harvard is lucky that they can claim any connection to her work. In doing this, Harvard is making itself a fucking joke.

Thread.

so the Economist article isn't attributed an author. but someone in the replies of this 🧵 tipped me off that it was Jəsse Singal. & it turns out that it was, which in retrospect isn't surprising (as he's one of the ppl who would never answer this question):

I did a deep-dive into Ben Mulroney's extracurricular activities: At the same time as Mulroney is filling-in as host of The West Block, he is also working for two registered lobby groups and as an adviser to several companies – some of whose CEOs he's interviewed on Global News 640 Toronto radio

picture this. you're a respected academic, an expert in your field (not one relevant to this case but still). a colleague emails to ask you to sign your name to their brief. you read it, and you see 'arguments' like this. and you think, goddamn i hate trans people so much i must sign my name to this

Doesn't even work on its own terms: what is valid currency is dictated by the state. If you're a medieval merchant who is owed a debt in gold, and the state you're living under has decreed that, for legal purposes, iron pyrite is gold, then yes, you will be required to accept payment in iron pyrite!

Same thing

What it sounds like when philosophers who are also anti-trans activists submit an amicus brief to a US court where they argue for banning trans girls and women from women's sports.

[1] it was not² [2] if it was, no-one could prove it³ [3] even if someone could prove it, is it a crime to appreciate a succulent footnote?⁴ [4] in some principalities, it is in fact a crime to enjoy a succulent footnote, particularly if that footnote is not so much a footnote as it is a human liver

Possibly the worst sentence I've ever read in a mission statement for AI: "We believe that artificial intelligence, when implemented ethically and intentionally, is not a replacement for teachers but a tool to rehumanize education."

I genuinely want to know how we, as educators, protect our trans students when the federal government is classifying them as a terrorist threat.

Under pressure from Texas government officials, Angelo State University in Texas is banning all discussion or mention of the existence of trans people along with banning the LGBTQ pride flag from campus and forced misgendering of trans people. conchoobserver.com/2025/09/19/a...

“If we cannot even in principle be free from external manipulation and anti-scientific claims — and instead remain passive … and welcome corrosive industry frames into our computer systems, our scientific literature, and our classrooms — then we have failed as scientists and as educators.” 5/🧵

"The technology industry is taking advantage of us, sometimes even speaking through us, to convince our students that these AI technologies are useful (or necessary) and not harmful.” doi.org/10.5281/zeno... 2/🧵

Only 1 person in the whole study went from identifying as trans to not identifying as trans. The 1/5 number came from youth going between the binary and non-binary spectrum. This headline and post are misleading on purpose to fit the economist's editorial bent on the political issue.

Latest projection suggests that more than 505,000 adults and kids have died due to USAID's illegal dismantling by Musk, Rubio, and Lewin Source: www.impactcounter.com/dashboard?vi...

Once we have gender-affirming care and abortion for all then we can bring up cishetero white guys again. Until then they are not to use public washrooms. Give it, what? About 75 years?

Technologically advance a band: Digital Light Orchestra

I know it's hard to do but you have to tune out the constant & I mean constant torrent of criticisms on social media re: activism & organizing. If you don't, it can stop you from trying to do any activism or organizing. Most of the critics aren't doing any organizing themselves so keep trying things

NEW: Air Force jets are doing ICE flights to Africa with transponders turned off, making them nearly un-trackable. This includes the third-country removal to Ghana and another secret flight. We figured out where it landed. From me for @rollingstone.com: www.rollingstone.com/politics/pol...

@ryanenos.bsky.social offers the most thoughtful breakdown I've seen about Fire rankings, which raises concerns that campuses that host more controversial speakers or engage in public policy discussions end up being punished because of how the rankings operate. www.chronicle.com/article/harv...

Why is this horrible for Universities? Just about everyone who isn't a citizen or green card holder already who's hired for a tenure track faculty position is hired through an H1B and then, after 3-5 years, applies for a green card. This is literally "No more foreign professors can be hired"

companies make it difficult or impossible to disable ai in their products because it is an authoritarian project made from a stack of consent violations in a trenchcoat they don't give you a checkbox for "i don't want this and will never use it" because they know many people would check that box

Has someone somewhere drawn a graphic of an old tent that by several misshapen fabric additions and pole extensions has become more and more unrecognizable as a tent and also somewhat confederate looking?

