Time is a flat circle.

Doing the most responsible thing an European AI labs can do after this weekend: shipping a blogpost. Why the EU can't into AI, how it's not about compute, but actual skill issue and failing for years to build an actual training ecosystem. pleias.ai/blog/fable-eu

Saw that report on the supposed politicization of humanities & social science scholarship, ppl would be well served by reading John McCumber's account of what happened to US academic philosophy under McCarthyism, so much chimes w that today: nupress.northwestern.edu/978081014607...

Carl Sagan's books-as-seed metaphor shows what a milquetoast ninny he was compared to John Milton. "I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragon's teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men."

i’ve only seen one brief clip of Jonathan Haidt’s NYU commencement speech but it’s him saying purple is his favorite color and then immediately mispronouncing “2026”

Fresh torment nexus unlocked! 1. Job seeker spams a list of AI companies with resume/ llm-written cover letter. 2. The AI companies all have e-mail auto-reply bots that start responding to chain. 3. Classic reply-all e-mail chain with a twist: nobody on it cares that it keeps going!

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.

Somehow that got posted without alt text.

More garden of heroes reporting! Since last I indulged my obsession with this story, they've abandoned the idea this would be in North Dakota and moved it to Washington DC. Completely predictably it's over budget and behind schedule... www.nytimes.com/2026/05/02/u...

Extremely funny that Bard’s trustees have called for “an orderly transition,” like Botstein has been deposed by a color revolution

I’m struggling to remember what Richard Dawkins is actually famous for—at first I thought he was the racist guy who stole the double helix, but no, James Watson. The entomologist positivist? Nope EO Wilson. Now struggling with the idea the word “meme” somehow explains why I’m supposed to know him?

One of those "essays I'll write one day" is that a great many people forget that Du Bois really was a PhD economist in-all-but-title and thought with economist brain sometimes. The much discussed "psychic wage of whiteness" thesis from Black Reconstruction really just is classic economist reasoning.

Here's an important read for today: policymakers are encouraging students to learn trades that are costly to teach, but community colleges and apprenticeships don't have the capacity to meet demand. This sends students to the more expensive for-profit sector, where they take on debt.

Godzilla vs Erin Brockovich

They tried so hard to make this headline shorter but there just wasn’t a way to do it.

Feeling buyers remorse for booking in the quiet car now that I’ve realized the giant group boarding the loud cars is the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

This is a fun read. I posted in the company Slack and the first response was appropriately yeah, 'scientists.' www.sciencealert.com/scientists-d...

12½ years ago, I made a map of all the buildings in the Netherlands. Unexpectedly, people loved it! Ever since, I have been wanting to make an updated version of the map. Newer data, higher resolution, more interactive! I never got around to it, until last week: bertspaan.nl/buildings

How many Republicans not named Donald Trump or Ron Johnson have won a statewide election in Wisconsin in the last nine years? Just one: Brian Hagedorn in 2019

really can't be said enough that this case was decided by the same court that decided plessy v. ferguson. if they could have found a plausible rationale to limit birthright citizenship they would have done it. but there is none! the text is as clear as constitutional language can be.

When a Schmidt dies, we take all the USB cables they accumulated in life, chain them through older and older ports, back to a splitter on my great-grandfather’s telephone jack… and so back through the generations, across the sea. Each grave flickers with power from a waterwheel in the old country.

If my grandmother had wheels, she’d be pip-installable.

RIP Jürgen Habermas! His work was central (in hindsight, weirdly so) to my college education, so much so that I rushed to meet him when he was on campus for an honorary degree…

Today is the one-year anniversary of my departure from the library referenced below. It is disheartening to see how that organization's leadership has continued to marginalize subject-area expertise and promote overly simplistic narratives about the history of science & tech. #histSTM #histsci 📜 🗃️

Reminder: You can watch the DOGE bro depos on YouTube! (I’ve seen a lot of clips compiled by news orgs, but some of them don’t link to the full videos.)

Today's edition of "collapsing boundary between human and machine" substack.com/home/post/p-... (see thread below for an analysis of how this helps the AI industry)

Noting in this NEH grants filing from the Author's Guild that Michael McDonald wasn't the only NEH staffer collaborating: Adam Wolfson also helped triage which chat-GPT flagged grants might actually be related to the garden of heroes or America 250. www.neh.gov/staff/adam-w...

