I get that the news cycle is packed right now, but I just heard from a colleague at the Smithsonian that this is fully a GIANT SQUID BEING EATEN BY A SPERM WHALE and it’s possibly the first ever confirmed video according to a friend at NOAA 10 YEAR OLD ME IS LOSING HER MIND (a thread 🧵)

Deleted my academia.edu account yesterday. Should have done it years ago, but the “AI-generated podcast” they generated from my most recent essay was the last straw. Good riddance.

My rapture outfit.

Just bringing this back…

advisory to academic workers from @aaup.org @uam-umd.bsky.social www.aaup.org/news/advisor...

After many years of school drop-offs, I’m about to make the most impactful one yet: dropping my older kid off at college this weekend. 🥳😩

Forests may not be top of mind but this policy change (and attempt to repeal the endangerment finding) would affect many US forest ecosystems. Petitions do make some difference. THINK CARBON SINK. Revoking the "Roadless Area Conservation Rule" would be devastating share.sierraclub.org/s/LQRpzjvv

A first-rate example of Hollywood’s geography-stitching location shooting. Cliffside dialogue shot in CO and jump (with stunt doubles) shot at the Fox Movie Ranch (now Malibu Creek State Park)

More news reporters like this, please. RIP Redford.

best tik tok account i’ve found recently is called “envoy of the plateau” by a yak farmer featuring videos of yaks hanging out & flipping each other like wrestlers which apparently they do often

battle doomscrolling by posting 5 small pleasures in life: paw pads sunrise/sunset a clean kitchen vetiver aroma puns

The Los Angeles Silent Film Festival opens Friday night with Harold Lloyd's "The Freshman." Weekend highlights include a few classics ("The Big Parade") and smaller films (Clara Bow in "Kid Boots"). Screenings will be held at the Los Feliz Theatre. www.americancinematheque.com/series/los-a...

They tried to warn everyone

Giant sequoias, some of the most spectacular lifeforms on earth, survived the impact that killed the dinosaurs, but 20% of them have died just in the last decade, and almost all the forests of the western Sierra Nevada have burned due to climate change. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

I remember sitting in the front row of Stephen Greenblatt’s Shakespeare course as an undergrad English major at UC Berkeley, a first-gen student. US higher ed is a fraught system, but it changed my life. I’m still in it, watching the attack from all sides. Gift link www.nytimes.com/2025/09/08/o...

Financial advice on the motion picture business in 1927. “Constant Earnings” & “A Cash Business” #filmhistory

Updated my website with this gorgeous lantern slide from NARA. The US National Parks are many things. Outdoor recreation destinations, wildlife refuges, sacred Indigenous land. And they were co-created by modern media. Yosemite Valley, Yosemite Falls, Moonlight Effect, no date (1890-1935).

The Trump admin wants to throw the amazing, popular, effective #RoadlessRule in the trash to allow the heavy machinery of logging, mining, & fracking in our wildest forests. We only have 3 weeks to comment. Here's our Wildlands & Wildlife Program Director Sarah McMillan's @therevelator.org op-ed:

John Cassavettes and Gena Rowlands house is for sale. A time capsule. www.redfin.com/CA/Los-Angel...

I did this the other day for each and every one of the 15 or so titles of mine it stole. Let's do this!

As things get worse in the US political news I can feel my energy for the daily news cycle drying up. Not proud or happy about it. But it does feel like real news is made elsewhere than in the spectacle of our compromised media.

A passport card is a card-size version of your passport. Please share this post with anyone who needs to show proof of U.S. citizenship but doesn’t want to carry their passport book. Details here: travel.state.gov/content/trav...

the phrase "decolonially trained AI" is giving me agita

teachers! excited to share a new website at this late date of Aug 15 to try to help us collectively prepare for back to school in the interpretative humanities classroom assaulted by the AI grift, so we don't have to go it alone. take a look, share, + most importantly: CONTRIBUTE against-a-i.com

This book. I am always revisiting it.

Disheartening news out of my Alma mater U Chicago today, which is reorganizing its Arts & Humanities Division.

My friend Paulina Choh and I are running an elemental media studies panel at #CAA2026! we are asking how the insights of media studies can be applied to 19th-century visual culture. Paper proposals due Aug 29! caa.confex.com/caa/2026/web... please repost and share!

folks I put together a compilation of hilarious clips from the short lived series Manimal, wherein a rich playboy solves crimes by changing into different beasts. here it is for your viewing pleasure, unless you don’t want to condone this sort of behavior (if so, fair) youtu.be/117fdJaHa68?...

You guys fall soccer practice has started in the park already 🍁

More than 240 journalists have been killed by Israel in Gaza since October 7th, more than all killed journalists of all post WW2 conflicts combined, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Libya, Korea, and Ukraine

Four Al Jazeera staff, including reporter Anas Al Sharif, were killed in an Israeli attack on a tent for journalists outside the main gate of Gaza's al-Shifa hospital aje.io/onll19

Finally read one of those stories going around about a person who fell into chatbot-induced delusional spiral. Scary. Understatement of the year: "chatbots 'sometimes prioritize generating text that sounds plausible over ensuring accuracy.'" Gift link. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/08/t...

Signal boosting this, it’s sure to be a good conference. Proposal deadline Oct. 1

🍕

this work saved millions of lives in 2021, won the Nobel Prize in 2023, and is cancelled in 2025

If you have an affiliation with the University of California system, including alumni, please sign this petition.

Analysts show that capital expenditures on AI were so big over the last 6 months they added more to the GDP than *all consumer spending*. That growth is offsetting pain from the tariffs and slow job growth. So the AI bubble may be propping up the whole US economy. What happens if and when it pops?

Also in this edition, an interview with Britt Paris (@hellobrittparis.bsky.social), the chair of the American Association of University Professors, on how faculty and academics are mobilizing to push back against an over-embrace of AI in colleges. Lots of great stuff here:

You guys according to my calculations the Naked Gun has 100% positive Bleusky approval, which is amazing. I’m about to go see it In The Theatre 🎭

Pardon me while I nerd out by posting this location shooting update from TikTok: www.tiktok.com/t/ZT6DY8U7b/

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is shutting down operations after loss of federal funding:

Federal agencies hiding out in a bunker

Camera traps installed high in the rainforest canopy in Malaysian Borneo have filmed a bounty of threatened primates, hornbills and a host of tree-dwelling animals feasting on figs. The cameras have since amassed more than 10,000 images of wildlife.

They are filming the sequel for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood in our neighborhood every night this week, so I stopped by the set to take a look. Impressive level of 1977 detail work here, down to the staged phone booth and fake band flyers.

Motherfucking wind farms…

Speaking of technological fantasies, this clip has been fun for my students to critique in Media History class in recent years. Ray Kurtzweil on rocks 🪨 youtu.be/lAJkDrBCA6k?...

Tsunami alert! 🌊

Images from films directed by Chris Marker - BOTD in 1921 A Grin Without a Cat (1977) Sans Soleil (1983) The Case of the Grinning Cat (2004) Ouvoir the Movie (2010)

Useful thread👇 Also, every film is an environmental film 🌱