Not sure how we are going to process and prosecute all the people in the leadership of Israel and the US who have intentionally slaughtered doctors, nurses, patients, and newborns. It’s been illegal since the 1940s but we don’t have law any more. www.nybooks.com/online/2026/...

This NYT article about the removal of pride flags at Boston University ends with the Director of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality program vowing to replace them every time. “We have a nice stockpile,” she said. (Gift link)

Definitely don't like that they keep coming back to the "content-neutral" justification for taking down the flags as if support for the LGBTQ+ community and its rights is non-neutral, just one side of an equal, two-sided debate of opinions, and not a fundamentally proper thing to do

I think there are several goals in play. - Make them visible to the general public - Make them ubiquitous, so people are used to seeing them around - Place them in non-confrontational settings to show them as non-threatening ("normal") and counter their reputation as feral paramilitaries

For sale: the complete 2,000 book Harlequin Intrigue line — !! www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

A history education cannot be automated.

ICE officers getting paid for standing around doing nothing while TSA employees work without pay is a pretty succinct summation of where we're at right now

I cannot emphasise enough how this minimisation tactic is explicitly designed to stop you thinking about the bigger picture and focus narrowly on the dodgy math of the exact moment you're in. Do not succumb. Check out the full updated dataset here: ketanjoshi.co/2025/05/23/d...

Where are all the multi-gigawatt, tens-of-megatonnes gas-fired data centres being proposed by Netflix? Are governments frantically rushing fast-tracking laws for video streaming? Which coal and gas plants are being reopened, extended or reenergised to power streaming?

For some reason "AI is just like watching Netflix" is back in my feeds so I took that as a sign to update my data tracking for Netflix. The company's energy use rose 1% from 2021 to 2024. Compare that to: Google: 71% Nvidia: 88% Meta: 96% Microsoft: 119%

My fear: the work that will need undoing after this is unfathomable, and the resources to undo it will be gone. Consider how far a fake quotation spreads before it’s caught, and how rarely a correction happens even then. The legacy of slop scholarship is going to be several orders of magnitude worse

When has ICE ever, EVER eased anyone’s workload?

War is ecocide.

Module 3 of the UK COVID Inquiry is out. Encouraging to see explicit recognition of the "widespread failure" of clinical leaders to understand aerosol science, and the "clear failure" of IPC leaders to understand that they might be wrong. #medsky #scisky covid19.public-inquiry.uk/reports/modu....

One: He isn’t paying for shit because he never does Two: because he never does and never has, it’s irresponsible to report this like he will Three: It’s illegal for him to do so and even if it weren’t, the correct answer is for him to pay his goddamn taxes

Doctors and nurses never had the correct PPE to protect themselves and the government needs to step up. Patients with Cancer and other conditions deserve to be protected. There is no half way on airborne risks.

So much should change, the question is will it? It won’t until our media wants to report on it. Until some politicians want to talk more about it.

9. People were ridiculed by some of our media for masking for the last 6 years. Those who were Clinically Vulnerable or suffering long covid or just were aware it was airborne and wanted to avoid getting long Covid. When wearing a respirator was the right thing to do to avoid infections.

8. They should have told businesses to clean the air. All those struggling with staff absences should have been told to open windows and use Hepa air purifiers or HVAC.

5. It meant Clinically Vulnerable haven’t been adequately protected or staff in healthcare. 6. Covid is airborne anywhere an infected person is. This means work places also. 7. They recommended to the Public gappy surgicals when they should have said ffp2 respirators because the seal to the face.

4. It means schools had the wrong guidance in place and children should have had clean air. Staff spent hours scrubbing tables for a predominantly airborne virus.

unnecessarily burdened with Covid infections.

Why is it so seismic for the Covid inquiry to state this week that ‘Covid is airborne’? 1. It means that we never had the correct advice to protect ourselves and still don’t! Covid hasn’t stopped being airborne. 2. It means so much could have been prevented. 3. It means healthcare has been …

Demands for the Right to Repair is roiling rural America amid broader backlash against our tech & AI overlords — an issue that could mobilize a lot of votes. Once again, power is lying on the ground waiting for politician(s) not subservient to donors & consultants to pick it up. wapo.st/4uKLa2Z

And Trump wonders why Europe no longer sees the US as an ally... #Trump #war #excursion #51ststate #iran www.nytimes.com/2026/03/20/w...

