👀

Given debates in the US on who truly represents the working class, I'll point out that in Brazil a movement to give workers a 5-day workweek - arguably the biggest worker gains in the 21st c - is led by a Black trans woman (Rep. Erika Hilton) & a Black gay man (City Council leader Rick Azevedo).

All of this. Adding: HR is also code for the state. if you are an affluent man with inherited entitlement Mark describes here, you simply don’t encounter the state very often. Maybe the DMV. But most of these dudes work. HR translates state power by managing regulations and risk.

Cheer up, USA. One of your soccer teams has won 4 World Cups.

If anyone happens to need it this week for...reasons...this is the best graphic on the complexity of human sex determination I've ever seen. I use it in an undergrad course on gene regulatory mechanisms. Shoutout to @unamandita.bsky.social! www.scientificamerican.com/article/beyo...

Truly bleak

This is so upsetting. “In a news release Tuesday night, Castro said “the Air Force confirmed that trainee Keon McDaniel died from the flu during the outbreak at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio.” Flu vaccination is crucial health protection, particularly for people living in close quarters.

"A Republic, if you can keep it"

The heat index here in central Virginia is going to be 105 degrees this week.

Ezra Klein has been upgraded from unwitting stooge to enthusiastic accomplice

The court held that "sex" in Title IX refers to "biological sex" but then doesn't define it. Is it DNA? Endogenous hormone profile? Gametes? Primary sex characteristics? Those can all be incongruous.

Universities, colleges, schools are social institutions that contain millions of formal and informal interactions with serendipitous outcomes that can’t be quantified. Regardless of the ‘efficiency gains’ replacing these with ChatGTP is pretty dystopian. Who would want to work in that world?

Trade unionists were among those indicted and rounded up by federal agents today in Minnesota. @radicalamy.bsky.social and I reported on Trump’s latest assault on his political enemies.

Google search is now just a Reddit /wikipedia aggregator: “tools like Google AI search and ChatGPT use to retrieve web content with citations in response to user queries, cite user-generated content from sites like Reddit or Wikipedia in roughly half of all queries” www.404media.co/it-is-trivia...

If you’re moderating a panel FIIIIIIND OOOOOUUUUUUT HOW PEOPLE’S NAMES ARE PRONOOOOOOOUNCED (Not based on personal experience, based on an account I just read)

Over the last month I saw that human editors are now stripped of control. I could no longer stop the system from auto-inviting "reviewers" with zero relevant expertise. Even worse - the AI began actively revoking the invitations I manually sent out to actual, qualified experts.

The consultant class and IT companies routinely come to higher ed to continue to profit from their bad ideas. Birnbaum documented that this had been going on in the US since the 1960s over 20 years ago.

let's be clear, let's be very clear, let's be incredibly clear about something: Marcia Lucas is why you love Star Wars. She's why Star Wars worked. She's why it has heart. She's responsible for the in-media-res beginning, she's responsible for basically everything charming and unique about >

This month, UCLA admin circulated two white papers that are so harrowing they’ve kept me awake at night. If you’re a UCLA person and haven’t seen these, you really must. In response, the Faculty Senate has scheduled a Town Hall on June 2. senate.ucla.edu/news/june-2-...

Michigan, Michigan State, and Ohio State are apparently in an never-ending battle to prove which one is the most ungovernable.

If this was African and African Diaspora Studies being mandated we’d see entire issues of prestige magazines pondering the disastrous implications.

yes of course we expect authors to check every citation what the fuck are you talking about

when I say things like “this is downstream of Dems not believing in anything” people jump into my replies and say Dems believe in abortion, fighting racism, and LGBT rights, and the answer to that is: not according to the scoreboard

🕳️

“Lose a month of sleep over one negative student evaluation despite receiving thirty-seven positive comments from the same class.“

Under-appreciated and unmentioned dimension of this story: the deprofessionalization of, and attacks on, teachers in the United States. This country does nothing but attack its educators and then sits back and marvels at the consequences. That context is entirely missing from this analysis.

Recently, FamilySearch digitized and uploaded tons of microfilmed records, including many from 18th-century Massachsuetts. They're using some sort of AI to transcribe/summarize the handwritten documents. I've noticed that the AI strips out references to race and enslavement in 18thc documents.

Also, this weird attempt to rationalize the decent into authoritarianism erases the fact that for trans people, immigrants, and a lot of academics fully fledged authoritarianism is already here. A lot of people have already had their lives completely ruined. They're not only halfway to it.

This week, I will officially graduate and earn my doctorate from Texas Tech—but I will not be walking the stage. Why? The university's unending assault on trans folks like me. 🧵 on all the bigotry

Just stripping away anything that works well, presumably to make consumers so desperate for structure that AI tools will seem appealing.

The people living next to this data center also just got disenfranchised through redistricting.

A very Strength In Numbers-coded article today: It looks like Republican Supreme Court justices made a very rudimentary, but willful, statistical error in their effective invalidating of the VRA in the Callais decision. www.gelliottmorris.com/p/2026-05-08...

I don’t see how this is a university.

Higher Ed also has a responsibility to remind employers that our job is to educate, not to provide training in highly specific job skills. You know whose job it is to provide job specific training? Employers!

elon musk spends two-thirds of his time spreading racist pseudoscience and hating trans people and here is Ezra Klein in 2026 saying Musk is relentlessly focused on the only things that matter to him: EVs and going to Mars. I'm sorry but the guy's just very very dim

By popular (?) demand, I've updated (and cleaned up) my suffrage and citizenship timeline with recent events and some additional clarifications. Feedback welcome! I will make the file available on my website (christinawolbrecht.com) by COB.

This is the same story as computers. They didn't erase all the labor that goes into organizing our lives and bureaucracies. They just moved that labor around, individualizing it, so we all have to (poorly) deal with Concur instead of one admin with expertise doing it.

Yup why do you think they have such a hatred for the US Postal Service

This should be a bigger story. I didn't know Isaiah but almost everyone in my lab, my TA, and a few close colleagues knew him well. They all say he was a sweet guy who was just really into herps. This is a tragedy.

People think that you’re looking down on them when you say this, but I truly don’t think it‘s that useful for academic writing. I use it solely to generate code for SPSS and STATA.

Today, the Court erected a new standard: Prove the green segment in the below is not part of the yellow circle

One of the most clarifying passages I've ever read on what "polarization" actually means in the U.S."

There still is absolutely no plan for how to finance & operate our universities without foreign students or restored federal funding, & the public still has zero awareness of the magnitude of this existential crisis, because our leaders have been totally absent from the public stage.

Ah. www.insidehighered.com/news/tech-in...

BREAKING: Fidelity won't let customers donate to the SPLC anymore via their charitable gift/donor-advised funds, citing Trump admin indictment of SPLC. No response yet from Schwab, Vanguard... but soon. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/29/b...

Every time I see someone talk about Claude I think about how they switched from female to male names as soon as they wanted the robots to seem like experts vs personal assistants.

In addition to the bigotry and horror of this, it is absolutely incredible that they are trying to alter reality by institutional fiat. Their very need to try and fix gender into a binary presupposes, and acknowledges, that something other than a binary exists.

Yale fires adjunct faculty, "the instructors most directly tasked with supporting our education. To implement Trust report while eroding the foundations of intellectual life is like giving a blood transfusion to a patient whose wounds haven’t been stitched shut: You’ll end up with a corpse anyway."

Good morning! This, right here, is fascism! Source: www.congress.gov/118/meeting/...