As corrupt and appalling as the ouster of this career prosecutor for refusing to prosecute Trump's enemies truly is, I strongly encourage folks to also understand this as evidence that Trump's authoritarian designs are facing serious institutional resistance:

This is a pretty straight/fair writeup of my discussion with Charlie Mullins. [The headline is inaccurate: as the article says, I described him as racist for describing legal migrants who come here to work as "rubbish" who bring "8 or 10" people who claim benefits.] www.gbnews.com/politics/cha...

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Speaking as a reproductive health reporter who covered these referenda endlessly and talked to MANY voters in Kansas, Missouri, and Ohio: Abortion rights are MORE popular than Democrats. They MAKE Democrats popular. Why would Democrats run away from one of the few policies that works for them

I genuinely cannot believe that Ezra Klein said we should run pro-life candidates in Kansas, Ohio, and Missouri; three states that recently held abortion referendums where the pro-choice side won!

Meta said this didn’t violate their policies, which is no surprise coming from the company that had grooming chatbots on their platform.

TIL the Turing Test had a third party, a woman Cassandra-type who, *if you listened to her*, would make the game very simple because she says the other guy’s actually a computer. The parallels to today, with the gender divide in AI ethicists/skeptics (as discussed in threads off this post) are 🤯

"Disney faces a wave of cancellations after pulling Jimmy Kimmel Live!, with subscribers reporting that the Disney+ cancellation page keeps crashing." creators.yahoo.com/lifestyle/st...

I truly don't understand how democratic leadership think they are going to move forward after voting to honor a white nationalist who essentially called Black women—the base of the party—stupid. It's insulting. I find it personally insulting.

Any trans person who lived through last fall is aware institutional Dems don't give a fuck about us.

There's no way any reasonable person can look at the totality of conservatives' comments on trans issues and not conclude that the end goal is to completely eliminate trans people from existing in public. There's no debate to be had with them because their "reasonable" arguments are a facade.

I would love for a single democrat to reckon with the fact that conservatives are not in fact motivated by reasonable concerns. They are — just as they were with ‘concerns’ over blacks and gays and numerous other minorities over the last five decades — motivated by bigotry.

I like this. Since under RFK Jr, Covid shots are now for people with underlying conditions that put them at risk, Michigan’s chief medical executive Dr. Natasha Bagdasarian states that not having the most recent Covid shot constitutes such an underlying condition. www.michigan.gov/mdhhs/inside...

Did we all take organic chemistry & the MCAT & miss the social part of our early 20’s and work 80 hours a week for 3+ years for the brain worm guy who doesn’t know what a p-value is to destroy our nation’s public health system? No. Time to lean into our expertise and speak up.

3 teens commit suicide so far encouraged and guided by these chatbots and openAI goes full steam ahead and targets product at teens. also, age prediction is digital physiognomy

Nearly 50 college instructors across #Illinois landed on #CharlieKirk's “Professor Watchlist.” @wbez.org reached out to all of them and found the list triggered hateful messages, threats of rape or death, and intensification since Kirk's killing. #twill www.wbez.org/politics/202...

I was mesmerized by the idea that something static can convey not only motion but also temporality, and I decided to test it empirically. It wasn’t an easy task, as the way our data was organized didn’t make it straightforward. But now, here is our paper! ♥️ www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...

it's also really important to spread the "this is illegal" message as far as you can because the majority of people are not exposed to it! most people do not even know the government is doing the illegal thing it's doing, let alone that it's illegal. when they learn about it they get mad!

This is a particularly dark day in Alberta. We must protect trans kids in this province, no matter what #ableg #abpoli www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

The idea that the combined MMR is dangerous but separately the vaccines are fine was created out of whole cloth by Andrew Wakefield, a disgraced former doctor who had a patent on a non-combined version of the MMR. We've known his research was bunk for almost 30 years.

The total lack of any meaningful resistance put up by university “leadership” will not stand up to scrutiny as some future interpreters seek to make sense of this time.

the hiring of Olivia Nuzzi by Vanity Fair makes the new rules of media clear: ❌ lightly criticizing Charlie Kirk ✅ FaceTime fingerblasting with your story’s subject, RFK Jr.

This is staggering. Dismantling the right wing propaganda machine is imo one of the biggest and most vital obstacles to the future of this country.

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Grades often stifle students’ willingness to take risks. But what if grading itself could invite risk? In Composition Studies 53.1, @dlib24.bsky.social explores how labor-based grading contracts (LBGCs) reshape what risk means in the classroom. 🧵

I had a healthy dose of criticism for Obama both as an editor and a columnist. My last political piece I was allowed to write for @washingtonpost.com was a critique of Obama’s immigration policies. They fired me anyway. Obama defended me anyway. www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...