I missed when Wicomb passed. Her first book You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town is one of the most amazing collections of short stories I've ever read. I plan to include it and her in my own future work on pessimism. RIP.

I feel like "academic hiring" discourse is always kind of downstream of the fact that in the 50s we started building a giant public system to make a college education almost universally available and in the 80s and 90s we started taking it apart to go back to the only-the-rich model

And it's working.

The Patriot Games thing is so utterly hilarious and preposterous at the same time.

@jennieci.bsky.social wrote a whole book about this. It's called "Contesting Conformity" and it's amazing.

The history of science since the 1940s is mostly this anyway, right?

It continues

We can make this place better by antagonizing genocide apologists.

Interesting how all the people who argued that words cannot be violent suddenly have opinions on words being violent and have never muttered nor written "Am Yisarel Chai" in support of genocide.

Guy who supports the police, who frequently kill children in the US, claiming that the problem is the words "Globalize the intifada" and not the guns.

Globalize the intifada means globalize the resistance [to genocide]. The only reason a Jew should find fright in those words is if they are supporting said genocide. The sentence itself is not antisemitic. It's the same as Globalize the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising!

For what it's worth, this is also why the US doesn't have substantial gun control measures or any remnants of New Deal Social Democracy.

War Pigs. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/17/u...

Learning that Perry Farrell is a Jewish boy from Queens makes me love Jane's Addiction and Porno for Pyros even more than I already did. @melnickjeffrey1.bsky.social did you know this?

Every time a Democrat compliments Reagan a Nazi gets their SS tattoo.

The reason middle aged white dads love Tom Petty's Wildflowers record so much is because it's mostly lullabies about being a middle aged white dad.

Dear colleagues: Today is the final day to submit to our 2026 Colloquy. Send your 250-word abstracts and short bios to: [email protected] Please indicate whether you will present in person or online (at the earlier online conference in April). Link Below!

I'm so fucking tired of competing with my friends for jobs.

Honestly, I’m furious. Sandy Hook should have been the end of this. Yet on its anniversary more children are dead, injured, and traumatized. It is a horror that is entirely preventable. And we should prevent it. It is not impossible. No matter what the received wisdom has become.

GUN ABOLITION IS A SENSIBLE RESPONSE TO THE MASS SHOOTINGS OF KIDS We don’t have to live this way. Students at my alma mater Brown did not have to die. Children at Sandy Hook did not have to die. Stop kowtowing to the rapacious gun lobby. Background checks are good, getting rid of guns is better.

This is accurate and has been clear to anyone with an interest in the actual substance of this “war” for about a decade

Hoping for the safety of everyone at Brown University. Another avoidable tragedy in the most violent society in the world.

Speed cameras log your information and picture and share them with ICE.

My god

real police state stuff

In 2009 as today, the leadership of The New School fails to live up to its founding values

Every so often you read a paper by an undergrad and know that they are smarter than you and should probably go to grad school, but then you remember that grad school as you remember it doesn't exist anymore.

This is what Microsoft costs. Imagine the stupidity of the schools dumping millions into AI bullshit. Universities help the movement of resources to tech oligarchs.

What is happening at Ursinus right now appears to be directly out of the higher ed consultant playbook. Gut the institution of those who deliver on the core academic mission to ‘cut costs’ — without acknowledging the costs of those cuts. More people should be talking about this.

If this isn’t a perfect embodiment of contemporary higher education.

For being totally out of power, with no substantial organizations, an "opposition" party in a stage of torpor and infighting, and no mass street movement, this is ridiculously optimistic. There's plenty of time for the fascists to regain strength, start a war, eliminate birthright citizenship, etc.

For being totally out of power, with no substantial organizations, an "opposition" party in a stage of torpor and infighting, and no mass street movement, this is ridiculously optimistic. There's plenty of time for the fascists to regain strength, start a war, eliminate birthright citizenship, etc.

"[The New School for Social Research] is a place that built, cemented, and still upholds a legacy of social justice and anti-fascist scholarship. This legacy is what is at stake today." www.e-flux.com/notes/678343...

The contempt that university managers have for their academic staff here in the UK is *off the scale*.

The founding of The New School was fundamentally antagonistic to this kind of program.

a sure sign that your bold new restructuring plan is all above board is how frequently and instantly highly secretive documents get leaked. apropos nothing in particular: here’s some planning documents for, idk, “UATX at The New School”(??) what we *do* have time, energy, and money for is…wild.

As a devastated Gaza is now flooded w heavy winter rains, and Israel has blocked much of the West Bank olive harvest, please consider donating to RAWA, a coalition of Palestinian community orgs Jewish V for Peace has partnered w to raise money and secure aid jvp.rawa.ps/en/

It's not grade inflation, it's just that my students learn more than yours.

It's all over but the grading now.

In what world are economic divides not politics? Other than the imagination of this author and their publisher?

This doesn't sound silly or sounds determinedly violent and a clear statement that rights only exist for those who have membership in a coercive community with military protection. Stateless peoples need not apply.

College students need to eat more vegetables.

I agree with this. That many of these thinkers were so mainstream and yet, so critical (right and left) that is sometimes lost in their inheritors as we are less and less politically and culturally powerful in the 21st century.

And now ICE and it's private partners have photographs of everyone with their license plates so they can be identified as citizens, consumers, and dissidents.

There is a *political* distinction between simply being a bigot and actually being committed to a worldview which sees biological race as a reality and racial struggle as the driving force of history.

This is a massive data grab for everyone who is planning on coming for the world cup. So much data for the AI machines.

My advice to the New School grad students is that it's time to get fucking weird. Don't let the DSA or your Union stop you. Occupy some buildings, chase university Presidents down Fifth Ave. Bring in allies from CUNY, NYU, Columbia, Pratt, SVA, the anarchist community, go hard.

Speaking of which, does anyone with a relatively successful podcast want to bring me on as their co-host?

Anyone know of any alt-ac positions in which you can actually make a decent living without becoming a glorified cop?

Officially time to decide if I can still do this job.