Now I want to know which CNN reporter or producer doesn't know the word "sycophant."

If strong-form unitary executive theory is true and there’s no executive *branch*, just a president and a bunch of subordinates carrying out his will, then immigration “judges” and administrative “warrants” must be false in any way that carries constitutional significance. 1/2

Democrats: here’s a handy cheat sheet of the current state of discourse so you can send your consultant money directly to support groups instead: Leftist: revolution Liberal: impeachments + trials Centrist: Nuremberg-style trials Libertarian: abolish ICE Conservative: reform ICE Fascist: more ICE $

This is your reminder that Hungarian-Jewish scientist George de Hevesy dissolved two Nobel Prizes in aqua regia to keep them out of the hands of the Nazis. He then left the dissolved solution on his shelf and fled to Sweden. (After the war he un-dissolved the gold and the prizes were re-cast.)

Digital Humanities people -- positionally I feel like I could maybe write something useful/interesting here as someone who moved from running a DH program to CTO-ing an AI startup -- any questions you'd conceivably read if I answered them?

The debate over LLMs needs to absorb the lessons learned in the debate about internet governance 20 years ago. Yes, we are not going to uninvent linear algebra. Sorry Butlerian Jihadis. But that doesn't mean we can't set policies that influence which LLM uses are central and which are marginal

A concept I've been meaning to float to make sense of what's happened to the US Constitution is an idea from the British constitutional tradition: "implied repeal." It's useful because it helps us to understand that Article I, & much else of the US Constitution, has been implicitly repealed.

This holiday season, give the gift that lets your loved ones combine their affection for James Scott with their irritation that those "No Farms No Food" bumper stickers try to normalize agriculture.

Just watched "Death By Lightning," the James Garfield/Charles Guiteau Netflix show -- went in w/ no expectations and was pleasantly surprised. Nick Offerman is now my heart's Chester Arthur, and the sets, especially the Republican National Convention, were impressive.

IMLS announces "upon further review" that it is reinstating all federal grants to libraries. It leaves out that it's doing this because a federal court told them a few weeks ago that the Trump admin's decision to destroy libraries was not legal. www.imls.gov/news/stateme...

OK, so I just got really obsessed with a very arcane question. There are 'land' and 'water' hemispheres that maximize the amount of each (below). But can you divide the earth into two hemispheres that are each 29% land, 71% water, just like the earth as a whole? The LLMs said no… but I persisted.

Cuomo spent months obsessively courting conservative voters and he drove Sliwa's vote% down to 7% but he was bleeding moderate Dem base voters with every new right wing message and Trump endorsement and Zohran took the opportunity and ran with it

This essay from @bschmidt.bsky.social on how history rejected computational methods, & so "quantitative history" ended up in the social sciences, & "digital humanities" in literature, with no historians doing computational work, is fascinating, & worth a read: dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/computa...

So much good stuff in here. I'm reading @bschmidt.bsky.social's piece on computational history: "The split in American digital history shows a way to make computation focus not on making the humanities more scientific but instead making them more creative."

Consensus among the developers standing at the Chelsea CitiBike station is that the special code for pedal assist bikes is routed through us east 1 while non-electric bikes are unaffected.

🍩 What if climate looked like a donut? 🌍 Here’s a bunch of cities turned into a sweet dataviz experiment. 🟡 → comfy zone 🔴 → hot 🔵 → cold Why a donut? Let me explain 👇

Despite the gutting of the National Center for Educational Statistics, the dept of Ed *did* manage to release 2024 college major counts in the usual format, so I can run it through the same code I do every year. First off, the change since peak of the largest fields -- another year of drops.

Talking loss functions at the FOSS luncheon

I shared some thoughts with @insidehighered.com about the first IPEDS data release since the Department of Education got DOGE-d. It's good to see the data coming out, but there are some concerns now and plenty more going forward. www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty...

Headed to Brazil for the first time next month. I've got a pretty meager frame of reference. Any reading recommendations (fiction or non-fiction)?