Chuffed as heck to have my story Sand Dollars up now in The Eckleburg Review -- check it out here: www.eckleburg.org/sand-dollars...

How was #NYC's transit system desegregated? In 1854, Elizabeth Jennings Graham, a 24-year-old Black school teacher, stood her ground on a NYC streetcar. Jennings was ordered to get off the car and wait for a car that served African American passengers.

YES: "interdisciplinarity is never just the meeting of two pre-existing disciplines, disciplines are made and remade through the interaction"

Fostering curiosity and community, libraries are a social good -- "Importantly, these are not ad hoc exchanges but robust sociotechnical infrastructures, with nation-building effects." Ever on point, Shannon Mattern:

You all MUST READ this piece by Kaitlyn Greenidge about the power of art to “exist outside of a tech lord’s algorithm.” www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/art-...

“‘The uncritical adoption of AI can lead to students not developing essential academic skills such as critical thinking and writing. If students are taught to learn through automation, without learning about how & why things work, they won’t be able to solve problems when something actually breaks’”

“While the AI industry claims its models can “think,” “reason,” and “learn,” their supposed achievements rest on marketing hype and stolen intellectual labor. In reality, AI erodes academic freedom, weakens critical reading, and subordinates the pursuit of knowledge to corporate interests.”

Today's the day to honor the gales of November! Dug this photo essay:

Beautiful data.

"Either a bubbling idea led solvers to connect puzzle pieces across the board, or solvers had grown frustrated and decided to physically forage for new connections, which sparked a solution. Perhaps it was a mixture of both."

What is happening at Goddard is absolutely devastating. We are losing history. We are losing an incredible amount of human talent, skill, and knowledge. Rebuilding it will be impossible same for same. Industry can not absorb the people or the equipment. This is undoing space science in the US.

I wrote about public libraries as spaces of civic solidarity, common knowledge, and public infrastructure — all endangered by commercial and federal saboteurs

ICYMI: Drop everything and spend 13 minutes with Amy Sherald--with her singular vision and talent, with her clarity about her central place in the jagged American story. You will be stirred by it all. www.cbsnews.com/video/amy-sh...

If I were running the DNC, there would be Democratic Party sponsored food relief banks across the country right now that specifically welcomed anyone regardless of party affiliation. Along with the food, there could be voter registration and links to runforsomething.net

Getting 10 people in a room to try to work on something together is HARD in 2025. And if you haven't done this, you won't know how hard. I think everyone who can should try to get 10 people in a room together to do something. It is deeply humbling.

“I’d like our educational institutions, at least, to lead with the message that these generative AI programs as they currently exist simply cannot be used ethically. That doesn’t mean unenforceable bans, but it does mean telling the truth.” Amen

“Taken together, our roundtable contributors present a suite of ideas that, if enacted, just might make higher education more livable for us all.” The full series “Higher Ed Under Trump” is live at Public Books. Read all the contributions here:

Fear will try to convince us to isolate, to hoard resources, to avoid community, to build the least threatening campaigns making little impact. A grounded risk assessment will move us closer to each other, it’ll remind us of that we are millions, it’ll make our work more bold and more brave.

Stoked beyond measure to be in @mrbullbull.bsky.social this month, please check it out if you are so inclined.

This from @tressiemcphd.bsky.social hit me over the head like a mallet of truth. This is the thing. This is what I’ve been trying to warn people about perfectly crystallized. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/12/o...

The focus on "AI Literacy" is particularly baffling, because guess what: it's just literacy! You can't use LLMs reliably unless you know what you're talking about. And the best way to actually learn something is to—you guess it—do your own work instead of having Chat-GPT do it for you.

What kind of AI governance do we need? Our new piece in @science.org answers this: we need policy grounded in evidence and built to generate more of it. Evidence-based policymaking is not a slogan—it’s a design challenge for democratic governance in the age of AI www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 🧵

Say it with me: this is not a glitch

ALL CAPS THIS IS CATASTROPHIC FOR SPACE SCIENCE AND ASTROPHYSICS ... GLOBALLY CATASTROPHIC, NOT JUST FOR AMERICANS 🔭🧪 www.politico.com/news/2025/07...

