The wonderful thing about Tyggers Is Tyggers are burning bright Their tops are made out of rubber In the forest of the night What bouncy, trouncy, flouncy, pouncy, Immortal hand or eye Did frame the most wonderful thing about Tyggers, Their fearful symmetry!

This NYT column by @polgreen.bsky.social is the truest thing I've ever seen about the REAL reason public trust in the media collapsed

Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey has supported immigration enforcement against people with criminal records and defended an agreement her state has with ICE. “I’m all for getting the bad guys,” she told Boston’s CBS affiliate.

The synthesis of this contradiction is IMO that a lot of the rhetoric of chatbot personhood is produced through and for sadistic fantasy. The *reason* a lot of people want to convince themselves that chatbots are people so badly is SO they can get off on "abusing" them

Fuentes then fantasizes about “breeding gulags”: “So just like Hitler imprisoned Gypsies, Jews, communists, you know, all of his political rivals, we have to do the same thing with women… They go to the breeding gulags. The good ones will be liberated. The bad ones will toil in the mines forever.”

But when I read about *how* its being used, it's mostly stories like OP--people using it for convenience, and only later some developing serious confusion and mystification that god is speaking to them or they are dating a computer. The mystification emerges more from habit than epistemology

Gorey

The International Olympic Committee ruled that an image of Toussaint Louverture, born into slavery and and leader of the Haitian Revolution, on Haiti’s uniforms violated Olympic rules barring political symbolism

Thank you and farewell to this maestro of effervescence and sting

‘In major assessments for maths, science and reading from 2011 to 2019, greater in-school computer use for learning correlates with lower scores. In contrast, students in classes with rare or no computer use at all typically score highest’

Blistering piece on ed tech in @economist.com. ‘Although ed-tech companies tout huge learning gains, independent research has made clear that technology rarely boosts learning in schools—and often impairs it.’ economist.com/united-state...

Legendary reggae drummer Sly Dunbar, one half of Sly & Robbie, has died at 73 stereogum.com/2486631/sly-...

1. ICE has STOPPED PAYING for medical treatment for its 73,000 detainees ICE has not paid its bills to 3rd party providers since OCTOBER and the situation will likely persist for MONTHS, a Popular Information investigation reveals Meanwhile, critically ill ICE detainees are not receiving care 🧵

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors has upheld a decision by city parks and arts officials to allow the controversial Vaillancourt Fountain to be removed from Embarcadero Plaza.

These 75 Democrats joined Republicans to "express gratitude" to ICE agents and call for greater local and state collaboration with ICE. jonathancohn.medium.com/a-tale-of-tw...

In the new VLC, @bassidiki.bsky.social deftly reveals the shared imperial logic bridging the juridical + medical senses of "immunity," showing why The Sign of Four is an island novel—and, by bringing in Ross, a less exceptional one than people pretend. Read it while it's hot! tinyurl.com/ywv45d3z

Gwendolyn Brooks (at 16)

Osita Nwanevu with the perfect rejoinder to that nonsense Compact piece (which way too many self-professed "liberals" took at face value), fleshed out with the types of actually diligent statistics and contextual analyses sorely absent from the conversation: www.ositanwanevu.com/on-race-gend...

*whispers* this would also be right about fan culture sorry 👀

Dallas City Council members approved exploratory measures for privatizing City Hall as they seek to sell the community site, demolishing its I.M. Pei-designed Brutalist building and a public plaza with sculptures to make way for a new casino funded by Trump donor Miriam Adelson.

I got kicked off a committee for repeatedly asking "why would we want that?"

Texas A&M University will not reinstate a lecturer who was fired after a video of her teaching about gender identity in a children’s literature class went viral, despite a faculty appeals panel unanimously concluding that her dismissal was not justified.

Like the suburban developments named after whatever natural feature was destroyed to build them

A better framework is to address the broader project of AI to displace interpersonal contact, thought, negotiation; and to normalize this project. This aspect of AI is essential to the economic agenda that it underpins. 2/n

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, and she'd say "Nice catch!" when I pointed to a potential problem, or "Great observation" in response to my comments.

Steve isn’t here anymore, but he always posted this picture on Hanukkah so I thought we could carry on his tradition and remember him.

it’s St Lucy’s day, so you know what that means — time for the best John Donne poem

i really want to push back more forcefully on this dishonest portrayal of the self as a "neutral" party. like setting aside that it's categorically not true, it's specifically being weaponized by people who perhaps don't have expertise, but certainly have prior interests in these subjects.

To the New York Times, a constitutional provision is just something that's "traditional."

In addition to all of the other benefits already reported about NYC congestion pricing, "In the first six months of the program, air pollution – in the form of particulate matter 2.5 micrometers and smaller – dropped by 22% in the Congestion Relief Zone (CRZ)" news.cornell.edu/stories/2025...

Wait did everyone else already just know that What I Got is Lady Madonna 🤯

A giant

Nonsense from Castro. Clearly having well-funded candidates across statewide races is a good idea, but JC could obviously run for AG in any case! The idea that having a high-profile Lieutenant Governor candidate is make-or-break for an AG race is bizarre and self-serving.

🚨🚨 Texas A&M Board of Regents is meeting next week and set to approve a new policy requiring pre-approval of courses on race and gender. This is a blatant violation of academic freedom.

It is worth saying that putting “Africana studies” in scare quotes as if it’s a ridiculous concept is not a political argument. It’s just racism. “Africa is not worthy of a major” is the implication. Yeah dude you’re just racist. (From Gerard Baker at the WSJ today) www.wsj.com/opinion/mamd...

Oh my god

In contemporary authoritarian regimes, they don’t ban dissenting voices—they have regime affiliated oligarchs buy up the big outlets and force out opposition voices. Anyway:

The attack on transgender people is not made to solve a problem. It is fomenting bigotry to take power. Concessions are encouragement to do more attacking.

In real ways I think a film better understood as an adaptation/remake of Oppenheimer than of Mary Shelley

Two "ideas" about universities are gaining stature today: *universities should declare institutional neutrality. *professors' speech is government speech (not neutral, partisan) if publicly funded. Some individuals endorse both principles, which is logically incoherent. 1/

So you should really watch this. Just 2 minutes. But a window into the truly radical nature of the people Trump is nominating. When pressed today, the nominee to be Ambassador to South Africa refuses to oppose reinstituting laws to prevent black people from voting in America.

I love the French www.bbc.com/news/article...

So excited for "A Study in Empire: How We Read Now" with brilliant colleagues Olivia Lingyi Xu, Jacob Romanow, Nasser Mufti, & Meghna Sapui at #NAVSA2025

Wentworth fails to catch Louisa because, in his secret heart, he wants her to die

Justice Kavanaugh: “If the person is a U. S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, that individual will be free to go after the brief encounter.”

Rooted cosmopolitanism vs rootless nationalism.

"Common decency stigmatizes people that do not participate in it—removes them from voluntary association. We indeed have to live with one another, but terms and conditions apply." me on why Ezra Klein should be ashamed / why shame is Good Actually www.bostonreview.net/articles/how...