Mood for 2026, (the artist is Ainsley Drew, on Instagram)

Holy shit we might have a cure for sickle cell anemia

Here’s my faculty argument for my “right to refuse AI”: I have academic freedom. I’m not fucking doing that. Thank you.

"The results are astonishingly clear. On rewilded land, biodiversity surged across the board, with the number of bird species up 261%. The variety of bumblebee and butterfly species more than doubled, their abundance increased over 10x." The cure for nature loss exists. share.google/w30RUdw1902W...

Trump Vowed to Crack Down on Fraudsters, but He’s Pardoned Dozens www.nytimes.com/2026/03/19/u... Bob Dylan, “you still a little and they put you in jail you steal a lot and they make you a king”

There are immediate humanitarian costs and atrocities, and there are substantial knock-on humanitarian costs and atrocities.

These are the very things that the 2019 NY climate law would accelerate, insulating people in NY from increasingly high and voltatile oil and natural gas prices. The governor could alleviate near-term affordability burdens in many ways without undermining progress toward the long-term solutions.

I should have led with this, but Hochul's opinion that the climate law is too costly, per the NYT headline in the top post, is madness. Fossil energy costs are skyrocketing due to Trump's and Netanyahu's war on Iran. The long-term solutions are clean electricity, electrification, energy efficiency.

The 2019 climate law, passed by an overwhelming majority of NY legislators, assesses CH4's warming impacts over a 20-year horizon. That's a clear policy choice. Now the NY governor is trying to unilaterally change that policy choice to 100 years, softening penalties on oil and natural gas.

School bans Twilight & Terry Pratchett books. Their rationale / excuse (hidden at end of article)? "the school admits that the categorisations of the books were written using AI, writing: “Although the categorisation was generated using AI, I consider this classification to be broadly accurate.”"

The Cookie Cutter University which NOUS is imposing upon everyone simply cannot attract anyone. They're just making 17-year-olds pick their future on the basis of the prestige of a couple of centuries-old places, rather than the content of their studies & research. #UKHE

Theory & Society has been intellectually hollowed out since the editorial takeover a few years ago A cautionary tale about what happens when politics replaces rigour. Early career scholars if you are unaware, please avoid this journal. Your work is worth more than a compromised venue. #AcademicSky

So we redefined standards to be test-based instead of a mix of projects, presentations, worksheets, and tests. Then we moved classes online and diminished the influence of instructors in favor of the e-learning platform. Instructors don’t even meet students and are relegated to an administrators.

!!!! Yes! 100% this! We have already seen this sort of thing driven by capitalism. The cutting of corners. Good enough with some concessions becomes the new normal. I’m thinking of education where personalized learning was standard in small classrooms but became unreasonable in large classrooms.

The danger to my job from AI isn't that AI can do my job, it's that my job is made even more precarious by the way AI is shaping ideas of the value of work. It can't do my job, but it can be part of convincing people (incorrectly) that my job isn't necessary.

Same. I work in accessibility. The people who pay for my work aren't the people who rely on the quality of my work. LLMs increase the pressure to reduce costs of audiodescription and subtitles. LLMs can't do my work as good as me, but they can do it cheaper. Everyone but the money people loose.

I’d quite like the UK media to stop entertaining the idea that people with massive pensions, their own homes and really big cars are ‘the working class’ as long as they’re a bit racist, while struggling renters on temporary contacts are ‘middle class urban elites’ as long as they’re not.

Colbert’s truthiness, for the 2020s AI hellscape.

Such layoffs almost always accompany big media mergers. Expect to see much more of this -- similar to the Fox News model of eliminating actual journalism (which is relatively expensive to produce) in favor of right-wing commentators (which is cheap and yet reliable for capturing attention).

“a BU policy that prohibits any placard, banner or sign to be posted where the public could see it unless it's in an approved location like a “Free Expression Board.”” What in the Orwellian hell is this.

More Pride flags popped up in windows on Boston university’s campus today. People are distributing them. I really don’t know where the administration thinks this will go.

PinkNews:

Stunningly bullshit framing on this NYT story that insists that somehow renewables are a dicy unpredictable thing and downplays that they're far, far cheaper most of the time by focusing on how they're not always. As is often the case with the NYT, comments smarter than article.