Find something to rejoice in today. Rage is fuel but not nourishment.

In July of 1852, Frederick Douglass delivered one of the greatest speeches in US history. Today it’s often presented in abridged form, though, and skips what seems like a long-winded introduction. If you read the intro closely, however, there’s an ingenious structure. THREAD👇🏽

Well, I guess it’s never too early to post this again —

Pin this, save it, we’ll need it. “When a prison camp opens in your town…when a DREAMer is disappeared from your classroom…when the President destroys what’s left of the Constitution…They will all say they didn’t know this was coming. And I want the American people to know that they did.” AOC 🔥🎯

One thing you will never think after reading a great book or listening to a great album or seeing a great piece of art is, “I’m really glad this person remained cautious while they were making this and guarded against being perceived as weird.”

Justice Sotomayor tells it like it is. With a notably missing "respectfully." (Though if it were me I'd write something like "With a big FUCK YOU, I dissent.")

They launched a coup, suffered no consequences for it, won back power, and have used the power to pardon everyone involved while remaking the country through violence and intimidation. It’s just ridiculous to talk about the political violence of yelling at ICE agents within that context.

A couple of months ago, I posted a checklist of things one could do to be useful in these days of rising fascism. Here’s Part Two of that list—more focused on ways to protect you and those in your tightest circles of care. Part One is embedded and also skeeted below.

I am baffled by some of the unevidenced leaps higher ed institutions are making toward AI. CalState and Ohio St. are acting nuts, IMO. www.insidehighered.com/opinion/colu...

I think we’ve become so inured to this stuff that it’s easy to lose sight of just how quickly epistemic collapse has accelerated. Ten years ago, the media was wringing its hands over social media misinformation and what it meant that Trump had the gall to lie. Now, the lies control health policy.

#AI literacy is not the answer. We're prioritising teaching students to use tools that won't exist in 5 years at the cost of developing the human skills that have mattered for centuries. Wrong problem, wrong solution. #Education #AILiteracy #CriticalThinking #Teaching #FutureOfWork #EdTech

Prolly a good time to mention one of the definitive books on L.A. and why it is the way it is, Mike Davis' "City of Quartz," is currently 30% off on Verso's website: www.versobooks.com/products/132...

Also, apropos of nothing in particular, if anyone tries to tell you that the protests in LA are a distraction from the budget bill, kindly remind them that the bill will MASSIVELY expand ICE’s budget, so the two things are very much related.

Rallying. In Support. Of Justice. Look I know it was by design that folks' trust in news media eroded, and by further design that manipulation and "hallucination" further confuse the issue of truth, but good people are gathering in DTLA. It's legal and I'm grateful for it.

"It wld be easy to put [the issue of AI-generated content] on the backburner, [to] focus on the 100s of other things libraries have been asked to do... We’ve seen what happens when publishers set the rules for new technology: it’s nothing good for libraries."

If you burn down a forest, you don't miss out on lumber for just that season. You have to replant all the trees, nurture them, and wait for them to grow. The science and research budget cuts happening now are wanton, senseless arson. Recovery, if it ever happens, will take generations.

Wow, yes. An amazing glimpse of the LLM Lie Machine at work. Anyone whose students are bring tempted by LLMs, sharing this could be very helpful showing how it lies, and how it fails.

"We ask [students] to read, reflect upon, write about, and discuss ideas, ... to help train them to be critical citizens. ... But [it's] like going to the gym and asking a robot to lift weights for you." ALL OF THIS

Fiction. Art. More fiction. A dash of poetry.

“In times of destruction, create something.” ~ Maxine Hong Kingston

You may have seen a lot of headlines since yesterday about budget negotiations, the threat to Medicaid & new restrictions that block transgender care. It's hard to track it all. Really grateful for the @unbreaking.org team that did incredible work to push updates to our pages today - unbreaking.org

DOGE is: - trying to fire thousands of federal workers - working secretly to collect and analyze data - using that info to surveil "Removing DOGE at this point would be like trying to remove a drop of food coloring from a glass of water."